The Sun had no managing editor until Dana bought it, Beach having preferred to direct personally all matters above the ken of the city editor. The Sun’s first managing editor was Isaac W. England, whom Dana had known and liked when both were on the Tribune. England was of Welsh blood and English birth, having been born in Twerton, a suburb of Bath, in 1832. He worked at the bookbinding trade until he was seventeen, and then came to the United States and made his living at bookbinding and printing. He used to tell his Sun associates of his triumphal return to England, when he was twenty, for a short visit, which he spent in the shop of his apprenticeship, showing his old master how much better the Yankees were at embossing and lettering.
England returned to America in the steerage and saw the brutal treatment of immigrants. This he described in several articles and sold them to the Tribune. Greeley gave him a job pulling a hand-press at ten dollars a week, but later made him a reporter. He was city editor of the Tribune until after the Civil War, and then he went with his friend Dana to Chicago for the short and profitless experience with the Chicago Republican. In the period between Dana’s retirement from the Republican and his purchase of the Sun, England was manager of the Jersey City Times.
England was managing editor of the Sun only a year, then becoming its publisher—a position for which he was well fitted. An example of his business ability was given in 1877, when Frank Leslie went into bankruptcy. England was made assignee, and he handled the affairs of the Leslie concern so well that its debts were paid off in three years. This was only a side job for England, who continued all the time to manage the business matters of the Sun. When he died, in 1885, Dana wrote that he had “lost the friend of almost a lifetime, a man of unconquerable integrity, true and faithful in all things.”
The second managing editor of the Sun was that great newspaperman Amos Jay Cummings. He was born to newspaper work if any man ever was. His father, who was a Congregational minister—a fact which could not be surmised by listening to Amos in one of his explosive moods—was the editor of the Christian Palladium and Messenger. This staid publication was printed on the first floor of the Cummings home at Irvington, New Jersey. Entrance to the composing-room was forbidden the son, but with tears and tobacco he bribed the printer, one Sylvester Bailey, who set up the Rev. Mr. Cummings’s articles, to let him in through a window. Cummings and Bailey later set type together on the Tribune. They fought in the same regiment in the Civil War. They worked together on the Evening Sun, and they are buried in the same cemetery at Irvington.
The trade once learned, young Amos left home and wandered from State to State, making a living at the case. In 1856, when he was only fourteen, he was attracted by the glamour that surrounded William Walker, the famous filibuster, and joined the forces of that daring young adventurer, who then had control of Nicaragua. The boy was one of a strange horde of soldiers of fortune, which included British soldiers who had been at Sebastopol, Italians who had followed Garibaldi, and Hungarians in whom Kossuth had aroused the martial flame.
Like many of the others in Walker’s army, Cummings believed that the Tennessean was a second Napoleon, with Central America, perhaps South America, for his empire. But when this Napoleon came to his Elba by his surrender to Commander Davis of the United States navy, in the spring of 1857, Cummings decided that there was no marshal’s baton in his own ragged knapsack and went back to be a wandering printer.
Cummings was setting type in the Tribune office when the Civil War began. He hurried out and enlisted as a private in the Twenty-Sixth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry. He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. At Marye’s Hill, in the battle of Fredericksburg, his regiment was supporting a battery against a Confederate charge. Their lines were broken and they fell back from the guns. Cummings took the regimental flag from the hands of the colour-sergeant and ran alone, under the enemy’s fire, back to the guns. The Jerseymen rallied, the guns were recovered, and Cummings got the Medal of Honor from Congress. He left the service as sergeant-major of the regiment and presently appeared in Greeley’s office, a seedy figure infolded in an army overcoat.
“Mr. Greeley,” said Amos, “I’ve just got to have work.”
“Oh, indeed!” creaked Horace. “And why have you got to have work?”
Cummings said nothing, but turned his back on the great editor, lifted his coat-tails and showed the sad, if not shocking, state of his breeches. He got work. In 1863, when the Tribune office was threatened by the rioters, Amos helped to barricade the composing-room and save it from the mob.