In a Catholic seminary he acquired the rudiments of knowledge, and advanced so far as to read Virgil. He also picked up a little French and Spanish in early life. The real instructors of his mind were Napoleon, Byron, and Scott. It was their fame, however, as much as their works, that attracted and dazzled him. It is a strange thing, but true, that one of the strongest desires of one of the least reputable of living men was, and is, to be admired and held in lasting honor by his fellow-men. Nor has he now the least doubt that he deserves their admiration, and will have it. In 1817, an edition of Franklin's Autobiography was issued in Scotland. It was his perusal of that little book that first directed his thoughts toward America, and which finally decided him to try his fortune in the New World. In May, 1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed at Halifax, with less than five pounds in his purse, without a friend on the Western Continent, and knowing no vocation except that of book-keeper.
Between his landing at Halifax and the appearance of the first number of the Herald sixteen years elapsed; during most of which he was a very poor, laborious, under-valued, roving writer for the daily press. At Halifax, he gave lessons in book-keeping for a few weeks, with little profit, then made his way along the coast to Portland, whence a schooner conveyed him to Boston. He was then, it appears, a soft, romantic youth, alive to the historic associations of the place, and susceptible to the varied, enchanting loveliness of the scenes adjacent, on land and sea. He even expressed his feelings in verse, in the Childe Harold manner,—verse which does really show a poetic habit of feeling, with an occasional happiness of expression. At Boston he experienced the last extremity of want. Friendless and alone he wandered about the streets, seeking work and finding none; until, his small store of money being all expended, he passed two whole days without food, and was then only relieved by finding a shilling on the Common. He obtained at length the place of salesman in a bookstore, from which he was soon transferred to the printing-house connected therewith, where he performed the duties of proof-reader. And here it was that he received his first lesson in the art of catering for the public mind. The firm in whose employment he was were more ambitious of glory than covetous of profit, and consequently published many works that were in advance of the general taste. Bankruptcy was their reward. The youth noted another circumstance at Boston. The newspaper most decried was Buckingham's Galaxy; but it was also the most eagerly sought and the most extensively sold. Buckingham habitually violated the traditional and established decorums of the press; he was familiar, chatty, saucy, anecdotical, and sadly wanting in respect for the respectabilities of the most respectable town in the universe. Every one said that he was a very bad man, but every one was exceedingly curious every Saturday to see "what the fellow had to say this week." If the youth could have obtained a sight of a file of James Franklin's Courant, of 1722, in which the youthful Benjamin first addressed the public, he would have seen a still more striking example of a journal generally denounced and universally read.
Two years in Boston. Then he went to New York, where he soon met the publisher of a Charleston paper, who engaged him as translator from the Spanish, and general assistant. During the year spent by him at Charleston he increased his knowledge of the journalist's art. The editor of the paper with which he was connected kept a sail-boat, in which he was accustomed to meet arriving vessels many miles from the coast, and bring in his files of newspapers a day in advance of his rivals. The young assistant remembered this, and turned it to account in after years. At Charleston he was confronted, too, with the late peculiar institution, and saw much to approve in it, nothing to condemn. From that day to this he has been but in one thing consistent,—contempt for the negro and for all white men interested in his welfare, approving himself in this a thorough Celt. If, for one brief period, he forced himself, for personal reasons, to veil this feeling, the feeling remained rooted within him, and soon resumed its wonted expression. He liked the South, and the people of the South, and had a true Celtic sympathy with their aristocratic pretensions. The salary of an assistant editor at that time was something between the wages of a compositor and those of an office-boy. Seven dollars a week would have been considered rather liberal pay; ten, munificent; fifteen, lavish.
Returning to New York, he endeavored to find more lucrative employment, and advertised his intention to open, near the site of the present Herald office, a "Permanent Commercial School," in which all the usual branches were to be taught "in the inductive method." His list of subjects was extensive,—"reading, elocution, penmanship, and arithmetic; algebra, astronomy, history, and geography; moral philosophy, commercial law, and political economy; English grammar, and composition; and also, if required, the French and Spanish languages, by natives of those countries." Application was to be made to "J.G.B., 148 Fulton Street." Applications, however, were not made in sufficient number, and the school, we believe, never came into existence. Next, he tried a course of lectures upon Political Economy, at the old Dutch Church in Ann Street, then not far from the centre of population. The public did not care to hear the young gentleman upon that abstruse subject, and the pecuniary result of the enterprise was not encouraging. He had no resource but the ill-paid, unhonored drudgery of the press.
For the next few years he was a paragraphist, reporter, scissorer, and man-of-all-work for the New York papers, daily and weekly, earning but the merest subsistence. He wrote then in very much the same style as when he afterwards amused and shocked the town in the infant Herald; only he was under restraint, being a subordinate, and was seldom allowed to violate decorum. In point of industry, sustained and indefatigable industry, he had no equal, and has never since had but one. One thing is to be specially noted as one of the chief and indispensable causes of his success. He had no vices. He never drank to excess, nor gormandized, nor gambled, nor even smoked, nor in any other way wasted the vitality needed for a long and tough grapple with adverse fortune. What he once wrote of himself in the early Herald was strictly true:
"I eat and drink to live,—not live to eat and drink. Social glasses of wine are my aversion; public dinners are my abomination; all species of gormandizing, my utter scorn and contempt. When I am hungry, I eat; when thirsty, drink. Wine or viands taken for society, or to stimulate conversation, tend only to dissipation, indolence, poverty, contempt, and death."
This was an immense advantage, which he had in common with several of the most mischievous men of modern times,—Calhoun, Charles XII., George III., and others. Correct bodily habits are of themselves such a source of power, that the man who has them will be extremely likely to gain the day over competitors of ten times his general worth who have them not. Dr. Franklin used to say, that if Jack Wilkes had been as exemplary in this particular as George III., he would have turned the king out of his dominions. In several of the higher kinds of labor, such as law, physic, journalism, authorship, art, when the competition is close and keen, and many able men are near the summit, the question, who shall finally stand upon it, often resolves itself into one of physical endurance. This man Bennett would have lived and died a hireling scribe, if he had had even one of the common vices. Everything was against his rising, except alone an enormous capacity for labor, sustained by strictly correct habits.
He lived much with politicians during these years of laborious poverty. Gravitating always towards the winning side, he did much to bring into power the worst set of politicians we ever had,—those who "availed" themselves of the popularity of Andrew Jackson, and who were afterwards used by him for the purpose of electing Martin Van Buren. He became perfectly familiar with all that was petty and mean in the political strifes of the day, but without ever suspecting that there was anything in politics not petty and mean. He had no convictions of his own, and therefore not the least belief that any politician had. If the people were in earnest about the affairs of their country, (their country, not his,) it was because the people were not behind the scenes, were dupes of their party leaders, were a parcel of fools. In short, he acquired his insight into political craft in the school of Tammany Hall and the Kitchen Cabinet. His value was not altogether unappreciated by the politicians. He was one of those whom they use and flatter during the heat of the contest, and forget in the distribution of the spoils of victory.
He made his first considerable hit as a journalist in the spring of 1828, when he filled the place of Washington correspondent to the New York Enquirer. In the Congressional Library, one day, he found an edition of Horace Walpole's Letters, which amused him very much. "Why not," said he to himself, "try, a few letters on a similar plan from this city, to be published in New York?" The letters appeared. Written in a lively manner, full of personal allusions, and describing individuals respecting whom the public are always curious,—free also from offensive personalities,—the letters attracted much notice and were generally copied in the press. It is said that some of the ladies whose charms were described in those letters were indebted to them for husbands. Personalities of this kind were a novelty then, and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical literature,—paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories, reports of trials, debates, balls, and police cases; his earnings ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve. If there had been then in New York one newspaper publisher who understood his business, the immense possible value of this man as a journalist would have been perceived, and he would have been secured, rewarded, and kept under some restraint. But there was no such man. There were three or four forcible writers for the press, but not one journalist.
During the great days of "The Courier and Inquirer," from 1829 to 1832, when it was incomparably the best newspaper on the continent, James Gordon Bennett was its most efficient hand. It lost him in 1832, when the paper abandoned General Jackson and took up Nicholas Biddle; and in losing him lost its chance of retaining the supremacy among American newspapers to this day. We can truly say, that at that time journalism, as a thing by itself and for itself, had no existence in the United States. Newspapers were mere appendages of party; and the darling object of each journal was to be recognized as the organ of the party it supported. As to the public, the great public, hungry for interesting news, no one thought of it. Forty years ago, in the city of New York, a copy of a newspaper could not be bought for money. If any one wished to see a newspaper, he had either to go to the office and subscribe, or repair to a bar-room and buy a glass of something to drink, or bribe a carrier to rob one of his customers. The circulation of the Courier and Inquirer was considered something marvellous when it printed thirty-five hundred copies a day, and its business was thought immense when its daily advertising averaged fifty-five dollars. It is not very unusual for a newspaper now to receive for advertising, in one day, six hundred times that sum. Bennett, in the course of time, had a chance been given to him, would have made the Courier and Inquirer powerful enough to cast off all party ties; and this he would have done merely by improving it as a vehicle of news. But he was kept down upon one of those ridiculous, tantalizing, corrupting salaries, which are a little more than a single man needs, but not enough for him to marry upon. This salary was increased by the proprietors giving him a small share in the small profits of the printing-office; so that, after fourteen years of hard labor and Scotch economy, he found himself, on leaving the great paper, a capitalist to the extent of a few hundred dollars. The chief editor of the paper which he now abandoned sometimes lost as much in a single evening at the card-table. It probably never occurred to him that this poor, ill-favored Scotchman was destined to destroy his paper and all the class of papers to which it belonged. Any one who now examines a file of the Courier and Inquirer of that time, and knows its interior circumstances, will see plainly enough that the possession of this man was the vital element in its prosperity. He alone knew the rudiments of his trade. He alone had the physical stamina, the indefatigable industry, the sleepless vigilance, the dexterity, tact, and audacity, needful for keeping up a daily newspaper in the face of keen competition.