The insinuation of Webb that we violated the sanctity of a seal we hurl back in proud defiance to his own brow.
Webb went to the police and to the grand jury, and for a few days it looked as if the hostile editors might reach for something of larger calibre than pens. Thus the Sun of January 22:
We were informed yesterday at the police office, and subsequently by a gentleman from Wall Street, that Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, had openly threatened to make a personal assault upon us. It was lucky for him that we did not hear this threat; but we can now only say that if such, or anything similar to it, be his intention, he will find each of the three editors of the Sun always provided with a brace of “mahogany stock” pistols, to accommodate him in any way he likes, or may not like.
The specification of “mahogany stock” referred to Colonel Webb’s own supposed predilection for pistols of that description. Mr. Day and his aids may have carried these handsome weapons, but it is not on record that they made use of them, or that they had occasion to do so. Persons gunning for editors seemed to neglect Mr. Day in favour of Mr. Bennett.
No sooner was this fierce clash with Webb over than the Sun found itself bombarded from many sides in the war over Maria Monk. This woman’s “Awful Disclosures” had just been published in book form by Howe & Bates, of 68 Chatham Street, New York. They purported to be “a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years as a novice and two years as a black nun in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal.” On January 18, 1836, the Sun began to publish these shocking stories, in somewhat condensed and expurgated form. It did not vouch for their truth, but declared that it printed them from an “imperative sense of duty.” “We have no better means than are possessed by any reader,” it cautiously added, “to decide upon their truth or falsehood.”
The “Disclosures” ran in the Sun for ten days, during which time about one-half of the book was printed. Maria Monk herself was in New York, and so cleverly had she devised the imposture that she was received in good society as a martyr. Such was the public interest that it was estimated by Cardinal Manning, in 1851, that between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the volume were sold in America and England. The Know-Nothing Party used it for political capital, and anti-Catholic riots in several cities were the result of its publication.
Its partial appearance in the Sun, while it may have helped the circulation of the book, undoubtedly hastened the exposure of the fraud. The editor of the Commercial Advertiser, William Leete Stone, liked nothing better than to show up impostors. He had already written a life of Matthias the Prophet, and he decided to get at the truth of Maria Monk’s revolting story.
Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of the Herkimer American, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the Northern Whig, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany Daily Advertiser, and of the Hartford Mirror. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded Zachariah Lewis as editor of the Commercial Advertiser. As a Mason he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the anti-Masonic movement.
Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841 President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also the first superintendent of the New York public schools—an office which he held at the time of his death, in 1844.
Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book, “Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant scandal of the time.