During the war Mr. Church and his brother, Francis Pharcellus Church, established the Army and Navy Journal, and in 1866 they founded that brilliant magazine, the Galaxy—later merged with the Atlantic Monthly—which printed the early works of Henry James. Colonel Church owned the Army and Navy Journal, and was its active editor, until his death, May 23, 1917, at the age of eighty-one. He was the biographer and literary executor of John Ericsson, the inventor, and he wrote also a biography of General Grant. He and his brother Francis were the most distinguished members of a family which, in its various branches, gave no less than seventeen persons to literature.
Francis P. Church’s connection with the Sun was longer and more pleasant than William’s. His writings for it ranged over a period of forty years. He was one of the Sun’s greatest editorial writers, and was the author of the most popular editorial article ever written—“Is There a Santa Claus?” But that comes in a later and far more brilliant period than the one in which William C. Church served the Sun all too briefly.
At the end of 1861, what with the expense of getting war news, and perhaps with the reluctance of the readers to absorb piety, the Sun’s cash-drawer began to warp from lack of weight, and Mr. Beach, who had never relinquished his rights to all the physical part of the paper, took it back. This is the way he announced his resumption of control on New Year’s morning, 1862:
Once more I write myself editor and sole proprietor of the New York Sun. My day-dream of rural enjoyment is broken, and I am again prisoner to pen and types. For months I sought to avoid the surrender, but only to find resistance without avail.... But I congratulate myself on my surroundings. Never was prisoner more royally treated.
What, then, to the readers of the Sun? Nothing save the announcement that I am henceforth its publisher and manager. They require no other prospectus, program, or platform.
Moses S. Beach.
John Vance, who is said to have worked twelve years without a vacation, left the Sun about that time because Mr. Beach refused to name him as editor-in-chief. Vance was a good writer, but he and Beach were often at odds over the Sun’s policies. It probably was Vance’s influence that kept the paper in line for Douglas in the Presidential campaign of 1860—a campaign in which the Sun was run for two months by Beach and for three months by the Morrisonites. Vance, in spite of his leaning toward Douglas, was an intimate friend of Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith, who was an Abolitionist and an advocate of universal brotherhood.
On Beach’s return to the Sun he set out to recover its lost advertising and to restore some of the livelier news features that had been suppressed by the Morrison group. Early in the summer of 1862 he began to shift advertising from the front page, to make room for the big war head-lines that had been run on the second page. He also used maps and woodcuts of cities, ships, and generals. The Sun’s pictures of the Monitor and the Merrimac were printed in one column by deftly standing the gallant iron-clads on their sterns.
It was in this summer that Beach reduced expenses and speeded up the issue of the paper by adopting the stereotyping process, one of the greatest advances in newspaper history:
About a week ago we commenced printing the Sun by a new process—that of stereotyping and printing with two presses. We are much gratified to-day in being able to say that the process has proved eminently successful. From this time forth we may expect to present a clean face to our many readers every day. We have completed one stereotype within seventeen minutes and a quarter, and two within nineteen minutes and a half.