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

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Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose summing up the Sun described as “the most magnificent production of mind, eloquence, and rhetorical talent that ever resounded in a hall of justice.” This was the Ogden Hoffman of whom Decatur said, when Hoffman left the navy in 1816, that he regretted that the young man should have exchanged “an honourable profession for that of a lawyer.” Hoffman and his partner Maxwell, who shared in this tremendous fee of fifteen hundred dollars, had been district attorneys of New York before the time of the Jewett murder, and the Sun inquired what would have been Robinson’s fate if Hoffman, and not Phenix, had been the prosecutor.

On August 20, 1836, the Sun announced that its circulation averaged twenty-seven thousand copies daily, or fifty-six hundred more than the combined sale of the eleven six-cent papers. Of the penny papers the Sun credited the Herald with thirty-two hundred and the Transcript with ten thousand, although both these rivals claimed at least twice as much. Columns were filled with the controversy which followed upon the publication of these figures. The Sun departed from a scholarly argument with the Transcript over the pronunciation of “elegiac,” and denounced it as a “nestle-tripe,” whatever that was.