The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman

These editorials so infuriated the curate of Burnham, a Reverend Trevor, that he initiated a libel action against the newspaper. After a good deal of negotiation Besley and Brinning got the suit dropped on a single condition: that Richard Adams Locke give up his post as editor of the Herald.
    For the twenty-five-year-old Locke, it must have been a bitter defeat—
    to have finally found a job he loved, only to be forced from it under threat from political opponents. It was a scenario that would be replayed a decade and a half later, halfway around the world, when he lost his job as editor of the New Era, the penny paper he had helped found, after his editorial denunciations of two Democratic power brokers. He was never able to keep a job for long. In his political views he steadfastly resisted the power of authority figures—whether politicians, aristocrats, or clergymen— and so too did he in his own life, at far greater cost, with the publishers who held sway over his future.
    Locke continued to write articles for the Herald and privately published pamphlets advocating, in William Griggs’s characterization, “the most ultra doctrines of Unitarianism and Universalism, in connection with the most Republican principles.” Though much of his writing championed Catholic emancipation, he was also a fierce opponent of religious control over civic life, and he took a strong stand against the temporal power of the pope—that is, the right of the pope to rule as sovereign over territory, an issue then very much in dispute. For nearly two years, in the pages of the Herald, he conducted a weekly debate on the issue with several Catholic clerics. (Even then, Locke seems never to have declined an opportunity to joust with a clergyman.) Another controversy arose from a sermon preached by a local minister, Reverend John Matthews of Kilve, advocating the use of philosophy as an aid in interpreting biblical texts. The sermon was so well liked by Matthews’s congregants that it was issued in pamphlet form under the title The Necessity of Philosophy to the Divine. Locke, unsurprisingly, found little in Matthews’s pamphlet to admire; he quickly produced his own pamphlet, called simply A Review, in which he derided the sermon as “unconscionably impudent and dogmatical” and argued—in line with Universalist principles of the time—that the Bible itself is sufficient source of religious information. This in turn led to a heated denunciation of Locke by an anonymous pamphleteer (he called himself only “A Defender of the Faith”) who suggested that Locke’s pamphlet “may have – 59 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 60
    the sun and the moon
    been better entitled A WRY VIEW OF PHILOSOPHY,” in so doing making cruel sport of Locke’s crossed eyes.
    In 1826, when he was twenty-six, Richard Adams Locke married a local girl named Esther Bowring, eleven years his junior, and the two settled at Mill Batch Farm. He was once again living under the same roof as his siblings and his father; his mother had died nine years earlier, at the age of only thirty-seven. Surely a tension existed between a son returned home after failing to establish himself in the world and a father who did not approve of his son’s politics or profession (he could not have had much to say about his fifteen-year-old daughter-in-law, given that his own wife had been fifteen when he married her) and who had chosen not to provide for him in his will.
    His father died the next year, at the age of sixty. Richard Adams Locke was now the oldest man living at Mill Batch—though this state of affairs proved temporary, as in 1829 his sister Ann got married and her new husband, John Kent, came to live at the farm. Almost fifty years old, Kent was an itinerant preacher very popular among the faithful of the surrounding area, where he was known as “the apostle of the hill country.”
    Thrown together in that crowded farmhouse were two antipodal