The books, taken from the safe, were carried to Alexander’s home by the man who had approached him. Close behind came police, who were prepared to arrest Alexander as soon as he received the “stolen property.” He was to be accused of hiring the burglars to crack the district attorney’s safe. But the hour was early in the morning, Alexander was sleeping the deep sleep of the just, and the criminal rang his doorbell in vain.
The ringsters then “arrested” the “thief,” and caused him to sign a false confession, accusing Alexander; but the failure of their theatricals had broken the hireling’s nerve as well as their own, and the conspiracy collapsed. Two of the hired criminals turned state’s evidence at the trial, but the powerful politicians of the ring were able to bring about a disagreement of the jury.
These were the greatest of the scandals which the Sun exposed in its news columns and denounced on its editorial page. It was the cry of the ringsters, and even of some honest men, that the Sun’s assaults on the evils that marred Grant’s administration were the result of Dana’s personal dislike of the President. More specifically it was declared that Dana was a disappointed office-seeker, and that the place of collector of customs at the port of New York was the office he sought.
We have it on the unimpeachable testimony of General James Harrison Wilson, the biographer of Dana, and, with Dana, a biographer of Grant, that General Rawlins, Grant’s most intimate friend, told Dana’s associates, and particularly General Wilson, that Dana was to be appointed collector. There is no evidence that Dana ever asked Grant, or any other man, for public office. One place, that of appraiser of merchandise at the port of New York, was offered him, and he refused it. The Sun said editorially, replying to an insinuation made by the Commercial Advertiser that if Dana had been made collector his paper would not denounce the administration:
The idea that the editor of the Sun, which shines for all, could consent to become collector of the port of New York is extravagant and inadmissible. It would be stepping down and out with a vengeance.
And yet we do not mean that the collector of New York need be other than an upright man. Moses H. Grinnell was such, and Tom Murphy, though a politician, a crony of Boss Grant, and one of the donors of Boss Grant’s cottage, certainly never took a dollar of money from the Federal Treasury to which he was not entitled. General Arthur, the present collector, is a gentleman in every sense of the word.
The office of collector is respectable enough, but it is not one that the editor of the Sun could desire to take without deserving to have his conduct investigated by a proceeding de lunatico.
Dana and the Sun lost friends because of the assaults on Grantism. The warfare was bitter and personal. In the case of Belknap, for instance, the Sun was attacking a man whom Dana, having known him as a good soldier, had recommended for appointment as Secretary of War. But it must be recalled that at the very height of his antagonism to Grant, the President, Dana never receded from his opinion that Grant, the general, was the Union’s greatest soldier. And the Sun was quick to applaud him as President when, as in currency matters, he took a course which Dana considered right.
The friends of Grant, nevertheless, turned against Dana and his paper. Some of them, stockholders in the Sun Printing and Publishing Association, quit the concern when they found themselves unable to turn Dana from his purpose. All their pleadings were vain.
“A few years from now,” Dana would reply, “I shall be willing to accept whatever judgment the nation passes on my course of action; but now I must do as I think right.”