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

THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE " SUN" 61

When a contemporary did not fail the Sun poked
fun at it:
MAJOR NOAH'S SINGULARITY —The Evening
Star of yesterday comes out in favor of the French,
lottery, gambling, and phrenology for ladies. Is the
man crazy?
The editor whose sanity was questioned was the
famous Mordecai Manuel Noah, one of the most versatile men of his time. He was a newspaper correspondent at fifteen. When he was twenty-eight, President
Madison appointed him to be consul-general at Tunis,
where he distinguished himself by his rescue of several
Americans who were held as slaves in the Barbary
States. On his return to New York, in 1816, he again
entered journalism, and was successively connected with
the National Advocate, the Enquirer, the Commercial
Advertiser, the Times and Messenger, and the Evening
Star. In 1825 he attempted to establish a great Jewish
colony on Grand Island, in the Niagara River, but he
found neither sympathy nor aid among his coreligionists, and the scheme was a failure.
Noah wrote a dozen dramas, all of which have been
forgotten, although he was the most popular playwright
in America at that day. His Evening Star was a good
paper, and the Sun's quarrels with it were not serious.
For their attacks on Attree, the editor of the Transcript, Messrs. Day and Wisner got themselves indicted
for criminal libel. They took it calmly:
Bigger men than we have passed through that ordeal.
There is Major Noah, the Grand Mogul of the editorial
tribe, who has not only been indicted, but, we believe,
placed at the bar. Then there's Colonel Webb; no
longer ago than last autumn he was indicted by the
grand jury of Delaware County. The colonel, it is said,