Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made

by James Dabney McCabe

He came back to New York about the beginning of 1835, a little sore from his unsuccessful battle with fate, but far from being dismayed or cast down. His failures to establish party organs had convinced him that success in journalism does not depend upon political favor, and he determined to make one more effort to build up a paper of his own, and this time one which should aim to please no party but the public. That there was need of an independent journal of this kind he felt sure, and he knew the people of the country well enough to be confident that if such a journal could be properly placed before them, it would succeed. The problem with him was how to get it properly before them. He had little or no money, and it required considerable capital to carry through the most insignificant effort of the kind. He made several efforts to inspire other persons with his confidence before he succeeded. One of these efforts Mr. Parton thus describes, in his Life of Horace Greeley: "An incident connected with the job-office of Greeley & Co. is perhaps worth mentioning here. One James Gordon Bennett, a person then well known as a smart writer for the press, came to Horace Greeley, and, exhibiting a fifty-dollar bill and some other notes of smaller denominations as his cash capital, wanted him to join in setting up a new daily paper, 'The New York Herald.' Our hero declined the offer, but recommended James Gordon to apply to another printer, naming one, who he thought would like to share in such an enterprise. To him the editor of 'The Herald' did apply, and with success."

The parties to whom Mr. Greeley referred Mr. Bennett were two young printers, whom he persuaded, after much painstaking, to print his paper and share with him its success or failure. He had about enough cash in hand to sustain the paper for ten days, after which it must make its own way. He proposed to make it cheap—to sell it at one penny per copy, and to make it meet the current wants of the day. The "Sun," a penny paper, was already in existence, and was paying well, and this encouraged Mr. Bennett to hope for success in his own enterprise.

He rented a cellar in Wall Street, in which he established his office, and on the 6th of May, 1835, issued the first number of "The Morning Herald." His cellar was bare and poverty-stricken in appearance. It contained nothing but a desk made of boards laid upon flour barrels. On one end of this desk lay a pile of "Heralds" ready for purchasers, and at the other sat the proprietor writing his articles for his journal and managing his business. Says Mr. William Gowans, the famous Nassau-Street bookseller: "I remember to have entered the subterranean office of its editor early in its career, and purchased a single copy of the paper, for which I paid the sum of one cent United States currency. On this occasion the proprietor, editor, and vendor was seated at his desk, busily engaged in writing, and appeared to pay little or no attention to me as I entered. On making known my object in coming in, he requested me to put my money down on the counter and help myself to a paper, all this time he continuing his writing operations. The office was a single oblong underground room; its furniture consisted of a counter, which also served as a desk, constructed from two flour barrels, perhaps empty, standing apart from each other about four feet, with a single plank covering both; a chair, placed in the center, upon which sat the editor busy at his vocation, with an inkstand by his right hand; on the end nearest the door were placed the papers for sale."

Standing on Broadway now, and looking at the marble palace from which the greatest and wealthiest newspaper in the Union sends forth its huge editions, one finds it hard to realize that just thirty-four years ago this great journal was born in a cellar, an obscure little penny sheet, with a poor man for its proprietor. Yet such was the beginning of "The New York Herald."

The prospect was not a pleasant one to contemplate, but Mr. Bennett did not shrink from it. He knew that it was in him to succeed, and he meant to do it, no matter through what trials or vicissitudes his path to fortune lay. Those who heard his expressions of confidence shook their heads sagely, and said the young man's air-castles would soon fade away before the blighting breath of experience. Indeed, it did seem a hopeless struggle, the effort of this one poor man to raise his little penny sheet from its cellar to the position of "a power in the land." He was almost unknown. He could bring no support or patronage to his journal by the influence of his name, or by his large acquaintance. The old newspaper system, with its clogs and dead-weights, was still in force, and as for newsboys to hawk the new journal over the great city, they were a race not then in existence. He had to fight his battle with poverty alone and without friends, and he did fight it bravely. He was his own clerk, reporter, editor, and errand boy. He wrote all the articles that appeared in "The Herald," and many of the advertisements, and did all the work that was to be performed about his humble office.

"The Herald" was a small sheet of four pages of four columns each. Nearly every line of it was fresh news. Quotations from other papers were scarce. Originality was then, as now, the motto of the establishment. Small as it was, the paper was attractive. The story that its first numbers were scurrilous and indecent is not true, as a reference to the old files of the journal will prove. They were of a character similar to that of "The Herald" of to-day, and were marked by the same industry, tact, and freshness, which make the paper to-day the most salable in the land.

Says Mr. Parton: "The first numbers were filled with nonsense and gossip about the city of New York, to which his poverty confined him. He had no boat with which to board arriving ships, no share in the pony express from Washington, and no correspondents in other cities. All he could do was to catch the floating gossip, scandal, and folly of the town, and present as much of them every day as one man could get upon paper by sixteen hours' labor. He laughed at every thing and every body,—not excepting himself and his squint eye,—and though his jokes were not always good, they were generally good enough. People laughed, and were willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man would commit or relate. We all like to read about our own neighborhood; this paper gratified the propensity.

"The man, we repeat, had really a vein of poetry in him, and the first numbers of 'The Herald' show it. He had occasion one day to mention that Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very promising subject for a poetical comment, but he added: 'When this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells, as in sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you.' This was nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him. It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the nature of things around him—a little Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity. Alluding, once, to the 'hard money' cry by which the lying politicians of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines: 'If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he if he has gold or paper money?' He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New School Presbyterian controversy: 'Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question is whether or not a man can do any thing toward saving his own soul.' He had also an article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add to these trifling specimens the fact that he uniformly maintained, from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was unreal, and would end in disaster."