Day was really out of the Sun then, after having been its master for five years lacking sixty-seven days, and the paper passed into the actual ownership of Beach, who had married Day’s sister, and who had acted as the bookkeeper of the Sun almost from its inception. There were those, including Edgar Allan Poe, who believed that Beach was the boss of the Sun even in the days of the moon hoax, but they were mistaken. The paper, as the Sun itself remarked on December 4, 1835, was “altogether ruled by Benjamin H. Day.”
“I owned the whole concern,” said Mr. Day in 1883, “till I sold it to Beach. And the silliest thing I ever did in my life was to sell that paper!”
And why did Day sell, for forty thousand dollars, a paper which had the largest circulation in the world—about thirty thousand copies? The answer is that it was not paying as well as it had paid.
There were a couple of years when his profits had been as high as twenty thousand dollars. The net return for the six months ending October 1, 1836, as announced by the Sun on April 19, 1837, was $12,981.88; but at the time when Day sold out, the Sun was about breaking even. The advertising, due to general dulness in business—for which the bank failures and the big fire were partly to blame—had fallen off. It was costing Day three hundred dollars a week more for operating expenses and materials than he got for the sales of newspapers, and this loss was barely made up by the advertising receipts. With what he had saved, and the forty thousand paid to him by Beach, he would have a comfortable fortune. He was only twenty-eight years old, and there might be other worlds to conquer.
From nothing at all except his own industry and common sense Day had built up an enterprise which the Sun itself thus described a few days before the change of ownership:
Some idea of the business done in the little three-story building at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets occupied by the Sun for the publication of a penny paper may be formed from the fact that the annual outlay for material and wages exceeds ninety-three thousand dollars—very nearly two thousand a week, and more than three hundred a day for the six working days. On this outlay we circulate daily thirty thousand papers. Allowing the other nine morning papers an average of three thousand circulation—which may fall short in two or three cases, while it is a large estimate for all the rest—it will appear that the circulation of the Sun newspaper is daily more than of all the others united.
That this is not mere gasconade, but susceptible of proof, we refer the curious to the paper-makers who furnish the stock for this immense circulation; to the type-founders who give us a new dress three times a year, and to the Messrs. Hoe & Co., who built our two double-cylinder Napier presses, which throw off copies of the Sun at the rate of four thousand per hour. We invite newspaper publishers to visit our establishment when the presses are in operation, and we shall be happy to show them what would have astonished Dr. Faust, with all his intimacy with a certain nil admirari potentate.
As for the influence of the paper among the people, the Sun dealt in no vain exaggeration when it said of itself, a year before Day’s departure:
Since the Sun began to shine upon the citizens of New York there has been a very great and decided change in the condition of the laboring classes and the mechanics. Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun; nor can even a boy be found in New York City or the neighboring country who will not know in the course of the day what is promulgated in the Sun in the morning.
Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk, and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success.