Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

"TIHE NEWSPAPER MIAN'S NEWSPAPER" 127
at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets for about
$220,000 more, he was associated with a body of coowners fairly representing the cream of influence in New
York, financial, professional, commercial, social, and political. His list of stockholders included such notables
of the law and of Republican politics as William M.
Evarts, Roscoe Conkling, Edwin D. Morgan, and Alonzo
B. Cornell, besides Thomas Murphy, Grant's close friend
and collector for the port, and George Opdyke, the war
mayor of the city in 1862 and 1863. Dana had with him
in The Sun Printing and Publishing Association such
representatives of large enterprise as Cyrus W. Field of
the Atlantic cable and William H. Webb, the great shipbuilder; such eminent bankers and merchants and publicists as Marshall O. Roberts, Abiel Abbott Low, the
father of Seth Low, Dorman B. Eaton, the father of civilservice reform, David Dows, F. A. Palmer of the Broadway Bank, Amos R. Eno, Elliot C. Cowdin, Theron R.
Butler, John H. Sherwood, and Salem R. Wales. Thomas
Hitchcock, who was to stand with Dana till the latter's
death as the second in ownership, was among the partners
in the two-cent Sun.
Surely, few newspapers, anywhere in the world, have
ever entered the competitive field through the archway
of a brighter rainbow of wealth and influence. To anybody
familiar with the personal and civic values of the New
York of the late Sixties and early Seventies it must have
seemed that the foregoing catalogue, extended by other
names almost as important, left naught for a newspaper
newcomer to desire in the way of assurance of a preferred

status. Nevertheless, the fact is as has been related. The
distinguished backing at the start counted little in The
Sun's subsequent career. In a few years many of the
original proprietors had been alienated by the turn of
the paper against the Grant Administration, a rupture
important in the history of the relations of American