“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.
J. Watson Webb, fiery as ever in spirit, still ran the Courier and Enquirer, “the Austrian organ in Wall Street,” as Raymond called it because of Webb’s hostile attitude toward Kossuth. Webb had been minister to Austria, a post for which Raymond was afterward to be nominated but not confirmed. The newspapers and the people were all pretty well satisfied with themselves. And then Stephen A. Douglas put his foot in it, and Kansas began to bleed.
Douglas had been one of the Sun’s great men, for the Sun listed heavily toward the Democratic party nationally; but it did not disguise its dislike of the Little Giant’s unhappily successful effort to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of squatter sovereignty. After the peace and quiet that had followed the Missouri Compromise, this attempt to bring slavery across the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes by means of a local-option scheme looked to the Sun very much like kicking a sleeping dragon in the face.
After Douglas had been successful in putting his bill through Congress, the Sun still rejected its principles. Commenting on the announcements of certain Missourians that they would take their slaves into the new Territory, the Sun said:
They may certainly take their slaves with them into the new Territory, but when they get them there they will have no law for holding the slaves. Slavery is a creation of local law, and until a Legislature of Kansas or Nebraska enacts a law recognizing slavery, all slaves taken into the Territory will be entitled to their freedom.
It was at this time that the germs of Secession began to show themselves on the culture-plates of the continent. The Sun was hot at the suggestion of a division of the Union:
It can only excite contempt when any irate member of Congress or fanatical newspaper treats the dissolution of the Union as an event which may easily be brought about. There is moral treason in this habit of continually depreciating the value of the Union.
The Sun saw that Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a smashing blow delivered by a Northern Democrat to the Democracy of the North; but the sectional hatred was not revealed in all its intensity until 1856, when Representative Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina, made his murderous attack on Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, in the Senate Chamber. This and its immediate consequences were well covered by the Sun, not only through its Associated Press despatches, but also in special correspondence from its Washington representative, “Hermit.” It had a report nearly a column long of Sumner’s speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” which caused Brooks to assault the great opponent of slavery.
That year was also the year of the first national convention of the Republican party, conceived by the Abolitionists, the Free Soilers, and the Know-nothings, and born in 1854. The Sun had a special reporter at Philadelphia to tell of the nomination of John C. Frémont, but the paper supported Buchanan. Its readers were of a class naturally Democratic, and although the paper was not a party organ, and had no liking for slavery or Secession, the new party was too new, perhaps too much colored with Know-nothingism, to warrant a change of policy.
On the subject of the Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice Taney and handed down two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Sun was blunt:
We believe that the State of New York can confer citizenship on men of whatever race, and that its citizens are entitled, by the Constitution, to be treated in Missouri as citizens of New York State. To treat them otherwise is to discredit our State sovereignty.
John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry was found worthy of a column in the Sun, but space was cramped that morning, for four columns had to be given to a report of the New York firemen’s parade. The firemen read the Sun.
But Mr. Beach sent a special man to report Brown’s trial at Charlestown, Virginia. The editorial columns echoed the sense of the correspondence—that the old man was not having a fair show. Besides, the Sun believed that Brown was insane and belonged in a madhouse rather than on the gallows. It printed a five-thousand-word sermon by Henry Ward Beecher on Brown’s raid. Beecher and the Beaches were very friendly, and there is still in Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, a pulpit made of wood brought from the Mount of Olives by Moses S. Beach.
When John Brown was hanged, December 2, 1859, the Sun remarked:
The chivalry of the Old Dominion will breathe easier now.... But, while Brown cannot be regarded as a common murderer, it is only the wild extravagance of fanatical zeal that will attempt to elevate him to the rank of a martyr.
In the Illinois campaign of 1858 the Sun was slow to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s prowess as a speaker, although Lincoln was then recognized as the leading exponent of Whig doctrine in his State. Referring to the debates between Lincoln and Douglas in their struggle for the Senatorship, the Sun said:
An extraordinary interest is attached by the leading men of all parties to the campaign which Senator Douglas is conducting in the State of Illinois. His rival for the Senatorial nomination, Mr. Lincoln, being no match for the Little Giant in campaign oratory, Senator Trumbull has taken the stump on the Republican side.
Two years later, when Lincoln was nominated for President, the Sun saw him in a somewhat different light:
Mr. Lincoln is an active State politician and a good stump orator. As to the chances of his election, that is a matter upon which we need not at present speculate.
But the time for the Sun to speculate came only three days later (May 22, 1860), when it frankly stated:
It is now admitted that Mr. Lincoln’s nomination is a strong one.... He is, emphatically, a man of the people.... That he would, if elected, make a good President, we do not entertain a doubt. His chances of election are certainly good. The people are tired of being ruled by professional politicians.
That was written before the Democratic national convention. The Sun wanted the Democrats to nominate Sam Houston. It saw that Douglas had estranged the anti-slavery Democrats of the North. When Douglas was nominated, the Sun remarked:
Of the six candidates in the field—Lincoln, Bell, Houston, Douglas, Breckinridge, and Gerrit Smith—Lincoln has unquestionably the best chance of an election by the people.
The Sun had no illusions as to the candidacy of John C. Breckinridge, the Vice-President under Buchanan, when he was nominated for President by the Democrats of the South, who refused to flock to the colours of Douglas:
The secessionists do not expect that Breckinridge will be elected. Should Lincoln and Hamlin be elected by the votes of the free States, then the design of the conspirators is to come out openly for a disruption of the Union and the erection of a Southern confederacy.
“The Union cannot be dissolved,” the Sun declared on August 4, “whosoever shall be elected President!”
And on the morning of Election Day the Sun, which had taken little part except to criticise the conduct of the Democratic campaign, said prophetically: “History turns a leaf to-day.” Its comment on the morning after the election was characteristic of its attitude during the canvass:
Mr. Lincoln appears to have been elected, and yet the country is safe.
In a paragraph of political gossip printed a week later the Sun said that Horace Greeley could have the collectorship of the port of New York if he resigned his claims to a seat in the Cabinet, and that—
For the postmastership Charles A. Dana of the Tribune, Daniel Ullman, Thomas B. Stillman, and Armor J. Williamson are named. Either Mr. Dana or Mr. Williamson would fill the office creditably.
That was probably the first time that Charles A. Dana got his name into the Sun.
Although unqualifiedly opposed to Secession, the Sun did not believe that military coercion was the best way to prevent it. It saw the temper of South Carolina and other Southern States, but thought that it saw, too, a diplomatic way of curing the disorder. South Carolina, it said, had a greater capacity for indignation than any other political body in the world. Here was the way to stop its wrath:
Open the door of the Union for a free and inglorious egress, and you dry up the machine in an instant.
This was somewhat on a plane with Horace Greeley’s advice in the Tribune—“Let the erring sisters go in peace.” The Sun, however, was more Machiavellian:
Our proposition is that the Constitution be so amended as to permit any State, within a limited period, and upon her surrender of her share in the Federal property, to retire from the confederacy [the Union] in peace. It is a plan to emasculate Secession by depriving it of its present stimulating illegality. Does any one suppose that even South Carolina would withdraw from the Union if her withdrawal were normal?
This was printed on December 8, 1860, some weeks before the fate of the Crittenden Compromise, beaten by Southern votes, showed beyond doubt that the South actually preferred disunion.
With mingled grief and indignation the Sun watched the Southern States march out of the Union. It poured its wrath on the head of the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, when that peculiar statesman suggested, on January 7, 1861, that New York City should also secede. “Why may not New York disrupt the bonds which bind her to a venal and corrupt master?” Wood had inquired.
The Sun had more faith in Lincoln than most of its Democratic contemporaries exhibited. Of his inaugural speech it said:
There is a manly sincerity, geniality, and strength to be felt in the whole address.
The day after the fall of Fort Sumter the Sun found a moment to turn on the South-loving Herald:
We state only what the proprietor of the Herald undoubtedly believes when we say that if the national ensign had not been hung out yesterday from its windows, as a concession to the gathering crowd, the issue of that paper for another day would have been more than doubtful.
Shortly afterward the Sun charged that the Herald had had in its office a full set of Confederate colours, “ready to fling to the breeze of treason which it and the mayor hoped to raise in this city.” Later in the same year the Sun accused the Daily News and the Staats-Zeitung of disloyalty, and intimated that the Journal of Commerce and the Express were not what they should be. The owner of the Daily News was Ben Wood, a brother of Fernando Wood. In its youth the News had been a newspaper of considerable distinction. It was an offshoot of the Evening Post, and one of its first editors was Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant. Another of its early editors was Samuel J. Tilden.
Wood, who was a Kentuckian by birth, made the News a Tammany organ and used it to get himself elected to Congress, where he served as a Representative from 1861 to 1865, constantly opposing the continuation of the war. The Sun’s accusation of disloyalty against the News was echoed in Washington, and for eighteen months, early in the war, the News was suppressed. The Staats-Zeitung, also included in the Sun’s suspicion, was then owned by Oswald Ottendorfer, who had come into possession of the great German daily in 1859, by his marriage to Mrs. Jacob Uhl, widow of the man who established it as a daily.
Presence in the ranks of the copperhead journalists was disastrous to the owner of the Journal of Commerce, Gerard Hallock, who had been one of the great figures of American journalism for thirty years. In the decade before the war Hallock bought and liberated at least a hundred slaves, and paid for their transportation to Liberia; yet he was one of the most uncompromising supporters of a national proslavery policy. When the American Home Missionary Society withdrew its support from slave-holding churches in the South, Hallock was one of the founders of the Southern Aid Society, designed to take its place.
In August, 1861, the Journal of Commerce was one of several newspapers presented by the grand jury of the United States Circuit Court for “encouraging rebels now in arms against the Federal government, by expressing sympathy and agreement with them.” Hallock’s paper was forbidden the use of the mails. He sold his interest in the Journal of Commerce, retired from business, never wrote another line for publication, and died four years later.
Another contemporary of the Sun which suffered during the war was the World, then a very young paper. It had first appeared in June, 1860, as a highly moral daily sheet. Its express purpose was to give all the news that it thought the public ought to have. This meant that it intended to exclude from its staid columns all thrilling police reports, slander suits, divorce cases, and details of murders. It refused to print theatrical advertising.
The World had a fast printing-press and obtained an Associated Press franchise. It hired some good men, including Alexander Cummings, who had made his mark on the Philadelphia North American, James R. Spalding, who had been with Raymond on the Courier and Enquirer, and Manton Marble. But the World, stripped of lively human news, was a failure. After two hundred thousand dollars had been sunk in a footless enterprise, the religious coterie retired, and left the World to the worldly.
Its later owners were variously reported to be August Belmont, Fernando Wood, and Benjamin Wood; but it finally passed entirely into the hands of Manton Marble, who made it a free-trade Democratic organ. Marble had learned the newspaper business on the Journal and the Traveler in Boston, and in 1858 and 1859 he was on the staff of the Evening Post. In July, 1861, the World and the Courier and Enquirer were consolidated, and Colonel J. Watson Webb, who had owned and edited the latter paper for thirty-four years, retired from newspaper life.
During the Civil War the World was strongly opposed to President Lincoln’s administration. Perhaps this fact accounts for the punishment which befell it through the misdeed of an outsider.
In May, 1864, there was sent to most of the morning-newspaper offices what purported to be a proclamation by the President, appointing a day of fasting and prayer, and calling into military service, by volunteering and draft, four hundred thousand additional troops. This was a fake, engineered by Joseph Howard, Jr., a newspaperman who had been employed on the Tribune, and who put out the hoax for the purpose of influencing the stock-market. The Sun, the Tribune, and the Times did not fall for the hoax, but the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce printed it, stopping their presses when they learned the truth.
General John A. Dix seized the offices of the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce, put soldiers to guard them, and suppressed the papers for several days—all this by order of the President. Howard, the forger, was arrested, and on his confession was sent to Fort Lafayette, where he was a prisoner for several weeks. Manton Marble wrote a bitter letter to Lincoln in protest against what he considered an outrage on the World. Marble remained at the head of the paper until 1876.
The Sun took the setback of Bull Run with better grace than most of the papers—far better than Horace Greeley, who yelled for a truce. It seemed to see that this was only the beginning of a long conflict, which must be fought to the end, regardless of disappointments. On August 15, 1861, it declared:
Let there be but one war. Better it should cost millions of lives than that we should live in hourly dread of wars, contiguous to a people who could make foreign alliances and land armies upon our shores to destroy our liberties.
On the subject of the war’s cost it said:
No more talk of carrying on the war economically! The only economy is to make short and swift work of it, and the people are ready to bear the expense, if it were five hundred millions of dollars, to-day.
This was printed when the war was very young; when no man dreamed that it would cost the Federal government six times five hundred millions.
The Sun’s editorial articles were not without criticism of the conduct of the war. It was one of the many papers that demanded the resignation of Seward at a time when the Secretary of State was generally blamed for what seemed to be the dilly-dallying of the government. Lincoln himself was still regarded as a politician as well as a statesman—a view which was reflected in the Sun’s comment on the preliminary proclamation of emancipation, September 22, 1862:
As the greatest and most momentous act of our nation, from its foundation to the present time, we would rather have seen this step disconnected from all lesser considerations and from party influences.
The inference in this was that Lincoln had deliberately made his great stroke on the eve of the Republican State convention in New York.
The Tribune declared that the proclamation was “the beginning of the end of the rebellion.” “The wisdom of the step is unquestionable,” said the Times; “its necessity indisputable.” The businesslike Herald remarked that it inaugurated “an overwhelming revolution in the system of labour.” The World said that it regretted the proclamation and doubted the President’s power to free the slaves. “We regard it with profound regret,” said the Journal of Commerce. “It is usurpation of power!” shouted the Staats-Zeitung.
Such was the general tone of the New York morning newspapers during the war. Only three—the Sun, the Tribune, and the Times—could be described as out-and-out loyalists. The Sun was for backing up Lincoln whenever it believed him right, and that was most of the time; yet it was free in its criticism of various phases of the conduct of the war.
Like most of the Democrats of New York, the Sun was an admirer of General McClellan, and it believed that his removal from the command of the army was due to politics. But when the election of 1864 came around, the Sun refused to join its party contemporaries in wild abuse of Lincoln and Johnson. On the morning after the Republican nominations it said:
It is no time to quarrel with those men who honestly wish to crush the rebellion on the ground that they have nominated a rail-splitter and a tailor. It would be more consistent with true democracy if these men were honored for rising from an humble sphere.
The Sun supported McClellan, praising him for his repudiation of the plank in the Democratic platform which declared the war a failure; but in the last days of the campaign it was frank in its predictions that Lincoln would be elected. On the morning after election it had this to say:
The reelection of Abraham Lincoln announces to the world how firmly we have resolved to be a free and united people.
After the assassination of President Lincoln the Sun said:
In the death of Mr. Lincoln the Southern people have lost one of the best friends they had at the North. He would have treated them with more gentleness than any other statesman. From him they would have obtained concessions it is now almost impossible for our rulers and people to grant.
The Sun’s attitude toward the copperheads and deluded pacifists of the North is reflected in an editorial article published on June 5, 1863. The North was then in its worst panic. Only a month previously Lee had defeated Hooker at Chancellorsville, and the victorious Confederates were marching through Maryland into Pennsylvania. At a mass-meeting in Cooper Union, George Francis Train and other copperheads denounced the war, praised Vallandigham, of Ohio, who had been banished into the South for his unpatriotic conduct, and declared for “peace and reunion.” It was largely a Democratic meeting, but the Sun would not stomach the disloyal outburst:
The fact that over ten thousand people assembled in and about Cooper Union on Thursday evening to listen to speeches and adopt an address and resolutions prepared under that “eye single to the public welfare,” discloses the ease with which a few political tricksters may present false issues to the unthinking and, in the excitement of the moment, induce their hearers to applaud sentiments that, when calmly considered, are unworthy of a great and free people. Taking advantage of the blunders of the present administration, these self-styled Democrats raise their banners and, under the guise of proclaiming peace, in reality proclaim a war upon those very principles it is the highest boast of every true Democrat to acknowledge.
The Democratic party is essentially the peace party of the present rebellion; but it will sanction no peace that is obtained by compromising the vital principles that give force to our form of government. They will not ask for peace at the expense of the Union, and desire no Democratic victories that do not legitimately belong to them as an expression of the confidence of the people in their fidelity to the Union and the Constitution.
The late meeting, then, should not be sanctioned by any true Democrat. It was in no sense Democratic; it was in reality an opposition meeting, and only as such will it be looked upon as having any important bearing upon the great questions of the hour, and if rightly interpreted by the administration will exert no evil influence upon the future destinies of this great nation.
The methods of gathering war news, early in the conflict, were haphazard. The first reports to reach New York from Southern fields were usually the government bulletins, but they were not as trustworthy as the official bulletins of the European war.
On the morning after the first battle of Bull Run, the Sun’s readers were treated to joyous head-lines:
A GREAT BATTLE—SEVENTY THOUSAND REBELS IN IT—OUR ARMY VICTORIOUS—GREAT LOSS OF LIFE—TWELVE HOURS’ FIGHTING—RETREAT OF THE REBELS—UNITED STATES FORCES PRESSING FORWARD.
But on the following morning the tune changed:
RETREAT OF OUR TROOPS—OUR ARMY SCATTERED—ONLY TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND UNION TROOPS ENGAGED—ENEMY NINETY THOUSAND STRONG—OUR CANNON LEFT BEHIND.
As a matter of fact, only about eighteen thousand troops were engaged on each side.
The Sun had no famous correspondents at the front. It sent three reporters to Virginia in 1861, and these sent mail stories and some telegraph matter, which was of value in supplementing the official bulletins, the Associated Press service, the specials from “Nemo” and “Hermit,” the Sun correspondents in Washington, and the matter rewritten from the Philadelphia and Western newspapers.
The Sun was still a local paper, with a constituency hungry for news of the men of the New York regiments. To the Sun readers the doings of General Meagher, of the Irish Brigade, or Colonel Michael Corcoran, of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, were more important than the strategic details of a large campaign.
The Sun, like all the Northern papers, was frequently deceived by false reports of Union victories. Federal troops were in Fredericksburg—on the front page—weeks before they were in it in reality; in Richmond, years too soon. But there was no doubt about Gettysburg, although the North did not get the news until the 5th of July. The Sun came out on Monday, the 6th, with these head-lines:
VICTORY!—INVASION COMES TO GRIEF—LEE UTTERLY ROUTED—HIS DISASTROUS RETREAT—ALL FEDERAL PRISONERS RECAPT