The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

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TH E

S U N AND TH E

M O O N

The Remarkable

True Account of Hoaxers,

Showmen, Dueling Journalists,

and Lunar Man-Bats

in Nineteenth-Century

New York

m at t h e w g o o d m a n

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

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T H E S U N A N D T H E M O O N

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Copyright © 2008 by Matthew Goodman

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

Designed by Brent Wilcox

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodman, Matthew.

The Sun and the moon : the remarkable true account of hoaxers, showmen, dueling journalists, and lunar man-bats in nineteenth-century New York / Matthew Goodman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-46500257-3 (alk. paper)

1. Moon—Miscellanea. 2. Fraud in science—New York (State)—

New York—History—19th century. 3. Journalism—Corrupt practices.

4. Day, Benjamin Henry, 1810–1889. 5. Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833) 6. New York (N.Y.)—History—19th century. I. Title.

QB581.9.G66 2008

974.7'103—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For my mother and father,

lifelong New Yorkers

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Is there any thing as extravagant as the imaginations of
men’s brains?

john locke,

An Essay on Human Understanding

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C O N T E N T S

P R O LO G U E
The Man on the Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1
Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2
The News of the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

3
Bearer of the Falcon Crest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4
The Atrocious Impositions of Matthias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

5
“The Evil Spirit of the Times” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

6
The Prince of Ivy Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

7
Strange Attractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

TH E M O O N

8
Celestial Discoveries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

9
A Passage to the Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

10
“If This Account Is True, It Is Most Enormously Wonderful” . . . . . 165

11
The Picturesque Beauty of the Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

12
“The Astronomical Hoax Explained” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

13
Moonshine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

14
Monck Mason’s Flying Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

15
“Joice Heth Is Not Dead” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

16
The Best Self-Hoaxed Man in New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

E P I LO G U E
That Tyranny Shall Be No Longer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
299

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
301

Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
327

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
335

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p r o l o g u e

The Man on the Moon

Apenny a paper: that was the basic equation. It was a penny a paper that brought the boys out this August morning before sunrise, as it did every morning, rousing them from the old crates and battered tin ket-tles and hogsheads still smelling of ale, from under staircases and above steam gratings and inside the backs of open wagons, out from New York’s hidden places. Four or five hours of sleep, cramped and anxious, the sort of night that could make even a thirteen-year-old feel ragged. Blinking in the yellow flicker of the oil lamps, the boys brushed traces of coal ash and wood shavings from their trousers, stretched and groaned and tried to remember the night before. Papers sold during the day had given them pennies for the night, the coppers they tossed down for butter cakes in the cellar room at Butter-cake Dick’s—only three cents bought a satisfyingly crisp, hot biscuit filled with butter, and a cup of coffee besides—where they could sit together at the scarred cherry tables and talk about the shows they had seen that evening, laughing and shoving, from the pits of the Olympic or the Chatham or the Broadway. Afterward, in ones and twos, they would wander out again in search of a place to sleep, ideally secluded and safe from any bored, drunken watchman looking to roust them for a bit of fun, or from a footpad who would turn their pockets out for the pennies.

Drowsily the boys navigated the crooked Dutch lanes that wound up from the Battery, where the high stone countinghouses crowded the sidewalks, and where even now the new Merchants’ Exchange was rising on Wall Street, its white marble columns glowing pale in the dawn; they spilled out onto the great avenue, Broadway, its trim brick houses and expensive French shops brilliantly illuminated by gas lamps. From all over
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the city they came to the corner of Spruce and Nassau streets, converging on the offices of the
Sun,
where they gathered to await that morning’s papers. For nearly two years newsboys had hawked the
Sun
on the streets of the city, haunting its steamboat landings, marketplaces, busy corners, all the places where crowds congregated—especially the crowds with clothing a bit more faded and frayed, those New Yorkers who had never before thought of themselves as newspaper readers. It was a new kind of selling for a new kind of newspaper.

At the
Sun
’s side door the clerk collected their money and handed them down their bundles. The newsboys paid sixty-seven cents for a hundred papers, which left a profit of thirty-three cents if they could sell them all.

They had to pay in cash, up front, and they weren’t allowed to return unsold papers (Mr. Day, the publisher of the
Sun,
had instituted that policy after he discovered that some of the boys were renting out papers to readers and then returning them to the
Sun
office, carefully refolded, for a re-fund at the end of the day), so they had to be careful about how many papers they chose to buy each morning. Thus the more careful boys made sure first to open a copy to page two, where the main news of the day was to be found, and scan it for a headline that could be yelled out on a street corner, one dramatic enough to make a passerby pause amid the noise and chaos of an outdoor market or ship landing. Murders were best, though their appeal depended on where the body had been found. The city’s lower wards were serviceable, the upper ones less so, and the Sixth, the poorest and most turbulent ward of all—the “bloody Sixth,” as it would later come to be known—meant to keep moving on down the page. Fires were excellent, shipwrecks would suffice, and scandals among the upper classes, although relatively infrequent, could be stretched out for days before readers lost interest and again ignored the newsboys’ cries.

This particular morning—August 21, 1835—looked especially profitable. The first item, a brief reprint about astronomy taken from a paper in Scotland, was no good at all, but it was followed in quick succession by paragraphs headlined “Fires” (there had been three of them, the best at a brewery in the Five Points), “Coroner’s Office” (an Englishman had acci-dentally walked off the dock at Broad Street and drowned), and “A Narrow Escape from Death” (the navy frigate
Constitution
had nearly collided with a steamboat that had several of the ship’s officers aboard).

But none had as much sales potential as the story that led the second column, prefaced by the lines “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To

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Prologue: The Man on the Moon

have a graceless child.” (Mr. Locke, recently brought on as editor of the
Sun,
seemed to have an affection for Shakespeare.) This story, which took up nearly the whole column, related the misfortunes of a prosperous gentleman from one of the state’s western counties, who had recently come to New York in search of his daughter. The girl had stolen $300 and a valuable gold watch from her parents and run away to the city with a young man. The couple had been spotted by a friend of the man’s in a Greenwich Street boardinghouse, where they had apparently been posing as husband and wife. Mr. Locke was known to be one of the city’s finest para-graphists, and he had been sure to note up front that the older man searching for the girl wasn’t her actual father: “The daughter, it is true, was the offspring of an indiscretion of her mother before she was married, and long prior to her first acquaintance with her present husband; but the knowledge of her mother’s early imprudence, and the sad lesson its results, and the mortification and misery which followed in its train, were so eminently calculated to instil, appears not only to have been wholly lost upon her unhappy girl, but rather to have inflamed than allayed the unfortunate viciousness of her disposition, and to have hurried her on to, it is most probable, the consummation of her own early and utter ruin.”

The girl and her beau had still not been found, which promised further updates, and the boys purchased their papers that morning confident of their sale.

Years later, having long since gone on to other trades, the newsboys would recall this as the day they had, without even knowing it, come into a fortune. Because for the next few weeks—at least for those boys who didn’t throw away their coins on cards or dice or lottery tickets—they had been able to bypass Butter-cake Dick’s and eat at any of the dozens of oyster cellars around town. Not until summer had ended was it legal to eat oysters in New York, and so for the next week they made do with clam and crab, but on the first of September, with the papers still selling in dazzling numbers, they tucked into oysters each night, slurped them icy from their shells, then ordered them boiled, fried, steamed, stewed, tossed into omelettes, and simmered in soups, and when they grew tired of oysters they ate shad; and better yet, after eating their fill they only had to walk upstairs, not back onto the street, because they now had coins enough in their pockets to rent a real bed for the night.

And all this unexpected good fortune had come not from the brewery fire or the young runaway, or indeed from any of the unhappiness that

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typically brought improved sales. Rather, it had been that astronomical item out of Scotland, which in the coming weeks would develop into the most spectacular series of their careers, as the
Sun’
s newly purchased steam-powered presses labored around the clock to meet the public’s demand. All of it had arisen from that single sentence, prefaced by the simple headline “Celestial Discoveries”: The Edinburgh Courant says—“We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”