of the Herald sixteen years elapsed; during most of which he was a
very poor, laborious, under-valued, roving writer for the daily press.
At Halifax, he gave lessons in book-keeping for a few weeks, with
little profit, then made his way along the coast to Portland, whence a
schooner conveyed him to Boston. He was then, it appears, a soft,
romantic youth, alive to the historic associations of the place, and
susceptible to the varied, enchanting loveliness of the scenes
adjacent, on land and sea. He even expressed his feelings in verse, in
the Childe Harold manner,--verse which does really show a poetic habit
of feeling, with an occasional happiness of expression. At Boston he
experienced the last extremity of want. Friendless and alone he
wandered about the streets, seeking work and finding none; until, his
small store of money being all expended, he passed two whole days
without food, and was then only relieved by finding a shilling on the
Common. He obtained at length the place of salesman in a bookstore,
from which he was soon transferred to the printing-house connected
therewith, where he performed the duties of proof-reader. And here it
was that he received his first lesson in the art of catering for the
public mind. The firm in whose employment he was were more ambitious
of glory than covetous of profit, and consequently published many
works that were in advance of the general taste. Bankruptcy was their
reward. The youth noted another circumstance at Boston. The newspaper
most decried was Buckingham's Galaxy; but it was also the most eagerly
sought and the most extensively sold. Buckingham habitually violated
the traditional and established decorums of the press; he was
familiar, chatty, saucy, anecdotical, and sadly wanting in respect for
the respectabilities of the most respectable town in the universe.
Every one said that he was a very bad man, _but_ every one was
exceedingly curious every Saturday to see "what the fellow had to say
this week." If the youth could have obtained a sight of a file of
James Franklin's Courant, of 1722, in which the youthful Benjamin
first addressed the public, he would have seen a still more striking
example of a journal generally denounced and universally read.
Two years in Boston. Then he went to New York, where he soon met the
publisher of a Charleston paper, who engaged him as translator from
the Spanish, and general assistant. During the year spent by him at
Charleston he increased his knowledge of the journalist's art. The
editor of the paper with which he was connected kept a sail-boat, in
which he was accustomed to meet arriving vessels many miles from the
coast, and bring in his files of newspapers a day in advance of his
rivals. The young assistant remembered this, and turned it to account
in after years. At Charleston he was confronted, too, with the late
peculiar institution, and saw much to approve in it, nothing to
condemn. From that day to this he has been but in one thing
consistent,--contempt for the negro and for all white men interested
in his welfare, approving himself in this a thorough Celt. If, for one
brief period, he forced himself, for personal reasons, to veil this
feeling, the feeling remained rooted within him, and soon resumed its
wonted expression. He liked the South, and the people of the South,
and had a true Celtic sympathy with their aristocratic pretensions.
The salary of an assistant editor at that time was something between
the wages of a compositor and those of an office-boy. Seven dollars a
week would have been considered rather liberal pay; ten, munificent;
fifteen, lavish.
Returning to New York, he endeavored to find more lucrative
employment, and advertised his intention to open, near the site of the
present Herald office, a "Permanent Commercial School," in which all
the usual branches were to be taught "in the inductive method." His
list of subjects was extensive,--"reading, elocution, penmanship, and
arithmetic; algebra, astronomy, history, and geography; moral
philosophy, commercial law, and political economy; English grammar,
and composition; and also, if required, the French and Spanish
languages, by natives of _those countries_." Application was to be
made to "J.G.B., 148 Fulton Street." Applications, however, were not
made in sufficient number, and the school, we believe, never came into
existence. Next, he tried a course of lectures upon Political Economy,
at the old Dutch Church in Ann Street, then not far from the centre of
population. The public did not care to hear the young gentleman upon
that abstruse subject, and the pecuniary result of the enterprise was
not encouraging. He had no resource but the ill-paid, unhonored
drudgery of the press.
For the next few years he was a paragraphist, reporter, scissorer, and
man-of-all-work for the New York papers, daily and weekly, earning but
the merest subsistence. He wrote then in very much the same style as
when he afterwards amused and shocked the town in the infant Herald;
only he was under restraint, being a subordinate, and was seldom
allowed to violate decorum. In point of industry, sustained and
indefatigable industry, he had no equal, and has never since had but
one. One thing is to be specially noted as one of the chief and
indispensable causes of his success. _He had no vices_. He never drank
to excess, nor gormandized, nor gambled, nor even smoked, nor in any
other way wasted the vitality needed for a long and tough grapple with
adverse fortune. What he once wrote of himself in the early Herald was
strictly true:
"I eat and drink to live,--not live to eat and drink. Social
glasses of wine are my aversion; public dinners are my
abomination; all species of gormandizing, my utter scorn and
contempt. When I am hungry, I eat; when thirsty, drink. Wine
or viands taken for society, or to stimulate conversation,
tend only to dissipation, indolence, poverty, contempt, and
death."
This was an immense advantage, which he had in common with several of
the most mischievous men of modern times,--Calhoun, Charles XII.,
George III., and others. Correct bodily habits are of themselves such
a source of power, that the man who has them will be extremely likely
to gain the day over competitors of ten times his general worth who
have them not. Dr. Franklin used to say, that if Jack Wilkes had been
as exemplary in this particular as George III., he would have turned
the king out of his dominions. In several of the higher kinds of
labor, such as law, physic, journalism, authorship, art, when the
competition is close and keen, and many able men are near the summit,
the question, who shall finally stand upon it, often resolves itself
into one of physical endurance. This man Bennett would have lived and
died a hireling scribe, if he had had even one of the common vices.
Everything was against his rising, except alone an enormous capacity
for labor, sustained by strictly correct habits.
He lived much with politicians during these years of laborious
poverty. Gravitating always towards the winning side, he did much to
bring into power the worst set of politicians we ever had,--those who
"availed" themselves of the popularity of Andrew Jackson, and who were
afterwards used by him for the purpose of electing Martin Van Buren.
He became perfectly familiar with all that was petty and mean in the
political strifes of the day, but without ever suspecting that there
was anything in politics not petty and mean. He had no convictions of
his own, and therefore not the least belief that any politician had.
If the people were in earnest about the affairs of their country,
(_their_ country, not his,) it was because the people were not behind
the scenes, were dupes of their party leaders, were a parcel of fools.
In short, he acquired his insight into political craft in the school
of Tammany Hall and the Kitchen Cabinet. His value was not altogether
unappreciated by the politicians. He was one of those whom they use
and flatter during the heat of the contest, and forget in the
distribution of the spoils of victory.
He made his first considerable hit as a journalist in the spring of
1828, when he filled the place of Washington correspondent to the New
York Enquirer. In the Congressional Library, one day, he found an
edition of Horace Walpole's Letters, which amused him very much. "Why
not," said he to himself, "try, a few letters on a similar plan from
this city, to be published in New York?" The letters appeared. Written
in a lively manner, full of personal allusions, and describing
individuals respecting whom the public are always curious,--free also
from offensive personalities,--the letters attracted much notice
and were generally copied in the press. It is said that some of the
ladies whose charms were described in those letters were indebted to
them for husbands. Personalities of this kind were a novelty then,
and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period
he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical
literature,--paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories,
reports of trials, debates, balls, and police cases; his earnings
ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve. If there had been
then in New York one newspaper publisher who understood his business,
the immense possible value of this man as a journalist would have been
perceived, and he would have been secured, rewarded, and kept under
some restraint. But there was no such man. There were three or four
forcible writers for the press, but not one journalist.
During the great days of "The Courier and Inquirer," from 1829 to
1832, when it was incomparably the best newspaper on the continent,
James Gordon Bennett was its most efficient hand. It lost him in 1832,
when the paper abandoned General Jackson and took up Nicholas Biddle;
and in losing him lost its chance of retaining the supremacy among
American newspapers to this day. We can truly say, that at that time
journalism, as a thing by itself and for itself, had no existence in
the United States. Newspapers were mere appendages of party; and the
darling object of each journal was to be recognized as the organ of
the party it supported. As to the public, the great public, hungry for
interesting news, no one thought of it. Forty years ago, in the city
of New York, a copy of a newspaper could not be bought for money. If
any one wished to see a newspaper, he had either to go to the office
and subscribe, or repair to a bar-room and buy a glass of something to
drink, or bribe a carrier to rob one of his customers. The circulation
of the Courier and Inquirer was considered something marvellous when
it printed thirty-five hundred copies a day, and its business was
thought immense when its daily advertising averaged fifty-five
dollars. It is not very unusual for a newspaper now to receive for
advertising, in one day, six hundred times that sum. Bennett, in the
course of time, had a chance been given to him, would have made the
Courier and Inquirer powerful enough to cast off all party ties; and
this he would have done merely by improving it as a vehicle of news.
But he was kept down upon one of those ridiculous, tantalizing,
corrupting salaries, which are a little more than a single man needs,
but not enough for him to marry upon. This salary was increased by the
proprietors giving him a small share in the small profits of the
printing-office; so that, after fourteen years of hard labor and
Scotch economy, he found himself, on leaving the great paper, a
capitalist to the extent of a few hundred dollars. The chief editor of
the paper which he now abandoned sometimes lost as much in a single
evening at the card-table. It probably never occurred to him that this
poor, ill-favored Scotchman was destined to destroy his paper and all
the class of papers to which it belonged. Any one who now examines a
file of the Courier and Inquirer of that time, and knows its interior
circumstances, will see plainly enough that the possession of this man
was the vital element in its prosperity. He alone knew the rudiments
of his trade. He alone had the physical stamina, the indefatigable
industry, the sleepless vigilance, the dexterity, tact, and audacity,
needful for keeping up a daily newspaper in the face of keen
competition.
Unweaned yet from the politicians, he at once started a cheap party
paper, "The Globe," devoted to Jackson and Van Buren. The party,
however, did not rally to its support, and it had to contend with the
opposition of party papers already existing, upon whose manor it was
poaching. The Globe expired after an existence of thirty days. Its
proprietor, still untaught by such long experience, invested the wreck
of his capital in a Philadelphia Jackson paper, and struggled
desperately to gain for it a footing in the party. He said to Mr. Van
Buren and to other leaders, Help me to a loan of twenty-five hundred
dollars for two years, and I can establish my Pennsylvanian on a
self-supporting basis. The application was politely refused, and he
was compelled to give up the struggle. The truth is, he was not
implicitly trusted by the Jackson party. They admitted the services he
had rendered; but, at the same time, they were a little afraid of the
vein of mockery that broke out so frequently in his writings. He was
restive in harness. He was devoted to the party, but he was under no
party illusions. He was fighting in the ranks as an adventurer or
soldier of fortune. He fought well; but would it do to promote a man
to high rank who knew the game so well, and upon whom no man could get
any _hold_? To him, in his secret soul, Martin Van Buren was nothing
(as he often said) but a country lawyer, who, by a dexterous use of
the party machinery, the well-timed death of De Witt Clinton, and
General Jackson's frenzy in behalf of Mrs. Eaton, had come to be the
chosen successor of the fiery chieftain. The canny Scotchman saw this
with horrid clearness, and saw nothing more. Political chiefs do not
like subalterns of this temper. Underneath the politician in Martin
Van Buren there was the citizen, the patriot, the gentleman, and the
man, whose fathers were buried in American soil, whose children were
to live under American institutions, who had, necessarily, an interest
in the welfare and honor of the country, and whose policy, upon the
whole, was controlled by that natural interest in his country's
welfare and honor. To our mocking Celt nothing of this was apparent,
nor has ever been.
His education as a journalist was completed by the failure of his
Philadelphia scheme. Returning to New York, he resolved to attempt no
more to rise by party aid, but henceforth have no master but the
public. On the 6th of May, 1835, appeared the first number of the
Morning Herald, price one cent. It was born in a cellar in Wall
Street,--not a basement, but a veritable cellar. Some persons are
still doing business in that region who remember going down into its
subterranean office, and buying copies of the new paper from its
editor, who used to sit at a desk composed of two flour-barrels and a
piece of board, and who occupied the only chair in the establishment.
For a considerable time his office contained absolutely nothing but
his flour-barrel desk, one wooden chair, and a pile of Heralds. "I
remember," writes Mr. William Gowans, the well-known bookseller of
Nassau Street,
"to have entered the subterranean office of its editor early
in its career, and purchased a single copy of the paper, for
which I paid the sum of one cent United States currency. On
this occasion the proprietor, editor, and vendor was seated
at his desk, busily engaged writing, and appeared to pay
little or no attention to me as I entered. On making known
my object in coming in, he requested me to put my money down
on the counter, and help myself to a paper; all this time he
continuing his writing operations. The office was a single
oblong underground room; its furniture consisted of a
counter, which also served as a desk, constructed from two
flour-barrels, perhaps empty, standing apart from each other
about four feet, with a single plank covering both; a chair,
placed in the centre, upon which sat the editor busy at his
vocation, with an inkstand by his right hand; on the end
nearest the door were placed the papers for sale."
Everything appeared to be against his success. It was one poor man in
a cellar against the world. Already he had failed three times; first,
in 1825, when he attempted to establish a Sunday paper; next, in 1832,
when he tried a party journal; recently, in Philadelphia. With great
difficulty, and after many rebuffs, he had prevailed upon two young
printers to print his paper and share its profits or losses, and he
possessed about enough money to start the enterprise and sustain it
ten days. The cheapness of his paper was no longer a novelty, for
there was already a penny paper with a paying circulation. He had cut
loose from all party ties, and he had no influential friends except
those who had an interest in his failure. The great public, to which
he made this last desperate appeal, knew him not even by name. The
newsboy system scarcely existed; and all that curious machinery by
which, in these days, a "new candidate for public favor" is placed,
at no expense, on a thousand news-stands, had not been thought
of. There he was alone in his cellar, without clerk, errand-boy,
or assistant of any kind. For many weeks he did with his own hands
everything,--editorials, news, reporting, receiving advertisements,
and even writing advertisements for persons "unaccustomed to
composition." He expressly announced that advertisers could have their
advertisements written for them at the office, and this at a time when
there was no one to do it but himself. The extreme cheapness of the
paper rendered him absolutely dependent upon his advertisers, and yet
he dared not charge more than fifty cents for sixteen lines, and he
offered to insert sixteen lines for a whole year for thirty dollars.
He at once produced an eminently salable article. If just such a paper
were to appear to-day, or any day, in any large city of the world, it
would instantly find a multitude of readers. It was a very small
sheet,--four little pages of four columns each,--much better printed
than the Herald now is, and not a waste line in it. Everything _drew_,
as the sailors say. There was not much scissoring in it,--the scissors
have never been much esteemed in the Herald office,--but the little
that there was all told upon the general effect of the sheet. There is
a story current in newspaper offices that the first few numbers of the
Herald were strictly decorous and "respectable," but that the editor,
finding the public indifferent and his money running low, changed his
tactics, and filled his paper with scurrility and indecency, which
immediately made it a paying enterprise. No such thing. The first
numbers were essentially of the same character as the number published
this morning. They had the same excellences and the same defects: in
the news department, immense industry, vigilance, and tact; in the
editorial columns, the vein of Mephistophelean mockery which has
puzzled and shocked so many good people at home and abroad. A leading
topic then was a certain Matthias, one of those long-bearded religious
impostors who used to appear from time to time. The first article in
the first number of the Herald was a minute account of the origin and
earlier life of the fellow,--just the thing for the paper, and the
sure method of exploding _him_. The first editorial article, too, was
perfectly in character:--
"In _débuts_ of this kind," said the editor,
"many talk of principle--political principle, party
principle--as a sort of steel-trap to catch the public. We
mean to be perfectly understood on this point, and therefore
openly disclaim all steel-traps,--all principle, as it is
called,--all party,--all politics. Our only guide shall be
good, sound, practical common-sense, applicable to the
business and bosoms of men engaged in every-day life. We
shall support no party, be the organ of no faction or
coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate,
from President down to constable. We shall endeavor to
record facts on every public and proper subject, stripped of
verbiage and coloring, with comments, when suitable, just,
independent, fearless, and good-tempered. If the Herald
wants the mere expansion which many journals possess, we
shall try to make it up in industry, good taste, brevity,
variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness."
He proceeded immediately to give a specimen of the "comments" thus
described, in the form of a review of an Annual Register just
published. The Register informed him that there were 1,492 "rogues in
the State Prison." His comment was: "But God only knows how many out
of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers,
blacklegs, speculators, and politicians." He learned from the Register
that the poor-house contained 6,547 paupers; to which he added, "and
double the number going there as fast as indolence and intemperance
can carry them." The first numbers were filled with nonsense and
gossip about the city of New York, to which his poverty confined him.
He had no boat with which to board arriving ships, no share in the
pony express from Washington, and no correspondents in other cities.
All he could do was to catch the floating gossip, scandal, and folly
of the town, and present as much of them every day as one man could
get upon paper by sixteen hours' labor. He laughed at everything and
everybody,--not excepting himself and his squint eye,--and, though his
jokes were not always good, they were generally good enough. People
laughed, and were willing to expend a cent the next day to see what
new folly the man would commit or relate. We all like to read about
our own neighborhood: this paper gratified the propensity.
The man, we repeat, really had a vein of poetry in him, and the first
numbers of the Herald show it. He had occasion to mention, one day,
that Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a
very promising subject for a poetical comment; but he added: "When
this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells as in
sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a
compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you." This was
nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar,
who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year
round. Many men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep
laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him.
It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the
nature of things around him,--a little Scotch sense, as well as an
inexhaustible fund of French vivacity. Alluding, once, to the "hard
money" cry, by which the lying politicians of the day carried
elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines: "If a man gets the
wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he whether he has gold or
paper-money?" He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New
School Presbyterian controversy: "Great trouble among the
Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a
man can do anything towards saving his own soul." He had, also, an
article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions
nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add
to these trifling specimens the fact, that he uniformly maintained,
from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was
unreal, and would end in disaster. Perhaps we can afford space for a
single specimen of his way of treating this subject; although it can
be fully appreciated only by those who are old enough to remember the
rage for land speculation which prevailed in 1836:--
"THE RICH POOR--THE POOR RICH.--'I have made $50,000 since
last January,' said one of these real-estate speculators to
a friend.
"'The dense you have,' said the other, looking up in
astonishment 'Why, last January you were not worth a
twenty-dollar bill.'
"'I know that; but I now calculate I'm worth full $50,000,
if not $60,000.'
"How have you made it?'