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

doctor in the city had successfully extracted a large black snake, more than four feet in length, that had been living for some months in a sailor’s stomach. (The sailor claimed that he had drunk from a spring in Jamaica, at the bottom of which he later noticed several tiny hair snakes wriggling.) The ingenious physician had coaxed the snake out of the sailor’s mouth with a bowl of warm milk— the face of the man had then “assumed a dark and ghastly appearance”—
    at which point the snake was immediately seized and killed. The snake story created quite a stir in the city, and in subsequent weeks the Sun published several follow-up items about the “singular operation.” The Courier and Enquirer and the Journal of Commerce denounced the story
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    the sun and the moon
    as a hoax, but Day, whose first issue of the Sun had featured a boy who whistled while he slept, knew that his readers would enjoy debating its truthfulness and appreciate its entertainment value. For his part, Wisner preferred to see the story as an allegory: the black snake of slavery, swallowed small but now grown large and dangerous, might be coaxed into unwariness with milk (of human kindness), but this was only a halfway measure, and it then had to be seized and destroyed by violence.
    Benjamin Day allowed Wisner to print his political views, but he also understood that his readers wanted to be entertained as well as edified.
    Even more, they wanted to find out about the life that was going on all around them. The best newspaper, he believed, served as a kind of omnium-gatherum that welcomed (as the Sun itemized in an article called “What Is a Newspaper?”) “bombastic panegyrics, jests, anecdotes, deaths, marriages, conundrums, enigmas, puns, poetry, acrostics and advertisements of every shade and color, and form, from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” News was not just the high doings of important persons, but rather the “shreds and patches” of everyday life, a daily record of the city in all its mottled and disorderly splendor.
    Best of all, Day knew, were the crime stories (they were the ones that most fully engaged the attention of his readers), and in the spring of 1835
    an especially promising crime story was developing in a town north of the city. For some years New Yorkers had been acquainted with a man named Robert Matthews, a carpenter from upstate who had grown his hair and beard long and rechristened himself Matthias the Prophet. Dressed in a green frock coat lined with pink silk, carrying a sword and preaching a furious gospel, Matthias had managed to win himself a small following among some of the city’s prominent residents, a handful of whom gave him money and houses in exchange for his promise of eternal abundance in heaven. Matthias’s disciples lived together in a farmhouse near the town of Sing Sing, up the Hudson, where they grew their own food, ate and bathed communally, and listened to his hours-long tirades against the human devils who would one day incur the wrath of the Lord, among them clergymen, doctors, disobedient women, and men who wore spectacles. Eventually dark stories began to spread about sexual escapades in the farmhouse, and when one of the disciples, a merchant named Elijah Pierson, fell sick and died and Matthias (known to the authorities as Robert Matthews) was arrested and charged with poisoning him, all of the ingre-dients—murder, madness, apostasy, depravity—were in place for what – 44 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 45
    The News of the City
    would become one of the most bizarre and sensational trials New York had ever seen, and for the Sun, a potential bonanza.
    Ever since the arrest, the Sun had been devoting extensive coverage to the case, examining it from every possible angle, including a report from a phrenologist who claimed to have analyzed Matthews’s cranial developments from across the courtroom