News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types from Maria Monk. There was the celebrated murder of Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr. Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre. Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes met their death on March 6, 1836, but the details did not reach New York for more than a month; it was April 12 when the Sun gave a column to them.
Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns full until May 10, when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the Sun:
Upon calculating the number of public floggings which that miserable scribbler, Bennett, has received, we have pretty accurately ascertained that there is not a square inch of his body which has not been lacerated somewhere about fifteen times. In fact, he has become a common flogging property; and Webb has announced his intention to cowskin him every Monday morning until the Fourth of July, when he will offer him a holiday. We understand that Webb has offered to remit the flogging upon the condition that he will allow him to shoot him; but Bennett says:
“No; skin for skin, behold, all that a man hath will he give for his life!”
The Sun beat the town on a great piece of news that spring. “Triumphant News from Texas! Santa Anna Captured!” the head-lines ran.
This appeared on May 18, four weeks after Sam Houston had taken the Mexican president; but it was the first intimation New York had had of the victory at San Jacinto.
During the investigation of the murder of Helen Jewett and the trial of Richard P. Robinson, the suspect, the Sun attacked Bennett for the manner in which the Herald handled the case. Bennett saw a good yellow story in the murder, for the house in which the murdered girl had lived could not be said to be questionable; there was no doubt about its character. Bennett’s interviewing of the victim’s associates did not please the Sun, which pictured the unfortunate women “mobbed by several hundred vagabonds of all sizes and ages—amongst whom the long, lank figure of the notorious Bennett was most conspicuous.”
When it was not Bennett, it was Colonel Webb or one of his men. The Sun went savagely after the proprietor of the Courier and Enquirer because he led the hissing at the Park Theatre against Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wood, the English opera-singers. The offence of the Woods lay in giving a performance on an evening when a benefit was announced for Mrs. Conduit, another popular vocalist. The town was divided upon the row, but as the Woods and Mrs. Conduit were all English-born, it was not a racial feud like the Macready-Forrest affair. The Sun rebuked Colonel Webb particularly because, after booing at the Woods, he had refused Mr. Wood’s offer to have it out over pistols and coffee.
Wood was not a lily-finger. He had been plain Joe Wood, the pugilist, before he married the former Lady Lennox and embraced tenor song in a serious way. Society rather took the part of the Woods, for after the Park Theatre row a dinner in their compliment was arranged by Henry Ogden, Robert C. Wetmore, Duncan C. Pell, John P. Hone, Carroll Livingston, and other leading New Yorkers.
The fearlessness of the Sun did not stop with saucing its contemporaries. When Robinson was acquitted of the Jewett murder, after a trial which the Sun reported to the extent of nearly a page a day, the Sun editorially declared: