Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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The “Disclosures” ran in the Sun for ten days, during which time about one-half of the book was printed. Maria Monk herself was in New York, and so cleverly had she devised the imposture that she was received in good society as a martyr. Such was the public interest that it was estimated by Cardinal Manning, in 1851, that between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the volume were sold in America and England. The Know-Nothing Party used it for political capital, and anti-Catholic riots in several cities were the result of its publication.

Its partial appearance in the Sun, while it may have helped the circulation of the book, undoubtedly hastened the exposure of the fraud. The editor of the Commercial Advertiser, William Leete Stone, liked nothing better than to show up impostors. He had already written a life of Matthias the Prophet, and he decided to get at the truth of Maria Monk’s revolting story.

Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of the Herkimer American, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the Northern Whig, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany Daily Advertiser, and of the Hartford Mirror. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded Zachariah Lewis as editor of the Commercial Advertiser. As a Mason he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the anti-Masonic movement.