New York, January 25, 1868.
Beneath this announcement was a farewell message from Moses Sperry Beach to the readers whom he had served for twenty years:
With unreserved confidence in the ability of those who are to continue this work of my life, I lay aside an armor which in these latter years has been too loosely borne.
So Moses S. Beach retired from journalism at forty-five. With the $175,000 paid to him for the Sun, and the profits he had made in his many years of ownership, he was easily rich enough to realize his dream of quiet rural life—a realization that lasted until his death in 1892.
But who was this Dana who was taking up at forty-eight the burden that a younger man was almost wearily laying down?
It is very likely that he was not well known to the readers of the Sun. The newspaper world knew him as one who had been the backbone of Greeley’s Tribune in the turbulent period before the Civil War and for a year after the war was on. The army world knew him as the man who had been chosen by Lincoln and Stanton for important and confidential missions. Students knew him as one of the editors of the “New American Encyclopedia.” By many a fireside his name was familiar as the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry.” Highbrows remembered him as one of the group of geniuses in the Brook Farm colony.
In none of these categories were many of the men who ran with the fire-engines, voted for John Kelly, and bought the Sun. But the Sun was the Sun; it was their paper, and they would have none other; and they would see what this Dana would do with it.
CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA
His Life at Brook Farm and His Tribune Experience.—His Break with Greeley, His Civil War Services and His Chicago Disappointment.—His Purchase of “The Sun.”