Authors: Matthew Goodman
the sun and the moon
religion), and he never stopped thinking of ways to improve his own paper; many of the innovations he brought to the
Herald
are still in use today. Bennett wrote the first daily Wall Street column, analyzing the latest doings of the stock market; he established the first European bureaus, staffed with regular correspondents; he conducted and published the first interviews with newsmakers; he introduced the use of maps to illustrate war coverage; he was the first to put the news on the front page rather than on page two.
In the early days of the
Herald
he had no money to hire anyone, and so he produced the entire paper by himself. By eight in the morning, when he arrived at his desk, he had already put in several hours of work at home, sustained only by tea and a biscuit. He wrote all morning in the office (where he also sold papers and received advertisements), and after a quick lunch spent the afternoon making his rounds of the city in search of news.
After dinner he was back at the office putting the finishing touches on the paper, and then he walked to the printer’s to check the page proofs before returning to his tiny apartment at the rear of a tenement building on Nassau Street. He was the
Herald’
s publisher, editor, reporter, proofreader, and business manager. His life was synonymous with his work, and he devoted himself to it with a single-mindedness that observers could not help but find both admirable and slightly appalling. Never before had New York seen an editor so naked in his ambitions, journalistic and personal alike (Bennett made no secret of his intention to become wealthy from the
Herald,
a goal he swiftly accomplished), nor one so willing to indulge the quirks of his own personality, and so eager to avenge his many grievances.
Like Richard Adams Locke, James Gordon Bennett was a British immigrant who had come late to American journalism. He did not arrive from Scotland until he was twenty-five years old, and he was already more than thirty when, in 1827, he was hired as a reporter for the old
New-York Enquirer,
then under the editorship of Mordecai Manuel Noah. Bennett became Noah’s assistant after his previous assistant was killed in a duel, but theirs turned out to be a combustible relationship and Noah sent him to Washington to cover the nation’s capital. Bennett’s letters from Washington were so popular among the paper’s readers that Mordecai Noah and later James Watson Webb (who replaced Noah after the
New-York Enquirer
merged with the
Morning Courier
), threatened by Bennett’s obvious talent and equally obvious ambitiousness, denied him a byline and made it known that they were giving Bennett the ideas for his
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pieces when not dictating them outright. Bennett chafed at the constraints and secretly worked to engineer the merger of the
Courier
and the
Enquirer,
two newspapers aligned with the Democratic Party; he believed that the local Democratic leadership would not support the newly created
Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer,
since they had always distrusted James Watson Webb, and would turn to Bennett to start a new Democratic newspaper. Bennett, however, had badly miscalculated. After the merger he left to start his own paper, the
Globe.
But New York’s Democrats trusted Bennett no more than they did Webb (they could tell that Bennett, whatever his gifts as a newspaperman, was at heart an oppor-tunist), and the
Globe
did not long survive.
For the first time in years Bennett was without a regular job. He wrote to Vice President Martin Van Buren (whom he had strongly supported in his bid to replace John C. Calhoun) seeking a consulship in the state of Bremen, but never received a reply. He applied for a reporter’s job at the
Washington Globe,
a position for which he was brilliantly qualified, but the
Globe’
s powerful editor, Francis P. Blair, merely directed him to a small Philadelphia daily paper, the
Pennsylvanian,
which needed an editor.
In the spring of 1834 Bennett became a partner in the paper, but once again he managed to alienate himself from the local Democratic establishment and by the end of the summer the
Pennsylvanian
had disappeared, and Bennett’s investment with it.
Penniless now, and a publishing failure twice over, at the end of 1834
Bennett returned to New York, where he applied for a job with the
Sun.
It must have been a distasteful errand for the proud Bennett, having to humble himself before a publisher so much younger than he and, in his estimation, so much less deserving of success. Benjamin Day, always a shrewd judge of talent, was inclined to hire him but was unwilling to overrule the vehement objections of George Wisner, who disapproved of Bennett’s sympathy for the Southern cause (Bennett had spent time in the South as a young reporter for the
Charleston Courier,
and had adopted the racial attitudes of a plantation owner), but likely also feared being overshadowed by him. Ultimately Day turned down Bennett’s request, pleading a lack of funds. It was a kind enough excuse, but James Gordon Bennett was not one to forget a slight, and the rejection helped fuel the antipathy he held for the
Sun
for the rest of his life.
After the publishers of the city’s other penny paper, the
Transcript,
likewise turned him away, Bennett approached the young printer Horace
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Greeley and proposed that they start a daily newspaper together. Greeley had been a partner in Horatio Sheppard’s illfated
Morning Post,
and a few years later he would found his own very successful paper, the
Tribune
(which, ironically, would merge with the
Herald
in 1924, creating the
New York Herald Tribune
). He seemed a promising candidate for such a partnership, but, like Wisner, Greeley was leery about throwing in his lot with a supporter of slavery—and one of such challenging disposition to boot—and he too said no.
James Gordon Bennett was now forty years old, and quickly running out of options. For the better part of two years he had offered his talents to anyone who would take them, and in return had received little more than rebuffs and false promises. He had no doubt that he would start another paper, for that was what he was meant to do. But his experience had been bitter and his lessons hard won; he saw now that to succeed he could depend on no one but himself. For the first time in his life he might run a newspaper as he, not some highbrow editor or hypocritical politician, wanted it to be run: the way a newspaper should be run. It would cost a penny—for the penny paper was the wave of the future— but unlike the other penny papers his would not be directed solely at a working-class audience. Rather than win his readers through crass appeals to party or class, he would give the people the latest news from around the city, taking them, for the first time, inside the downtown countinghouses and the society balls and even the annual church meetings, in addition to more of what they really wanted—crime stories, of course, but written stylishly, with a sense of drama, not those shabby little police court columns; sharp-witted provocations; and scandals like they had never even imagined. Nor would he focus on the city’s merchants; once enough readers had been won, the merchants would come flocking to him with their advertisements. He would not limit himself at all; limitations, he believed, were for lesser men. Alone in his dingy room, he nursed his grudges as other men did their drinks—slowly, to let the happy feeling last.
In the spring of 1835 Bennett scraped together five hundred dollars and hired the firm of Anderson & Smith to print his newspaper, which he had decided to call the
Morning Herald.
He took the cheapest office he could find near the newspaper district, just a small, dark room, not even on street level; he improvised a desk and brought in a single wooden chair. It
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was, for the moment, all he would need. By the end of the first week of May 1835, he was ready to deliver his
Morning Herald
to the world.
The
Herald,
Bennett grandly declared in the first issue, was “equally intended for the great masses of the community—the merchant, mechanic, working people—the private family as well as the public hotel—the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal.”
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 endeavour 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.
At once Bennett began launching volleys against the city’s other newspapers, starting with the
Herald’
s chief rival, the
Sun,
“with its brace of blockheads for editors and lead of dirty and indecent police reporters.”
The
Sun,
he declared, was produced by “the garbage of society—a set of poor creatures whose light is going down faster than it ever went up; whose paper is too indecent, too immoral for any respectable person to touch, or any family to take in.” Referring, presumably, to Wisner’s abolitionist sentiments, Bennett called the
Sun
a “decrepit, dying penny paper, owned and controlled by a set of woolly-headed and thick-lipped Negroes.” (In response the
Sun
asserted that Bennett’s “only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope.”) The
Sun’
s Matthias pamphlet, Bennett claimed, “is full of exaggeration, folly, and falsehood, and is written in the vilest taste of the Police Office literature.” The
Herald,
unlike the other penny papers, would not feature a police office column at all; it would not be “inundating the town with indecent and filthy police reports of drunkards, blacks, and negresses.” Bennett had loftier aims for his crime stories; he disdained the usual run of wife beaters and shoplifters, preferring, whenever possible, stories that involved prostitutes (the more elegant the bordello the better) and profligacy of any kind among the rich and famous. For several days running the
Herald’
s news columns led off with lengthy articles about a trial under way in New York’s circuit court, in which a man named
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George Barnard was suing a woman by the name of Mary Power for a breach of promise of marriage. The two, who lived in the upstate town of Hudson, had begun a romantic relationship (or, as Bennett preferred, “the gentleman commenced making love to the lady”) when Mary was just twelve years old. Sometime later George moved to New Orleans on business, and over several months they maintained a regular correspondence, with numerous letters sent on each side. In one George proposed marriage, and in another Mary (who had earlier declined his proposals) agreed. Many weeks passed without George coming to visit Mary, even though he had since moved back to New York City, just a few hours’ sail from Hudson. Finally Mary wrote that another man had proposed to her, and she asked George to release her from their engagement. George replied that he could not do this without receiving a sizable payment as compensation for his “loss of time, and expense of feelings” during the years of their courtship. Mary refused to pay and married her new suitor; George took her to court for breach of promise. Day after day Bennett provided all the details of the court proceedings, culminating in the jury’s decision in favor of George Barnard, with an award of one thousand dollars. The verdict, Bennett thundered, was “one of the most strange hallu-cinations on the subject that has ever yet taken place in this or any other country.” He declared it a mockery of justice—and he published all of the letters that had passed between the two lovers, in full, so that his readers might see it for themselves.
By July 1835, just two months after the
Morning Herald
began publishing, Bennett could claim a daily circulation of seven thousand, almost as great as that of the
Sun,
which by then had been publishing for nearly two years. Well into his middle age, James Gordon Bennett had found his true path as a newspaperman. With the
Herald
he could at last display his remarkable gift for reading the public’s desires, a gift that the
Times’
s Henry Raymond would later complain had been bestowed on him by the devil.
For much of the summer of 1835 New York sweltered under a thick gray slate of a sky, the air a stifling haze that by evening thickened into a fog so dense, as one visiting Yankee was heard to remark, that you could drive a peg into it and hang up your hat. Old-timers said the weather recalled that of 1811, a summer memorable mostly for the appearance of the Great Comet, a comet so large and spectacular that for
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weeks it could be seen with the naked eye. Now New Yorkers awaited another celestial visitor, Halley’s Comet, which the famed English astronomer Sir John Herschel, watching the skies from his observatory in South Africa (an observatory that Richard Adams Locke would shortly make the focus of endless speculation), had predicted would be arriving sometime soon.
The city’s papers were filled with stories of horses dropping dead in the street from exhaustion, of laborers suddenly taking sick and dying, according to the common belief of the time, from a too rapid consumption of ice water. On Elm Street a policeman was set upon from behind and drenched with a shoeful of the brown, stinking water that ran in the gut-ters after a thunderstorm. The temper of the city grew short, the general mood as foul as the smells that rose up from the streets and pervaded every home, mansion, and shanty alike. Many New Yorkers expected a reprise of the events of the previous summer, when, night after terrifying night, white mobs, some of them several thousand strong, had roamed the streets looting and burning the homes, stores, and churches of blacks and abolitionists. Before the week was over the attacks were being carried out with an almost military precision, with preestablished targets, runners passing information among the roving bands, and horse carts chained together to form primitive but effective barricades shielding the work of destruction. The rioters had been inflamed by newspaper reports that the Reverend Samuel H. Cox, a local minister, had advocated the “amalgamation” of blacks and whites and, most gallingly, claimed that Christ was a colored man. As the riots nightly raged, the
Commercial Advertiser
published false reports that black gangs, “breathing violence and revenge,”