CHARLES A. DANA.
THE FAMOUS EDITOR OF THE “SUN.”
HE man who with Greeley made the New York “Tribune” one of the greatest powers in the land, and who, from 1868 to 1897, was the chief and managing editor of the New York “Sun,” is certainly entitled to rank among our foremost men. Charles A. Dana lived a remarkable life, a life of strenuous effort and of continuous and notable achievement. He was born at Hinsdale, New Hampshire, in 1819, but his early life was passed at the village of Gaines, in Western New York, in Buffalo, and at Guildhall, Vermont. One of his earliest recollections was of being tied to a post with his mother’s garter because he had run away and gotten himself very muddy, thus displaying, at three years old, the restless spirit of enterprise which did much to make him the man he was. When he was eleven years old he returned to Buffalo to be a clerk in his uncle’s dry goods store. He was very successful as a salesman, and remained in the establishment until the failure of the business, in 1837, when he determined to prepare himself for college. He said that he found the elements of Latin very hard and disagreeable work, and he had the greatest difficulty in remembering the paradigms. Two winter terms at a country school, in his early boyhood, and two years at Harvard completed Mr. Dana’s systematic education, as too close application affected his eyesight, and he was obliged to withdraw from college at the end of his sophomore year. He had cultivated such a taste for languages, however, that no year since passed which he did not devote in part to serious study, and he became master of most spoken languages except the Slavonic and Oriental, and he began, at the age of seventy-five, the study of Russian. Harvard College afterward conferred upon him the degree which he was prevented from earning in the regular way, and is proud to count him among her most honored sons.
After leaving college Mr. Dana joined that remarkable body of men and women who conducted the Brook Farm experiment. He distinguished himself as one of the very few practical men among that band of philosophers, and gained, while at Brook Farm, a little experience in the newspaper business in conducting a publication known as “The Harbinger,” which was the organ of the association.
In 1844 his eyes had sufficiently recovered to enable him to do regular work, and he obtained employment under Elizur Wright, better known as an insurance actuary than as an editor, but who then conducted “The Chronotype,” an orthodox newspaper, which was a great favorite with the Congregational ministers of New England. Mr. Wright used to enjoy telling how “Dana always had a weakness for giving people with fixed convictions something new to think about,” and how he illustrated this weakness during the absence of his chief by writing strong editorials against the doctrine of a bill. This piece of enterprise involved the editor-in-chief in the labor of writing a personal letter to each of his ministerial subscribers, and to many others explaining how the paper “had been left in charge of a young man without mellow journalistic experience.” Mr. Dana’s compensation was five dollars per week, and at this amount it remained until 1847, when he joined the staff of the New York “Tribune” at ten dollars, a figure which was gradually increased to fifty dollars, which was the highest salary he ever received on the “Tribune.” Many delightful stories are told of the intercourse of Dana and Greeley. The part they took in politics, the fight against slavery, the organization of the Republican Party, Mr. Dana’s loyal support of Greeley’s aspirations for political preferment, all these are a part of the political history of our country. Just before joining the “Tribune” staff Mr. Dana was married to Miss Eunice MacDaniel, of New York. Of his delight in family life no testimony can be stronger than his own words written during a brief interval of leisure: “I have been busy with my children, drawing them about in old Bradley’s one-horse wagon, rowing and sailing with them on the bay and sound, gathering shells on the shore with them, picking cherries, lounging on the grass with the whole tribe about me. There’s no delight like that in a pack of young children of your own.... A house without a baby is inhuman.”
During these busy years Mr. Dana, together with Mr. Ripley, edited “The American Cyclopedia,” a work which is a monument of his care and learning and patient labor; and he also prepared and published a “Household Book of Poetry,” one of the very best collections of its kind, and one which has found its way into a very large number of American homes and contributed in no small measure to further the cause of good literature. In 1862 there came about a radical difference between Mr. Greeley and Mr. Dana as to the proper policy of the “Tribune” in regard to the war. The result was Mr. Dana’s withdrawal from the paper. He was immediately asked by Mr. Stanton to audit a large number of disputed claims in the quartermaster’s office at Cairo. This led to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of War, which position he held until the end of the Rebellion. About one-third of his time during this period was spent with the armies at the front. In this way he served as the confidential agent of the administration, and was once styled by Mr. Lincoln “the eyes of the Government at the front.” His reports were remarkable for their unconventional form, their brevity, and the completeness and accuracy with which they placed Stanton and Lincoln in possession of the exact facts. “Miles of customary military reports,” says a recent writer, “were worth less to Lincoln than half a dozen of Dana’s vivid sentences.”
After the close of the war Mr. Dana spent one year in Chicago as editor of “The Republican.” He had been deceived about the financial basis of the enterprise, and was in no way responsible for its failure. Returning to New York, he organized the company which purchased the old “Sun” property, and started the paper on a long career of success and of influence. He was probably the most independent man who ever managed a great newspaper. He possessed the power of working without that conscious effort which characterizes the activity of most men, and which seems to be the source of so many early break-downs. He was not easily disturbed. At the “Sun” office, they like to tell a doubtful story of the old days when the work of the paper was conducted in four small rooms. The city editor came hurriedly in exclaiming, “Mr. Dana, there’s a man out there with a cocked revolver. He is very much excited. He insists on seeing the editor-in-chief.” “Is he very much excited?” said Mr. Dana, hardly looking up from his work, “if you think it worth the space, ask Amos Cummings if he will kindly see the gentleman and write him up.” A noted sensational clergyman once volunteered to write, under an assumed name, for the “Sun.” He foolishly tried to adapt himself to what he imagined was the irresponsible tone of a Sunday paper, and there can be no doubt that Mr. Dana enjoyed writing in blue pencil across the back of his first article, “This is too wicked.”
During the winter the great editor occupied his house on Madison Avenue and Sixtieth Street, but his summer house was on a little island, two or three miles from Glen Cove, which his wide knowledge of trees and fruits and flowers enabled him to make a singularly delightful spot. In the summer of 1897, when Mr. Dana was approaching his eightieth year, and still continued to manage his great newspaper, surrounded by a corps of trained and efficient men, he was attacked with a serious illness, and passed away on the afternoon of October 17th. It is doubted whether any other man has left his mark more deeply on the nineteenth century than has the famous editor of the “Sun.”
ROSCOE CONKLING.
(THE NEW YORK “SUN,” APRIL 18, 1888.)
HE most picturesque, striking, and original figure of American politics disappears in the death of Roscoe Conkling. Alike powerful and graceful in person, he towered above the masses of men in the elasticity of his talents and the peculiarities and resources of his mental constitution as much as he did in form and bearing. Yet his career cannot be called a great success, and he was not a great man.
But he was an object of great love and admiration to an extraordinary circle of friends, including not alone those who shared his opinions, but many who were utterly opposed to them. He was by nature a zealous partisan, and it was his inclination to doubt the good sense and the disinterestedness of those who were on the other side; but, nevertheless, the strongest instinct of his nature was friendship, and his attachments stood the test of every trial except such as trenched upon his own personality. This he guarded with the swift jealousy of most intense selfhood, and no one could in any way impinge upon it and remain his friend. Then, his resentments were more lasting and more unchangeable than his friendships. This, in our judgment, was the great weakness of the man. Who can say that in his innermost heart Conkling did not deplore it? At any rate, the candid observer who sums up his history must deplore it for him. “And the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out forever.”
For a long period Mr. Conkling was a great political power in New York and in the country. This was during the culmination of General Grant. Originally Conkling was not friendly to Grant, and when the latter appointed his first Cabinet, the Senator’s condemnation was unreserved and stinging. This attitude was maintained during nearly the whole of Grant’s first year in the Presidency. At that time Senator Fenton stood near the President and dispensed the political bounty of the Administration. This Conkling could not endure, and when Congress met in December, 1869, he was full of war. But it soon got abroad that Fenton was a candidate for the Presidency. This settled the difficulty and brought the rival Senator into intimate relations with the President. This position he ever afterwards maintained, and it formed the most successful and to him the most satisfactory portion of his life. When Grant was finally defeated at Chicago in 1880, and all hopes of his restoration to the White House was obliterated, the Senator soon abandoned the field of his renown, and went back to the disappointments and struggles of private life.
As we have said, friendship was the greatest positive force in Mr. Conkling’s character, and there never was any hesitation or any meanness in his bestowal of it. In this respect he was the most democratic of men. He was just as warmly devoted to persons holding low places in the social scale as to the great and powerful, and he was just as scrupulous in his observation of all the duties of a friend toward the one kind of people as toward the other. There was nothing snobbish about him. He would go as far and exert himself as greatly to serve a poor man who was his friend as to serve one who was rich and mighty. This disposition he carried into politics. He had very little esteem for office-giving as a political method; but if a friend of his wanted a place, he would get it for him if he could. But no important politician in New York ever had fewer men appointed on the ground that they were his friends or supporters. His intense and lofty pride could not thus debase itself.
It is esteemed a high thing that with all the powers he wielded and the opportunities opened to him under a President the least scrupulous ever known in our history as regards jobbery and corruption, Mr. Conkling never pocketed a copper of indecent and dishonorable gain in the course of his public life. It is a high thing, indeed, and his bitterest enemies cannot diminish the lustre of the fact. The practice of public robbery was universal. Thievery was rampant everywhere in the precincts of the Administration. The Secretary of the Navy plundered millions. The Secretary of War sold public places and put the swag in his pocket. The Secretary of the Interior was forced by universal indignation to resign his ill-used office. The private secretaries of the President dealt in whiskey and defrauded the revenue. The vast gambling scheme of Black Friday had its fulcrum within the portals of the White House, and counted the President’s own family among its conspirators. It was a period of shameless, ineffable, unblushing villainy pervading the highest circles of public power. And while all Republican statesmen, leaders, and journalists knew it, condoned it, defended it even, the best they could, Mr. Conkling was the special spokesman, advocate, and orator of the Administration which was the creator of a situation so unprecedented and revolting. But while he thus lived and moved in the midst of corruption, he was not touched by it himself. The protector of brigands and scoundrels before the tribunal of public opinion, he had no personal part in their crimes and no share in their spoils. As the poet went through hell without a smutch upon his garments, so the proud Senator, bent chiefly upon the endurance of the Republican party, came out of that epoch of public dishonesty as honest and as stainless as he entered it.
In the records of the higher statesmanship it can be said that there is very much to the credit of Mr. Conkling’s account. As a parliamentary champion he had perhaps no superior; but others appear to have originated and perfected the measures to which in either House of Congress he gave the support of potent logic, fertile illustration, aggressive repartee, and scathing sarcasm. We do not recall a single one of the great and momentous acts of Congress which were passed in his time, of which he can certainly be pronounced the author. Yet his activity was prodigious, and it was a strange freak of his complicated character to bring before the House or Senate, through others, propositions which he thought essential. His hand could often be recognized in motions and resolutions offered on all sides of the chamber, and often by members with whom he was not known to be familiar.
The courage of Mr. Conkling, moral as well as personal, was of a heroic strain. After his mind was made up, he feared no odds, and he asked no favor. He dared to stand out against his own party, and he, a Republican, had the nerve to confront and defy the utmost power of a Republican administration. There was something magnanimous, too, in the way he bore misfortune. After the death of a distinguished man, with whom he had been very intimate, it was ascertained that his estate instead of being wealthy, was bankrupt. Mr. Conkling was an endorser of his notes for a large sum of money, and saying calmly, “He would have done as much for me,” he set himself to the laborious task of earning the means to pay off the debt. He paid it in no long time, and we don’t believe that any man ever heard him murmur at the necessity.
In social life Mr. Conkling endeared himself to his intimates, not only by the qualities which we have endeavored to describe and indicate, but by the richness of his conversation, and the wit and humor—sometimes rather ponderous—with which it was seasoned, and by the stores of knowledge which he revealed. His reading had been extensive, especially in English literature, and his memory was surprisingly tenacious. Many of the most impressive passages of oratory and of literature he could repeat by heart. He was fond of social discussion on all sorts of questions, and liked no one the less who courteously disagreed with him.
As a lawyer, we suppose that his great ability was in cross-examination and with juries. The exigencies and the discussive usage of political life prevented that arduous, persevering application to pure law which is necessary to make a great jurist; but his intellectual powers were so vigorous and so accurate that he made up the deficiency of training and habit and no one can doubt that, if he had given himself to the law alone, he would have gained a position of the very highest distinction. As it was, the most eminent counsel always knew that he had a formidable antagonist when Mr. Conkling was against him; and every court listened to his arguments, not merely with respect, but with instruction.
We shall be told, of course, that the supreme fault of this extraordinary mind was in perfection of judgment; and when we consider how largely his actions were controlled by pride and passion, and especially by resentment, we must admit that the criticism is not wholly without foundation. There was also in his manner that which might justify the belief that often he was posing for effect, like an actor on the stage; and we shall not dispute that so at times it may have been. But there are so few men who are entirely free from imperfection, and so many who inherit from their ancestors characteristics which ought to be disapproved, that we may well overlook them when they are combined with noble and admirable gifts. And after all has been said, even those whom he opposed most strenuously, and scorned or resisted most unrelentingly, may remember that we are all human, while they let fall a tear and breathe a prayer to heaven as the bier of Roscoe Conkling passes on its way to the grave.
