Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [351]
In 1815 New York newspapers still closely resembled their colonial predecessors in form and function. Aimed primarily at merchants, their pages featured lists of ship arrivals and departures, current wholesale prices, money conversion rates, stock and bond quotations, real estate transactions, and—in long columns of minute type—“advertisements” placed by wholesalers, retailers, patent medicine vendors, and transport companies. Many, though not all, contained accounts of events in Albany or Washington or Europe (often clipped from papers elsewhere and typically well out of date), extracts from congressional speeches, and political editorials. None could claim to have many readers. In 1820 the two largest papers in New York were the Commercial Advertiser, edited by Colonel William Leete Stone, and the Evening Post, Alexander Hamilton’s old sheet, still edited by William Coleman. Neither sold more than two thousand copies daily.
Over the next decade, however, publishers awoke to the fact that no other city in the country was receiving better information about distant markets and conditions, or getting it faster—or making more money from it. In 1824 the price of cotton in Liverpool shot up unexpectedly. When the news reached New York a few weeks later via the Black Ball Line, its owner, Jeremiah Thompson, dispatched agents by fast pilot boat to New Orleans, where they turned a quick profit buying cotton at the old price from unsuspecting suppliers. Stories like this, repeated over and over as canals and steamboats quickened the flow of intelligence toward Manhattan, whetted the entrepreneurial imaginations of a new generation of publishers. By 1830 New York had forty-seven newspapers, eleven of them dailies, each determined to bring the news to its readers ahead of the others.
Semaphore or “telegraph” poles on Staten Island, visible by telescope from the Battery, already signaled the arrival of packets from Europe off Sandy Hook, and another semaphore, atop the Exchange, was adjusted accordingly, relaying the information to all interested parties. Impatient and aggressive editors now dispatched swift news boats to dart out and retrieve the latest overseas intelligence in time for an extra edition; some even ordered construction of schooners that could range a hundred miles into the open sea to intercept incoming vessels. For domestic news, they arranged teams of relay riders and steamboats that could make the trip up from Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia in a couple of days or less.
Most influential of the new papers was the Courier and Enquirer (1829), the offspring of a strange political marriage between James Watson Webb, editor of the Morning Courier, and Mordecai M. Noah, editor of the Enquirer. Bellicose and supercilious, Webb, a West Point graduate, had fought in the War of 1812, fought Indians in the Northwest, and fought duels with fellow officers. He also loathed blacks, Irish immigrants, and Jews—especially, among the latter category, Mordecai Noah. Noah had moved to New York after a brief diplomatic career and established himself as a journalist, playwright, and Tammany influential. Appointed interim high sheriff of New York in 1821, he failed to win relection the following year when opponents raised a rumpus about having a Jew supervise the hanging of Christians. (“Pretty Christians to need hanging at all” was Noah’s tart retort.) In 1825 Noah proposed to found a refuge for Jews of the world on an island in the Niagara River and proclaimed himself “high sheriff of the Jews.” When that project failed, he turned to editing the Enquirer, with the aid of a squint-eyed Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett. After Noah supported Andrew Jackson for president in 1828, the victorious Jackson appointed him “surveyor and inspector of the New York Port,” a sinecure that allowed him to continue editing the Enquirer. But Webb too had backed Jackson, and in 1829 party pressure forced the two editors to combine their papers.
The new Courier and Enquirer became the largest and most powerful paper in the United States,