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.