For George W. Wisner

The 190th anniversary of the Sun, which we are marking this year, moves us to tip our hat to George W. Wisner. In 1833, he was hired by the Sun’s founder, Benjamin Day, to cover police court. That started at 4 a.m. He also pulled an oar in what passed for the editorial galley. It was in court that, on the fourth day of the Sun, Wisner was struck by the kind of epiphany that can light up a newspaperman’s biography for all time.It seems, Frank O’Brien writes in his history of the Sun, that the top story that day was a debate between Envy and Candor in respect of the beauties of one Miss H. What had caught Wisner’s eye, though, was a report that Britain would free the slaves of the West Indies. Benjamin Day, it has been speculated, was out fishing. Wisner, in the event, dipped his pen in the ink of righteousness and scribbled out, in a matter of minutes, what became one of the most famous editorials of all time.“We supposed,” it said, “that the eyes of men were but half open to this case. We imagined that the slave would have to toil for years and purchase what in justice was already his own. We did not once dream that the light had so far progressed as to prepare the British nation for this colossal stride in justice and humanity and benevolence which they are about to make. The abolition of West Indian slavery will form a brilliant era in the annals of the world.”Abolition in the Indies, he wrote, would “circle with a halo of imperishable glory the brows of the transcendent spirits who wield the present destinies of the British Empire. Would to Heaven that the honor of leading the way in this godlike enterprise had been reserved for our own country! But as the opportunity for this is passed, we trust we shall at least avoid the everlasting disgrace of long refusing to imitate so bright and glorious an example.”Thus the Sun emerged against slavery. The Sun, as O’Brien put it, “came out for the freedom of the slave twenty-eight years before that freedom was to be accomplished in the United States through war. The Sun was the Sun of Day, but the hand was the hand of Wisner. That young man was an Abolitionist before the word was coined.” Day was quoted by O’Brien as saying years later that he’d rarely agreed with Wisner.“I was rather Democratic in my notions,” Benjamin Day admitted. Whenever Wisner got a chance, Day explained, he “was always sticking in his damned little Abolitionist articles.” There was little doubt, O’Brien reckoned, that Wisner wrote the editorial facing the Sun against slavery while he was waiting for something to turn up in the police court. Then at the office, he set in type the editorial (and a piece about the arrest of a washer woman who stole a tub).Considering that Wisner got four dollars a week for his “break-o’-day work,” O’Brien reckons, “he made a very good morning of that.” O’Brien deems it “worthy of record” that the next day’s Sun “did not repudiate Wisner’s assault on human servitude.” On September 10, Day did run an editorial “hitting at the methods of the Abolitionists,” but “grieving over the existence of slavery.” Two years hence, Wisner sold his share of the Sun for $5,000 and moved to Michigan to sing sic transit gloria.

For George W. Wisner

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