On the following day the True Sun title was entirely missing, and its absence was explained in an editorial article as follows:
Having understood on Wednesday (June 21) that a daily paper was about being issued in this city as nearly like our own as it could be got up, under the title of The True Sun, for the avowed purpose of benefitting the proprietors at our expense, we yesterday changed our inside title, being determined to place an injunction upon any such piratical proceedings. Yesterday morning the anticipated Sun made its appearance, and at first sight we immediately abandoned our intention of defending ourselves legally, being convinced that it is a mere catchpenny second-hand concern which (had it our whole list and patronage) would in one month be among the “Things that were.” It is published by William F. Short and edited by Stephen B. Butler, who announces that his “politics are Whig.”... Mr. Short, with the ingenuity of a London pickpocket, though without the honesty, has made up his paper as nearly like ours as was possible and given it the name of The (true) Sun for the purpose of imposing on the public.... We hereby publish William F. Short and Stephen B. Butler to our editorial brethren and to the printing profession in general as Literary Scoundrels.
A day later (June 24, 1835) the Sun declared that in establishing the True Sun “Short, who is one of the printers of the Messenger, actually purloined the composition of his reading matter”; and it printed a letter from William Burnett, publisher of the Weekly Messenger, to support its charge of larceny.
On June 28, six days after the True Sun’s first appearance, the Sun announced the failure of the pretender. The True Sun’s proprietors, it said, “have concluded to abandon their piratical course.”
Another True Sun was issued by Benjamin H. Day in 1840, two years after he sold the Sun to Moses Y. Beach. A third True Sun, established by former employees of the Sun on March 20, 1843, ran for more than a year. A daily called the Citizen and True Sun, started in 1845, had a short life.
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: