Shortly afterward the Sun charged that the Herald had had in its office a full set of Confederate colours, “ready to fling to the breeze of treason which it and the mayor hoped to raise in this city.” Later in the same year the Sun accused the Daily News and the Staats-Zeitung of disloyalty, and intimated that the Journal of Commerce and the Express were not what they should be. The owner of the Daily News was Ben Wood, a brother of Fernando Wood. In its youth the News had been a newspaper of considerable distinction. It was an offshoot of the Evening Post, and one of its first editors was Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant. Another of its early editors was Samuel J. Tilden.
Wood, who was a Kentuckian by birth, made the News a Tammany organ and used it to get himself elected to Congress, where he served as a Representative from 1861 to 1865, constantly opposing the continuation of the war. The Sun’s accusation of disloyalty against the News was echoed in Washington, and for eighteen months, early in the war, the News was suppressed. The Staats-Zeitung, also included in the Sun’s suspicion, was then owned by Oswald Ottendorfer, who had come into possession of the great German daily in 1859, by his marriage to Mrs. Jacob Uhl, widow of the man who established it as a daily.
Presence in the ranks of the copperhead journalists was disastrous to the owner of the Journal of Commerce, Gerard Hallock, who had been one of the great figures of American journalism for thirty years. In the decade before the war Hallock bought and liberated at least a hundred slaves, and paid for their transportation to Liberia; yet he was one of the most uncompromising supporters of a national proslavery policy. When the American Home Missionary Society withdrew its support from slave-holding churches in the South, Hallock was one of the founders of the Southern Aid Society, designed to take its place.
In August, 1861, the Journal of Commerce was one of several newspapers presented by the grand jury of the United States Circuit Court for “encouraging rebels now in arms against the Federal government, by expressing sympathy and agreement with them.” Hallock’s paper was forbidden the use of the mails. He sold his interest in the Journal of Commerce, retired from business, never wrote another line for publication, and died four years later.
Another contemporary of the Sun which suffered during the war was the World, then a very young paper. It had first appeared in June, 1860, as a highly moral daily sheet. Its express purpose was to give all the news that it thought the public ought to have. This meant that it intended to exclude from its staid columns all thrilling police reports, slander suits, divorce cases, and details of murders. It refused to print theatrical advertising.
The World had a fast printing-press and obtained an Associated Press franchise. It hired some good men, including Alexander Cummings, who had made his mark on the Philadelphia North American, James R. Spalding, who had been with Raymond on the Courier and Enquirer, and Manton Marble. But the World, stripped of lively human news, was a failure. After two hundred thousand dollars had been sunk in a footless enterprise, the religious coterie retired, and left the World to the worldly.
Its later owners were variously reported to be August Belmont, Fernando Wood, and Benjamin Wood; but it finally passed entirely into the hands of Manton Marble, who made it a free-trade Democratic organ. Marble had learned the newspaper business on the Journal and the Traveler in Boston, and in 1858 and 1859 he was on the staff of the Evening Post. In July, 1861, the World and the Courier and Enquirer were consolidated, and Colonel J. Watson Webb, who had owned and edited the latter paper for thirty-four years, retired from newspaper life.
During the Civil War the World was strongly opposed to President Lincoln’s administration. Perhaps this fact accounts for the punishment which befell it through the misdeed of an outsider.
In May, 1864, there was sent to most of the morning-newspaper offices what purported to be a proclamation by the President, appointing a day of fasting and prayer, and calling into military service, by volunteering and draft, four hundred thousand additional troops. This was a fake, engineered by Joseph Howard, Jr., a newspaperman who had been employed on the Tribune, and who put out the hoax for the purpose of influencing the stock-market. The Sun, the Tribune, and the Times did not fall for the hoax, but the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce printed it, stopping their presses when they learned the truth.
General John A. Dix seized the offices of the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce, put soldiers to guard them, and suppressed the papers for several days—all this by order of the President. Howard, the forger, was arrested, and on his confession was sent to Fort Lafayette, where he was a prisoner for several weeks. Manton Marble wrote a bitter letter to Lincoln in protest against what he considered an outrage on the World. Marble remained at the head of the paper until 1876.