The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (16 page)

were threatening to burn down the city, while the
Courier and Enquirer’
s editorials seemed calculated to egg on the rioters in their destruction.

“How much longer are we to submit?” asked James Watson Webb, in-veighing against the president of the American AntiSlavery Society, whose dry-goods store was a prime target of the mobs. “In the name of the country, in the name of Heaven, how much more are we to bear from Arthur Tappan’s mad impudence?”

Now, in the summer of 1835, a new and even more menacing threat had arisen. Back in May the American AntiSlavery Society had initiated a full-scale campaign to flood the South with antislavery literature. By the end of July some 175,000 copies of the society’s magazines had passed through the New York post office on their way to Southern destinations.

– 91 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 92

the sun and the moon

There they were met with organized resistance such as might greet the advance guard of an invading army. In Charleston, the mailbags containing the abolitionist literature were stolen from the post office; the next night a crowd of thousands raised effigies of Arthur Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader from Boston, and ceremoniously burned the magazines, to great shouts and cheers, in an enormous bonfire. The flames soon spread everywhere: all through August the Southern night was illuminated by the flickering glow of torchlight parades. Nearly every city, large and small, held its own anti-abolitionist rally. Newspaper editors urged the passage of state laws making it a crime punishable by death to circulate abolitionist literature south of the Potomac; the governors of the offended states would have the authority to demand that the North extradite these “fugitives from justice,” and if they were not handed up, to offer a reward for their capture and transport to a Southern jail. In Norfolk, Virginia, a rally was held to raise money “for the heads of Garrison, Tappan & Co.” Residents of a parish in Louisiana put up a reward of fifty thousand dollars for the capture of Tappan dead or alive. (When informed of the bounty that had been placed on his head, Tappan managed to joke, “If that sum is placed in the New York Bank, I may possibly think of giving myself up.”) New York was a center of the cotton trade, and seven thousand South-erners were said to be living there, among them any number of potential conspirators; whispers began to circulate that a team of assassins from New Orleans had secretly arrived in the city to murder Tappan. Philip Hone worried in his diary that “the least spark would create a flame in which the lives and property of Arthur Tappan and his associates would be endangered.” James Watson Webb printed a letter from a North Carolinian who claimed to have encountered a group of men heading for New York to capture Tappan, to which Webb had appended a taunting message: “Keep a look out, Arthur—a large reward is offered for you— before you are aware, you may be
boxed.
” According to Webb, Southern slaves were “as well off as it is probably practicable for that race to be under any circumstances. They are fed, clothed and treated in all respects, with a care and kindness that made them happy and contented with their lot.” The abolitionists, on the other hand, “ought to be honest and acknowledge their real character—the worst enemies the slaves have in the country.”

– 92 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 93

“The Evil Spirit of the Times”

In the
Evening Star,
editor Mordecai Manuel Noah proudly affirmed his quarter century of opposition to “every attempt to create excitement, or produce unhappy difficulties on the Slave question” and opened the columns of the newspaper to the citizens of the South; he was, he said,

“happy to make the paper the medium of communication through which their sentiments can be heard, and their wishes made known to the people of the United States.” Noah also issued a veiled threat of attacks like the ones of the previous summer: “The immediate abolitionists hold a large caucus this day—we know where they meet. . . . If they are determined to go on and keep up this excitement, their deeds be on their own heads.”

The
Transcript
similarly threatened the visiting British abolitionist George Thompson: “If he ventures too far even here in promulgating his wild and objectionable doctrines, he may involve not only himself, but also many respectable citizens who have unfortunately been made converts to his peculiar faith, in consequences the most dreadful and alarming.” Even the more progressive-minded William Leggett of the
Evening Post
(filling in for the traveling William Cullen Bryant), while criticizing Southern censorship of abolitionist literature, felt obliged to add that “we deprecate, as earnestly and sincerely as any person can, in the north or south, the conduct of the abolitionists.”

“If our feeble voice might prove of any avail,” wrote Leggett, “we should exert it with all our power to dissuade the misguided men engaged in the abolition cause from prosecuting their designs, when certain ruin must be the consequence, even to the poor wretches in whose behalf they fancy themselves labouring.”

Of all the daily newspapers in New York, only one maintained a firm and unapologetic stance against slavery: the
Sun.
If Benjamin Day had believed that Richard Adams Locke would take a less forceful position on the issue than had George Wisner, he was relieved of that idea soon enough. Locke filled the
Sun’
s columns with news of outrages committed against Southern abolitionists, “the Excitement against the AntiSlavery advocates,” he called it, “which has made murder and outrages almost as common in some of the slave holding states as slavery itself.” The “Excitement,” though, was not confined to the South, as was shown in the story of a New Jersey mob who surrounded the house of a black man accused of an unspecified offense; the mob was composed entirely of Quakers. “The evil spirit of the times,” Locke observed, “appears to be
– 93 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 94

the sun and the moon

pervading all classes, sects, and communities of the country.” He was right. The next few months would witness more than one hundred riots, most of them directly related to issues of race and slavery; it was the most violent period in America since the days of the Revolution.

Locke decried the atmosphere of threat and menace that was rising against all those, South or North, who dared to stand against popular opinion on slavery: “With all our boasting about the glorious government under which we live, the sanctity of our laws, and the safety of the persons and property of our citizens under their protection, there is not another government in Christendom in which there is in reality less security against rapine or murder, or in which they are more winked at and even commended, if they are the offering of any popular prejudice, than in this our
free
and
happy
land.” In the face of New York’s overwhelming sympathy for the Southern cause (an anti-abolition rally held in the Park later that summer would draw a crowd of nearly ten thousand), Locke railed against the threats made upon Arthur Tappan and other abolitionists.

“Let them invite the abduction and murder of a citizen of the North by offering money for him,” he warned, “and they would see in what latitude

‘true chivalry’ is found. ‘The very stones would cry out’ against such an outrage. From the Potomac to the St. Lawrence, from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic, every man would be roused, and a deep and thundering burst of indignation would go forth that would shake the Blue Ridge from its base.” From the offices of the
Sun,
in the cheerless summer of 1835, a New Yorker could hear the distant rumblings of civil war.

Perhaps Locke’s strongest and most comprehensive statement on slavery came in response to a reader’s letter canceling his subscription to the
Sun,
“as you have come out in favor of the abolitionists.”

“We have complied with the gentleman’s request,” Locke began his reply, “and ordered our carrier to leave him the Sun no longer.” He acknowledged that the Northern states had no legal right to enforce abolition in the South, because slavery was “an evil which the south has inherited, and which can only be eradicated by the slaveholders themselves.” Still, he felt it perfectly within his rights to call for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (“to wipe away the foul stain from the capitol of our country”), his argument growing into a stirring, full-throated condemnation of slavery of the sort that never appeared in the editorial columns of a New York daily newspaper. Other editors paused for a perfunctory disapproval of Southern slavery on their way to a de-

– 94 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 95

“The Evil Spirit of the Times”

nunciation of abolitionists or a defense of states’ rights; this was something entirely different. Slavery, Locke declared,

is at war with the genius of our government—it scoffs at our national declaration, and brands us with hypocrisy before the nations of the earth. It paralyzes the power of our free institutions at home, and makes them a “hissing and a bye-word abroad.” It is sheltered under the wings of our national eagle, republican law is its protector, republican equality its advocate, republican morality its patron, and republican freemen its body guard. It is a sin in itself apart from the rigors incidental to its administration. It wrests from our fellow men the lega-cies which God Almighty has bequeathed them—inalienable birth-right endowments, exchanged for no equivalent, unsurrendered by volition, and unforfeited by crime. It derides the sanctity with which reason, religion and law have invested domestic relations—annihilates marriage— makes void parental authority—invites the violation of chastity by denying it legal protection, and bids God speed to lust as it riots at noon day, glorying in the immunities of law. Its baneful influence is beginning to be felt in every part of the Union. At the north the press lowers under a censorship, and the freedom of speech, that glorious privilege of American citizens—is trampled under the feet of a ruthless mob. At the south the mechanic arts and all vigorous enterprise is crushed under an incubus—a thriftless agriculture is smiting the land with barrenness and decay—prodigality, in lavishing upon the rich the plundered earnings of the poor, is accounted high souled generosity— revenge is regarded as the refinement of honor—aristocracy entitled republicanism, and despotism chivalry.

“Such is slavery,” Locke concluded, “and such
we
shall ever call it, the loss of a few subscribers to the contrary notwithstanding. We have stopped the gentleman’s paper, as we said in the beginning of this article, and if there are any more of our subscribers who think that to tell the
truth
is to be an abolitionist, we shall be happy to stop theirs also.”

Though the question of slavery dominated the city’s attention in the summer of 1835, it was one slave in particular, Joice Heth, who became the focus of its curiosity and wonder, her sitting room the destination of immense crowds that came to see her day after day, for as long as she remained on

– 95 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 96

the sun and the moon

view. She had been brought to New York by P. T. Barnum, a twenty-four-year-old would-be promoter who had arrived in the city only recently with his wife and daughter from the village of Bethel in western Connecticut. Within a matter of days Barnum had produced an attraction that captivated the city as had no other in recent memory—at least until later that same month, when Richard Adams Locke unveiled his moon series in the
Sun.

These two great impositions on the public (as the saying of the day had it) would, in their denouements, entangle Barnum, Locke, and Bennett in an elaborate series of deceptions and exposures. By that time, however, Barnum was already moving on to the next attraction. With Joice Heth he had successfully re-created himself as a showman, setting in motion a career that would eventually make him a multimillionaire, a friend of presidents and royalty, and arguably, for a time, the most famous American in the world.

It had all begun years before, as in so many American success stories, with a single plot of land on which he could build.

– 96 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 97

c h a p t e r
6

The Prince of

Ivy Island

P. t. barnum was not born into wealth, although he grew up believing that he was. He was born—or, as he liked to put it, made his first appearance on the stage—in the village of Bethel, Connecticut, on July 5, 1810, not long after the town’s Independence Day celebrations had been completed. “The smoke had all cleared away,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the drums had finished their rattle, and when peace and quiet were restored, I made my
début.
”

Though Bethel had been settled since the seventeenth century, modern ways had arrived there only fitfully, and its daily life was not much different from that of more recently settled frontier towns. For the women of the town, days were filled with an exhausting array of household chores, few of them lightened by any mechanical conveniences, from washing and ironing clothes to making soap and candles, milking cows, churning butter, and preparing meals in a large iron pot suspended in the fireplace; the men, by and large, worked in the fields or in the town’s main industry, the manufacture of combs and hats. Children ate their meals with lead spoons, on pewter plates sold from the backs of wagons by itinerant peddlers. Everyone, clergymen included, drank the hard cider they called “gumption.” Physicians made house calls on horseback, carrying their calomel, jalap, and Epsom salts, the mainstays of their practice, in their saddlebags. In the spring it was customary for the townspeople to be bled: the ill for cure, the healthy for prevention. Anyone found guilty of offending public morals was apt to find himself locked up in the public
– 97 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 98