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,