THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA
_His Life at Brook Farm and His Tribune Experience.--His
Break with Greeley, His Civil War Services and His Chicago
Disappointment.--His Purchase of “The Sun.”_
Day and Dana each did a great thing for the _Sun_ and incidentally
for journalism and for America. Day made humanity more intelligent by
making newspapers popular. Dana made newspapers more intelligent by
making them human.
Day started the _Sun_ at twenty-three and left it at twenty-eight. Dana
took the _Sun_ at forty-eight and kept it for thirty years. Each, in
his time, was absolute master of the paper.
“The great idea of Day’s time,” wrote E. P. Mitchell on the _Sun’s_
fiftieth birthday, fifteen years after Dana took hold, “was cheapness
to the buyer. The great idea of the _Sun_ as it is, was and is interest
to the reader.”
Of the nine men who have been owners of the _Sun_, seven were of
down-east Yankee stock, and six of the seven were born in New England.
Of the editors-in-chief of the _Sun_--except in that brief period of
the lease by the religious coterie--all have been New Englanders but
one, and he was the son of a New Englander.
Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, on August 8, 1819. His father
was Anderson Dana, sixth in descent from Richard Dana, the colonial
settler; and his mother, Ann Denison, came of straight Yankee stock.
The father failed in business at Hinsdale when Charles was a child,
and the family moved to Gaines, a village in western New York, where
Anderson Dana became a farmer. Here the mother died, leaving four
children--Charles Anderson, aged nine; Junius, seven; Maria, three, and
David, an infant. The widower went to the home of Mrs. Dana’s parents
near Guildhall, Vermont, and there the children were divided among
relatives. Charles was sent to live with his uncle, David Denison, on a
farm in the Connecticut River Valley.
There was a good teacher at the school near by, and at the age of ten
Charles was considered as proficient in his English studies as many
boys of fifteen. When he was twelve he had added some Latin to the
three R’s. In the judgment of that day he was fit to go to work. His
uncle, William Dana, was part owner of the general store of Staats &
Dana, in Buffalo, New York, whither the boy was sent by stage-coach. He
made himself handy in the store and lived at his uncle’s house.
Buffalo, a distributing place for freight sent West on the Erie Canal,
had a population of only fifteen thousand in 1831. Many of Staats &
Dana’s customers were Indians, and young Charles added to the store’s
efficiency by learning the Seneca language. At night he continued his
pursuit of Latin, tackled Greek, read what volumes of Tom Paine he
could buy at a book-shop next door, and followed the career, military
and political, of the strenuous Andrew Jackson. When he had a day off
he went fishing in the Niagara River or visited the Indian reservation.
He was a normal, healthy lad, even if he knew more Latin than he
should. When war threatened with Great Britain over the Caroline
affair, Dana joined the City Guard and had a brief ambition to be a
soldier. He was of slender build, but strong. He belonged to the
Coffee Club, a literary organization, and he made a talk to it on early
English poetry.
“The best days of my life,” he called this period.
Staats & Dana failed in the panic of 1837, and Charles, then eighteen,
and the possessor of two hundred dollars saved from his wages, decided
to go to Harvard. He left Buffalo in June, 1839, although his father
did not like the idea of letting him go to Harvard.
“I know it ranks high as a literary institution, but the influence
it exerts in a religious way is most horrible--even worse than
Universalism.”
Anderson Dana had a horror of Unitarianism, and had heard that Charles
was attending Unitarian meetings.
“Ponder well the paths of thy feet,” he wrote in solemn warning to his
perilously venturesome son, “lest they lead down to the very gates of
hell.”
Dana entered college without difficulty, and devoted much of his time
to philosophy and general literature. He wrote to his friend, Dr.
Austin Flint, whom he had met in Buffalo, and who had advised him to go
to Harvard.
I am in the focus of what Professor Felton calls
“supersublimated transcendentalism,” and to tell the truth,
I take to it rather kindly, though I stumble sadly at some
notions.
This was not strange, for besides hearing Unitarian discourse, young
Dana was attending Emerson’s lectures at Harvard and reading Carlyle.
[Illustration:
CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT
A Photograph Taken in 1857 When He Was Managing Editor of the
New York “Tribune.”
]
In his first term Dana stood seventh in a class of seventy-four. In the
spring of 1840 he left Cambridge, but pursued the university studies at
the home of his uncle in Guildhall, Vermont. Here, at an expense of
about a dollar a week, he put in eight hours a day at his books, and
for diversion went shooting or tinkered in the farm shop. His sister,
then fifteen years old, was there, and he helped her with her studies.
Dana returned to Harvard in the autumn, but not for long. His purse was
about empty, and he found no means of replenishing it at Cambridge.
In November the faculty gave him permission to be absent during the
winter to “keep school.” Dana went to teach at Scituate, Massachusetts,
getting twenty-five dollars a month and his board.
His regret at leaving college was keen, for it meant that he would miss
Richard Henry Dana’s lectures on poetry, and George Ripley’s on foreign
literature.
Young Dana’s mind was full in those days. There was the eager desire
for education, with poverty in the path. He thought he saw a way around
by going to Germany, where he could live cheaply at a university and be
paid for teaching English. There was also a religious struggle.
I feel now an inclination to orthodoxy, and am trying to
believe the real doctrine of the Trinity. Whether I shall
settle down in Episcopacy, Swedenborgianism, or Goethean
indifference to all religion, I know not. My only prayer is,
“God help me!”
But the immediate reality was teaching school in a little town where
most of the pupils were unruly sailors, and Dana faced it with
good-natured philosophy. At the end of a day’s struggle to train some
sixty or seventy Scituate youths, he went back to the home of Captain
Webb, with whose family he boarded, and read Coleridge for literary
quality, Swedenborg for religion, and “Oliver Twist” for diversion.
Candles and whale-oil lamps were the only illuminants, and Dana’s
eyes, never too strong, began to weaken.
He returned to college in the spring of 1841, but his eyes would stand
no more. He was about to find work as an agricultural labourer when
Brook Farm attracted him. Through George Ripley he was admitted to
that association, which sought to combine labour and intellect in a
beautiful communistic scheme. He agreed to teach Greek and German and
to help with the farm work.
Dana subscribed for three of the thirty shares--at five hundred dollars
a share--of the stock of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and
Education, as the company was legally titled. Brook Farm was a fine
place of a hundred and ninety-two acres, in the town of Roxbury,
about nine miles from Boston. It cost $10,500 and, as most of the
shareholders had no money to pay on their stock, mortgages amounting
to eleven thousand dollars were immediately clapped on the place--a
feat rare in the business world, at once to mortgage a place for more
than its cost. Dana, now twenty-three years old, was elected recording
secretary, one of the three trustees, and a member of the committees on
finance and education.
He remained as a Brook Farmer to the end of the five years that the
experiment lasted. There he met Hawthorne, who lingered long enough to
get much of the material for his “Blithedale Romance”; Thoreau, who
had not yet gone to Walden Pond; William Ellery Channing, second, the
author and journalist; Albert Brisbane, the most radical of the group
of socialists of his day; and Margaret Fuller, who believed in Brook
Farm, but did not live there.
Brook Farm was the perfect democracy. The members did all the work,
menial and otherwise, and if there was honour it fell to him whose
task was humblest. The community paid each worker a dollar a day, and
charged him or her about two dollars and fifty cents a week for board.
It sold its surplus produce, and it educated children at low rates.
George Ripley, the Unitarian minister, was chief of the cow-milking
group, and Dana helped him. Dana, as head waiter, served food to John
Cheever, valet to an English baronet then staying in Boston.
“And it was great fun,” Dana said, in a lecture delivered at the
University of Michigan forty years afterward. “There were seventy
people or more, and at dinner they all came in and we served them.
There was more entertainment in doing the duty than in getting away
from it.”
It was at Brook Farm that Dana first made the acquaintance of Horace
Greeley, who, himself a student of Fourier, was interested in the
Roxbury experiment, so much more idealistic than Fourierism itself.
Dana took Brook Farm seriously, but he was not one of the poseurs
of the colony. No smocks for him, no long hair! He wore a full,
auburn beard, but he wore a beard all the rest of his life. He was a
handsome, slender youth, and he got mental and physical health out of
every minute at the farm. By day he was busy teaching, keeping the
association’s books, milking, waiting on table, or caring for the
fruit-trees. He was the most useful man on the farm. At night, when the
others danced, he was at his books or his writings.
He wrote articles for the _Harbinger_, and for the _Dial_,
which succeeded the _Harbinger_ as the official organ of the
Transcendentalists. Dr. Ripley was the editor of the _Harbinger_, and
he had such brilliant contributors as James Russell Lowell and George
William Curtis; but Dana was his mainstay. He wrote book-reviews,
editorial articles and notes, and not a little verse. His “Via Sacra”
is typical of the thoughtful youth:
Slowly along the crowded street I go,
Marking with reverent look each passer’s face,
Seeking, and not in vain, in each to trace
That primal soul whereof he is the show.
For here still move, by many eyes unseen,
The blessed gods that erst Olympus kept;
Through every guise these lofty forms serene
Declare the all-holding life hath never slept;
But known each thrill that in man’s heart hath been,
And every tear that his sad eyes have wept.
Alas for us! The heavenly visitants--
We greet them still as most unwelcome guests,
Answering their smile with hateful looks askance,
Their sacred speech with foolish, bitter jests;
But oh, what is it to imperial Jove
That this poor world refuses all his love?
A Mrs. Macdaniel, a widow, came to Brook Farm from Maryland with
her son and two daughters. One of the daughters brought with her
an ambition for the stage, but her destiny was to be Mrs. Dana. On
March 2, 1846, in New York, Charles A. Dana and Eunice Macdaniel were
married. That day, coincidentally, the fire insurance on the main
building at Brook Farm lapsed, perhaps through the preoccupation of
the recording secretary; and the next day this building, called the
Phalanstery, was burned.
That was the beginning of the end of Brook Farm and of Dana’s secluded
life. He went to work on the Boston _Daily Chronotype_ for five dollars
a week. It was a Congregational paper, owned and edited by Elizur
Wright. When Wright was absent, Dana acted as editor, and on one of
these occasions he caused the _Chronotype_ to come out so “mighty
strong against hell,” that Mr. Wright declared, years afterward, that
he had to write a personal letter to every Congregational minister
in Massachusetts, explaining that the apparent heresy was due to
his having left the paper in the charge of “a young man without
journalistic experience.”
In February, 1847, Dana went to New York, and Horace Greeley made him
city editor of the _Tribune_ at ten dollars a week. Later in that year
Dana insisted on an increase of salary, and Greeley agreed to pay him
fourteen dollars a week--a dollar less than his own stipend; but in
consideration of this huge advance Dana was obliged to give all his
talents to the _Tribune_.
Dana still nursed his desire to see Europe, but he had given up the
idea of teaching in a German university. Newspaper work had captured
him. Germany was still attractive, but now as a place of news, for the
rumblings against the rule of Metternich were being heard in central
Europe. And in France there was a sweep of socialism, a subject which
still held the idealistic Dana, and the beginning of the revolution in
Paris (February 24, 1848).
Dana told Greeley of his European ambition, but Greeley threw cold
water on it, saying that Dana--not yet thirty--knew nothing about
foreign politics. Dana asked how much the _Tribune_ would pay for a
letter a week if he went abroad “on his own,” and Greeley offered ten
dollars, which Dana accepted. He made a similar agreement with the New
York _Commercial Advertiser_ and the Philadelphia _North American_, and
contracted to send letters to the _Harbinger_ and the _Chronotype_ for
five dollars a week.
“That gave me forty dollars a week for five letters,” said Dana
afterward; “and when the _Chronotype_ went up, I still had thirty-five
dollars. On this I lived in Europe nearly eight months, saw plenty of
revolutions, supported myself there and my family in New York, and
came home only sixty-three dollars out for the whole trip.” Not a bad
outcome for what was probably the first correspondence syndicate ever
attempted.
The trip did wonders for Dana. He saw the foreign “improvers of
mankind” in action, more violent than visionary; saw theory dashed
against the rocks of reality. He came back a wiser and better
newspaperman, with a knowledge of European conditions and men that
served him well all his life. There is seen in some of his descriptions
the fine simplicity of style that was later to make the _Sun_ the most
human newspaper.
Social experiments still interested Dana after his return to New York
in the spring of 1849, but he was able to take a clearer view of their
practicability than he had been in the Brook Farm days. He still
favoured association and cooperation, and every sane effort toward the
amelioration of human misery, but he now knew that there was no direct
road to the millennium.
Once home, however, and settled, not only as managing editor, but as
a holder of five shares of stock in the _Tribune_, Dana was kept busy
with things other than socialistic theories. Slavery and the tariff
were the overshadowing issues of the day.
Greeley was the great man of the _Tribune_ office, but Dana, in the
present-day language of Park Row, was the live wire almost from the day
of his return from Europe. When Greeley went abroad, Dana took charge.
Greeley now drew fifty dollars a week; Dana got twenty-five, Bayard
Taylor twenty, George Ripley fifteen. Dana’s five shares of stock
netted him about two thousand dollars a year in addition to his salary.
Here is a part of a letter which Dana wrote in 1852 to James S. Pike,
the Washington correspondent of the _Tribune_:
KEENEST OF PIKES:
What a desert void of news you keep at Washington! For
goodness’ sake, kick up a row of some sort. Fight a duel,
defraud the Treasury, set fire to the fueling-mill, get Black
Dan [Webster] drunk, or commit some other excess that will make
a stir.
The solemn phrases of transcendentalism had vanished from the tip of
Dana’s pen.
In the fight over slavery in the fifties, the effort of Greeley
and Dana was against the further spread of the institution over
new American territory, rather than for its complete overthrow.
When Greeley was at the helm, the _Tribune_ appeared to admit the
possibility of secession, a forerunner of “Let the erring sisters
depart in peace.” But when Dana was left in charge, the editorials
pleaded for the integrity of the Union at any cost. Greeley was heart
and soul for liberty, but his fist was not in the fight. Of the
political situation in 1854, Henry Wilson wrote, in his “Rise and Fall
of the Slave Power”:
At the outset Mr. Greeley was hopeless, and seemed disinclined
to enter the contest. He told his associates that he would
not restrain them; but, as for himself, he had no heart for
the strife. They were more hopeful; and Richard Hildreth, the
historian; Charles A. Dana, the veteran journalist; James S.
Pike, and other able writers, opened and continued a powerful
opposition in its columns, and did very much to rally and
assure the friends of freedom and nerve them for the fight.
Dana went farther than Greeley cared to go, particularly in his attacks
on the Democrats; so far, in fact, that Greeley often pleaded with him
to stop. Greeley wrote to James S. Pike:
Charge Dana not to slaughter anybody, but be mild and
meek-souled like me.
Greeley wrote to Dana from Washington, where Dana’s radicalism was
making his colleague uncomfortable:
Now I write once more to entreat that I may be allowed to
conduct the _Tribune_ with reference to the mile wide that
stretches either way from Pennsylvania Avenue. It is but a
small space, and you have all the world besides. I cannot stay
here unless this request is complied with. I would rather cease
to live at all.
If you are not willing to leave me entire control with
reference to this city, I ask you to call the proprietors
together and have me discharged. I have to go to this and that
false creature--Lew Campbell, for instance--yet in constant
terror of seeing him guillotined in the next _Tribune_ that
arrives, and I can’t make him believe that I didn’t instigate
it. So with everything here. If you want to throw stones at
anybody’s crockery, aim at my head first, and in mercy be sure
to aim well.
Again Greeley wrote to Dana:
You are getting everybody to curse me. I am too sick to be out
of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.... I
can bear the responsibilities that belong to me, but you heap a
load on me that will kill me.
With all Dana’s editorial work--and he and Greeley made the _Tribune_
the most powerful paper of the fifties, with a million readers--he
found time for the purely literary. He translated and published a
volume of German stories and legends under the title “The Black Ant.”
He edited a book of views of remarkable places and objects in all
countries. In 1857 was published his “Household Book of Poetry,” still
a standard work of reference. He was criticised for omitting Poe from
the first edition, and at the next printing he added “The Raven,” “The
Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” Poe and Cooper were among the literary gods
whom Dana refused to worship in his youth, but in later life he changed
his opinion of the poet.
With George Ripley, his friend in Harvard, at Brook Farm, and in the
_Tribune_ office, Dana prepared the “New American Encyclopedia,” which
was published between 1858 and 1863. It was a huge undertaking and a
success. Dana and Ripley carefully revised it ten years afterward. In
1882, with Rossiter Johnson, Dana edited and published a collection of
verse under the title “Fifty Perfect Poems.”
Although Dana persisted that the Union must not fall, Greeley still
believed, as late as December, 1860, that it would “not be found
practical to coerce” the threatening States into subjection. When war
actually came, however, Greeley at last adopted the policy of “No
compromise, no concessions to traitors.”
The _Tribune’s_ cry, “Forward to Richmond!” sounded from May, 1861,
until Bull Run, was generally attributed to Dana. Greeley himself made
it plain that it was not his:
I wish to be distinctly understood as not seeking to be
relieved from any responsibility for urging the advance of the
Union army in Virginia, though the precise phrase, “Forward
to Richmond!” was not mine, and I would have preferred not to
reiterate it. Henceforth I bar all criticism in these columns
on army movements. Now let the wolves howl on! I do not believe
they can goad me into another personal letter.
As a matter of fact, “Forward to Richmond!” was phrased by Fitz-Henry
Warren, then head of the _Tribune’s_ correspondence staff in
Washington. He came from Iowa, where in his youth he was editor of the
Burlington _Hawkeye_. He resigned from the _Tribune_ late in 1861 to
take command of the First Iowa Cavalry, which he organized. In 1862 he
became a brigadier-general, and he was later brevetted a major-general.
In 1869 he was the American minister to Guatemala. From being one of
the men around Greeley he became one of the men with Dana, and in
1875–1876 he did Washington correspondence for the _Sun_, and wrote
many editorial articles for it.
In 1861 Dana was an active advocate of Greeley’s candidacy for the
United States Senate, and almost got him nominated. If Greeley had
gone to the Senate, Dana might have continued on the _Tribune_; but
it became evident, before the war was a year old, that one newspaper
was no longer large enough for both men. The sprightly, aggressive,
unhesitating, and practical Dana, and the ambitious, but eccentric
and somewhat visionary Greeley found their paths diverging. The
circumstances under which they parted were thus described by Dana in a
letter to a friend:
On Thursday, March 27, I was notified that Mr. Greeley had
given the stockholders notice that I must leave, or he would,
and that they wanted me to leave accordingly. No cause of
dissatisfaction being alleged, and H. G. having been of late
more confidential and friendly than ever, not once having said
anything betokening disaffection to me, I sent a friend to him
to ascertain if it was true, or if some misunderstanding was at
the bottom of it. My friend came and reported that it was true,
and that H. G. was immovable.
On Friday, March 28, I resigned, and the trustees at once
accepted it, passing highly complimentary resolutions and
voting me six months’ salary after the date of my resignation.
Mr. Ripley opposed the proceedings in the trustees, and,
above all, insisted on delay in order that the facts might be
ascertained; but all in vain.
On Saturday, March 29, Mr. Greeley came down, called another
meeting of the trustees, said he had never desired me to
leave, that it was a damned lie that he had presented such an
alternative as that he or I must go, and finally sent me a
verbal message desiring me to remain as a writer of editorials;
but has never been near me since to meet the “damned lie”
in person, nor written one word on the subject. I conclude,
accordingly, that he is glad to have me out, and that he really
set on foot the secret cabal by which it was accomplished. As
soon as I get my pay for my shares--ten thousand dollars less
than I could have got for them a year ago--I shall be content.
That was the undramatic and somewhat disappointing end of Dana’s
fourteen years on the _Tribune_. He was forty-three years old and not
rich. All he had was what he got from the sale of his _Tribune_ stock
and what he had saved from the royalties on his books.
From the literary view-point he was doubtless the best-equipped
newspaperman in America, but there was no great place open for him then.
Dana’s work on the _Tribune_ had attracted the attention of most of
the big men of the North, including Edwin M. Stanton, who in January,
1862, was appointed Secretary of War in place of Simon Cameron. Stanton
asked Dana to come into the War Department, and assigned him to service
upon a commission to audit unsettled claims against the quartermaster’s
department. While in Memphis on this work he first met General Grant,
then prosecuting the war in the West.
In the autumn of 1862, Stanton offered to Dana a post as second
Assistant Secretary of War, and Dana, having accepted, told a
newspaperman of his appointment. When the news was printed, the
irascible Stanton was so much annoyed--although without any apparent
reason--that he withdrew the appointment. Dana then became a partner
with George W. Chadwick, of New York, and Roscoe Conkling, of Utica, in
an enterprise for buying cotton in that part of the Mississippi Valley
which the Union army occupied.
Dana and Chadwick went to Memphis in January, 1863, armed with letters
from Secretary Stanton to General Grant and other field commanders.
But no sooner had their cotton operations begun than Dana saw the
evil effect that this traffic was having. It had aroused a fever of
speculation. Army officers were forming partnerships with cotton
operators, and even privates wanted to buy cotton with their pay. The
Confederacy was being helped rather than hindered.
Disregarding his own fortunes, Dana called upon General Grant and
advised him to “put an end to an evil so enormous, so insidious and so
full of peril to the country.” Grant at once issued an order designed
to end the traffic, but the cotton-traders succeeded in having it
nullified by the government.
Then Dana went to Washington, saw President Lincoln and Secretary
Stanton, and convinced them that the cotton trade should be handled by
the Treasury Department. As a result of Dana’s visit, Lincoln issued
his proclamation declaring all commercial intercourse with seceded
States to be unlawful. Thus Dana patriotically worked himself out of a
paying business.
Yet his unselfishness was not without a reward. It reestablished his
friendly relations with Stanton, and won for him the President’s
confidence.
Just then there was an important errand to be done. Many complaints
had been made against General Grant. Certain temperance people had
told Lincoln that Grant was drinking heavily, and although Lincoln
jested--“Can you tell me where Grant buys his liquor? I would
like to distribute a few barrels of the same brand among my other
major-generals”--he really wished to have all doubts settled.
The President and Mr. Stanton chose Dana for the mission. It was an
open secret. If Grant did not know that Dana was coming to make a
report on his conduct, all the general’s staff knew it. General James
Harrison Wilson, biographer of Dana--and, with Dana, biographer of
Grant--wrote of this situation:
It was believed by many that if he [Dana] did not bring plenary
authority to actually displace Grant, the fate of that general
would certainly depend upon the character of the reports which
the special commissioner might send to Washington in regard to
him.
Wilson was at this time the inspector-general of Grant’s army. He
consulted with John A. Rawlins, Grant’s austere young adjutant-general
and actual chief of staff, and the two officers agreed that Dana must
be taken into complete confidence. Wilson wrote:
We sincerely believed that Grant, whatever might be his faults
and weaknesses, was a far safer man to command the army than
any other general in it, or than any that might be sent to it
from another field.
Dana and Wilson and Rawlins made the best of a delicate, difficult
situation. Dana was taken into headquarters “on the footing of an
officer of the highest rank.” His commission was that of a major of
volunteers, but his functions were so important that he was called “Mr.
Dana” rather than “Major Dana.” Dana himself never used the military
title.
Dana sent his first official despatches to Stanton in March, 1863,
from before Vicksburg. Grant’s staff made clear to him the plan of the
turning movement by which the gunboats and transports were to be run
past the Vicksburg batteries while the army marched across the country,
and Dana made most favourable reports to Washington on the general’s
strategy.
Dana saw not only real warfare, but a country that was new to him.
After a trip into Louisiana he wrote to his friend, William Henry
Huntington:
During the eight days that I have been here, I have got new
insight into slavery, which has made me no more a friend of
that institution than I was before.... It was not till I saw
these plantations, with their apparatus for living and working,
that I really felt the aristocratic nature of it.
Under a flag of truce Dana went close to Vicksburg, where he was met by
a Confederate major of artillery:
Our people entertained him with a cigar and a drink of whisky,
of course, or, rather, with two drinks. This is an awful
country for drinking whisky. I calculate that on an average a
friendly man will drink a gallon in twenty-four hours. I wish
you were here to do my drinking for me, for I suffer in public
estimation for not doing as the Romans do.
Dana was with Grant on the memorable night of April 16, 1863, when the
squadron of gunboats, barges, and transports ran the Vicksburg forts.
From that time on until July he accompanied the great soldier. It was
Dana who received and communicated Stanton’s despatch giving to Grant
“full and absolute authority to enforce his own commands, and to remove
any person who, by ignorance, inaction, or any cause, interferes with
or delays his operations.”
Dana was in many marches and battles. Like the officers of Grant’s
staff, he slept in farmhouses, and ate pork and hardtack or what the
land provided. The move on Vicksburg was a brilliant campaign, and
in ten days Dana saw as much of war as most men of the Civil War saw
in three years. Dana sent despatches to Washington describing the
battles at Champion’s Hill and the Big Black Bridge, the investment of
Vicksburg, and the establishment of a line of supply from the North.
Through Dana’s eyes the government began to see Grant as he really was.
Dana, with either Grant or Wilson, rode over all the country of the
Vicksburg campaign, often under fire. He was present at Grant’s
councils, and rode into Vicksburg with him after its surrender. Dana’s
view of the great soldier’s personality is given in something he wrote
many years later, long after their friendship was ended:
Grant was an uncommon fellow--the most modest, the most
disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a
temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was
judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great
man, except morally; nor an original or brilliant man, but
sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never
faltered. When the time came to risk all, he went in like a
simple-hearted, unaffecting, unpretending hero, whom no ill
omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social,
friendly man, too; fond of a pleasant joke and also ready
with one; but liking above all a long chat of an evening,
and ready to sit up with you all night talking in the cool
breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not
demonstrative in friendship; but always holding to his friends
and just even to the enemies he hated.
Here is Dana’s picture of Rawlins, sent to Stanton on July 12,
1863--eight days after the fall of Vicksburg:
He is a lawyer by profession, a townsman of Grant, and has
great influence over him, especially because he watches him
day and night, and whenever he commits the folly of tasting
liquor, hastens to remind him that at the beginning of the war
he gave him [Rawlins] his word of honor not to touch a drop as
long as it lasted. Grant thinks Rawlins a first-rate adjutant,
but I think this is a mistake. He is too slow, and can’t write
the English language correctly without a great deal of careful
consideration.
In spite of this criticism, Dana admired Rawlins. Without him, he said,
Grant would not have been the same man.
After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Dana returned to Washington. He was now
an Assistant Secretary of War, and his success as an official reporter
on the conduct of the Army of the Tennessee had been so great that
Stanton sent him to cover, in the same way, the operations of the Army
of the Cumberland, going first to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga.
Dana saw the hottest of the great fight at Chickamauga, and galloped
twelve miles to send his despatches about it to Stanton. He made blunt
reports to the government on the unfitness of Rosecrans:
I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands, but I know
of no one except Thomas who could now be safely put in his
place.
After a conference at Louisville between Stanton and Grant, Rosecrans
was relieved and Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland.
A fine soldier and a modest man, Thomas was disinclined to supplant a
superior.
“You have got me this time,” he said to Dana, “but there is nothing
for a man to do in such a case but obey orders.”
Dana’s despatches had made Stanton realize the importance of holding
Chattanooga, and the Secretary of War ordered Thomas to defend it at
all hazards.
“I will hold the town till we starve!” replied Thomas.
Dana was not only a useful eye for the government, but he was a valued
companion for General Wilson and other officers who went with him on
his missions. He knew more poetry than any other man in the army except
General Michael Lawler, an Illinois farmer, whose boast it was that on
hearing any line of standard English verse he could repeat the next
line. Dana, the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry,” would try
to catch Lawler, but in vain. Dana was not so literal as the Illinois
general, but General Wilson says that he “seemed never to forget
anything he had ever read.”
The great advantage of Dana’s despatches to Stanton was that they gave
a picture of the doings in his field of work that was not biased by
military pride or ambition. He wrote what he saw and knew, without
counting the effect on the generals concerned. For one illuminating
example, there was his story of the final attack in the battle of
Missionary Ridge. To read Grant or Sherman, one would suppose that the
triumphant assault was planned precisely as it was executed; but Dana’s
account of that fierce day is the one that must be relied upon:
The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest
miracles in military history. No man that climbs the ascent by
any of the roads that wind along its front could believe that
eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling
face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed. It seems
as awful as the visible interposition of God. Neither Grant nor
Thomas intended it. Their orders were to carry the rifle-pits
along the base of the ridge and capture their occupants; but
when this was accomplished, the unaccountable spirit of the
troops bore them bodily up those impracticable steeps, over
bristling rifle-pits on the crest, and thirty cannon enfilading
every gully. The order to storm appears to have been given
simultaneously by Generals Sheridan and Wood, because the men
were not to be held back, dangerous as the attempt appeared
to military prudence. Besides, the generals had caught the
inspiration of the men, and were ready themselves to undertake
impossibilities.
No wonder that even when Lincoln was confined to his chamber by
illness, Dana’s despatches were brought to him; “not merely because
they are reliable,” as Assistant Secretary of War Watson wrote to Dana,
“but for their clearness of narrative and their graphic pictures of
the stirring events they describe.” A conservative tribute to the best
reporter of the Civil War.
Dana returned to Washington about the beginning of 1864 to take up
office tasks, and particularly the reorganization of the Cavalry
Bureau. Dishonest horse-dealers were plundering the government, and
Dana never rested until he had sent enough of these rogues to prison to
frighten the rest of the band. Dana was a good office man; he worked,
says James Harrison Wilson, “like a skilful bricklayer.” And as he
relieved Stanton of much of the routine of the War Department, the
Secretary supported him in his assaults on dishonest contractors, even
when the political pressure brought to bear for their protection was at
its highest.
Lincoln sent Dana to report Grant’s progress in the Virginia campaign
that opened in May, 1864. On the 26th, three weeks after the march
began, he was able to notify Washington of an entire change in the
morale of the contending armies:
The rebels have lost all confidence, and are already morally
defeated. This army has learned to believe that it is sure of
victory. Even our officers have ceased to regard Lee as an
invincible military genius.... Rely upon it, the end is near as
well as sure.
In the eventful weeks of that early summer Dana became an observer for
Grant as well as for the government. It was evident to Dana that the
great soldier, and not Washington, must decide what was to be done. In
a despatch from Washington, whither he had returned at Grant’s request,
Dana said to the general:
Until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done,
everything will go on in the fatal way in which it has gone on
for the past week.
Longstreet’s Confederates were coming down the Shenandoah Valley,
and Grant, taking heed of Dana’s significant message, sent Sheridan
to dispose of them. Then, as Grant himself was stationed in front of
Petersburg, Dana resumed his activities in the office at Washington.
“It has fallen to the lot of no other American,” says General Wilson,
“to serve as the confidential medium of communication between the army
and the government and between the government and the general-in-chief,
as it did to Dana during the War of the Rebellion.”
One pleasant errand which fell to Dana was the delivery to Sheridan,
after his victory over Early at Cedar Creek, of his promotion to
major-general. This entailed a journey on horseback through the Valley
of Virginia, and the constant danger of capture by Mosby’s guerrillas;
but Dana, who greatly admired Sheridan, was glad to take the chance.
When the news came to Washington of the fall of Richmond, in April,
1865, Secretary Stanton sent Dana to the Confederate capital to gather
up its archives. Many of these historically valuable papers had been
removed and scattered, but Dana collected what he could and sent them
to Washington. He wanted to be present with Grant at Lee’s surrender,
but fate kept him in Richmond, for Lincoln was there, and needed him.
When at last he got away, Grant had left Appomattox. Dana joined him
_en route_, and together they reached Washington on the day before the
President’s assassination.
It was on the day of his arrival that Dana went to the President to ask
him whether it would be well to order the arrest of Jacob Thompson, a
Confederate commissioner who was trying to go from Canada to Europe
through Maine. Lincoln returned the historic reply:
“No, I rather think not. When you have got an elephant by the
hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him
run!”
A few hours after the President’s death, however, Stanton ordered Dana
to obtain Thompson’s arrest.
Dana was active in unearthing the conspiracy that led to the
assassination. A month later, acting under Stanton’s injunctions,
he wrote the order to General Miles authorizing him to manacle and
fetter Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay, Jr., whenever he thought
it advisable, the Secretary of War being in fear that some of the
prisoners of state might escape or kill themselves.
[Illustration:
MR. DANA AT FIFTY
From a Photograph Taken in 1869, a Year After He Obtained
Control of “The Sun.”
]
Dana then and afterward resented the suggestion that the president
of the fallen Confederacy had met with cruelty or injustice while he
was confined in Fortress Monroe. In his “Recollections of the Civil
War,” he said:
Medical officers were directed to superintend his meals and
give him everything that would excite his appetite. As it was
complained that his quarters in the casemate were unhealthy and
disagreeable, he was, after a few weeks, transferred to Carroll
Hall, a building still occupied by officers and soldiers. That
Davis’s health was not ruined by his imprisonment at Fort
Monroe is proved by the fact that he came out of prison in
better condition than when he went in, and that he lived for
twenty years afterward, and died of old age.
A new newspaper, the _Daily Republican_, was started in Chicago, a few
weeks after the close of the Civil War, by Senator Trumbull and other
prominent Illinoisans. They asked Dana to become its editor. His work
in the War Department was done, and he had hoped to go into business,
for his own estimate of his power as a journalist was not as flattering
as the opinions of those who knew him. Yet the Chicago proposition was
attractive on paper, for its capital was fixed at the large sum of five
hundred thousand dollars--an amount sufficient, in those days, to carry
on any intelligently managed journal.
Dana resigned as Assistant Secretary of War on July 1, 1865, went
to Chicago, and became editor of the _Republican_. No man was more
intellectually fit for the editorship of a newspaper in that hour of
reconstruction. He had been a real Republican from the founding of the
party. He cared little for the new President, Andrew Johnson, and the
_Republican_ was more inclined toward the side of Stanton, who differed
with Johnson as to the methods which should be used in the remaking of
the South. Of Johnson, Dana wrote to General Wilson:
The President is an obstinate, stupid man, governed by
preconceived ideas, by whisky, and by women. He means one thing
to-day and another to-morrow, but the glorification of Andrew
Johnson all the time.
The statement that the capital stock of the _Republican_ was fixed at
half a million dollars must now be qualified. It was fixed on paper,
but not in the banks. Little of the money was actually paid in, and
some of the subscribers were not solvent. Dana worked hard with his
pen, but the _Republican_ had not enough backing to hold it up. After
one year of it Dana resigned and came East, determined to start a paper
in New York.
He had friends of influence and wealth who were glad to be associated
with him. These included:
Thomas Hitchcock
Isaac W. England
Charles S. Weyman
John H. Sherwood
M. O. Roberts
George Opdyke
E. D. Smith
F. A. Palmer
William H. Webb
Roscoe Conkling
A. B. Cornell
E. D. Morgan
David Dows
John C. Hamilton
Amos R. Eno
S. B. Chittenden
Freeman Clarke
Thomas Murphy
William M. Evarts
Cyrus W. Field
E. C. Cowdin
Salem H. Wales
Theron R. Butler
Marshall B. Blake
F. A. Conkling
A. A. Low
Charles E. Butler
Dorman B. Eaton
The most eminent of this distinguished group was, of course, William
M. Evarts, then the leader of the American bar. He had been counsel
for the State of New York in the Lemmon slave case, pitted against
Charles O’Connor, counsel for the State of Virginia. He became chief
counsel for President Johnson in the impeachment proceedings of 1868,
and later was Johnson’s Attorney-General. He was chief counsel for the
United States in the Alabama arbitration, senior counsel for Henry
Ward Beecher in the Tilton case, Secretary of State under Hayes, and a
United States Senator from 1885 to 1891.
Roscoe Conkling was a United States Senator from New York at the time
when Dana bought the _Sun_. He was one of Grant’s strongest supporters,
and led the third-term movement in 1880. His brother, Frederick
Augustus Conkling, was the Republican candidate for mayor of New York
in the first year that Dana controlled the _Sun_, although later he
changed his politics, supporting Tilden in 1876, and Hancock in 1880.
Edwin D. Morgan was Conkling’s colleague in the Senate, where he served
from 1863 to 1869. He was Governor of New York from 1858 to 1862. He,
like most of Dana’s associates, was a Grant man, and it was Morgan who
managed Grant’s second Presidential campaign.
Alonzo B. Cornell, then only thirty-six years old, had risen from
being a boy telegrapher to a directorship in the Western Union. He was
already prominent in the Republican politics of New York State, and was
afterward Governor for three years (1880–1882).
George Opdyke, a loyal Lincoln man, had been mayor of New York in the
trying years of 1862 and 1863.
Cyrus W. Field had won world-wide distinction as the Columbus of modern
times, as John Bright called him. Two years before Dana bought the
_Sun_ Field had succeeded, after many reverses, in making the Atlantic
cable a permanent success.
Amos R. Eno, merchant and banker, was the man who had made New York
laugh by building the Fifth Avenue Hotel so far north--away up at
Twenty-Third Street--that it was known as Eno’s Folly. This he did
nearly ten years before Dana went to the _Sun_, and in 1868 the hotel
was not only the most fashionable in the United States, but the most
profitable.
A. A. Low was a merchant and the father of Seth Low, later mayor of
New York. William H. Webb was a big ship-builder. Thomas Murphy was
a Republican politician whom Grant made collector of the port of New
York, and who gave Grant his place at Long Branch as a summer home.
At least three of the men in the list were active in the _Sun_
office. Thomas Hitchcock was a young man of wealth and scholarship
who had become acquainted with Dana when both were interested in
Swedenborgianism. He wrote, among other books, a catechism of that
doctrine. For many years he contributed to the _Sun_, under the name
“Matthew Marshall,” financial articles which appeared on Mondays, and
which were regarded as the best reviews and criticisms of their kind.
Charles S. Weyman got out the _Weekly Sun_, and edited that delightful
column, “Sunbeams.”
Salem H. Wales was a merchant whose daughter became Mrs. Elihu Root.
Dorman B. Eaton was one of the pioneers of civil-service reform.
Marshall O. Roberts, F. A. Palmer, David Dows, and E. C. Cowdin were
great names in the business and financial world.
Why Dana and his friends did not start a new paper is explained in the
following letter, written by Dana to General Wilson:
Just as we were about commencing our own paper, the purchase of
the _Sun_ was proposed to me and accepted. It had a circulation
of from fifty to sixty thousand a day, and all among the
mechanics and small merchants of this city. We pay a large
sum for it--$175,000--but it gives us at once a large and
profitable business.
If you have a thousand dollars at leisure, you had better
invest it in the stock of our company, which is increased to
$350,000 in order to pay for the new acquisition. Of this sum
about $220,000 is invested in the Tammany Hall real estate,
which is sure to be productive, independent of the business of
the paper.
The “Tammany Hall real estate” was the building at the corner of
Nassau and Frankfort Streets, where Tammany kept its headquarters
from 1811, when it moved from Martling’s Long Room, at Nassau and
Spruce Streets, to 1867, when Dana and his friends bought the building
with the expectation of starting a new paper. If Moses S. Beach had
attracted Dana’s attention to the _Sun_ in time, he might have sold
him, as well as the paper, his own building at Nassau and Fulton
Streets. But the Tammany Hall building was a better-placed home for the
_Sun_ than its old quarters. It faced City Hall Park and was a part of
Printing-House Square. Dana was right about the productiveness of the
real estate, for no spot in New York sees more pedestrians go by than
the Nassau-Frankfort corner. The _Sun_ lived there for forty-three
years, and its present home, taken when the old hall became too small
and ancient, is only a block away.
The first number of the _Sun_ issued under Dana--Monday, January 27,
1868--contained a long sketch of Tammany Hall and its former home,
concluding:
Peace succeeds to strife. No new Halleck can sing:
There’s a barrel of porter at Tammany Hall,
And the Bucktails are enjoying it all the night long;
In the time of my boyhood ’twas pleasant to call
For a seat and cigar ’mid the jovial throng.
So far as the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets is
concerned, _L’Empire est paix_. The _Sun_ shines for all; and
on the site of old Tammany’s troubles and tribulations we turn
back the leaves of the past, dispel the clouds of discord, and
shed our beams far and near over the Regenerated Land.
Dana changed the appearance of the _Sun_ overnight. He kept it as a
folio, for he always believed in a four-page paper, even when he was
printing ten pages, but he reduced the number of columns on a page from
eight to seven, widening each column a little.
The principal head-lines, which had been irregular in size and two to
the page, were made smaller and more uniform, and four appeared at the
top of the front page. The editorial articles, which had been printed
in minion, now appeared a size larger, in brevier, and the heads on
them were changed to the simple, dignified full-face type of the size
that is still used.
Dana changed the title-head of the _Sun_ from Roman, which it had
been from the beginning, to Old English, as it stands to-day. He also
changed the accompanying emblem. It had been a variation of the seal
of the State of New York, with the sun rising in splendour behind
mountains; on the right, Liberty with her Phrygian cap held on a staff,
gazing at an outbound vessel; on the left, Justice with scales and
sword, so facing that if not blindfolded she would see a locomotive and
a train of cars crossing a bridge. These classic figures were kept, but
the eagle--the State crest--which brooded above the sunburst in Beach’s
time, was removed, so that the rays went skyward without hindrance.
Dana liked “It Shines for All,” the _Sun’s_ old motto--everybody liked
it, but only one newspaper, the _Herald_, ever had the effrontery to
pilfer it--but he took it from the scroll in the emblem and replaced
there the State motto, “Excelsior.”
The _Sun_, under its new master, rose auspiciously--master, not
masters, for in spite of the number of his financial associates,
Dana was absolute. The men behind him realized the folly of dividing
authority. The _Sun_, whether under Day or one of the Beaches, had
always been a one-man paper. Therefore it succeeded, just as the
_Herald_, another journal governed by an autocrat, went ahead; but with
the _Tribune_, where the stockholders ruled and argued, things were
different.
Dana was the boss. As General Wilson wrote in his biography:
From this time forth it may be truthfully said that Dana was
the _Sun_, and the _Sun_ Dana. He was the sole arbiter of its
policy, and it was his constant practice to supervise every
editorial contribution that came in while he was on duty. The
editorial page was absolutely his, whether he wrote a line in
it or not, and he gave it the characteristic compactness of
form and directness of statement which were ever afterward its
distinguishing features.
Dana was a man whose natural intellectual gifts had been augmented by
his travels, his experience on the _Tribune_, his exploits in the war,
and his association with the big men of his time. Add to all this his
solid financial backing and his acquirement of a paper with a large
circulation, and the combination seemed an assurance of success. Yet,
had Dana lacked the peculiarly human qualities that were his, the
indefinable newspaper instinct that knows when a tom-cat on the steps
of the City Hall is more important than a crisis in the Balkans, the
_Sun_ would have set.
Only genius could enable a lofty-minded Republican, with a Republican
aristocracy behind him, to take over the _Sun_ and make a hundred
thousand mechanics and tradesmen, nearly all Democrats, like their
paper better than ever before. And that is what Dana did, except
that he added to the _Sun’s_ former readers a new army of admirers,
recruited by the magic of his pen.