Our opinion, calmly and dispassionately formed from the evidence, is that Richard P. Robinson is guilty of the wilful and peculiarly atrocious murder of Helen Jewett.... Any good-looking young man, possessing or being able to raise among his friends the sum of fifteen hundred dollars to retain Messrs. Maxwell, Price, and Hoffman for his counsel, might murder any person he chose with perfect impunity.
Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose summing up the Sun described as “the most magnificent production of mind, eloquence, and rhetorical talent that ever resounded in a hall of justice.” This was the Ogden Hoffman of whom Decatur said, when Hoffman left the navy in 1816, that he regretted that the young man should have exchanged “an honourable profession for that of a lawyer.” Hoffman and his partner Maxwell, who shared in this tremendous fee of fifteen hundred dollars, had been district attorneys of New York before the time of the Jewett murder, and the Sun inquired what would have been Robinson’s fate if Hoffman, and not Phenix, had been the prosecutor.
On August 20, 1836, the Sun announced that its circulation averaged twenty-seven thousand copies daily, or fifty-six hundred more than the combined sale of the eleven six-cent papers. Of the penny papers the Sun credited the Herald with thirty-two hundred and the Transcript with ten thousand, although both these rivals claimed at least twice as much. Columns were filled with the controversy which followed upon the publication of these figures. The Sun departed from a scholarly argument with the Transcript over the pronunciation of “elegiac,” and denounced it as a “nestle-tripe,” whatever that was.
There was a little room left for the news. Aaron Burr’s death got a stick; Marcy’s nomination for Governor of New York, an inch; Audubon’s arrival in America, four lines. News that looks big now may not have seemed so imposing then, as this Sun paragraph of September 22, 1836, would show:
Two more States are already spoken of for addition to the Union, under the names of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Richard Adams Locke left the Sun in the fall of 1836, and on October 6, in company with Joseph Price, started the New Era, a penny paper for which the Sun wished success. In less than a month, however, Locke and his former employer were quarrelling about the price of meals at the Astor House. That famous hotel was opened in May, 1836, with all New York marvelling at the wonders of its walnut furniture, so much nicer than the conventional mahogany! Before it was built, it was referred to as the Park Hotel. When it opened it was called Astor’s Hotel, but in a few months it came to be known by the name which stuck to it until it was abandoned in 1913.
But to return to our meal. Said Mr. Locke’s New Era:
A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers abusing the Astor House. Nothing can be more groundless. Where the arrangements are complete, the charges, of course, must be corresponding. We suppose the report has been set afloat by some person who was kicked out for not paying his bill.
To this horrid insinuation Day replied:
The report they speak of was set afloat by ourselves, after paying $1.25 for a breakfast for a lady and her infant a year and a half old, served just one hour and seven minutes after it was ordered, with coffee black as ink and without milk, and that, too, in a room so uncleanly as to be rather offensive.