Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/363

Rh gence of the American people that one is led to feel that there was much virtue in the "vice" that so aroused his doleful critics.

Dana was born in New Hampshire in 1819 and, when twelve years of age, went to Buffalo to become a clerk in his uncle's store. Here Indians were sometimes customers and he learned the Seneca language, adding to it Latin and Greek, and later on prepared himself to enter Harvard, which he did in 1839. When he was obliged to leave college he joined the Brook Farm Colony and, to pay his way, taught Greek and German in addition to waiting on the table. He was thus early associated with all that was cultured and scholarly in America and it was through his Brook Farm experiences that he came to know Horace Greeley and to be employed by him in February, 1847, as the city editor of the Tribune, at $10 a week. On the Tribune he soon became an important factor, so much so that credit was given to him for many of the editorials that were commonly ascribed to Greeley. His was the broader culture, and Greeley deferred to it, as is shown by the frequent letters that he wrote to him from Washington when, Dana was acting as managing editor and Greeley was writing on the politics of the nation.

On one occasion Dana, who was much interested in the new Opera House, left Greeley's Washington article out of the paper to make way for his favorite subject. Greeley good-naturedly protested:

"What would it cost to burn the Opera House? If the price is reasonable, have it done and send me the bill."

The campaign in the Tribune for an early movement of the northern troops in 1861 was Dana's, though it was Greeley who had to stand for the pleasant suggestion of Bennett that hanging was too good for the man