Five hundred citizens gathered at the theatre that night, waited until nine o’clock, and then charged through the doors, breaking up the performance of “Metamora.” The Sun described it:
The supernumeraries scud from behind the scenes like quails—the stock actors’ teeth chattered—Oceana looked imploringly at the good-for-nothing Yankees—Nahmeeoke trembled—Guy of Godalwin turned on his heel, and Metamora coolly shouldered his tomahawk and walked off the stage.
The management announced that Farren was discharged. The mayor of New York and Edwin Forrest made conciliatory speeches, and the crowd went away.
The attacks of Colonel Stone, editor of the six-cent Commercial, aroused the Sun to retaliate in kind. A column about the colonel ended thus:
He was then again cowskinned by Mr. Bryant of the Post, and was most unpoetically flogged near the American Hotel. He has always been the slave of avarice, cowardice, and meanness.... The next time he sees fit to attack the penny press we hope he will confine himself to facts.
A month later the Sun went after Colonel Stone again:
The colonel ... for the sake of an additional glass of wine and a couple of real Spanish cigars, did actually perpetrate a most excellent and true article, the first we have seen of his for a long time past. Now we have serious thoughts that the colonel will yet become quite a decent fellow, and may ultimately ascend, after a long course of training, to a level with the penny dailies which have soared so far above him in the heavens of veracity.
It must be said of Colonel Stone that he was a man of literary and political attainments. He was editor of the Commercial Advertiser for more than twenty years.
The colonel did not reform to the Sun’s liking at once, but the feud lessened, and presently it was the Transcript—a penny paper which sprang up when the Sun’s success was assured—to which the Sun took its biggest cudgels. One of the Transcript’s editors, it said, had passed a bogus three-dollar bill on the Bank of Troy. Another walked “on both sides of the street, like a twopenny postman,” while a third “spent his money at a theatre with females,” while his family was in want. But, added the Sun, “we never let personalities creep in.”
The New York Times—not the present Times—had also started up, and it dared to boast of a circulation “greater than any in the city except the Courier.” Said the Sun: