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GREAT MEN'S BODIES
CHARLES A. DANA (1819–1897)
Horace Greeley showed how a man of the right material could, without collegiate or other systematic education, become a great editor, and a great power in the nation, especially in stormy times. Charles A. Dana has shown, with equal clearness, what a man who had such an education—but who earned it himself—could do in the same field. Of a famous family; born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, August 18, 1819; clerk in a store at Buffalo, he fitted himself for college; entered Harvard in 1839; but failing sight kept him from graduating. But he had learned how to use the tools of self-instruction, and he wasted no time. Treasurer of the Brook Farm Community; then connected with the Harbinger; fifteen years with the New York Tribune under Greeley; a great Assistant Secretary of War; and twenty-nine years editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, his fitness for his work, and how well he did it, can be best told by one who saw him do it, and who was exceptionally fit to judge. This is the touching personal tribute paid him at his death by one of our most gifted reviewers, one who knew him intimately:
"There has never lived in the United States a more genuine American than Charles A. Dana. Never has our commonwealth boasted of a citizen who was more deeply impregnated, by birth and education, with the spirit of our institutions, or more thoroughly and fruitfully conversant with their workings and their transformations during the last fifty years. From this point of view he has been, at times, compared with Horace Greeley. It is certain, however, that Mr. Dana's mental training in early life was much more rigorous and stimulative, and that his stores of knowledge were far ampler and more various than those of the elder journalist. Yet Greeley himself was not more purely and unmistakably a product of this country, of its traditions, and of its atmosphere. His stalwart and uncompromising Americanism was the outcome of ante-natal prepossessions as well as of life-long associations. Charles A. Dana was of Puritan stock, and to this fact, doubtless, we should attribute the sturdy reliance on his own conclusions, and the readiness to defy the world on their behalf, which were among his most striking characteristics. He differed from Greeley not only by virtue of a more virile temperament and much greater moral steadiness; but in this significant particular,
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