CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR
One of the Few Entirely Loyal Newspapers of New York.—Its Brief Ownership by a Religious Coterie.—It Returns to the Possession of M. S. Beach, Who Sells It to Dana.
In 1852, when Moses Sperry Beach came into the sole ownership of the Sun, it was supposed that the slavery question had been settled forever, or at least with as much finality as was possible in determining such a problem. The Missouri Compromise, devised by Henry Clay, had acted as a legislative mandragora which lulled the United States and soothed the spasms of the extreme Abolitionists. Even Abraham Lincoln, now passing forty years, was losing that interest in politics which he had once exhibited, and was devoting himself almost entirely to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois.
The Sun had plenty of news to fill its four wide pages, and its daily circulation was above fifty thousand. The Erie Railroad had stretched itself from Piermont, on the Hudson River, to Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie. The Hudson River Railroad was built from New York to Albany. The steamship Pacific, of the Collins Line, had broken the record by crossing the Atlantic in nine days and nineteen hours. The glorious yacht America had beaten the British Titania by eight miles in a race of eighty miles.
Kossuth, come as the envoy plenipotentiary of a Hungary ambitious for freedom, was New York’s hero. Lola Montez, the champion heart-breaker of her century, danced hither and yon. The volunteer firemen of New York ran with their engines and broke one another’s heads. The Young Men’s Christian Association, designed to divert youth to gentler practices, was organized, and held its first international convention at Buffalo in 1854. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, of the United States army, was in California, recently the scene of the struggle between outlawry and the Vigilantes, and was not very sure that he liked the life of a soldier.
Messrs. Heenan, Morrissey, and Yankee Sullivan furnished, at frequent intervals, inspiration to American youth. The cholera attacked New York regularly, and as regularly did the Sun print its prescription for cholera medicine, which George W. Busteed, a druggist, had given to Moses Yale Beach in 1849, and which is still in use for the subjugation of inward qualms. The elder Beach, enjoying himself in Europe with his son Joseph Beach, sent articles on French and German life to his son Moses Sperry Beach’s paper.
Literature was still advancing in New England. Persons of refinement were reading Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables,” Ik Marvel’s “Reveries of a Bachelor,” Irving’s “Mahomet,” and Parkman’s “Conspiracy of Pontiac.” Marion Harland had written “Alone.” Down in Kentucky young Mary Jane Holmes was at work on her first novel, “Tempest and Sunshine.” But brows both high and low were bent over the instalments in the National Era of the most fascinating story of the period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
The writing of news had not gone far ahead in quality. Most of the reporters still wrote in a groove a century old. Every chicken-thief who was shot, “clapped his hand to his heart, cried out that he was a dead man, and presently expired.” But the editorial articles were well written. On the Sun John Vance, a brilliant Irishman, was turning out most of the leaders and getting twenty dollars a week. In the Tribune office Greeley pounded rum and slavery, while his chief assistant, Charles A. Dana, did such valuable work on foreign and domestic political articles that his salary grew to the huge figure of fifty dollars a week.
Bennett was working harder than any other newspaper-owner, and was doing big things for the Herald. Southern interests and scandal were his long suits. “We call the Herald a very bad paper,” said Greeley to a Parliamentary committee which was inquiring about American newspapers. He meant that it was naughty; but naughtiness and all, its circulation was only half as big as the Sun’s.
Henry J. Raymond was busy with his new venture, the Times, launched by him and George Jones, the banker. With Raymond were associated editorially Alexander C. Wilson and James W. Simonton. William Cullen Bryant, nearing sixty, still bent “the good grey head that all men knew” over his editor’s desk in the office of the Evening Post. With him, as partner and managing editor, was that other great American, John Bigelow.