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.
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.