Notable exceptions were two evening papers, the Express and the Daily News. The Express was established in June, 1836, under the editorship of James Brooks and his brother Erastus, graduates of the Advertiser, of Portland, Maine. It was devoted to Whig politics and the shipping of New York. The Daily News took no considerable part in journalism until twenty-five years later, when Benjamin Wood bought it.
In other parts of the country the one-cent newspaper, properly conducted, met with the favour which the public had showered upon Ben Day. William M. Swain, who has been mentioned as a fellow compositor with Ben Day, and who tried to dissuade his friend from the folly of starting the Sun, saw the wisdom of the penny paper, and saw, also, that the New York field was filled. He went to Philadelphia and established the Public Ledger, the first issue appearing on March 25, 1836. The Ledger was not the first penny sheet to be published in Philadelphia, the Daily Transcript having preceded it by a few days. These two newspapers soon consolidated, however.
Swain’s Ledger was at once sensational and brave. It came out for the abolition of slavery, and its office was twice mobbed. It was mobbed again in 1844, during the Native American riots. Swain was a big, hard-working man. George W. Childs, his successor as proprietor of the Ledger, wrote of him that for twenty years it was his habit to read every paragraph that went into the paper. Swain made three million dollars out of the Ledger; but when, during the Civil War, the cost of paper compelled nearly all the newspapers to advance prices, he tried to keep the Ledger at one cent, and lost a hundred thousand dollars within a year. Childs, who had been a newsdealer and book-publisher, bought the paper from Swain in 1864, and raised its price to two cents.
When Swain went to Philadelphia he had two partners, Arunah S. Abell and Azariah H. Simmons, both printers, and, like Swain, former associates of Day. Simmons remained with Swain on the Ledger until his death in 1855, but Abell—the man who poked more fun than anybody else at Day for his penny Sun idea—went to Baltimore and there established a Sun of his own, the first copy coming out on May 17, 1837. It was a success from the start. How well it paid Abell to follow Ben Day’s scheme may be judged by the fact that thirty years later Abell bought Guilford, a splendid estate near Baltimore, and paid $475,000 for it.
Both Swain and Abell were friends of S. F. B. Morse, and they helped him to finance the electric telegraph. The Baltimore Sun published the famous message—“What hath God wrought?”—sent over the wire from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, when the telegraph first came into practical use. Abell was the sole proprietor of the Baltimore Sun from 1837 to 1887. He died in 1888 at the age of eighty-two.
Other important newspapers started in the ten years that followed Day’s founding of the Sun were the Detroit Free Press, the St. Louis Republic, the New Orleans Picayune, the Burlington Hawkeye, the Hartford Times, the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
In 1830 there were only 852 newspapers in the United States, which then had a population of 12,866,020, and these newspapers had a combined yearly circulation of 68,117,000 copies. Ten years later the population was 17,069,453, and there were 1,631 newspapers with a combined yearly circulation of 196,000,000 copies. In other words, while the population increased 32 per cent. in a decade, the total sale of newspapers increased 187 per cent. The inexpensive paper had found its readers.
AN EXTRA OF “THE SUN”
These Special Editions Were Issued on the Arrival of Every Mail Ship from England.