The Beaches, father and sons, owned the Sun throughout the Mexican War, a period notable for the advance of newspaper enterprise; and Moses Yale Beach proved more than once that he was the peer of Bennett in the matter of getting news.
Shortly before war was declared—April 24, 1846—the telegraph-line was built from Philadelphia to Fort Lee, New Jersey, opposite New York. June found a line opened from New York to Boston; September, a line from New York to Albany. The ports and the capitals of the nation were no longer dependent on horse expresses, or even upon the railroads, for brief news of importance. Morse had subdued space.
For a little time after the Mexican War began there was a gap in the telegraph between Washington and New York, the line between Baltimore and Philadelphia not having been completed; but with the aid of special trains the Sun was able to present the news a few hours after it left Washington. It was, of course, not exactly fresh news, for the actual hostilities in Mexico were not heard of at Washington until May 11, more than two weeks after their accomplishment.
The good news from the battle-fields of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma was eighteen days in reaching New York. All Mexican news came by steamer to New Orleans or Mobile, and was forwarded from those ports, by the railroad or other means, to the nearest telegraph-station. Moses Y. Beach was instrumental in whipping up the service from the South, for he established a special railroad news service between Mobile and Montgomery, a district of Alabama where there had been much delay.
On September 11, 1846, the Sun uttered halleluiahs over the spread of the telegraph. The line to Buffalo had been opened on the previous day. The invention had been in every-day use only two years, but more than twelve hundred miles of line had been built, as follows:
| New York to Boston | 265 |
| New York to Albany and Buffalo | 507 |
| New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington | 240 |
| Philadelphia to Harrisburg | 105 |
| Boston to Lowell | 26 |
| Boston toward Portland | 55 |
| Ithaca to Auburn | 40 |
| Troy to Saratoga | 31 |
| Total | 1,269 |
England had then only one hundred and seventy-five miles of telegraph. “This,” gloated the Sun, “is American enterprise!”
The Sun did not have a special correspondent in Mexico, and most of its big stories during the war, including the account of the storming of Monterey, were those sent to the New Orleans Picayune by George W. Kendall, who is supposed to have put in the mouth of General Taylor the words—
“A little more grape, Captain Bragg!”
Moses Yale Beach himself started for Mexico as a special agent of President Polk, with power to talk peace, but the negotiations between Beach and the Mexican government were broken off by a false report of General Taylor’s defeat by Santa Anna, and Mr. Beach returned to his paper.