“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR
_One of the Few Entirely Loyal Newspapers of New York.--Its Brief
Ownership by a Religious Coterie.--It Returns to the Possession
of M. S. Beach, Who Sells It to Dana._
In 1852, when Moses Sperry Beach came into the sole ownership of the
_Sun_, it was supposed that the slavery question had been settled
forever, or at least with as much finality as was possible in
determining such a problem. The Missouri Compromise, devised by Henry
Clay, had acted as a legislative mandragora which lulled the United
States and soothed the spasms of the extreme Abolitionists. Even
Abraham Lincoln, now passing forty years, was losing that interest in
politics which he had once exhibited, and was devoting himself almost
entirely to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois.
The _Sun_ had plenty of news to fill its four wide pages, and its daily
circulation was above fifty thousand. The Erie Railroad had stretched
itself from Piermont, on the Hudson River, to Dunkirk, on the shore of
Lake Erie. The Hudson River Railroad was built from New York to Albany.
The steamship Pacific, of the Collins Line, had broken the record by
crossing the Atlantic in nine days and nineteen hours. The glorious
yacht America had beaten the British Titania by eight miles in a race
of eighty miles.
Kossuth, come as the envoy plenipotentiary of a Hungary ambitious for
freedom, was New York’s hero. Lola Montez, the champion heart-breaker
of her century, danced hither and yon. The volunteer firemen of New
York ran with their engines and broke one another’s heads. The Young
Men’s Christian Association, designed to divert youth to gentler
practices, was organized, and held its first international convention
at Buffalo in 1854. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, of the United States
army, was in California, recently the scene of the struggle between
outlawry and the Vigilantes, and was not very sure that he liked the
life of a soldier.
Messrs. Heenan, Morrissey, and Yankee Sullivan furnished, at frequent
intervals, inspiration to American youth. The cholera attacked New York
regularly, and as regularly did the _Sun_ print its prescription for
cholera medicine, which George W. Busteed, a druggist, had given to
Moses Yale Beach in 1849, and which is still in use for the subjugation
of inward qualms. The elder Beach, enjoying himself in Europe with his
son Joseph Beach, sent articles on French and German life to his son
Moses Sperry Beach’s paper.
Literature was still advancing in New England. Persons of refinement
were reading Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven
Gables,” Ik Marvel’s “Reveries of a Bachelor,” Irving’s “Mahomet,” and
Parkman’s “Conspiracy of Pontiac.” Marion Harland had written “Alone.”
Down in Kentucky young Mary Jane Holmes was at work on her first novel,
“Tempest and Sunshine.” But brows both high and low were bent over the
instalments in the _National Era_ of the most fascinating story of the
period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
The writing of news had not gone far ahead in quality. Most of the
reporters still wrote in a groove a century old. Every chicken-thief
who was shot, “clapped his hand to his heart, cried out that he was a
dead man, and presently expired.” But the editorial articles were well
written. On the _Sun_ John Vance, a brilliant Irishman, was turning out
most of the leaders and getting twenty dollars a week. In the _Tribune_
office Greeley pounded rum and slavery, while his chief assistant,
Charles A. Dana, did such valuable work on foreign and domestic
political articles that his salary grew to the huge figure of fifty
dollars a week.
Bennett was working harder than any other newspaper-owner, and was
doing big things for the _Herald_. Southern interests and scandal
were his long suits. “We call the _Herald_ a very bad paper,” said
Greeley to a Parliamentary committee which was inquiring about American
newspapers. He meant that it was naughty; but naughtiness and all, its
circulation was only half as big as the _Sun’s_.
Henry J. Raymond was busy with his new venture, the _Times_, launched
by him and George Jones, the banker. With Raymond were associated
editorially Alexander C. Wilson and James W. Simonton. William Cullen
Bryant, nearing sixty, still bent “the good grey head that all men
knew” over his editor’s desk in the office of the _Evening Post_. With
him, as partner and managing editor, was that other great American,
John Bigelow.
J. Watson Webb, fiery as ever in spirit, still ran the _Courier and
Enquirer_, “the Austrian organ in Wall Street,” as Raymond called
it because of Webb’s hostile attitude toward Kossuth. Webb had been
minister to Austria, a post for which Raymond was afterward to be
nominated but not confirmed. The newspapers and the people were all
pretty well satisfied with themselves. And then Stephen A. Douglas put
his foot in it, and Kansas began to bleed.
Douglas had been one of the _Sun’s_ great men, for the _Sun_ listed
heavily toward the Democratic party nationally; but it did not disguise
its dislike of the Little Giant’s unhappily successful effort to
organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of
squatter sovereignty. After the peace and quiet that had followed the
Missouri Compromise, this attempt to bring slavery across the line of
thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes by means of a local-option scheme
looked to the _Sun_ very much like kicking a sleeping dragon in the
face.
After Douglas had been successful in putting his bill through
Congress, the _Sun_ still rejected its principles. Commenting on the
announcements of certain Missourians that they would take their slaves
into the new Territory, the _Sun_ said:
They may certainly take their slaves with them into the new
Territory, but when they get them there they will have no law
for holding the slaves. Slavery is a creation of local law,
and until a Legislature of Kansas or Nebraska enacts a law
recognizing slavery, all slaves taken into the Territory will
be entitled to their freedom.
It was at this time that the germs of Secession began to show
themselves on the culture-plates of the continent. The _Sun_ was hot at
the suggestion of a division of the Union:
It can only excite contempt when any irate member of Congress
or fanatical newspaper treats the dissolution of the Union as
an event which may easily be brought about. There is moral
treason in this habit of continually depreciating the value of
the Union.
The _Sun_ saw that Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a
smashing blow delivered by a Northern Democrat to the Democracy of the
North; but the sectional hatred was not revealed in all its intensity
until 1856, when Representative Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina,
made his murderous attack on Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts,
in the Senate Chamber. This and its immediate consequences were well
covered by the _Sun_, not only through its Associated Press despatches,
but also in special correspondence from its Washington representative,
“Hermit.” It had a report nearly a column long of Sumner’s speech,
“The Crime Against Kansas,” which caused Brooks to assault the great
opponent of slavery.
That year was also the year of the first national convention of the
Republican party, conceived by the Abolitionists, the Free Soilers, and
the Know-nothings, and born in 1854. The _Sun_ had a special reporter
at Philadelphia to tell of the nomination of John C. Frémont, but
the paper supported Buchanan. Its readers were of a class naturally
Democratic, and although the paper was not a party organ, and had no
liking for slavery or Secession, the new party was too new, perhaps too
much colored with Know-nothingism, to warrant a change of policy.
On the subject of the Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice
Taney and handed down two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the _Sun_
was blunt:
We believe that the State of New York can confer citizenship on
men of whatever race, and that its citizens are entitled, by
the Constitution, to be treated in Missouri as citizens of New
York State. To treat them otherwise is to discredit our State
sovereignty.
John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry was found worthy of a column in the
_Sun_, but space was cramped that morning, for four columns had to be
given to a report of the New York firemen’s parade. The firemen read
the _Sun_.
But Mr. Beach sent a special man to report Brown’s trial at
Charlestown, Virginia. The editorial columns echoed the sense of the
correspondence--that the old man was not having a fair show. Besides,
the _Sun_ believed that Brown was insane and belonged in a madhouse
rather than on the gallows. It printed a five-thousand-word sermon
by Henry Ward Beecher on Brown’s raid. Beecher and the Beaches were
very friendly, and there is still in Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church,
Brooklyn, a pulpit made of wood brought from the Mount of Olives by
Moses S. Beach.
When John Brown was hanged, December 2, 1859, the _Sun_ remarked:
The chivalry of the Old Dominion will breathe easier now....
But, while Brown cannot be regarded as a common murderer, it is
only the wild extravagance of fanatical zeal that will attempt
to elevate him to the rank of a martyr.
In the Illinois campaign of 1858 the _Sun_ was slow to recognize
Abraham Lincoln’s prowess as a speaker, although Lincoln was then
recognized as the leading exponent of Whig doctrine in his State.
Referring to the debates between Lincoln and Douglas in their struggle
for the Senatorship, the _Sun_ said:
An extraordinary interest is attached by the leading men of all
parties to the campaign which Senator Douglas is conducting in
the State of Illinois. His rival for the Senatorial nomination,
Mr. Lincoln, being no match for the Little Giant in campaign
oratory, Senator Trumbull has taken the stump on the Republican
side.
Two years later, when Lincoln was nominated for President, the _Sun_
saw him in a somewhat different light:
Mr. Lincoln is an active State politician and a good stump
orator. As to the chances of his election, that is a matter
upon which we need not at present speculate.
But the time for the _Sun_ to speculate came only three days later (May
22, 1860), when it frankly stated:
It is now admitted that Mr. Lincoln’s nomination is a strong
one.... He is, emphatically, a man of the people.... That he
would, if elected, make a good President, we do not entertain a
doubt. His chances of election are certainly good. The people
are tired of being ruled by professional politicians.
That was written before the Democratic national convention. The _Sun_
wanted the Democrats to nominate Sam Houston. It saw that Douglas had
estranged the anti-slavery Democrats of the North. When Douglas was
nominated, the _Sun_ remarked:
Of the six candidates in the field--Lincoln, Bell, Houston,
Douglas, Breckinridge, and Gerrit Smith--Lincoln has
unquestionably the best chance of an election by the people.
The _Sun_ had no illusions as to the candidacy of John C. Breckinridge,
the Vice-President under Buchanan, when he was nominated for President
by the Democrats of the South, who refused to flock to the colours of
Douglas:
The secessionists do not expect that Breckinridge will be
elected. Should Lincoln and Hamlin be elected by the votes of
the free States, then the design of the conspirators is to come
out openly for a disruption of the Union and the erection of a
Southern confederacy.
“The Union cannot be dissolved,” the _Sun_ declared on August 4,
“whosoever shall be elected President!”
And on the morning of Election Day the _Sun_, which had taken little
part except to criticise the conduct of the Democratic campaign, said
prophetically: “History turns a leaf to-day.” Its comment on the
morning after the election was characteristic of its attitude during
the canvass:
Mr. Lincoln appears to have been elected, and yet the country
is safe.
In a paragraph of political gossip printed a week later the _Sun_ said
that Horace Greeley could have the collectorship of the port of New
York if he resigned his claims to a seat in the Cabinet, and that--
For the postmastership Charles A. Dana of the _Tribune_,
Daniel Ullman, Thomas B. Stillman, and Armor J. Williamson are
named. Either Mr. Dana or Mr. Williamson would fill the office
creditably.
That was probably the first time that Charles A. Dana got his name into
the _Sun_.
Although unqualifiedly opposed to Secession, the _Sun_ did not believe
that military coercion was the best way to prevent it. It saw the
temper of South Carolina and other Southern States, but thought that it
saw, too, a diplomatic way of curing the disorder. South Carolina, it
said, had a greater capacity for indignation than any other political
body in the world. Here was the way to stop its wrath:
Open the door of the Union for a free and inglorious egress,
and you dry up the machine in an instant.
This was somewhat on a plane with Horace Greeley’s advice in the
_Tribune_--“Let the erring sisters go in peace.” The _Sun_, however,
was more Machiavellian:
Our proposition is that the Constitution be so amended as
to permit any State, within a limited period, and upon her
surrender of her share in the Federal property, to retire
from the confederacy [the Union] in peace. It is a plan to
emasculate Secession by depriving it of its present stimulating
illegality. Does any one suppose that even South Carolina would
withdraw from the Union if her withdrawal were normal?
This was printed on December 8, 1860, some weeks before the fate of the
Crittenden Compromise, beaten by Southern votes, showed beyond doubt
that the South actually preferred disunion.
With mingled grief and indignation the _Sun_ watched the Southern
States march out of the Union. It poured its wrath on the head of
the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, when that peculiar statesman
suggested, on January 7, 1861, that New York City should also secede.
“Why may not New York disrupt the bonds which bind her to a venal and
corrupt master?” Wood had inquired.
The _Sun_ had more faith in Lincoln than most of its Democratic
contemporaries exhibited. Of his inaugural speech it said:
There is a manly sincerity, geniality, and strength to be felt
in the whole address.
The day after the fall of Fort Sumter the _Sun_ found a moment to turn
on the South-loving _Herald_:
We state only what the proprietor of the _Herald_ undoubtedly
believes when we say that if the national ensign had not been
hung out yesterday from its windows, as a concession to the
gathering crowd, the issue of that paper for another day would
have been more than doubtful.
Shortly afterward the _Sun_ charged that the _Herald_ had had in
its office a full set of Confederate colours, “ready to fling to the
breeze of treason which it and the mayor hoped to raise in this city.”
Later in the same year the _Sun_ accused the _Daily News_ and the
_Staats-Zeitung_ of disloyalty, and intimated that the _Journal of
Commerce_ and the _Express_ were not what they should be. The owner
of the _Daily News_ was Ben Wood, a brother of Fernando Wood. In its
youth the _News_ had been a newspaper of considerable distinction. It
was an offshoot of the _Evening Post_, and one of its first editors was
Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant. Another of its early
editors was Samuel J. Tilden.
Wood, who was a Kentuckian by birth, made the _News_ a Tammany organ
and used it to get himself elected to Congress, where he served as a
Representative from 1861 to 1865, constantly opposing the continuation
of the war. The _Sun’s_ accusation of disloyalty against the _News_
was echoed in Washington, and for eighteen months, early in the war,
the _News_ was suppressed. The _Staats-Zeitung_, also included in the
_Sun’s_ suspicion, was then owned by Oswald Ottendorfer, who had come
into possession of the great German daily in 1859, by his marriage to
Mrs. Jacob Uhl, widow of the man who established it as a daily.
Presence in the ranks of the copperhead journalists was disastrous to
the owner of the _Journal of Commerce_, Gerard Hallock, who had been
one of the great figures of American journalism for thirty years. In
the decade before the war Hallock bought and liberated at least a
hundred slaves, and paid for their transportation to Liberia; yet he
was one of the most uncompromising supporters of a national proslavery
policy. When the American Home Missionary Society withdrew its support
from slave-holding churches in the South, Hallock was one of the
founders of the Southern Aid Society, designed to take its place.
In August, 1861, the _Journal of Commerce_ was one of several
newspapers presented by the grand jury of the United States Circuit
Court for “encouraging rebels now in arms against the Federal
government, by expressing sympathy and agreement with them.” Hallock’s
paper was forbidden the use of the mails. He sold his interest in the
_Journal of Commerce_, retired from business, never wrote another line
for publication, and died four years later.
Another contemporary of the _Sun_ which suffered during the war was
the _World_, then a very young paper. It had first appeared in June,
1860, as a highly moral daily sheet. Its express purpose was to give
all the news that it thought the public _ought_ to have. This meant
that it intended to exclude from its staid columns all thrilling police
reports, slander suits, divorce cases, and details of murders. It
refused to print theatrical advertising.
The _World_ had a fast printing-press and obtained an Associated Press
franchise. It hired some good men, including Alexander Cummings, who
had made his mark on the Philadelphia _North American_, James R.
Spalding, who had been with Raymond on the _Courier and Enquirer_, and
Manton Marble. But the _World_, stripped of lively human news, was a
failure. After two hundred thousand dollars had been sunk in a footless
enterprise, the religious coterie retired, and left the _World_ to the
worldly.
Its later owners were variously reported to be August Belmont, Fernando
Wood, and Benjamin Wood; but it finally passed entirely into the hands
of Manton Marble, who made it a free-trade Democratic organ. Marble had
learned the newspaper business on the _Journal_ and the _Traveler_
in Boston, and in 1858 and 1859 he was on the staff of the _Evening
Post_. In July, 1861, the _World_ and the _Courier and Enquirer_ were
consolidated, and Colonel J. Watson Webb, who had owned and edited the
latter paper for thirty-four years, retired from newspaper life.
During the Civil War the _World_ was strongly opposed to President
Lincoln’s administration. Perhaps this fact accounts for the punishment
which befell it through the misdeed of an outsider.
In May, 1864, there was sent to most of the morning-newspaper offices
what purported to be a proclamation by the President, appointing a
day of fasting and prayer, and calling into military service, by
volunteering and draft, four hundred thousand additional troops. This
was a fake, engineered by Joseph Howard, Jr., a newspaperman who had
been employed on the _Tribune_, and who put out the hoax for the
purpose of influencing the stock-market. The _Sun_, the _Tribune_, and
the _Times_ did not fall for the hoax, but the _Herald_, the _World_,
and the _Journal of Commerce_ printed it, stopping their presses when
they learned the truth.
General John A. Dix seized the offices of the _Herald_, the _World_,
and the _Journal of Commerce_, put soldiers to guard them, and
suppressed the papers for several days--all this by order of the
President. Howard, the forger, was arrested, and on his confession was
sent to Fort Lafayette, where he was a prisoner for several weeks.
Manton Marble wrote a bitter letter to Lincoln in protest against what
he considered an outrage on the _World_. Marble remained at the head of
the paper until 1876.
The _Sun_ took the setback of Bull Run with better grace than most of
the papers--far better than Horace Greeley, who yelled for a truce. It
seemed to see that this was only the beginning of a long conflict,
which must be fought to the end, regardless of disappointments. On
August 15, 1861, it declared:
Let there be but one war. Better it should cost millions
of lives than that we should live in hourly dread of wars,
contiguous to a people who could make foreign alliances and
land armies upon our shores to destroy our liberties.
On the subject of the war’s cost it said:
No more talk of carrying on the war economically! The only
economy is to make short and swift work of it, and the people
are ready to bear the expense, if it were five hundred millions
of dollars, to-day.
This was printed when the war was very young; when no man dreamed that
it would cost the Federal government six times five hundred millions.
The _Sun’s_ editorial articles were not without criticism of the
conduct of the war. It was one of the many papers that demanded the
resignation of Seward at a time when the Secretary of State was
generally blamed for what seemed to be the dilly-dallying of the
government. Lincoln himself was still regarded as a politician as well
as a statesman--a view which was reflected in the _Sun’s_ comment on
the preliminary proclamation of emancipation, September 22, 1862:
As the greatest and most momentous act of our nation, from its
foundation to the present time, we would rather have seen this
step disconnected from all lesser considerations and from party
influences.
The inference in this was that Lincoln had deliberately made his great
stroke on the eve of the Republican State convention in New York.
The _Tribune_ declared that the proclamation was “the beginning of the
end of the rebellion.” “The wisdom of the step is unquestionable,” said
the _Times_; “its necessity indisputable.” The businesslike _Herald_
remarked that it inaugurated “an overwhelming revolution in the system
of labour.” The _World_ said that it regretted the proclamation and
doubted the President’s power to free the slaves. “We regard it with
profound regret,” said the _Journal of Commerce_. “It is usurpation of
power!” shouted the _Staats-Zeitung_.
Such was the general tone of the New York morning newspapers during
the war. Only three--the _Sun_, the _Tribune_, and the _Times_--could
be described as out-and-out loyalists. The _Sun_ was for backing up
Lincoln whenever it believed him right, and that was most of the time;
yet it was free in its criticism of various phases of the conduct of
the war.
Like most of the Democrats of New York, the _Sun_ was an admirer of
General McClellan, and it believed that his removal from the command
of the army was due to politics. But when the election of 1864 came
around, the _Sun_ refused to join its party contemporaries in wild
abuse of Lincoln and Johnson. On the morning after the Republican
nominations it said:
It is no time to quarrel with those men who honestly wish to
crush the rebellion on the ground that they have nominated a
rail-splitter and a tailor. It would be more consistent with
true democracy if these men were honored for rising from an
humble sphere.
The _Sun_ supported McClellan, praising him for his repudiation of the
plank in the Democratic platform which declared the war a failure; but
in the last days of the campaign it was frank in its predictions that
Lincoln would be elected. On the morning after election it had this to
say:
The reelection of Abraham Lincoln announces to the world how
firmly we have resolved to be a free and united people.
After the assassination of President Lincoln the _Sun_ said:
In the death of Mr. Lincoln the Southern people have lost
one of the best friends they had at the North. He would have
treated them with more gentleness than any other statesman.
From him they would have obtained concessions it is now almost
impossible for our rulers and people to grant.
The _Sun’s_ attitude toward the copperheads and deluded pacifists of
the North is reflected in an editorial article published on June 5,
1863. The North was then in its worst panic. Only a month previously
Lee had defeated Hooker at Chancellorsville, and the victorious
Confederates were marching through Maryland into Pennsylvania. At
a mass-meeting in Cooper Union, George Francis Train and other
copperheads denounced the war, praised Vallandigham, of Ohio, who had
been banished into the South for his unpatriotic conduct, and declared
for “peace and reunion.” It was largely a Democratic meeting, but the
_Sun_ would not stomach the disloyal outburst:
The fact that over ten thousand people assembled in and about
Cooper Union on Thursday evening to listen to speeches and
adopt an address and resolutions prepared under that “eye
single to the public welfare,” discloses the ease with which
a few political tricksters may present false issues to the
unthinking and, in the excitement of the moment, induce their
hearers to applaud sentiments that, when calmly considered,
are unworthy of a great and free people. Taking advantage of
the blunders of the present administration, these self-styled
Democrats raise their banners and, under the guise of
proclaiming peace, in reality proclaim a war upon those very
principles it is the highest boast of every true Democrat to
acknowledge.
The Democratic party is essentially the peace party of the
present rebellion; but it will sanction no peace that is
obtained by compromising the vital principles that give force
to our form of government. They will not ask for peace at the
expense of the Union, and desire no Democratic victories that
do not legitimately belong to them as an expression of the
confidence of the people in their fidelity to the Union and the
Constitution.
The late meeting, then, should not be sanctioned by any true
Democrat. It was in no sense Democratic; it was in reality an
opposition meeting, and only as such will it be looked upon as
having any important bearing upon the great questions of the
hour, and if rightly interpreted by the administration will
exert no evil influence upon the future destinies of this great
nation.
The methods of gathering war news, early in the conflict, were
haphazard. The first reports to reach New York from Southern fields
were usually the government bulletins, but they were not as trustworthy
as the official bulletins of the European war.
On the morning after the first battle of Bull Run, the _Sun’s_ readers
were treated to joyous head-lines:
A GREAT BATTLE--SEVENTY THOUSAND REBELS IN IT--OUR ARMY
VICTORIOUS--GREAT LOSS OF LIFE--TWELVE HOURS’ FIGHTING--RETREAT
OF THE REBELS--UNITED STATES FORCES PRESSING FORWARD.
But on the following morning the tune changed:
RETREAT OF OUR TROOPS--OUR ARMY SCATTERED--ONLY TWENTY-TWO
THOUSAND UNION TROOPS ENGAGED--ENEMY NINETY THOUSAND
STRONG--OUR CANNON LEFT BEHIND.
As a matter of fact, only about eighteen thousand troops were engaged
on each side.
The _Sun_ had no famous correspondents at the front. It sent three
reporters to Virginia in 1861, and these sent mail stories and some
telegraph matter, which was of value in supplementing the official
bulletins, the Associated Press service, the specials from “Nemo”
and “Hermit,” the _Sun_ correspondents in Washington, and the matter
rewritten from the Philadelphia and Western newspapers.
The _Sun_ was still a local paper, with a constituency hungry for news
of the men of the New York regiments. To the _Sun_ readers the doings
of General Meagher, of the Irish Brigade, or Colonel Michael Corcoran,
of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, were more important than the strategic
details of a large campaign.
The _Sun_, like all the Northern papers, was frequently deceived
by false reports of Union victories. Federal troops were in
Fredericksburg--on the front page--weeks before they were in it in
reality; in Richmond, years too soon. But there was no doubt about
Gettysburg, although the North did not get the news until the 5th of
July. The _Sun_ came out on Monday, the 6th, with these head-lines:
VICTORY!--INVASION COMES TO GRIEF--LEE UTTERLY ROUTED--HIS
DISASTROUS RETREAT--ALL FEDERAL PRISONERS RECAPTURED--EIGHTEEN
THOUSAND PRISONERS CAPTURED--MEANS OF ESCAPE DESTROYED.
On April 10, 1865, the head-lines were sprinkled with American flags
and cuts of Columbia, and the types carried the welcome news for which
the North had waited for four long years:
OUR NATION REDEEMED--SURRENDER OF LEE AND HIS WHOLE ARMY--THE
TERMS--OFFICERS AND MEN PAROLED AND TOLD TO GO HOME--THE
COUNTRY WILD WITH JOY, ETC., ETC., ETC.
The “etc., etc., etc.,” suggests that the head-writer was too wild with
joy to go into more details.
It was not until May, 1862, that the _Sun_ abandoned the ancient custom
of giving a large part of the first page to advertising. This reform
came late, perhaps because Moses S. Beach was out of the _Sun_ in the
early months of the war.
On August 6, 1860, the control of the paper had passed from Mr. Beach
to Archibald M. Morrison, a rich young man of religious fervour, who
was prompted by other religious enthusiasts to get the _Sun_ and use
it for evangelical purposes. Mr. Morrison gave Mr. Beach one hundred
thousand dollars for the good-will of the paper, and agreed to pay
a rental for the material. Mr. Beach retained the ownership of the
building, of the presses, and, indeed, of every piece of type.
The new proprietors of the _Sun_ held a prayer-meeting at noon every
day in the editorial rooms. They also injected a bit of religion into
the columns by printing on the first page reports of prayer-meetings
in the Sailors’ Home and of the doings of missionaries in Syria and
elsewhere. In spite of the new spirit that pervaded the office,
however, it was still possible for the unregenerate old subscriber to
find some little space devoted to the fistic clashes of Heenan and
Morrissey. Flies are not caught with vinegar.
The new management made a sort of department paper of the _Sun_, the
front page being divided with the headings “Financial,” “Religious,”
“Criminal,” “Calamities,” “Foreign Items,” “Business Items,” and
“Miscellaneous.” It was not a bad newspaper, and it was quite possible
that some business men would prefer it to the Beach kind of sheet; but
it is certain that the advertisers were not attracted and that some
readers were repelled. One of the latter climbed the stairs of the
building at Fulton and Nassau Streets early one morning and nailed
to the door of the editorial rooms a placard which read: “Be ye not
righteous overmuch!”
During the Morrison régime the _Sun_ refused to accept advertisements
on Sunday. Of course, the printers worked on Sunday night, getting out
Monday’s paper, but that was something else. The _Sun_ went so far
(July 23, 1861) as to urge that the Union generals should be forbidden
to attack the enemy on Sundays. “Our troops must have rest, and need
the Sabbath,” it said.
William C. Church, one of the rising young newspapermen of New York,
was induced to become the publisher under the _Sun’s_ new management.
He was only twenty-four years old, but he had had a good deal of
newspaper experience in assisting his father, the Rev. Pharcellus
Church, to edit and publish the New York _Chronicle_. After a few weeks
in the _Sun_ office, however, Mr. Church saw that the paper, though
daily treated with evangelical serum, was not likely to be a howling
success; and on December 10, 1860, four months after he took hold as
publisher, it was announced that Mr. Church had “withdrawn from the
publication of the _Sun_ for the purpose of spending some months in
European travel and correspondence for the paper.”
Mr. Church wrote a few letters from Europe, but when the Civil War
started he hurried home and went with the joint military and naval
expedition headed by General T. W. Sherman and Admiral S. F. Dupont.
He was present at the capture of Port Royal, and wrote for the
_Evening Post_ the first account of it that appeared in the North.
Later he acted as a war-correspondent of the _Times_, writing under the
pseudonym “Pierrepont.” In October, 1862, he was appointed a captain of
volunteers, and toward the close of the war he received the brevets of
major and lieutenant-colonel.
During the war Mr. Church and his brother, Francis Pharcellus Church,
established the _Army and Navy Journal_, and in 1866 they founded that
brilliant magazine, the _Galaxy_--later merged with the _Atlantic
Monthly_--which printed the early works of Henry James. Colonel Church
owned the _Army and Navy Journal_, and was its active editor, until his
death, May 23, 1917, at the age of eighty-one. He was the biographer
and literary executor of John Ericsson, the inventor, and he wrote also
a biography of General Grant. He and his brother Francis were the most
distinguished members of a family which, in its various branches, gave
no less than seventeen persons to literature.
Francis P. Church’s connection with the _Sun_ was longer and more
pleasant than William’s. His writings for it ranged over a period of
forty years. He was one of the _Sun’s_ greatest editorial writers, and
was the author of the most popular editorial article ever written--“Is
There a Santa Claus?” But that comes in a later and far more brilliant
period than the one in which William C. Church served the _Sun_ all too
briefly.
At the end of 1861, what with the expense of getting war news, and
perhaps with the reluctance of the readers to absorb piety, the _Sun’s_
cash-drawer began to warp from lack of weight, and Mr. Beach, who had
never relinquished his rights to all the physical part of the paper,
took it back. This is the way he announced his resumption of control on
New Year’s morning, 1862:
Once more I write myself editor and sole proprietor of the
New York _Sun_. My day-dream of rural enjoyment is broken,
and I am again prisoner to pen and types. For months I sought
to avoid the surrender, but only to find resistance without
avail.... But I congratulate myself on my surroundings. Never
was prisoner more royally treated.
What, then, to the readers of the _Sun_? Nothing save the
announcement that I am henceforth its publisher and manager.
They require no other prospectus, program, or platform.
MOSES S. BEACH.
John Vance, who is said to have worked twelve years without a vacation,
left the _Sun_ about that time because Mr. Beach refused to name him as
editor-in-chief. Vance was a good writer, but he and Beach were often
at odds over the _Sun’s_ policies. It probably was Vance’s influence
that kept the paper in line for Douglas in the Presidential campaign of
1860--a campaign in which the _Sun_ was run for two months by Beach and
for three months by the Morrisonites. Vance, in spite of his leaning
toward Douglas, was an intimate friend of Elihu Burritt, the Learned
Blacksmith, who was an Abolitionist and an advocate of universal
brotherhood.
On Beach’s return to the _Sun_ he set out to recover its lost
advertising and to restore some of the livelier news features that had
been suppressed by the Morrison group. Early in the summer of 1862 he
began to shift advertising from the front page, to make room for the
big war head-lines that had been run on the second page. He also used
maps and woodcuts of cities, ships, and generals. The _Sun’s_ pictures
of the Monitor and the Merrimac were printed in one column by deftly
standing the gallant iron-clads on their sterns.
It was in this summer that Beach reduced expenses and speeded up the
issue of the paper by adopting the stereotyping process, one of the
greatest advances in newspaper history:
About a week ago we commenced printing the _Sun_ by a new
process--that of stereotyping and printing with two presses. We
are much gratified to-day in being able to say that the process
has proved eminently successful. From this time forth we may
expect to present a clean face to our many readers every day.
We have completed one stereotype within seventeen minutes and a
quarter, and two within nineteen minutes and a half.
That was rapid work for 1862, but the stereotypers of the present
day will take a form from the composing-room, make the papier-mâché
impression, pour in the molten metal, and have the curved plate ready
for the press in twelve minutes.
The new process saved Beach a lot of money as well as much precious
time. Before its coming, when the paper was printed directly from the
face of the type, the _Sun_ had to buy a full new set of type six or
eight times a year, at an annual cost of six thousand dollars.
The war played havoc with newspaper finances. The price of news-print
paper rose to twenty-four cents a pound. All the morning papers except
the _Sun_ raised their prices to three or four cents in 1862. The _Sun_
stayed at its old penny.
On January 1, 1863, in order to meet advancing costs and still sell
the _Sun_ for one cent, Beach found it necessary to “remove one column
from each side of the page”--a more or less ingenuous way of saying
that the _Sun_ was reduced from seven columns to five. The columns were
shortened, too, and the whole paper was set in agate type. The _Sun_
then looked much as it had appeared twenty years before.
With these economies Beach was able to keep the price at one cent until
August 1, 1864, when the _Sun_ slyly said:
We shall require the one cent for the _Sun_ to be paid in gold,
or we will receive as an equivalent two cents in currency.
Apologies or explanations are needless. An inflated currency
has raised the price of white paper nearly threefold.
Of course nobody had one cent in gold, so the _Sun_ readers grinned and
paid two cents in copper.
From that day on the price of the _Sun_ was two cents until July 1,
1916, when Frank A. Munsey bought the _Sun_, combined his one-cent
newspaper, the New York _Press_, with it, and reduced the price to
one cent. On January 26, 1918, by reason of heavy expenses incidental
to the war, the _Sun_, with all the other large papers of New York,
increased its price to two cents a copy. In its eighty-five years
the _Sun_ has been a penny paper thirty-two years, a two-cent paper
fifty-three years.
The _Sun_ was constantly profitable in the decade before the Civil
War. The average annual profits from 1850 to 1860 were $22,770.
The high-water mark in that period was reached in 1853, when the
advertising receipts were $89,964 and the net profits $42,906. Its
circulation in September, 1860, was fifty-nine thousand copies daily,
of which forty-five thousand were sold on the island of Manhattan.
One of the secrets of the _Sun’s_ popularity in the years when it had
no such news guidance as Bennett gave to the _Herald_, no such spirited
editorials as Greeley put into the _Tribune_, no such political
prestige as Raymond brought to the _Times_, was Moses S. Beach’s belief
that his public wanted light fiction. The appetite created by Scott
and increased by Dickens was keen in America. True, the penny _Sun’s_
literary standards were not of Himalayan height. Hawthorne was too
spiritual for its readers, Poe too brief. They wanted wads of adventure
and dialogue, dour squires, swooning ladies, hellish villains, handsome
heroes, and comic character folk. The young mechanic had to have
something he could understand without knitting his brows. For him,
“The Grocer’s Apprentice; a Tale of the Great Plague,” and “Dick Egan;
or, the San Francisco Bandits,” written for the _Sun_ by H. Warren
Trowbridge.
In the days before the Civil War, wives snatched the _Sun_ from
husbands to read “Maggie Miller; or, Old Hagar’s Secret,” “written
expressly for the _Sun_” by Mary J. Holmes, already famous through
“Lena Rivers” and “Dora Deane.” Ephemeral? They are still reading “Lena
Rivers” in North Crossing, Nebraska.
Horatio Alger, Jr., wrote several of his best tales for Mr. Beach, who
printed them serially in the _Sun_ and the _Weekly Sun_. To the New
York youth of 1859, who dreamed not that in three years he would be
clay on the slope at Fredericksburg, it was the middle of a perfect day
to pick up the _Sun_, read a thrilling news story about Blondin cooking
an omelet while crossing the Niagara gorge on a tight rope, and then,
turning to the last page, to plunge into “The Discarded Son; or, the
Cousin’s Plot,” by the author of “The Secret Drawer,” “The Cooper’s
Ward,” “The Gipsy Nurse,” and “Madeline the Temptress”--for all these
were written expressly for the _Sun_ by young Mr. Alger. He was only
twenty-five then, with the years ahead when, a Unitarian minister, he
should see fiction material in the New York street-boy and write the
epics of _Ragged Dick_ and _Tattered Tom_.
What did the women readers of the _Sun_ care about the discovery of oil
in Pennsylvania or the wonderful trotting campaign of Flora Temple,
when they could devour daily two columns of “Jessie Graham; or, Love
and Pride”? The _Sun_ might condense A. T. Stewart’s purchase of two
city blocks into a paragraph, but there must be no short measure of
“Gerald Vane’s Lost One,” by Walter Savage North.
When the religious folk held the reins of the _Sun_ they tried to
compromise by printing “Great Expectations” as a serial, but the wise
Mr. Beach, on getting the paper back, quickly flung to his hungry
readers “Hunted Down,” by Ann S. Stephens. Later in the war he catered
to the martial spirit with “Running the Blockade,” by Captain Wheeler,
United States army.
One column of foreign news, one of city paragraphs, one of editorial
articles, one of jokes and miscellany, one of fiction, and nineteen
of advertising--that was about the make-up of Beach’s _Sun_ before
the Civil War; that was the prescription which enabled the _Sun_ to
sell nearly sixty thousand copies in a city of eight hundred thousand
people. It was a fairly well condensed paper. In February, 1857, when
it printed one day two and a half columns about the mysterious murder
of Dr. Harvey Burdell, the rich dentist of Bond Street, it broke its
record for length in a police story.
It was in Moses S. Beach’s time that the Atlantic cable, second only
to the telegraph proper as an aid to newspapers, was laid. On August
6, 1858, when Cyrus W. Field telegraphed to the Associated Press from
Newfoundland that the ends of the cables had reached both shores of the
sea, the _Sun_ said that it was “the greatest triumph of the age.”
Eleven days later the _Sun_ contained this article:
We received last night and publish to-day what purports to be
the message of Queen Victoria, congratulating the President of
the United States on the successful completion of the Atlantic
telegraph. We are assured that the message is genuine, and
that it came through the Atlantic cable. It is not surprising,
however, that the President, on receiving it, doubted its
genuineness, as among the hundreds who crowded our office last
evening the doubters largely preponderated.
The message, accepting it as the queen’s, is, in style and
tone, utterly unworthy of the great event which it was designed
to celebrate.
The message is so shabbily like royalty that we cannot believe
it to be a fabrication.
Perhaps that was written by John Vance, the Irish exile. And perhaps
the editorial article which appeared the following day was written by
Beach himself:
Victoria’s message ... in its complete form, as it appears in
our columns to-day, is friendly and courteous, though rather
commonplace in expression and style.
New York had a great celebration over the laying of the cable that
week. The _Sun’s_ building bore a sign illuminated by gaslight:
S. F. B. MORSE AND CYRUS W. FIELD,
WIRE-PULLERS OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY.
The first piece of news to come by cable was printed in the _Sun_ of
August 27, 1858, and ran:
A treaty of peace has been concluded with China, by which
England and France obtain all their demands, including the
establishment of embassies at Peking and indemnification for
the expenses of the war.
It will be remembered that this first cable was not a success, and
that permanent undersea telegraph service did not come until 1866; but
the results produced in 1858 convinced the world that Field and his
associates were right, and that perseverance and money would bring
perfect results.
After the war, when paper became cheaper, Beach preferred to enlarge
the _Sun_ rather than reduce its price to one cent. He never printed
more than four pages, but the lost columns were restored, with
interest, so that there were eight to a page. Even at two cents a copy
it was still the cheapest of the morning papers; still the beloved of
the working classes and the desired of the politicians. Just after the
war ended the _Sun_ declared that it was read by half a million people.
On January 25, 1868, when the _Sun_ had been in the possession of
the Beaches for about thirty of its thirty-five years, a new editor
and manager, speaking for a new ownership of the _Sun_, made this
announcement at the head of the editorial column:
THE SUN
THE OLDEST CHEAP PAPER IN NEW YORK.
Notice is hereby given that the _Sun_ newspaper, with its
presses, types, and fixtures, has become the property of an
association represented by the undersigned, and including
among its prominent stockholders Mr. M. S. Beach, recently the
exclusive owner of the whole property. It will henceforth be
published in the building known for the last half-century as
Tammany Hall, on the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets.
Its price will remain as heretofore at two cents a copy, or
six dollars per annum to mail subscribers. It will be printed
in handsome style on a folio sheet, as at present; but it will
contain more news and other reading matter than it has hitherto
given.
In changing its proprietorship, the _Sun_ will not in any
respect change its principles or general line of conduct. It
will continue to be an independent newspaper, wearing the
livery of no party, and discussing public questions and the
acts of public men on their merits alone. It will be guided, as
it has been hitherto, by uncompromising loyalty to the Union,
and will resist every attempt to weaken the bonds that unite
the American people into one nation.
The _Sun_ will support General Grant as its candidate for the
Presidency. It will advocate retrenchment and economy in the
public expenditures, and the reduction of the present crushing
burdens of taxation. It will advocate the speedy restoration of
the South, as needful to revive business and secure fair wages
for labor.
The _Sun_ will always have all the news, foreign, domestic,
political, social, literary, scientific, and commercial. It
will use enterprise and money freely to make the best possible
newspaper, as well as the cheapest.
It will study condensation, clearness, point, and will endeavor
to present its daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in
the most luminous and lively manner.
It will not take as long to read the _Sun_ as to read the
London _Times_ or Webster’s Dictionary, but when you have
read it you will know about all that has happened in both
hemispheres. The _Sun_ will also publish a semiweekly edition
at two dollars a year, containing the most interesting articles
from the daily, and also a condensed summary of the news
prepared expressly for this edition.
The _Weekly Sun_ will continue to be issued at one dollar
a year. It will be prepared with great care, and will also
contain all the news in a condensed and readable form. Both
the weekly and semiweekly will have accurate reports of the
general, household, and cattle markets. They will also have an
agricultural department, and will report the proceedings of
the Farmers’ Club. This department will be edited by Andrew
S. Fuller, Esq., whose name will guarantee the quality of his
contributions.
We shall endeavor to make the _Sun_ worthy the confidence of
the people in every part of the country. Its circulation is
now more than fifty thousand copies daily. We mean that it
shall soon be doubled; and in this, the aid of all persons who
want such a newspaper as we propose to make will be cordially
welcomed.
CHARLES A. DANA,
Editor and Manager.
New York, January 25, 1868.
Beneath this announcement was a farewell message from Moses Sperry
Beach to the readers whom he had served for twenty years:
With unreserved confidence in the ability of those who are to
continue this work of my life, I lay aside an armor which in
these latter years has been too loosely borne.
So Moses S. Beach retired from journalism at forty-five. With the
$175,000 paid to him for the _Sun_, and the profits he had made in his
many years of ownership, he was easily rich enough to realize his dream
of quiet rural life--a realization that lasted until his death in 1892.
But who was this Dana who was taking up at forty-eight the burden that
a younger man was almost wearily laying down?
It is very likely that he was not well known to the readers of the
_Sun_. The newspaper world knew him as one who had been the backbone of
Greeley’s _Tribune_ in the turbulent period before the Civil War and
for a year after the war was on. The army world knew him as the man who
had been chosen by Lincoln and Stanton for important and confidential
missions. Students knew him as one of the editors of the “New American
Encyclopedia.” By many a fireside his name was familiar as the compiler
of the “Household Book of Poetry.” Highbrows remembered him as one of
the group of geniuses in the Brook Farm colony.
In none of these categories were many of the men who ran with the
fire-engines, voted for John Kelly, and bought the _Sun_. But the _Sun_
was the _Sun_; it was their paper, and they would have none other; and
they would see what this Dana would do with it.