“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR
_Moses Y. Beach as an Emissary of President Polk.--The Associated
Press Founded in the Office of “The Sun.”--Ben Day’s
Brother-in-Law Retires with a Small Fortune._
The Beaches, father and sons, owned the _Sun_ throughout the Mexican
War, a period notable for the advance of newspaper enterprise; and
Moses Yale Beach proved more than once that he was the peer of Bennett
in the matter of getting news.
Shortly before war was declared--April 24, 1846--the telegraph-line was
built from Philadelphia to Fort Lee, New Jersey, opposite New York.
June found a line opened from New York to Boston; September, a line
from New York to Albany. The ports and the capitals of the nation were
no longer dependent on horse expresses, or even upon the railroads, for
brief news of importance. Morse had subdued space.
For a little time after the Mexican War began there was a gap in the
telegraph between Washington and New York, the line between Baltimore
and Philadelphia not having been completed; but with the aid of special
trains the _Sun_ was able to present the news a few hours after it left
Washington. It was, of course, not exactly fresh news, for the actual
hostilities in Mexico were not heard of at Washington until May 11,
more than two weeks after their accomplishment.
The good news from the battle-fields of Palo Alto and Resaca de la
Palma was eighteen days in reaching New York. All Mexican news came by
steamer to New Orleans or Mobile, and was forwarded from those ports,
by the railroad or other means, to the nearest telegraph-station. Moses
Y. Beach was instrumental in whipping up the service from the South,
for he established a special railroad news service between Mobile and
Montgomery, a district of Alabama where there had been much delay.
On September 11, 1846, the _Sun_ uttered halleluiahs over the spread of
the telegraph. The line to Buffalo had been opened on the previous day.
The invention had been in every-day use only two years, but more than
twelve hundred miles of line had been built, as follows:
New York to Boston 265
New York to Albany and Buffalo 507
New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington 240
Philadelphia to Harrisburg 105
Boston to Lowell 26
Boston toward Portland 55
Ithaca to Auburn 40
Troy to Saratoga 31
-----
Total 1,269
England had then only one hundred and seventy-five miles of telegraph.
“This,” gloated the _Sun_, “is American enterprise!”
The _Sun_ did not have a special correspondent in Mexico, and most of
its big stories during the war, including the account of the storming
of Monterey, were those sent to the New Orleans _Picayune_ by George W.
Kendall, who is supposed to have put in the mouth of General Taylor the
words--
“A little more grape, Captain Bragg!”
Moses Yale Beach himself started for Mexico as a special agent of
President Polk, with power to talk peace, but the negotiations between
Beach and the Mexican government were broken off by a false report of
General Taylor’s defeat by Santa Anna, and Mr. Beach returned to his
paper.
The more facilities for news-getting the papers enjoyed, the more
they printed--and the more it cost them. Each had been doing its bit
on its own hook. The _Sun_ and the _Courier and Enquirer_ had spent
extravagant sums on their horse expresses from Washington. The _Sun_
and the _Herald_ may have profited by hiring express-trains to race
from Boston to New York with the latest news brought by the steamships,
but the outflow of money was immense. The news-boats--clipper-ships,
steam-vessels, and rowboats--which went down to Sandy Hook to meet
incoming steamers cost the _Sun_, the _Herald_, the _Courier and
Enquirer_, and the _Journal of Commerce_ a pretty penny.
With the coming of the Mexican War there were special trains to be run
in the South. And now the telegraph, with its expensive tolls, was
magnetizing money out of every newspaper’s till. Not only that, but
there was only one wire, and the correspondent who got to it first
usually hogged it, paying tolls to have a chapter from the Bible, or
whatever was the reporter’s favourite book, put on the wire until his
story should be ready to start.
It was all wrong, and at last, through pain in the pocket, the
newspapers came to realize it. At a conference held in the office of
the _Sun_, toward the close of the Mexican War, steps were taken to
lessen the waste of money, men, and time.
[Illustration:
MOSES SPERRY BEACH
A Nephew of Benjamin H. Day and a Son of Moses Yale Beach. He
Held “The Sun” Until Dana’s Time. This Picture is Reproduced
from the First Edition of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” Mr.
Beach Was One of Clemens’s Fellow Voyagers.
]
At this meeting, presided over by Gerard Hallock, the veteran editor
of the _Journal of Commerce_, there were represented the _Sun_, the
_Herald_, the _Tribune_--the three most militant morning papers--the
_Courier and Enquirer_, the _Express_, and Mr. Hallock’s own paper.
The conference formed the Harbour Association, by which one fleet
of news-boats would do the work for which half a dozen had been
used, and the New York Associated Press, designed for cooperation in
the gathering of news in centres like Washington, Albany, Boston,
Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Alexander Jones, of the _Journal of
Commerce_, became the first agent of the new organization. He had been
a reporter on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was he who invented
the first cipher code for use in the telegraph, saving time and tolls.
Thus in the office where some of the bitterest invective against
newspaper rivals had been penned, there began an era of good feeling.
So busy had the world become, and so full of news, through the new
means of communication afforded by Professor Morse, that the invention
of opprobrious names for Mr. Bennett ceased to be a great journalistic
industry.
As an example of the change in the personal relations of the newspaper
editors and proprietors, the guests present at a dinner given by Moses
Y. Beach in December, 1848, when he retired from business and turned
the _Sun_ over to his sons Moses and Alfred, were the venerable Major
Noah, then retired from newspaper life; Gerard Hallock, Horace Greeley,
Henry J. Raymond, of the _Courier and Enquirer_, and James Brooks, of
the _Express_. All praised Beach and his fourteen years of labour on
the _Sun_, but there was never a word about Benjamin H. Day. Evidently
that gentleman’s re-entry into the newspaper field as the proprietor of
the _True Sun_ had put him out of tune with his brother-in-law. Richard
Adams Locke was there, however--the only relic of the first régime.
What the _Sun_ thought of itself then is indicated in an editorial
printed on December 4, when the Beach brothers relieved their father,
who was in bad health:
We ask those under whose eyes the _Sun_ does not shine from
day to day--our _Sun_, we mean; this large and well-printed
one-cent newspaper--to look it over and say whether it is not
one of the wonders of the age. Does it not contain the elements
of all that is valuable in a diurnal sheet? Where is more
effort or enterprise expended for so small a return?
Of this effort and enterprise we feel proud; and a circulation
of over fifty thousand copies of our sheet every day among at
least five times that number of readers, together with the
largest cash advertising patronage on this continent, convinces
us that our pride is widely shared.
The _Sun_ that Ben Day had turned over to Moses Y. Beach was no longer
recognizable. Fifteen years had wrought many changes from the time when
the young Yankee printer launched his venture on the tide of chance.
The steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph had made over American
journalism. The police-court items, the little local scandals, the
animal stories--all the trifles upon which Day had made his way to
prosperity--were now being shoved aside to make room for the quick, hot
news that came in from many quarters. The _Sun_ still strove for the
patronage of the People, with a capital P, but it had educated them
away from the elementary.
The elder Beach was enterprising, but never rash. He made the _Sun_ a
better business proposition than ever it was under Day. Ben Day carried
a journalistic sword at his belt; Beach, a pen over his ear. Perhaps
Day could not have brought the _Sun_ up to a circulation of fifty
thousand and a money value of a quarter of a million dollars; but, on
the other hand, it is unlikely that Beach could ever have started the
_Sun_.
Once it was started, and once he had seen how it was run, the task of
keeping it going was fairly easy for him. He was a good publisher. Not
content with getting out the _Sun_ proper, he established the _Weekly
Sun_, issued on Saturdays, and intended for country circulation, at
one dollar a year. In 1848 he got out the _American Sun_, at twelve
shillings a year, which was shipped abroad for the use of Europeans who
cared to read of our rude American doings. Another venture of Beach’s
was the _Illustrated Sun and Monthly Literary Journal_, a sixteen-page
magazine full of woodcuts.
Mr. Beach had for sale at the _Sun_ office all the latest novels in
cheap editions. He wrote a little book himself--“The Wealth of New
York: A Table of the Wealth of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City
Who Are Estimated to Be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars or Over,
with Brief Biographical Notices.” It sold for twenty-five cents.
Perhaps Beach was the father of the newspaper syndicate. In December,
1841, when the _Sun_ received President Tyler’s message to Congress
by special messenger, he had extra editions of one sheet printed for
twenty other newspapers, using the same type for the body of the
issue, and changing only the title-head. In this way such papers as
the _Vermont Chronicle_, the Albany _Advertiser_, the Troy _Whig_, the
Salem _Gazette_, and the Boston _Times_ were able to give the whole
text of the message to their readers without the delay and expense of
setting it in type.
Here is Dana’s own estimate of the second proprietor of the _Sun_:
Moses Y. Beach was a business man and a newspaper manager
rather than what we now understand as a journalist--that is
to say, one who is both a writer and a practical conductor
and director of a newspaper. Mr. Beach was a man noted for
enterprise in the collection of news. In the latter days when
he owned and managed the _Sun_ in New York, the telegraph was
only established between Washington and Boston, though toward
the end of his career it was extended, if I am not mistaken, as
far towards the South as Montgomery in Alabama. The news from
Europe was then brought to Halifax by steamers, just as the
news from Mexico was brought to New Orleans. Mr. Beach’s energy
found a successful field in establishing expresses brought by
messengers on horseback from Halifax to Boston and from New
Orleans to Montgomery, thus bringing the news of Europe and
the news of the Mexican War to New York much earlier than they
could have arrived by the ordinary public conveyance. With him
were associated, sooner or later, two or three of the other
New York papers; but the energy with which he carried through
the undertaking made him a conspicuous and distinguished
figure in the journalism of the city. The final result was the
organization of the New York Associated Press, which has now
become a world-embracing establishment for the collection of
news of every description, which it furnishes to its members in
this city and to other newspapers in every part of the country.
Under the stimulus of Mr. Beach’s energetic intellect, aided by
the cheapness of its price, the _Sun_ became in his hands an
important and profitable establishment. Yet he is scarcely to
be classed among the prominent journalists of his day.
Through conservatism, good business sense, and steady work, Moses Y.
Beach amassed from the _Sun_ what was then a handsome fortune, and when
he retired he was only forty-eight. His last years were spent at the
town of his birth, Wallingford, where he died on July 19, 1868, six
months after the _Sun_ had passed out of the hands of a Beach and into
the hands of a Dana.
[Illustration:
(_From Photo in the Possession of Mrs. Jennie Beach Gasper_)
ALFRED ELY BEACH
A Son of Moses Y. Beach; He Left “The Sun” to Conduct the
“Scientific American.”
]
Beach Brothers, as the new ownership of the _Sun_ was entitled, made
but one important change in the appearance and character of the paper
during the next few years.
Up to the coming of the telegraph the _Sun_ had devoted its first page
to advertising, with a spice of reading-matter that usually was in the
form of reprint--miscellany, as some newspapermen call it, or bogus, as
most printers term it. But when telegraphic news came to be common but
costly, newspapers began to see the importance of attracting the casual
reader by means of display on the front page. The Beaches presently
used one or two columns of the latest telegraph-matter on the first
page; sometimes the whole page would be so occupied.
In 1850, from July to December, they issued an _Evening Sun_, which
carried no advertising.
On April 6, 1852, Alfred Ely Beach, more concerned with scientific
matters than with the routine of daily publication, withdrew from the
_Sun_, which passed into the sole possession of Moses S. Beach, then
only thirty years old. It was reported that when the partnership was
dissolved the division was based on a total valuation of two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for the paper which, less than nineteen
years before, Ben Day had started with an old hand-press and a hatful
of type. Horace Greeley, telling a committee of the British parliament
about American newspapers, named that sum as the amount for which the
_Sun_ was valued in the sale by brother to brother.
“It was very cheap,” he added.