Rising with the Sun

Abstract

Poverty and politics spawned the emergence of newsboys in antebellum New York. The New York Sun, founded in 1833 by the radical printer Benjamin Day, was the first successful penny newspaper in the United States and the first to use hawkers and carriers on a large scale. Before this date, newspapers circulated through the colonies and early republic via carriers and postriders of various ages and conditions, including apprentices and slaves. Day’s newsboys—many of them poor immigrants—earned both wages and profits as they served Whigs, Democrats, and members of Day’s own Workingmen’s Party. This generation of newsboys did not simply distribute newspapers but stirred up demand for them with their cries of murders, hoaxes, and slave revolts. Their ranks included future turfman Bill Lovell, actor-comedian Barney Williams, and entrepreneur Mark Maguire, the original “King of the Newsboys.”