The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT 113
mercial Advertiser. As a Mason he had a controversy
with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the
anti-Masonic movement.
Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and
Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of
the United States. In 1841 President William Henry
Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but
when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler.
He was also the first superintendent of the New York
public schools-an office which he held at the time! of
his death, in 1844.
Stone went to Montreal, visited the H6tel Dieu, and
minutely compared the details set down by the Monk
woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and
the plan of the building. The result of his investigation
was to establish the fact that the " Awful Disclosures "
were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in
his newspaper, but in his book, " Maria Monk and the
Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu." The adherents of the
woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general
belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years;
not even after her own evil history was told, and after
the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a massmeeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city
prison in New York fourteen years after she had created
the most unpleasant scandal of the time.
News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types
from Maria Monk. There was the celebrated murder of
Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr. Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre.
Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes
met their death on March 6, 1836, but the details did
not reach New York for more than a month; it was
April 12 when the Sun gave a column to them.
Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns