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

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The influence of Partner Wisner, the Abolitionist, was evident in many pages of the Sun. On June 23, 1834, it printed a piece about Martin Palmer, who was “pelted down with stones in Wall Street on suspicion of being a runaway slave,” and paid its respects to Boudinot, a Southerner in New York who was reputed to be a tracker of runaways. It was he who had set the crowd after the black:

The man who will do this will do anything; he would dance on his mother’s grave; he would invade the sacred precincts of the tomb and rob a corpse of its winding-sheet; he has no SOUL. It is said that this useless fellow is about to commence a suit against us for a libel. Try it, Mr. Boudinot!

During the anti-abolition riots of that year the Sun took a firm stand against the disturbers, although there is little doubt that many of them were its own readers.

The paper made a vigorous little crusade against the evils of the Bridewell in City Hall Park, where dozens of wretches suffered in the filth of the debtors’ prison. The Sun was a live wire when the cholera re-appeared, and it put to rout the sixpenny papers which tried to make out that the disease was not cholera, but “summer complaint.” Incidentally, the advertising columns of that day, in nearly all the papers were filled with patent “cholera cures.”