The front-page advertising, culled from other newspapers and printed for effect, consisted of the notices of steamship sailings. In one of these Commodore Vanderbilt offered to carry passengers from New York to Hartford, by daylight, for one dollar, on his splendid low-pressure steamboat Water Witch. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then thirty-nine years old, and had made the boat line between New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey, pay him forty thousand dollars a year. When the Sun started, the commodore was at the height of his activity, and he stuck to the water for thirty years afterward, until he had accumulated something like forty million dollars.
E. K. Collins had not yet established his famous Dramatic line of clipper-ships between New York and Liverpool, but he advertised the “very fast sailing coppered ship Nashville for New Orleans.” He was only thirty then.
Cooks were advertised for by private families living in Broadway, near Canal Street—pretty far up-town to live at that day—and in Temple Street, near Liberty, pretty far down-town now.
On the second page was a bit of real news, the melancholy suicide of a young Bostonian of “engaging manners and amiable disposition,” in Webb’s Congress Hall, a hotel. There were also two local anecdotes; a paragraph to the effect that “the city is nearly full of strangers from all parts of this country and Europe”; nine police-court items, nearly all concerning trivial assaults; news of murders committed in Florida, at Easton, Pennsylvania, and at Columbus, Ohio; a report of an earthquake at Charlottesville, Virginia, and a few lines of stray news from Mexico.
The third page had the arrivals and clearances at the port of New York, a joke about the cholera in New Orleans, a line to say that the same disease had appeared in the City of Mexico, an item about an insurrection in the Ohio penitentiary, a marriage announcement, a death notice, some ship and auction advertisements, and the offer of a reward of one thousand dollars for the recovery of thirteen thousand six hundred dollars stolen from the mail stage between Boston and Lynn and the arrest of the thieves.
The last page carried a poem, “A Noon Scene,” but the atmosphere was of the Elysian Fields over in Hoboken rather than of midday in the city. When Day scissored it, probably he did so with the idea that it would fill a column. Another good filler was the bank-note table, copied from a six-cent contemporary. The quotations indicated that not much of the bank currency of the day was accepted at par.
The rest of the page was filled with borrowed advertising. The Globe Insurance Company, of which John Jacob Astor was a director, announced that it had a capital of a million dollars. The North River Insurance Company, whose directorate included William B. Astor, declared its willingness to insure against fire and against “loss or damage by inland navigation.” At that time the boilers of river steamboats had an unpleasant trick of blowing up; hence Commodore Vanderbilt’s mention of the low pressure of the Water Witch. John A. Dix, then Secretary of State of the State of New York, and later to be the hero of the “shoot him on the spot” order, advertised an election. Castleton House Academy, on Staten Island, offered to teach and board young gentlemen at twenty-five dollars a quarter.
THE FIRST ISSUE OF “THE SUN”
Such was the first Sun. Part of it was stale news, rewritten. Part was borrowed advertising. It is doubtful whether even the police-court items were original, although they were the most human things in the issue, the most likely to appeal to the readers whom Day hoped to reach—people to whom the purchase of a paper at six cents was impossible, and to whom windy, monotonous political discussions were a bore.