“Robinson seemed to be a young man of excellent ideas, but not very highly educated,” Mr. Day remarked about fifty years later.
Perhaps the Day standards were very high. Robinson was twenty six when he worked on the Sun. He had been educated at an academy in Delhi, New York, and after that had studied law and been admitted to the bar. He was too poor to practise at once, and went into newspaper work to make a living. After leaving the Sun he was elected district attorney of Greene County, and in 1843 was appointed master of chancery in New York. He left the Democratic party when the Republican party was organized, but returned to his old political allegiance after the Civil War. In 1876 he was elected Governor of New York—an achievement which still left him a little less famous than his fellow reporter, Locke.
“Give us one of your real Moscow fires,” sighed the Sun in the first week of its existence.
The prayer was answered a little more than two years later, when about twenty blocks south of Wall Street, between Broad Street and the East River, were consumed. The fire started late in the evening of Wednesday, December 16, and all that the Sun printed about it the next morning was one triple-leaded paragraph:
POSTSCRIPT—HALF PAST 1 O’CLOCK—A TREMENDOUS CONFLAGRATION is now raging in the lower part of the city. The Merchants’ Exchange is in flames. Nearly all the blocks in the triangle bounded by William and Wall Streets and the East River are consumed! Several hundred buildings are already down, and the firemen have given out. God only knows when the fire will be arrested.
On Friday morning the Sun had two and a half columns about the fire, and gave an approximately correct estimate that seven hundred buildings had been burned, at a loss of twenty million dollars. The calamity provided an opportunity for the fine writing then indulged in, and the fire reporter did not overlook it; nor did he forget Moscow. Here are typical extracts:
Where but thirty hours since was the rich and prosperous theater of a great and productive commerce, where enterprise and wealth energized with bold and commanding efforts, now sits despondency in sackcloth and a wide and dreary waste of desolation reigns.
It seemed as if God were running in his anger and sweeping away with the besom of his wrath the proudest monuments of man. Destruction traveled and triumphed on every breeze, and billows of fire rolled over and buried in their burning bosoms the hopes and fortunes of thousands. Like the devouring elements when it fed on Moscow’s palaces and towers, it was literally a “sea of fire,” and the terrors of that night of wo and ruin rolling years will not be able to efface.
The merchants of the First Ward, like Marius in the ruins of Carthage, sit with melancholy moans, gazing at the graves of their fortunes, and the mournful mementoes of the dreadful devastation that reigns.
On the afternoon of the following day the Sun got out an extra edition of thirty thousand copies, its normal morning issue of twenty-three thousand being too small to satisfy the popular demand. The presses ran without stopping for nearly twenty-four hours.