Authors: Matthew Goodman
In New York Richard Adams Locke set himself the task of learning shorthand (several instructional books would have been available to him, perhaps the most famous being Samuel Taylor’s
Stenography, Or the Art
of Shorthand Perfected
), which he recognized would prove an invaluable skill for a journalist looking for a job. Stenography was surely something of a comedown for him after years of work for newspapers and literary journals, but he had few choices and needed to support his family in whatever way he could. According to P. T. Barnum (who would soon come to know him personally), Locke was at the time “the only shorthand reporter in the city,” and before he found regular employment on a newspaper he supplemented his income by working as a legal reporter, furnishing for New York publishers the trial transcripts of celebrated court cases, among them the murder trial of the notorious minister Ephraim K. Avery.
Locke produced that transcript—the full title of which is
Report of the
Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery, Methodist Minister, for the Murder of
Sarah Maria Cornell, at Tiverton, in the County of Newport, Rhode Island, Before the Supreme Judicial Court of that State, May 6th, 1833—
as a pamphlet for a Cortland Street bookseller named William Stodart. The pamphlet demonstrates why Locke was an especially useful reporter; as a stenographer he could record the full trial transcript (the Avery trial transcript comprised fifty densely printed pages), while as a journalist he could also provide the colorful detail that brought the trial alive for readers, as, for instance, in his description of Reverend Avery’s entrance into court on the opening day of the trial: Shortly after the Judges and counsel had taken their seats, the prisoner was brought in; he bowed to each, and sat at the counsel table with perfect self possession, which was not however characterized by any unbe-coming confidence of demeanor, but appeared rather the result of great mental firmness. In point of health, he seems to have suffered severely since his arraignment in March last; his face is greatly attenuated, and its complexion might almost be described as cadaverous.
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On the cover of the Avery pamphlet Locke’s name is followed by the title A. B., an abbreviation of the Latin
Artium Baccalaureus,
or “bachelor of arts.” This suggests that he was already circulating the story that he had graduated from the University of Cambridge. Bereft of connec-tions and desperately needing work, and with little except his wits to fall back on, Locke must have hoped that the deception would grant him ca-chet in a profession where Englishmen were not uncommon, but an advanced degree—especially one from an institution as eminent as Cambridge—certainly was. Among the city’s more prominent newspaper editors, William Cullen Bryant was the only one who had attended college; most editors had started their careers in business or the military. In the world of New York newspapermen Locke would have met few individuals who knew the first thing about English university life and might have been able to spot an impostor, especially one who so impeccably fitted the role, what with his distinguished ancestry (made even more so by his claims of descent from the great John Locke), his remarkable vocab-ulary (even by the more literate standards of the age), and his unusual erudition. By this time he was knowledgeable in a broad range of scholarly fields, having written on science, theology, literature, politics, and, most recently, history. In 1834 he produced a thirty-two-page pamphlet,
History of the Polish Revolution, with the Latest Atrocities of the Russian Conquerors, Compiled Upon the Authority of Personal Sufferers,
a moving account of the failed Polish uprising against the occupying armies of Russia. The Poles had fought through the winter of 1830 and into 1831 before finally being put down, and three years later their struggle was still very much on the minds of those, like Locke himself, with Republican sympathies.
History of the Polish Revolution
was published anonymously. Locke’s political beliefs had made him essentially unemployable back in Somerset, and it only made sense that here in New York, freed of that troublesome history and with a wife and child depending on him, he would be more discreet about revealing them. Later, when he had become editor of the
Sun,
taking the desk of the abolitionist George Wisner, he could state his opinions more openly; for now, though, he was another English immigrant who had arrived in the city with a handful of bags, and who, in his early thirties, was older than most of the men with whom he was competing for work. He would not have wanted to alienate those whose sympathies lay elsewhere, for instance, James Watson Webb of the
Courier
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and Enquirer,
who sometime around 1834 provided Locke his first regular job in New York.
Colonel Webb, as he liked to be called (he had served in the army on the western frontier, though he never attained any rank higher than lieu-tenant), presented the very picture of the New York newspaper editor. He stood over six feet tall, and carried himself with an imperiousness that made him look even taller; he had deep-blue eyes, dark wavy hair, and long silvered sideburns, and was known around town, unironically, as “the Apollo of the press.” He drank champagne with breakfast and brandy and port at other meals, and had a taste for mutton and for the French pastries made by Delmonico’s of William Street. He enjoyed whist and billiards and the novels of Bulwer-Lytton; he dressed expensively and always traveled first-class. He saw himself as a defender of society’s natural aristocracy, and as such was a nativist and a racist, even by the standards of his own time. According to Webb, the black man was marked by “debasing ignorance and mental inferiority,” his race “the most stupid, ferocious and cowardly of the divisions into which the creator has divided mankind.” God-given, like the mark of Cain, this inferiority was a permanent condition, immune to any attempts at social amelioration.
Once, on hearing of a proposal to establish a Negro college in New Haven, Webb wondered, “What benefit can it be to a waiter or coach-man to read Horace?”
James Watson Webb was also a great believer in the duel, which he regarded as an efficient enforcer of public morality. In 1838 his feud with Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine resulted in Cilley’s death in a rifle duel with another congressman, W. J. Graves of Kentucky, a friend of Webb’s. Four years later Webb fought his own duel with a Kentucky congressman, Thomas F. Marshall. The two men had a long-standing antagonism (among other charges Webb accused Marshall, a temperance activist, of being a former drunk), and finally Marshall challenged Webb to a duel. It was held at dawn, with pistols, in a field in Delaware. Not wanting to kill the congressman, Webb fired into the air and was struck in the hip by Marshall’s shot, at which point the duel was stopped by the two men’s seconds. Back in New York, Webb was arrested and charged with leaving the state for the purposes of engaging in a duel, the first time the statute had been invoked in the four decades since it had been enacted.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to the maximum term of two years
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in the notorious upstate prison Sing Sing; he served two weeks before receiving a pardon from Governor William H. Seward, on the condition that he never again participate in any duels.
James Watson Webb hired Richard Adams Locke to be a metropolitan reporter with a special emphasis on crime stories, including reports from the police court. It was highly unusual for one of the dignified merchant paper to assign a reporter to the crime beat, but by 1834 the
Sun
was already making its influence felt on newspaper journalism in New York.
Now, mixed in with the Senate speeches, European correspondence, and the latest commodity prices, the expansive pages of the
Courier and Enquirer
included reports of tenement fires, rabid dogs, thefts of pocket watches and fire snuffers and cases of musk, a cartman who killed another with a blow from his shovel, a husband who killed his wife with a blow from a lead clock weight, a lunatic woman arrested for attempting to cook and eat her baby. Richard Adams Locke now joined George Wisner and his fellow Englishman, William Attree, in the early morning hours in the long yellow courthouse by City Hall, though rather than report all the day’s cases, as they did, he generally focused on one or two in greater detail, tending to choose crimes that would be of greater interest to the prosperous readers of the
Courier and Enquirer:
a burglary in one of the better parts of town, for instance, or a pocket picked at the Italian Opera House.
But he liked a good story no matter where it happened, such as his item about Eliza Sullivan of the Five Points, a grandmotherly woman who had befriended a young visitor to town named John Cowan. Cowan was in need of lodging for the night, and the kindly old lady insisted that he share her room. Upon awakening the next morning, he found to his horror that she had absconded with not merely the pocketbook in his trousers but the trousers themselves. Fortunately, another resident of the house was able to furnish young Cowan with a substitute pair of pants, “which from their size,” Locke reported, “must have occasioned him no little trouble to get into.”
His appearance in them at the Police Office satisfied every beholder that they were a tight fit. Indeed he looked as if he had been melted and poured into them; to bring his feet together was utterly impossible, and when he walked he exactly resembled the figure of the Colossus of Rhodes, as represented in pictures.
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“He was a little too gorgeous and florid in his descriptions of police scenes,” recalled James Gordon Bennett, a Scots immigrant who served for several years as the
Courier’
s Washington correspondent and would later become one of Locke’s bitterest rivals, “but otherwise showed learning and science, although out of place.” Mostly, however, during his time at the
Courier and Enquirer,
Richard Adams Locke kept his learning under wraps. Once he had written essays on Milton and the nature of God; now he trolled the city’s low places, exposing his readers to miseries that were, in a favorite phrase of his, “better imagined than described.” While James Watson Webb railed in the accompanying columns against the Democrats, and the foreigners, and the Papists, and the amalgamators, Locke stayed silent, and wrote as well as he could, and went where he was told. In April 1835, long established at the
Courier,
he boarded a carriage for White Plains, where he would report on the trial of Robert Matthews, accused of a murder committed under another name: Matthias the Prophet.
It was in the White Plains courthouse that Richard Adams Locke first met Benjamin Day, who was looking for a reporter to cover the Matthias trial for the
Sun.
Locke accepted the assignment, provided that his name was not attached to the articles, since he was attending the trial under the auspices of the
Courier and Enquirer.
Day agreed to this proviso, and all of Locke’s pieces on the Matthias trial carried only the byline “Reported for the Sun” or “Written for the Sun.” His trial coverage for the
Sun,
as for the
Courier and Enquirer,
consisted almost entirely of recorded witness testimony, for which his earlier stenographic training proved invaluable. The far more explosive material he was saving for the series of articles, exclusive to the
Sun,
that would shortly follow.
The five installments of the series—the first feature articles ever to appear in the
Sun
—ran on the paper’s front page, each one bearing the same eye-catching headline, printed in capital letters: “MEMOIRS OF
MATTHIAS THE PROPHET, WITH A FULL EXPOSURE OF HIS
ATROCIOUS IMPOSITIONS, AND OF THE DEGRADING DELU—
SIONS OF HIS FOLLOWERS.” Richard Adams Locke (again anonymously) offered the
Sun’
s readers a lengthy history of the Matthias case, exploring the powerful hold he exerted over his wealthy followers, the details of the alleged poisoning of a wayward disciple, and his eventual acquittal on the murder charge and conviction for the lesser charge of
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assault. Much as he would do later in his moon series for the
Sun,
Locke approached the Matthias series as a dramatic narrative that built slowly and suspensefully to its climax. He began it not with the trial or an account of the alleged murder but in a more literary fashion—with prefatory remarks, draped in the portentous gothic tones of one of the horror stories that Edgar Allan Poe was just then beginning to write: Voluminous as is the history of religious delusion, and heavily as its shadows fall upon the human character, it may be questioned whether its pages afford an example arrayed in more appalling gloom, and standing forth in a more startling attitude than the one we are about to unveil in these memoirs. . . . The world has indeed heard that Matthias the pretended prophet is a daring and impudent impostor; that he has deceived and defrauded several intelligent persons, and that he was even suspected of having murdered an infatuated disciple whose extensive property he had previously transferred to himself. But it has not dreamed of those “greater and yet greater abominations” which like the polluted “chambers of imagery” in the visions of Ezekiel, successively reveal their horrors in an increasing magnitude of intensity which the firmest minds will be unable to contemplate without a sensible enerva-tion of their power.
Those horrors included Matthias’s sexual claims on his female disciples, several of whom were married, as well as the terrible beating he in-flicted on his eighteen-year-old married daughter when she steadfastly refused her father’s demand that she give herself to one of his male disciples so that the two might produce “an offspring of incarnate angels.” In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives—a “harem,”