The influence of Partner Wisner, the Abolitionist, was evident in many pages of the Sun. On June 23, 1834, it printed a piece about Martin Palmer, who was “pelted down with stones in Wall Street on suspicion of being a runaway slave,” and paid its respects to Boudinot, a Southerner in New York who was reputed to be a tracker of runaways. It was he who had set the crowd after the black:
The man who will do this will do anything; he would dance on his mother’s grave; he would invade the sacred precincts of the tomb and rob a corpse of its winding-sheet; he has no SOUL. It is said that this useless fellow is about to commence a suit against us for a libel. Try it, Mr. Boudinot!
During the anti-abolition riots of that year the Sun took a firm stand against the disturbers, although there is little doubt that many of them were its own readers.
The paper made a vigorous little crusade against the evils of the Bridewell in City Hall Park, where dozens of wretches suffered in the filth of the debtors’ prison. The Sun was a live wire when the cholera re-appeared, and it put to rout the sixpenny papers which tried to make out that the disease was not cholera, but “summer complaint.” Incidentally, the advertising columns of that day, in nearly all the papers were filled with patent “cholera cures.”
The Sun had an eye for urban refinement, too, and begged the aldermen to see to it that pigs were prevented from roaming in City Hall Park. In the matter of silver forks, then a novelty, it was more conservative, as the following paragraph, printed in November, 1834, would indicate:
EXTREME NICETY—The author of the “Book of Etiquette,” recently printed in London, says: “Silver forks are now common at every respectable table, and for my part I cannot see how it is possible to eat a dinner comfortably without them.” The booby ought to be compelled to cut his beefsteak with a piece of old barrel-hoop on a wooden trencher.
Not even abolition or etiquette, however, could sidetrack the Sun’s interest in animals. In one issue it dismissed the adjournment of Congress in three words and, just below, ran this item:
THE ANACONDA—Most of those who have seen the beautiful serpent at Peale’s Museum will recollect that in the snug quarters allotted to him there are two blankets, on one of which he lies, and the other is covered over him in cold weather. Strange to say that on Monday night, after Mr. Peale had fed the serpent with a chicken, according to custom, the serpent took it into his head to swallow one of the blankets, which is a seven-quarter one, and this blanket he has now in his stomach. The proprietor feels much anxiety.
Almost every newspaper editor in that era had a theatre feud at one day or another. The Sun’s quarrel was with Farren, the manager of the Bowery, where Forrest was playing. So the Sun said:
DAMN THE YANKEES—We are informed by a correspondent (though we have not seen the announcement ourselves) that Farren, the chap who damned the Yankees so lustily the other day, and who is now under bonds for a gross outrage on a respectable butcher near the Bowery Theater, is intending to make his appearance on the Bowery stage THIS EVENING!