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

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THE STORY OF "THE SUN"

The Courier and Enquirer, under Colonel Webb,
belched broadsides of old-fashioned Democratic doctrine, and Webb hired the best men he could find to load
the guns. He had Bennett, Noah, James K. Paulding,
and, later, Charles King and Henry J. Raymond. These
were all good writers, most of them good newspapermen; but so far as the general public was concerned,
Colonel Webb might as well have put them in a cage.
The Journal of Commerce was a great sixpenny, but
it was not for the people to read. From 1828 until the
Civil War its editor was Gerard Hallock, an enterprising journalist who ran expensive horse-expresses to
Washington to get the proceedings of Congress, but
would not admit that the public at large was more interested in a description of the murdered Helen Jewett's
gowns than in a new currency bill. The clipper-ships
that lay off Sandy Hook to get the latest foreign news
from the European vessels cost Hallock and Webb, who
combined in this enterprise, twenty thousand dollars a
year-probably more than they spent on all their local
news.
In the solemn sanctum of the Evening Post, William
Cullen Bryant and William Leggett wrote scholarly
verse and free-trade editorials. They were live men, but
their newspaper steed was slow. Leggett could urge
Bryant to give a beating to Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and he himself fought a duel with
Blake, the treasurer of the Park Theatre; but these
great men had little steam when it came to making a
popular newspaper. The great editors were of a cult.
They revolved around one another, too far aloft for the
common eye.
Charles King was the most conservative of them all.
He was a son of Rufus King, Senator from New York
and minister to England, and he was editor of the