As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat, and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot. For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering, supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run.
Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so far descended from himself as to come in public contact with the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we could not have believed.
Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the Herald’s financial articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of Wall Street. When he was a writer on the Courier and Enquirer, and one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters. In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet.
In 1828 he became Washington correspondent of the Enquirer, and it was at his suggestion that Webb, in 1829, bought that paper and consolidated it with his own Courier. Bennett was a Tammany Society man, therefore a Jacksonian. He left Webb because of Webb’s support of Nicholas Biddle, and started a Jackson organ, the Pennsylvanian, in Philadelphia. This was a failure.
Meanwhile Bennett had seen the Sun rise, and he felt that there must be room for another penny paper in New York. With his knowledge of stocks he believed that he could make Wall Street news a telling feature. In his second issue of the Herald, May 11, 1835, he printed the first money-market report, and three days later he ran a table of sales on the Stock Exchange. At this time, and for three years afterward, Bennett visited Wall Street daily and wrote his own reports.
His flings at the United States Bank, of which Webb’s friend Biddle was president, and his stories of alleged stock speculations by the colonel himself, were the cause of Webb’s animosity toward his former associate. Bennett took Webb’s assault calmly, and even wrote it up in the Herald, suggesting at the end that Webb’s torn overcoat had suffered more damage than anything else.
Day’s quarrel with Bennett, which never reached the physical stage, was the natural outcome of an intense rivalry among the most successful penny papers of that period—the Sun, the Herald, and the Transcript. Against the sixpenny respectables these three were one for all and all for one, but against one another they were as venomous as a young newspaper of that day felt that it had to be to show that it was alive.
Day’s antagonism toward Webb was sporadic. Most of the time the young owner of the Sun treated the fiery editor of the Courier and Enquirer as flippantly as he could, knowing that Webb liked to be taken seriously. Day’s constant bête noire was the commercial and foreign editor of Webb’s paper, Mr. Hoskin, an Englishman.
On January 21, 1836, the Sun charged that Webb and Hoskin had rigged a “diabolical plot” against it. The sixpenny papers had formed a combination for the purpose of sharing the expense of running horse-expresses from Philadelphia to New York, bringing the Washington news more quickly than the penny papers could get it by mail. The Sun and the Transcript then formed a combination of their own, and in this way saved themselves from being beaten on Jackson’s message, sent to Congress in December, 1835.
In January, 1836, Jackson sent a special message to Congress. It was delivered on Monday, the 18th, and on Wednesday, the 20th, the Sun published a column summary of it. Webb made the charge that his messenger from Washington had been lured into Day’s offices, and that the Sun got its story by opening the package containing the message intended for the Courier and Enquirer. The Sun replied that it received the message legitimately, and that the whole thing was a scheme to discredit Mr. Day and his bookkeeper, Moses Y. Beach: