MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE
_“The Sun” Uses Albany Steamboats, Horse Expresses, Trotting Teams,
Pigeons, and the Telegraph to Get News.--Poe’s Famous Balloon
Hoax and the Case of Mary Rogers._
The second owner of the _Sun_, Moses Yale Beach, was, like Ben Day,
a Yankee. He was born in the old Connecticut town of Wallingford on
January 7, 1800. He had a little education in the common schools, but
showed more interest in mechanics than in books. When he was fourteen
he was bound out to a cabinet-maker in Hartford. His skill was so fine
that he saw the needlessness of serving the customary seven years, and
his industry so great that he was able, by doing extra work in odd
times, to get together enough money to buy his freedom from his master.
He set up a cabinet-shop of his own at Northampton, Massachusetts.
When Beach was twenty, he made the acquaintance of Miss Nancy Day,
of Springfield, the sister of Benjamin was the inventor of the Ben
Day process used in Day were married in 1821, and as the business at
Northampton was not prospering, they settled down in Springfield.
The young man was a good cabinet-maker, but his mind ran to inventions
rather than to chests and high-boys. Steamboat navigation had not
yet attained a commercial success, but Beach was a close student of
the advance made by Robert Fulton and Henry Bell. First, however, he
devoted his talents as an inventor to a motor in which the power came
from explosions of gunpowder. He tried this on a boat which he intended
to run on the Connecticut River between Springfield and Hartford. When
it failed, he turned back to steam, and he undoubtedly would have made
a success of this boat line if his money resources had been adequate.
Beach then invented a rag-cutting machine for use in paper-mills, and
he might have had a fortune out of it if he had taken a patent in time,
for the process is still used. As it was, the device enabled him to get
an interest in a paper-mill at Saugerties, New York, where he removed
in 1829. This mill was prosperous for some years, but in 1835 Beach
found it more profitable to go to work for his young brother-in-law,
Mr. Day, who had by this time brought the _Sun_ to the point of assured
success.
Beach was a great help to Day, not only as the manager of the _Sun’s_
finances, but as general supervisor of the mechanical department. In
the three years of his association with Day he picked up a good working
knowledge of the newspaper business. He recognized the features that
had made the _Sun_ successful--chiefly the presentation of news that
interested the ordinary reader--and saw the neglect of this policy was
keeping the old-fashioned sixpenny papers at a standstill.
He did not underestimate other news. “Other news,” in that day, meant
the proceedings of Congress and the New York State Legislature, the
condensed news of Europe, as received from a London correspondent or
rewritten from the English journals, and such important items as might
be clipped from the newspapers of the South and West. Many of these
American papers sent proof-sheets of news articles to the _Sun_ by mail.
When Beach bought the paper there was no express service. There had
been, in fact, no express service in America except the one which
Charles Davenport and N. S. Mason operated over the Boston and Taunton
Railway. But in March, 1839, about a year after Beach got the _Sun_,
William F. Harnden began an express service--later the Adams Express
Company--between New York and Boston, using the boats from New York to
Providence and the rail from Providence to Boston.
This was a big help to the New York papers, for with the aid of the
express the English papers brought by ships landing at Boston were in
the New York offices the next day. To a city which still lacked wire
communication of any kind this was highly important, and there was
hardly an issue of the _Sun_ in the spring of 1839 that did not contain
a paragraph laudatory of Mr. Harnden’s enterprise.
The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom.
While the _Sun_ did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal
stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually
had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained
the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous
article. It was by ship that _Sun_ readers learned of Daguerre and his
picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the
war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and
downs--mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan.
There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were
the doings of actors known to America:
At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys--father to the Miss
Davys whose ears the queen boxed--has been appointed Bishop of
Marlborough.
Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty
pounds a night for sixty nights in New York.
On June 1, 1839, the _Sun_ got out an extra on the arrival, at three
o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen
days--the fastest trip up to that time--and fifty-seven thousand
copies of the paper were sold. The _Sun’s_ own sailing vessels met the
incoming steamships down the bay. The _Sun_ boasted:
In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our
papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this
city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we
proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the
news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular
editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead
of the morning papers.
The _Sun_ had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with
their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When
the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page
picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in
Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five
feet--less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants--and her
paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the
_Sun_ favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and
that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand.
Quoth the _Sun_:
Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering
_lazaroni_ of Wall Street stick up their noses at us?
In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England
arrived together, the _Sun_ gave the story a front-page display, and
actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article.
A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the _Sun’s_ account of the
arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:
Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the
7th, the steamer President had not arrived.
The President never arrived, and her fate is one of the secrets of
the sea. She sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with thirty-one
passengers, including Tyrone Power, the Irish actor, who had just
concluded his second American tour. It is conjectured that the
President sank during the great gale that sprang up her second night
out.
In getting news from various parts of the United States, the _Sun_ took
a leaf from the book of Colonel Webb and other journalists who had
used the horse express. In January, 1841, on the occasion of Governor
William H. Seward’s message to the Legislature, the _Sun_ beat the
town. The Legislature received the message at 11 A.M. on January 5:
An express arriving exclusively for the _Sun_ then started, it
being one o’clock, and at six this morning reached our office,
thus enabling us to repeat the triumph achieved by us last year
over the whole combined press of New York, large and small.
It is but just to say that our express was brought on by the
horses of the Red Bird Line with unparalleled expedition, in
spite of wind, hail, and rain.
Nowadays a Governor’s message is in the newspaper-offices days before
it is sent to the Legislature, and there, treated in the confidence
that is never betrayed by a decent newspaper, it is prepared for
printing, so that it may be on the street five minutes after it is
delivered, if its importance warrants. In the old days the message,
borne by relays of horse vehicles down the snow-covered post-road from
Albany to New York, was more important to the newspapers than the
messages of this period appear to be. With newspapers, as with humans,
that which is easy to get loses value.
In October, 1841, the _Sun_ spent money freely to secure a quick report
of the momentous trial of Alexander McLeod for the murder of Amos
Durfee. War between the United States and Great Britain hinged on the
outcome. During the rebellion in Upper Canada, in 1837, the American
steamer Caroline was used by the insurgents to carry supplies down the
Niagara River to a party of rebels on Navy Island. A party of loyal
Canadians seized and destroyed the Caroline at Grand Island, and in the
fight Durfee and eleven others were killed. The Canadian, McLeod, who
boasted of being a participant, was arrested when he ventured across
the American border in 1840.
The British government made a demand for his release, insisting that
what McLeod had done was an act of war, performed under the orders of
his commanding officer, Captain Drew. President Van Buren replied that
the American government had several times asked the British government
whether the destruction of the Caroline was an act of war, and had
never received a reply; and further, that the Federal government had
no power to prevent the State of New York from trying persons indicted
within its jurisdiction.
The whole country realized the hostile attitude of the British
ministry, and accepted its threat that war would be declared if McLeod
were not released. The trial took place at Utica, New York, and the
_Sun_ printed from two to five columns a day about it. It ran a special
train from Utica to Schenectady. There a famous driver, Otis Dimmick,
waited with a fine team of horses to take the story to the Albany boat,
the fastest means of transportation between the State capital and the
metropolis. The _Sun_ declared that one day Dimmick and his horses made
the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in forty-nine minutes.
And the end of it all was proof that McLeod, who had boasted of
killing “a damned Yankee,” had been asleep in Chippewa on the night
of the Caroline affair, and was nothing worse than a braggart. So the
war-cloud blew over.
Beach was a man of great faith in railroads and all other forms of
progress. When the Boston and Albany road was finished, the _Sun_
related how a barrel of flour was growing in the field in Canandaigua
on a Monday--the barrel in a tree and the flour in the wheat--and on
Wednesday, transformed and ready for the baker, it was in Boston.
Sperm candles manufactured by Mr. Penniman at Albany on
Wednesday morning were burning at Faneuil Hall and at the
Tremont, in Boston, on the evening of the same day.
The _Sun_ had faith in Morse and his telegraph from the outset. The
invention was born in Nassau Street, only a block or two from the
_Sun’s_ office. Morse put the wire into practical use between Baltimore
and Washington on May 24, 1844. That was a Friday. The _Sun_ said
nothing about it the next day, and had no Sunday paper; but on Monday
it said editorially:
MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH--The new invention is completed from
Baltimore to Washington. The wire, perfectly secured against
the weather by a covering of rope-yarn and tar, is conducted
on the top of posts about twenty feet high and one hundred
yards apart. The nominations of the convention this day are to
be conveyed to Washington by this telegraph, where they will
arrive in a few seconds. On Saturday morning the batteries were
charged and the regular transmission of intelligence between
Washington and Baltimore commenced.... At half past 11 A.M.,
the question being asked, what was the news at Washington, the
answer was almost instantaneously returned: “Van Buren stock is
rising.” This is indeed the annihilation of space.
It is hardly necessary to say that the convention referred to was the
Democratic national convention at Baltimore, that Van Buren’s stock,
high early in the proceedings, fell again, and that James K. Polk was
the nominee.
But as New York was not fortunate enough to have the first commercial
telegraph-line, the _Sun_ had to rely on its own efforts for speedy
news from the convention. It ran special trains from Baltimore,
“beating the United States mail train and locomotive an hour or two.”
The _Sun_ soon afterward expressed annoyance at a report that it was
itself a part of a monopoly which was to control the telegraph, and
that it had bought a telegraph-line from New York to Springfield,
Massachusetts. It insisted that there should be no monopoly, and that
the use of the telegraph must be open to all. There was no suggestion
that Morse intended to control his invention improperly, but the _Sun_
was not quite satisfied with the government’s lassitude. Morse had
offered his rights to the government for one hundred thousand dollars,
and Congress had sneered.
It was not until 1846 that the telegraph was extended to New York,
and in the meantime the New York papers used such other means as they
could for the collection of news. Besides trains, ships, horses, and
the fleet foot of the reporter, there were pigeons. Beach went in for
pigeons extensively. When the _Sun_ moved from 156 Nassau Street, in
the summer of 1842, it took a six-story building at the southwest
corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, securing about three times as much
room as it had in the two-story building at Spruce Street. On the top
of the new building Beach built a pigeon-house, which stood for half a
century.
The strange, boxlike cote attracted not only the attention of Mr.
Bennett, whose _Herald_ was quartered just across the street, but
of all the folk who came and went in that busy region. So many were
the queries from friends and the quips from enemies concerning the
pigeon-house that the _Sun_ (December 14, 1843), vouchsafed to explain:
Why, we have had a school of carrier-pigeons in the upper
apartments of the _Sun_ office since we have occupied the
building. Did our contemporaries believe that we ever could be
at fault in furnishing the earliest news to our readers? Or did
they indulge the hope that in newspaper enterprise they could
ever catch us napping?
Carrier-pigeons have long been remarked for their sagacity
and admired for their usefulness. They are, of all birds,
the most invaluable, and as auxiliary to a newspaper cannot
be too highly prized. Part of the flock in our possession
were employed by the London _Morning Chronicle_ in bringing
intelligence from Dublin to London, and from Paris to London,
crossing both channels; therefore they are not novices in the
newspaper express.
If there was delay in the arrival of the Boston steamer, and
the weather clear, we despatched our choice pigeon, Sam Patch,
down the Sound, and he invariably came back with a slip of
delicate tissue-paper tied under his wing, containing the news.
We thus are apprised of the arrival of the steamer some two
hours before any one else hears of her. Our men are at their
cases; the steam is up in our pressroom, and our extras are
always out first.
We sometimes let one of our carriers fly to the Narrows, and in
twenty minutes or so we know what is coming in, thirty miles
from Sandy Hook Light. We despatch them as far as Albany, on
any important mission; frequently to New Jersey, and in the
summer-time they sometimes look in at Rockaway and let us know
what is going on at the pavilion. We have a small sliding door
in our observatory, on the top of the _Sun_ office, through
which the little aerials pass. By sending off one every little
while, we ascertain the details of whatever is important or
interesting at any given point.
They often fly at the rate of sixty miles an hour, easy! For
example, a half-dozen will leave Washington at daylight this
morning and arrive here about noon, beating the mail generally
ten hours or so. They can come through from Albany in about
two hours and a half, solar time. They fly exceedingly high,
and keep so until they make the spires of the city, and then
descend. We have not lost one by any accident, and believe ours
is the only flock of value or importance in the country.
We give this brief detail of “them pigeons” because our prying
friends and neighbors in the newspaper way have such a meager,
guesswork account of them; and because we dislike any mystery
or artifice in our business operations.
Speed and more speed was the newspaper demand of the hour, particularly
among the penny papers. The _Sun_ and the _Herald_ had been battling
for years, with competitors springing up about them, usually to die
within the twelvemonth. Now the _Tribune_ had come to remain in the
fray, even if it had not as much money to spend on news-gathering as
the _Sun_ and the _Herald_.
Edgar Allan Poe saw the fever that raged among the rivals. He had just
returned to New York from Philadelphia with his sick wife and his
mother. He was a recognized genius, but his worldly wealth amounted
to four dollars and fifty cents. He had written “The Narrative of A.
Gordon Pym,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and other
immortal stories, but his livelihood had been precarious. He had
been in turn connected with the _Southern Literary Messenger_, the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, and _Graham’s Magazine_, and had twice issued
the prospectuses for new periodicals of his own, fated never to be born.
His fortunes were at their lowest when he arrived in New York on April
6, 1844. He and his family found rooms in Greenwich Street, near Cedar,
now the thick of the business district. “The house is old and looks
buggy,” he wrote to a friend, but it was the best he could do with less
than five dollars in his pocket.
He had to have more money. The newspapers seemed to be the most
available place to get it, and the _Sun_ the livest of them.
Speed--that was what they wanted. They had been having ocean steamers
until they were almost sick. Railroads were unromantic. Horses were an
old story. The telegraph was still regarded as theory, and it hardly
appealed to the imagination.
Pigeons? Perhaps there was inspiration in the sight of Sam Patch
preening himself on a cornice of the _Sun’s_ building. A magnified
pigeon would be an air-ship. Poe sat him down, wrote the “balloon
hoax,” and sold it to Mr. Beach. It appeared in the _Sun_ of April 13,
1844.
Beneath a black-faced heading that was supplemented by a woodcut of
three race-horses flying under the whips of their jockeys and the
subtitle “By Express,” was the following introduction:
ASTOUNDING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM CHARLESTON,
VIA NORFOLK!--THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE
DAYS!!!--ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND OF A STEERING BALLOON
INVENTED BY MR. MONCK MASON.
We stop the press at a late hour to announce that by a private express
from Charleston, South Carolina, we are just put in possession of
full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by
man. _The Atlantic Ocean has actually been traversed in a balloon,
and in the incredibly brief period of three days!_ Eight persons have
crossed in the machine, among others Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr.
Monck Mason. We have barely time now to announce this most novel and
unexpected intelligence, but we hope by ten this morning to have ready
an extra with a detailed account of the voyage.
P. S.--The extra will be positively ready, and for sale at our counter,
by ten o’clock this morning. It will embrace all the particulars yet
known. We have also placed in the hands of an excellent artist a
representation of the “Steering Balloon,” which will accompany the
particulars of the voyage.
The promised extra bore a head of stud-horse type, six banks in all,
and as many inches deep.
“Astounding News by Express, _via_ Norfolk!” it announced. “The
Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!--Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s
Flying-Machine!!!--Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, Near Charleston, of
Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth,
and Four Others in the Steering Balloon Victoria, after a Passage of
Seventy-Five Hours from Land to Land--Full Particulars of the Voyage!!!”
The great problem is at length solved. The air, as well as
the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and
will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The
Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon! And this, too,
without difficulty--without any great apparent danger--with
thorough control of the machine--and in the inconceivably brief
period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore!
By the energy of an agent at Charleston, South Carolina, we
are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a
detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which
was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M.
and 2 P.M. on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard
Bringhurst, Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck; Mr. Monck
Mason, and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr.
Harrison Ainsworth, author of “Jack Sheppard,” _et cetera_,
and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful
flying-machine--with two seamen from Woolwich--in all, eight
persons.
The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic
and accurate in every respect, as with a slight exception they
are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason
and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is
indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon
itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The
only alteration in the MS. received has been made for the
purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr.
Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.
The story that followed was about five thousand words in length. To
summarize it, Monck Mason had applied the principle of the Archimedean
screw to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon. The gas-bag was an
ellipsoid thirteen feet long, with a car suspended from it. The screw
propeller, which was attached to the car, was operated by a spring. A
rudder shaped like a battledore kept the air-ship on its course.
The voyagers, according to the story, started from Mr. Osborne’s
home near Penstruthal, in North Wales, intending to sail across the
English Channel. The mechanism of the propeller broke, and the balloon,
caught in a strong northeast wind, was carried across the Atlantic at
the speed of sixty or more miles an hour. Mr. Mason kept a journal,
to which, at the end of each day, Mr. Ainsworth added a postscript.
The balloon landed safely on the coast of South Carolina, near Fort
Moultrie.
The names of the supposed voyagers were well chosen by Poe to give
verisimilitude to the hoax. Monck Mason and Robert Holland, or Hollond,
were of the small party which actually sailed from Vauxhall Gardens,
London, on the afternoon of November 7, 1836, in the balloon Nassau and
landed at Weilburg, in Germany, five hundred miles away, eighteen hours
later. Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, was then one of the shining
stars of English literary life. The others named by Poe were familiar
figures of the period.
Poe adopted the plan, used so successfully by Locke in the moon hoax,
of having real people do the thing that they would like to do; but
there the resemblance of the two hoaxes ends, except for the technical
bits that Poe was able to inject into his narrative. The moon hoax
lasted for weeks; the balloon hoax for a day. Even the _Sun_ did not
attempt to bolster it, for it said the second day afterward:
BALLOON--The mails from the South last Saturday night not
having brought confirmation of the balloon from England, the
particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our
extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is
erroneous. The description of the balloon and the voyage was
written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to
obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and
satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible.
About a week later, when the _Sun_ was still being pounded by its
contemporaries, a few of which had been gulled into rewriting the
story, another editorial article on the hoax appeared:
BALLOON EXPRESS--We have been somewhat amused with the comments
of the press upon the balloon express. The more intelligent
editors saw its object at once. On the other hand, many of
our esteemed contemporaries--those who are too ignorant to
appreciate the pleasant satire--have ascribed to us the worst
and basest motives. We expected as much.
The “pleasant satire” of which the _Sun_ spoke was evidently meant to
hold up to view the craze of the day for speed in the transmission of
news and men. Yet the _Sun_ itself, as the leader of penny journalism,
had been to a great extent the cause of this craze. It had taught the
people to read the news and to hanker for more.
There was another story which Poe and the _Sun_ shared--one that will
outlive even the balloon hoax. Almost buried on the third page of the
_Sun_ of July 28, 1841, was this advertisement in agate type:
Left her home on Sunday morning, July 25, a young lady; had
on a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat,
light-colored shoes, and parasol light-colored; it is supposed
some accident has befallen her. Whoever will give information
respecting her at 126 Nassau shall be rewarded for their
trouble.
The next day the _Sun_ said in its news columns:
☞ The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age
was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her
dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary
C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having
disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.
The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia
Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John
Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure
of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to
keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle of the Elysian Fields
of Hoboken. To the _Sun_, which had then no Poe, no _Sherlock Holmes_,
the murder was the text for a moral lesson:
There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the
most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently
obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing
behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale
of articles purchased exclusively by males--especially of
cigar-stores and drinking-houses--young and beautiful females
for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the
interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and
consequent custom, of the other sex--especially of the young
and thoughtless.
It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the
most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl
was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which
has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and
violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being
used as an instrument of cupidity--as a sort of “man-trap”
to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the
spendthrift and of constant dissipation--she has become the
victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to
the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to
engender and encourage.
The _Sun_ and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers
mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a
more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher
of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed
Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone
to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill,
and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed
the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to
the ship Kalamazoo, for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove
the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in
fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene
transferred to Paris.
The great social event of the town in 1842 was the visit of Charles
Dickens. He had been expected for several years. In fact, as far back
as October 13, 1838, the _Sun_ remarked:
Boz is coming to America. We hope he will not make a fool of
himself here, like a majority of his distinguished countrymen
who preceded him.
The _Sun_ got out an extra on the day when Dickens landed, but it
was not in honour of Boz, but rather because of the arrival of
the Britannia with a budget of foreign news. Buried in a mass of
Continental paragraphs was this one:
Among the passengers are Mr. Charles Dickens, the celebrated
author, and his lady.
The ship-news man never even thought to ask Dickens how he liked
America. But society was waiting for Boz, and he was tossed about on a
lively sea of receptions and dinners. The _Sun_ presently thought that
the young author was being exploited overmuch:
Mr. Dickens, we have no doubt, is a very respectable gentleman,
and we know that he is a very clever and agreeable author. He
has written several books that have put the reading world in
most excellent good humor. In this way he has done much to
promote the general happiness of mankind, and honestly deserves
their gratitude.
Having crossed the water for the purpose of traveling in
America, where his works have been extensively read and
admired, he is, of course, received and treated with marked
civility, attention, and respect. We should be ashamed of our
countrymen if it were otherwise. During his stay at Boston the
citizens gave him a public dinner. At New Haven he received
a similar token of kind regard. In this city a ball has been
given him. All these attentions were right and proper, and
as far as we can learn they have been uniformly conducted in
a gentlemanly and respectable manner, becoming alike to the
characters of those who gave and him who received them.
But a few penny-catchers of the press are determined to make
money out of Boz. The shop-windows are stuffed with lithograph
likenesses of him, which resemble the original just about as
much as he resembles a horse. His own wife would not recognize
them in any other way than by the word “Boz” written under them.
Then a corps of sneaking reporters, most of them fresh from
London, are pursuing him like a pack of hounds at his heels to
catch every wink of his eye, every motion of his hands, and
every word that he speaks, to be dished up with all conceivable
embellishments by pen and pencil, and published in extras,
pamphlets, and handbills. To make all this trash sell well in
the market, the greatest possible hurrah must be made by the
papers interested in the speculations, and therefore the whole
American people are basely caricatured by them, and represented
as one vast mob following Dickens from place to place, and
striving even to touch the hem of his garment.
That our readers at a distance may not be induced to suppose
that the good people of New York are befooling themselves in
this way, we beg leave to assure them that all these absurd
reports are ridiculous caricatures, hatched from the prolific
brains of a few reckless reporters for a few unprincipled
papers. They do in truth make as great fools of themselves as
they represent the public to be generally. But beyond their
narrow and contemptible circle we are happy to know that Mr.
Dickens is treated with that manly and sincere respect which
is so justly his due, and which must convince him that he is
amongst a warm-hearted people, who know both how to respect
their guest and themselves.
When Dickens sailed for home, in June, the _Sun_ bade him _bon voyage_
with but a paragraph. It was more than a year afterward that it came to
him again; and meanwhile he had trodden on the toes of America:
The appearance of the current number of “The Life and
Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” will not add to the happiness
of retrospections. Where is that Boston committee, where the
renowned getters-up of the City Hotel dinner and the ball at
the Park Theater, with its _tableaux vivants_, its splendid
decorations, and tickets at ten dollars each?
The scene is passing now before our memory--the crammed
theater, full up to its third tier, the dense crowd opening
a passage for Mr. Dickens and the proud and happy committee
while he passes up the center of the stage amid huzzas and the
waving of handkerchiefs, while the band is playing “God Save
the Queen” and “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” And _our_
Irving, _our_ Halleck, _our_ Bryant passed around in the crowd,
unnoticed and almost unknown. Shame! Let our cheeks crimson, as
they ought.
The _Sun_ itself was doing very nicely. On its tenth birthday,
September 3, 1843, it announced that it employed eight editors and
reporters, twenty compositors, sixteen pressmen, twelve folders and
counters, and one hundred carriers. The circulation of the daily paper
was thirty-eight thousand, of the _Weekly Sun_ twelve thousand.
Mr. Beach owned the _Sun’s_ new home at Fulton and Nassau Streets and
the building at 156 Nassau Street which he had recently vacated, and
which was burned down in the fire of February 6, 1845. He had a London
correspondent who ran a special horse express to carry the news from
London to Bristol. A _Sun_ reporter went to report Webster’s speech on
the great day when the Bunker Hill Monument was finished. He got down
correctly at least the last sentence: “Thank God, I--I also--am an
American!”
With a circulation by far the largest in the world, the _Sun_ was
obliged to buy a new dress of type every three months, for the day of
the curved stereotype plate was still far off. Early in 1846 two new
presses, each capable of six thousand _Suns_ an hour, were put in at a
cost of twelve thousand dollars.
The size of the paper grew constantly, although Beach stuck to a
four-page sheet because of the limitations of the presses. Instead of
adding pages, he added columns. From Day’s little three-column _Sun_
the paper had grown, by April of 1840, to a width of seven columns. Of
the total of twenty-eight columns in an issue twenty-one and a half
were devoted to advertising, three to mixed news and editorials, two
and a half to the court reports, and one column to reprint.
With the page seven columns wide, Beach thought that the two
words--“_The Sun_”--looked lonely, and to fill out the heading he
changed it to read “_The New York Sun_.” This continued from April 13
to September 29, 1840, when the proprietor saw how much more economical
it would be to cut out “New York” and push the first and seventh
columns of the first page up to the top of the paper. Then it was “_The
Sun_” once more in head-line as well as body.
The paper is never the _New York Sun_, Eugene Field’s poem to the
contrary notwithstanding. It is the _Sun_, universal in its spirit, and
published in New York by the accident of birth.
Three years after that the _Sun_ became an eight-column paper, and
there were no more sneers at the blanket sheets, for the _Sun_ itself
was getting pretty wide.
It was in the reign of Moses Y. Beach as owner of the _Sun_, that
Horace Greeley came to stay in New York journalism. He had been fairly
successful as editor of the _New Yorker_, and his management of the
campaign paper called the _Log Cabin_, issued in 1840 in the interest
of General Harrison, was masterly. With the prestige thus obtained, he
was able, on April 10, 1841, to start the _Tribune_.
In the first number he announced his intention of excluding the
police reports which had been so valuable to “our leading penny
papers”--meaning the _Sun_ and the _Herald_--and of making the
_Tribune_ “worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined.”
It was a week before the _Sun_ mentioned its former friend, and then it
was only to say:
A word to Horace Greeley--if he wishes us to write him or any
of his sickly brood of newspapers into notice, he must first go
to school and learn a little decency. He must further retract
the dirty, malignant, and wholesale falsehood which he procured
to be published in the Albany _Evening Journal_ a year ago last
winter, with the hope of injuring the _Sun_. He must then deal
in something besides misstatements of facts.... Until he does
all this we shall feel very indifferent to any thrusts that he
can make at us with his dagger of lath.
Soon afterward the _Sun_ rubbed it in by quoting the Albany _Evening
Journal_:
Galvanize a large New England squash, and it would make as
capable an editor as Horace.
But Greeley was a lively young man, in spite of his eccentric ways and
his habit of letting one leg of his trousers hang out of his unpolished
boots. Only thirty when he started the _Tribune_, he had had a lot
of experience, particularly with politicians and with fads. He still
believed in some of the fads, including temperance--which was then
considered a fad--vegetarianism, and Abolition. He had been, too, a
poet; and his verses lived to haunt his mature years. He had to give
away most of the five thousand copies that were printed of the first
number of the _Tribune_, but in a month he had a circulation of six
thousand, and in two months he doubled this.
Greeley had the instinct for getting good men, but not always the knack
of holding them. One of his early finds was Henry J. Raymond, who
attracted his attention as a boy orator for the Whig cause. Raymond
worked for Greeley’s _New Yorker_ and later for the _Tribune_. He was a
good reporter, using a system of shorthand of his own devising.
On one occasion, at least, he enabled the _Tribune_ to beat the other
papers. He was sent to Boston to report a speech, and he took with
him three printers and their cases of type. After the speech Raymond
and his compositors boarded the boat for New York, and as fast as the
reporter transcribed his notes the printers put the speech into type.
On the arrival of the boat at New York the type was ready to be put
into the forms, and the _Tribune_ was on the street hours ahead of its
rivals.
Greeley paid Raymond eight dollars a week until Raymond threatened to
leave unless he received twenty dollars a week. He got it, but Greeley
made such a fuss about the matter that Raymond realized that further
increases would be out of the question. Presently he went to the
_Courier and Enquirer_, and from 1843 to 1850 he tried to restore some
of the glory that once had crowned Colonel Webb’s paper.
In this period Raymond and his former employer, Greeley, fought their
celebrated editorial duel--with pens, not mahogany-handled pistols--on
the subject of Fourierism, that theory of social reorganization which
Greeley seemed anxious to spread, and which was zealously preached
by another of his young men, Albert Brisbane, now perhaps better
remembered as the father of Arthur Brisbane. But Colonel Webb’s paper
would not wake wide enough to suit the ambitious Raymond, who seized
the opportunity of becoming the first editor of the New York _Times_.
Other men who worked for Greeley’s _Tribune_ in its young days were
Bayard Taylor, who wrote articles from Europe; George William Curtis,
the essayist; Count Gurowski, an authority on foreign affairs; and
Charles A. Dana.
Beach soon recognized Greeley as a considerable rival in the morning
field, and there was a long tussle between the _Sun_ and the
_Tribune_. It did not content itself with words, and there were street
battles between the boys who sold the two papers. Stung by one of
Beach’s articles, Greeley called the _Sun_ “the slimy and venomous
instrument of Locofocoism, Jesuitical and deadly in politics and
grovelling in morals.” The term Locofoco had then lost its original
application to the Equal Rights section of the Democratic party and was
applied--particularly by the Whigs--to any sort of Democrat.
Moses Y. Beach had no such young journalists about him as Dana or
Raymond, but he had two sons who seemed well adapted to take up the
ownership of the _Sun_. He took them in as partners on October 22,
1845, under the title of “M. Y. Beach & Sons.” The elder son, Moses
Sperry Beach, was then twenty-three years old, and had already been
well acquainted with the newspaper business, particularly with the
mechanical side of it. Before his father took him as a partner, young
Moses had joined with George Roberts in the publication of the Boston
_Daily Times_, but he was glad to drop this and devote himself to the
valuable property at Fulton and Nassau Streets.
If a genius for invention is inheritable, both the Beach boys were
richly endowed by their father. Moses S. invented devices for the
feeding of rolls of paper, instead of sheets, to flat presses; for
wetting news-print paper prior to printing; for cutting the sheets
after printing; and for adapting newspaper presses to print both sides
of the sheet at the same time.
Alfred Ely Beach was only nineteen when he became partner in the _Sun_.
After leaving the academy at Monson, Massachusetts, where he had been
schooled, he worked with his father in the _Sun_ office, and learned
every detail of the business. The inventive vein was even deeper in
him than in his brother. When he was twenty he formed a partnership
with his old schoolmate, Orson D. Munn, of Monson, and they bought the
_Scientific American_ from Rufus Porter and combined its publishing
business with that of soliciting patents.
Alfred Beach retained his interest in the _Sun_ for several years, but
he is best remembered for his inventions and for his connection with
scientific literature. In 1853 he devised the first typewriter which
printed raised letters on a strip of paper for the blind. He invented
a pneumatic mail-tube, and a larger tube on the same principle, by
which he hoped passengers could be carried, the motive power being the
exhaustion of air at the far end by means of a rotating fan.
He was the first subway-constructor in New York. In 1869 he built a
tunnel nine feet in diameter under Broadway from Warren Street to
Murray Street, and the next year a car was sent to and fro in this
by pneumatic power. A more helpful invention, however, was the Beach
shield for tunnel-digging--a gigantic hogs-head with the ends removed,
the front circular edge being sharp and the rear end having a thin iron
hood. This cylinder was propelled slowly through the earth by hydraulic
rams, the dislodged material being removed through the rear.
Mr. Beach was connected with the _Scientific American_ until his death
in 1896. His son, Frederick Converse Beach, was one of the editors of
that periodical, and his grandson, Stanley Yale Beach, is still in the
same field of endeavour.