The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (50 page)

In the early 1840s, after his departure from the
New Era
, Richard Adams Locke developed an interest in the controversial electromagnetic theories of Dr. Henry Hall Sherwood of New York. (In later years Sherwood would become known for his “savage rotary magnetic machine,” which he claimed could cure all manner of diseases from rheumatism to herpes and tuberculosis.) Like Sherwood, Locke had come to believe that the earth in its orbit gradually moved from a tilted position to a perpendicular one and then back again; over eons, this movement had a profound impact on the world’s climate. When the angle was greatest came a dreadful period of darkness and ice, but when the earth stood perpendicular to the sun, as Locke asserted in a lecture called “Magnetism and Astronomy,” “the sun will shine from pole to pole in every part of the Earth’s annual orbit, and perennial spring will load its valleys with fertility, clothe its hills with verdure, even to the tops of its mountains.” The earth becomes, everywhere, a paradise—and from this observation Locke had developed a theory of his own.

Such a beneficent age, he believed, occurs every several thousand years.

The earth had last experienced one in the centuries before Christ, and while its effects were unknown to modern science, among the ancients they were “the great theme of their poets and philosophers—the subject of their sacred mysteries—depicted in the spiral circles of their temples, and taught to the initiated in their noble orreries and zodiacs.” The Bible spoke eloquently of this period, through the allegorical language that Locke had always seen there. Eden’s tree of life stood for the magnetic axis of the earth, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil for the axis of rotation; the serpent circling the tree was not an actual snake, but rather “the serpentine or spiral motion of the earth’s axis.” While the Bible, then, could not be taken as literal history, it did preserve important historical information that would otherwise be lost. The magnetic theory was thus another effort by Locke—the most ambitious of all, if also the most wrongheaded—to reconcile the worlds of science and scripture.

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Edgar Allan Poe reported in 1846 that “Mr. Locke is now engaged in carefully revising” his ideas about magnetism—adding, in his typical manner of backhanded praise, “My own opinion is that his theory (which he has reached more by dint of imagination than anything else) will finally be established, although, perhaps, never thoroughly by
him
.” That revision never appeared; it was just one of several scientific projects on which Richard Adams Locke was said to be working, none of which ever came to light. As early as November 1835, just three months after the publication of the moon series, the
Sun
had reported that Locke (“whom our cotem-poraries accuse of being the author of the celebrated ‘Astronomical Discoveries’”) was preparing a series of public lectures on astronomy, an abstract of which would soon be published in the
Sun
. That abstract, however, never came, and neither did the lectures. Likewise, in November 1850, the magazine
International Miscellany of Literature, Art, and Science
ran an item that remarked on how “theories of light seem now in an unusual degree to occupy the attention of men of science”; Lord Brougham would shortly be publishing an essay on the topic, while “Mr. Richard Adams Locke (who saw through it so well when he made his discoveries in the moon) has been for some years engaged upon an elaborate and we have no doubt very learned and ingenious book in the same regard.” That book too never appeared. In fact, no work of any kind by Richard Adams Locke ever appeared again in his lifetime. Once he had been numbered among the most prolific and highly regarded journalists in New York, but after 1842 (when he published the last of his occasional essays on science and art in the
New-York Mirror
) there was only silence.

Not coincidentally, 1842 was also the year Locke gave up journalism for good, taking a job as an inspector for the Customs Service in New York. Employment in the Customs Service was open only to citizens of the United States. Locke, of course, had been born in Great Britain, and, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, he was never naturalized as a U.S. citizen. His nationality would seem to have been an insurmountable obstacle to his employment, but the New York Custom House was a hotbed of Democratic Party patronage—a reform commission later observed that “partisan zeal and work, the payment of partisan assessments, and the exertion of official influence for partisan purposes, have, as a rule, been essential conditions for securing appointments or promotion”— and it is not difficult to imagine that Locke, who was intimate enough with the local Democratic Party to have edited two
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Epilogue: That Tyranny Shall Be No Longer

of its newspapers (the
Democratic-Republican New Era
and the
Brooklyn
Daily Eagle
), would have been able to circumvent the citizenship requirement. Presumably this requirement was why New York was listed as his birthplace in all Custom House registers of employees, and why Locke told U.S. census inspectors in both 1850 and 1860 that he had been born in New York—a falsehood that later made its way into several histories.

New York’s Custom House had long been a sink of not only patronage but also graft, where inspectors were known to receive bribes from merchants whose ships’ cargo they oversaw. This was a tradition, however, in which Richard Adams Locke seems not to have partaken, since he never had much money. (The writer Herman Melville, who began work at the Custom House shortly after Locke retired, also refused to accept bribes.

His brother-in-law wrote of him “quietly returning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back, quietly avoiding offence alike to the corrupting merchants and their clerks and runners, who think that all men can be bought.”) The 1860 census, for instance, shows that Locke did not own his own home, and at the end of his working life had amassed a personal estate valued at one thousand dollars, less than that of nearly all his neighbors. By 1850 Richard Adams and Esther Bowring Locke had six children, all of whom continued to live at home. The only one old enough to work was their twenty-year-old daughter Adelaide, but she could not have been bringing in much money; ten years later, the 1860

census would list her profession as “Servant.”

The difficulties the family faced in those years, even after Locke took his job at the Custom House, were perhaps most vividly expressed in a brief, poignant letter that he wrote on June 7, 1850, to the
Sun’
s publisher Moses Sperry Beach (one of Moses Yale Beach’s sons, who had taken over the paper two years earlier). “Dear Sir,” he wrote, Have you any thing for me to do? My family is in a state of great exigency. If you have, you may depend upon it that, in anything I undertake I can render you effective service. Afford me a chance and you will see.

If the younger Beach ever replied to him, there is no record of it. In any case Locke’s plea went unheeded, for he never worked again for the
Sun
.

The same year he wrote to Beach, Locke became the chief boarding officer for the Customs Service on Staten Island, the position he would hold

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for the rest of his working life. In 1858 he was again briefly in the news when a mob, angered that Staten Island was being used as a quarantine site for yellow fever victims, burned down a government hospital that Locke had been assigned to help protect. At the subsequent trial, Locke testified that he had seen two clergymen among the crowd, looking on, as he put it, with “complacency and satisfaction.” The
New York Times
, in its coverage of the trial, took umbrage at Locke’s implication of the ministers. “Mr. Locke has in great perfection the gift of seeing what does not exist,” the
Times
commented. “Sometimes his fictions are lunar, at other times terrestrial.”

He still participated in local Democratic politics, at a certain remove; an item in a Staten Island newspaper reported that he was scheduled to present a lecture before the Richmond County Democratic Union Club

“on the principles and objects of the Democratic party.” A far more important invitation came in December 1851, when he was asked to deliver the welcoming address for the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth, a former journalist who had recently become the president of his country’s first parliamentary government. This was Kossuth’s first trip to America since assuming the presidency, and his first landing was in Staten Island, where he stayed overnight before departing the next morning for Manhattan. A celebration was arranged to see Kossuth off. A large tent, flying twinned American and Hungarian flags, was set up on a hill overlooking the bay. With Locke sitting beside him, Kossuth was driven by horse-drawn carriage to a tent where a crowd of three thousand had assembled. A chronicler of the day’s events reported that Locke rose to the podium, “handsome, bearded, and self-possessed,” where he read his prepared address.

“No impulse of the human heart is so contagious as valor in the cause of liberty,” Locke proclaimed, and “no principles are so imperishable and prolific as those of freedom.” He drew cheers with the rousing finish, adorned with the rhetorical flourishes so popular at the time, in which he compared the honored guest with that most revered of American patriots, George Washington: Go on then, Great Kossuth, his worthiest successor upon this earth, and fulfil your mission. Stand forth like the Angel of the Apocalypse, with one foot upon the land and the other upon the sea, and swear ye the Western continent to the Eastern, that tyranny shall be no longer!

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The Kossuth address, Richard Adams Locke’s most important public appearance, provided a fitting coda to a political life in New York that had begun seventeen years earlier, with an anonymous pamphlet written in support of the Polish uprising against the Russian invaders.
That
tyranny shall be no longer
: it was a sentiment that had motivated Locke for the whole of his career, whether that tyranny was religious, racial, or economic. In nearly every case, the stance he took had been highly un-popular, so it must have been especially gratifying, that bright December morning, to stand before a crowd and receive its acclaim.

In January 1862, at the age of sixty-one, he retired from the Customs Service, having worked there nearly twenty years. After that he was rarely seen outside his house. According to every account he lived quietly, almost reclusively, for his remaining years, devoting his attention to problems in math and science.

He died on February 16, 1871, and was buried at the Silver Mount Cemetery on Staten Island, not far from his home, where in later years Esther and three of their children would be buried alongside him. His death was met with no obituaries in any of the New York papers, not even the
Sun
, whose success he had done so much to nurture. About the only notice of his death came in the weekly magazine
Every Saturday
, which used the occasion to reflect less on the life of Richard Adams Locke than on the vagaries of fame: “Are we so soon forgotten?” asks Rip Van Winkle, in the play, with in-describable pathos. It seems to be a fact that we are forgotten very soon indeed. Twenty-five or thirty years ago the name of the author of the

“Moon Hoax” was on everybody’s lip. His brilliant essay made the fortune of the Sun newspaper; cravats and soaps and hair-brushes were named after him. He was a perfume in a shop-window and the winning horse on the race-course. Since then his popularity has so completely died away that when the death of Richard Adams Locke was announced last week it affected the general public very much as if some one had said, “Noah is dead.” How very, very quietly a popular idol sometimes slips off his pedestal! Twenty years ago who would have dared to question the fame of this ingenious author? Popularity looks so much like fame that one is constantly mistaken for the other, as if they were twins. But they are not twins; they are not even brothers, yet it is difficult to determine at that time “which is which.” Fame is frequently an undemonstrative lad
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with a wonderful amount of latent vitality. Popularity might be described as a precocious child who never lives to grow up.

At one time Locke’s name had been known to everyone in New York, the center, for a while, of a great hubbub; thirty-five years later his death occasioned barely a whisper. There had been one moment, though, not long after the appearance of his moon series, when he had wryly imagined for himself a kind of immortality. He recalled it in 1840 at the end of his letter of reply to Park Benjamin of the
New World
, as “the incident of all others, which I considered the most complimentary to the author,” one that had recently occurred aboard a ferry crossing the Long Island Sound.

So much of his life had been spent around water, ever since his summers at his grandfather’s house in Burnham, just a few paces from the beach, where he could stand by the docks and watch the cargo ships coming in from all over the world, trying to decipher the strange letters burned into the wooden crates unladen by the crewmen—little suspecting, of course, that he would spend nearly twenty years of his life inspecting the cargo of just such ships, when they would no longer seem quite so romantic. Not far from there, up the Bristol Channel, was where he and Esther, carrying their baby daughter, had embarked on the ocean voyage that would take them to a new life in America. A decade after that, when they had finally arrived at their own house by the water, it was a ferry that brought him to work each morning in Lower Manhattan, first at the
New
Era
and then at the Custom House.