CHAPTER VIII

“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.