The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Payne, by one account, could manage only a stiff nod to acknowledge that the moldering remains were indeed those of his fiancée. Meanwhile, a coroner’s assistant prevailed upon Phoebe Rogers to identify the long white dress her daughter had been wearing on the day of her disappearance. Even this, according to the Journal of Commerce, was not for the faint of heart, being “so discolored and half-rotten as to render it almost impossible to be identified, and so impregnated with the effluvia from her person that scarcely any person would venture to touch or examine it.” Apparently Mrs. Rogers weathered the ordeal with some distinction, identifying the dress “beyond the shadow of a doubt” on the strength of an old tear in the fabric, which she and her daughter had repaired with a distinctive pattern of stitchwork.

  Although the official identification was now complete, Daniel Payne’s troubles were far from over. Earlier that day he had given a lengthy deposition to city magistrates, acquitting himself honorably in the eyes of the police, but the press scented blood. The following day, as Mary’s remains were reinterred behind a church on Varick Street, reporters picked over Payne’s account of his actions in tones ranging from outrage to ridicule. Payne had testified that Mary intended to visit her aunt, Mrs. Downing, on the Sunday morning of her disappearance, but she had not said so to her mother or anyone else. Was this, the press wondered, a deception on the part of Mary—who, by some accounts, was later seen in the company of another man—or was Payne lying to cover his own guilt? His alibi for the afternoon in question, a three-hour nap, was far from convincing. His story of arranging to meet Mary at an omnibus stop was also held up to suspicion, as was his statement that he did not keep the appointment because of a thunderstorm. “Far be it from me to cast any suspicion upon anyone,” wrote a correspondent in the Tribune, but “Payne’s evidence is very inconclusive and unsatisfactory on many points—he fancies the omnibuses run on Sundays, and because it rained he would not go and meet her to whom he was engaged to be married.”

  Speculation mounted as a new detail came to light. A few days before her disappearance, Mary and her mother had a heated exchange that ended with Phoebe extracting a promise that her daughter would not marry Payne. The quarrel had been overheard by the housemaid, and soon made its way into the press, fueling rumors that Mary had broken the engagement. It was thought by some that Payne might have killed her in a jealous rage.

  Even Payne’s supporters were forced to concede that he had not behaved in a gentlemanly fashion. “Some persons think that Payne should be arrested,” said a writer in the Atlas. “If the authorities have satisfied themselves of the truth of his statement, which they ought to have done, we cannot see what suspicion can lie against him. The only curious circumstance was that on hearing of the murder the lover did not go to see his betrothed. This may be accounted for by the subsequent testimony of Alfred Crommelin, which states that Payne is a dissipated man.”

  Under fire, Payne responded with indignation. On August 13 he wrote a letter to the Times and Evening Star objecting to the manner in which the newspaper had conspired “to throw a doubt on the mind of the public” as to his whereabouts on the fatal Sunday. He promised to produce affidavits that would “entirely exculpate me with regard to this horrible affair.” Three days later, Payne presented himself at the newspaper’s offices carrying sworn statements from his brother and from three of the tavern keepers and restaurant owners who had served him on the Sunday in question. In addition, Payne brought letters from Phoebe Rogers and her cousins, Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Downing, attesting to the “earnest nature” of his efforts to locate Mary after her disappearance. Taken together, the seven affidavits corroborated every word of Payne’s deposition to the authorities. The Times immediately backpedaled. “No one can read the affidavits,” the paper stated, “without feeling that Mr. Payne stands exonerated from even a shadow of suspicion.” The other newspapers quickly followed suit.

  It is significant that Payne felt obliged to plead his case to the newspapers, and that they required a higher standard of proof than the police. “It is certain that the public look more to this paper now,” boasted the Tattler, “rather than to the police, for an elucidation of the mystery.” If the tone of the coverage grew a little smug, the city’s editors had cause for satisfaction: Their efforts had goaded City Hall into action. Many of them had been patrons of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium when Mary held court there, and felt personally invested in the capture of her killers. “Who caused any stir to be made to discover the murderers of Mary C. Rogers?” thundered the New York Atlas. “Why, the Press!”

  For all of that, even the press had been slow to take notice. In the days immediately following the discovery of the body there had been no mention in any of the newspapers, and little reason to suppose that the murder would stand out among the dozens of other unreported and unsolved cases of stabbing, drowning, and domestic violence that had occurred over the course of the summer months. Almost a week elapsed before the first scattered reports of the crime appeared, and even then the notices were buried in the back columns, under neutral headings such as “Police Office” and “City Affairs.” It was not until the first week of August that the Mary Rogers case was singled out and promoted to front-page news. “The murder is of such an atrocious character,” declared the Daily Express, “as to demand that it be taken forth from the ordinary police reports, to be made a matter of especial attention, in order, if possible, to arouse inquiry as to the murderers.”

  The reasons for calling for “especial attention” had more to do with personal agendas than with the crime itself. Each of the city’s editors had a private grievance against City Hall, with concerns ranging from police powers and judicial reform to universal temperance and moral rectitude. In each case the tragedy of Mary Rogers seemed to provide a potent symbol. To some, she was an innocent lamb led to the slaughter, illustrating the failures of law enforcement. “Our city is all but helpless,” wrote the Commercial Advertiser. “Whose sister or daughter will be next?” To others, Mary Rogers was a “fallen woman” led astray by the weaknesses of the flesh, an emblem of New York’s descent into depravity. “One word to the young ladies into whose hands this paper may fall,” wrote the Advocate of Moral Reform, “a voice from the grave—from an untimely and dishonored grave—speaks to you in tones of warning and entreaty. Had Cecilia Rogers loved the house of God—had she reverenced the Sabbath—how different had been her fate!”

  As the press drumbeat gathered force, a thriving if morbid carnival atmosphere sprang up at Elysian Fields. “The curiosity and crowds continue at Hoboken,” noted the Herald, “and the name of poor Mary Rogers is on every lip.” Families and courting couples spread out their picnic lunches on the spot where the body came ashore. The headmistress of a New York girls’ school brought a delegation of her young charges to Castle Point, where she delivered a cautionary lecture on the wages of sin.

  As the drama took hold of the public imagination, the apparent indifference of the police and public officials brought renewed protests. “Nothing tending to elucidate the mystery hanging over the murder of poor Mary has yet transpired at the Police Office,” wrote the Herald. Instead, the public appetite for news was being fueled by “stories made to suit the gullibility of the gaping crowd…but, on enquiry, they are all found to be like the baseless fabric of a vision.” Each new rumor, no matter how baseless, commanded several columns of newsprint. One story held that Mary Rogers had been spotted on the fatal Sunday near Theater Alley, walking arm in arm with a young man with whom she appeared to be on intimate terms. Another had it that a “well known person” had fled the city to escape arrest. Accounts of similar crimes in distant cities were circulated in the hope that they might throw light on the case.

  The newspapers rose to new heights of indignation when Alfred Crommelin, Mary’s rejected suitor, came forward with his theory that she had been carried off to a house of ill repute and murdered there. “Was it not perpetrated in one of the hundred assignation houses
which are permitted to exist by our grave administration of criminal justice?” asked the Herald. “Ought not every one of these dens to be searched at once for traces of violence, murder and blood? More than one person has been engaged in this horrid crime—it cannot hide forever.”

  “Murder will out,” insisted the New York Sunday Mercury, and the press would be the instrument “adopted to help it out.” The Mercury liked to claim credit for being the first newspaper to bring attention to the crime. “We must remember,” one editorial noted, “that it was in these pages the ghastly matter first came to public notice.” While it was true that the Mercury was among the first—with an article that managed to botch the victim’s name and address, along with the date of the crime—the real force behind the reporting of the Mary Rogers murder lay with James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the Herald, a man once described by an envious competitor as having “no more decency than a rutting pig.”

  No less a figure than Walt Whitman would describe Bennett as a “reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant.” But even his most bitter critics were forced to admit that Bennett’s path was bold and innovative, having made the Herald “impudent and intrusive” at a time when the more established sixpenny press had receded into bland uniformity. Often described as the father of yellow journalism, Bennett claimed with characteristic bluster that his paper would “outstrip everything in the conception of man.” Later, he expanded on the point: “What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day—the theaters have had their day—the temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great movements of human thought.…A newspaper can send more souls to heaven, and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York—besides making money at the same time.” Bennett was in no doubt as to the role he himself would play in this revolution: “Shakespeare is the great genius of the drama, Scott of the novel, Milton and Byron of the poem—and I mean to be the genius of the newspaper press.”

  Born in Scotland in 1795, Bennett emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-four. He would later claim to have been seized by a sudden impulse to see the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, though he seems also to have been seeking an escape from family pressure to enter the priesthood. Tall and gangly, Bennett had long hair, a small chin-beard, and a pair of crossed eyes that left him acutely self-conscious about his appearance. In later years he liked to recall how he had once been chased out of a bordello, having been informed by the ladies of the evening that he was “too ugly to come amongst us.”

  On his arrival in America, Bennett spent several years living hand-to-mouth as a proofreader, translator, and freelance journalist. In 1827, at the age of thirty-one, he joined the staff of the New York Enquirer, where much of his time was spent covering the “hollow-heartedness and humbuggery” of political life in the early days of Tammany Hall. His outspoken style earned him a stint as the paper’s Washington correspondent, where he offered a blunt and entertaining commentary on the city’s political landscape and social pretensions: “Do you see that lady at the Northwest corner of the second cotillion?” one dispatch ran. “The caputography of her head would puzzle a corps of engineers.”

  By 1835 the combative Bennett had left the Enquirer and burned his bridges with nearly every other editor in town. With a grubstake of five hundred dollars, he decided to strike out on his own. He found a cheap basement office on Wall Street, stretched out some pine boards across a pair of flour barrels, and sat down to compose the first issue of the New York Herald. The new journal, Bennett promised, would offer “good sound, practical common sense, applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in every-day life. We shall endeavor to record facts on every public and proper subject, stripped of verbiage and coloring, with comments when suitable, just, independent, fearless and good tempered. If the Herald wants the mere expansion which many journals possess, we shall try to make it up in industry, good taste, brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness.”

  Priced at one cent, Bennett’s Herald joined the “Penny Press” tradition of Benjamin Day’s Sun, which set its sights on the working classes and relied on street sales at the hands of newsboys, as opposed to the annual subscriptions offered by the larger, upper-class “blanket” sheets such as the Commercial Advertiser and the Evening Post. “Everybody wonders how people can buy these receptacles of scandal, the penny press,” wrote the diarist Philip Hone, “and yet everybody does encourage them; and the very man who blames his neighbors for setting so bad an example, occasionally puts one in his pocket to carry home to his family for their and his own edification.”

  From the first, Bennett aimed at the widest possible audience—“the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal”—in the belief that he could attract the wealthy society readership as well as the man on the street. He resolved to “astonish some of these big journals that now affect to look down on us with scorn.” From his first issue, Bennett courted controversy. “The man was never happier than when he was firing broadsides at his betters,” noted a rival journalist. “He was born for a scrap.” From time to time Bennett’s clashes boiled over into actual combat, with the result that on one occasion a parcel labeled “For Mr. Bennett Only” was found to contain a crude bomb, rigged to detonate when opened. Bennett escaped injury when he noticed grains of black powder trickling out of the box.

  Every so often a disgruntled reader would confront Bennett on the street and express his dissatisfaction by lashing the editor with a horsewhip. Once, when an assailant’s whip snapped in two across Bennett’s shoulders, the editor politely picked up the pieces and handed them back to his attacker. Even his former employer James Watson Webb of the Enquirer felt moved to violence on several occasions. Webb, who had a habit of touting favored stocks in return for under-the-table “considerations,” was indignant to find his integrity questioned in the pages of the Herald. Not content to flail away with his walking stick, Webb forced Bennett’s jaws open and spat down his throat. Bennett responded with unflappable humor: In attempting to bash open his head, Bennett suggested, Webb “no doubt wanted to let out the never-failing supply of good humor and wit which has created such a reputation for the Herald, and appropriate the contents to supply the emptiness of his own thick skull.”

  Webb later took his revenge in the form of a boycott of the Herald and the “moral pestilence” of its editor, uniting the city’s rival newspapers in a campaign designed to drive Bennett out of business. Advertisers were urged to withdraw their patronage, and hotel owners were advised to refuse service to anyone seen carrying a Herald. “The creed of us all,” wrote Webb, “should be—purchase not, read not, touch not.”

  In Bennett’s view, this “Moral War,” as it came to be known, sprang from his denunciation of “the affected prudery of society.” He found it “ridiculous and false” that journalists such as himself were obliged to observe the vapid pieties of the day, resorting to such tortured euphemisms as “the branches of the body” in reference to arms and legs, and “inexpressibles” for personal articles of clothing. With gleeful verve, Bennett prepared to do battle: “Petticoats—petticoats—petticoats—petticoats—there—you fastidious fools—vent your mawkishness on that!”

  In truth, Bennett’s offenses were not quite so trivial as he liked to pretend. Webb’s outrage had less to do with intimate garments than with Bennett’s religious provocations. In May of 1840 Bennett had seized on a religious charity event to denounce the Pope as a “decrepit, licentious, stupid Italian blockhead” and to ridicule the doctrine of transubstantiation as “the delicious luxury of creating and eating our divinity.” Not surprisingly, the city’s clergy took issue. Bennett watched with satisfaction as a “Holy Alliance” of church and press railed against him, recalling that a similar campaign of name-calling had helped to propel Martin Van Buren into the White Ho
use. “These blockheads are determined to make me the greatest man of the age,” he wrote. “Newspaper abuse made Mr. Van Buren chief magistrate of this republic—and newspaper abuse will make me the chief editor of this country. Well—be it so, I can’t help it.”

  No less controversial was Bennett’s claim to have advanced the cause of journalism by “discovering and encouraging the popular taste for vicarious vice and crime.” Polite society was scandalized when the Herald presented a sensationalized account of the murder of Helen Jewett, a “beautiful but erring” twenty-three-year-old prostitute. The young woman had plied her trade in a luxurious brothel known as “The Palace of Passions” on Thomas Street, three doors down from a police station. On a Sunday morning in April of 1836, an unknown assailant bludgeoned her to death with a hatchet and then attempted to set the body on fire. Four neighborhood watchmen responded to the disturbance and doused the smoldering corpse with water from a backyard cistern, while various clients—en deshabillé, in Bennett’s phrase—sought to remove themselves from the premises.

  As one might expect in a journalistic climate that quailed at the mention of body parts, the other newspapers did not see the Jewett murder as a fit subject. Bennett felt otherwise. The Herald had been in business for less than a year at the time, but Bennett had already blazed a path in the virtually uncharted realm of crime reporting. Six years earlier, as a reporter for the Enquirer, Bennett covered a sensational murder trial in Salem, Massachusetts, involving two young men charged with the murder of a retired sea captain. The case drew national interest, with no less a figure than Daniel Webster joining the prosecution, but as the press gathered at the courthouse, the state attorney general dictated a set of restrictive guidelines intended to preserve the “solemn dignity” of the process. Bennett recoiled in anger, expressing his indignation in terms that would mold his future: “It is an old, worm-eaten Gothic dogma of Courts to consider the publicity given to every event by the Press as destructive to the interests of law and justice.…The press is the living Jury of the Nation.”