New York, May 29, 1850.
Greatest And Best Of
Pikes: I have long desired and designed to write you a letter, and no
doubt you have long expected it; but with me the idea is easy, the execution
difficult. In fact, I intend to petition the extra session of our legislature,
now about to be held, for an elongation of the days and a second pair of hands
in order to come a little nearer what I want to do.
First and foremost, a thousand thanks for your articles, especially
that which I headed “Wanted a Candidate,” and that on “Prospects of Disunion.”
They were great and good, and stirred up the animals, which you as well as I
recognize as one of the great ends of life. The fact is that between you and me
we have bothered the Silver Greys most infernally, and probably shall do so
again.
I suppose you are swearing at the non-appearance of your response
on the banking business; but I have had it in type ever since it got here, with
some most sound, conservative, and elegant remarks from the able pen of one of
the first writers in the country attached, and that every night on leaving the
office I have regularly ordered that that article shall go in on the editorial
page, but that hitherto it has been constantly and persistently and
pertinaciously crowded out by other things. However, I live in hope of printing
it to-morrow. The article on Webster was postponed in consequence of the
Buffalo speech, but it will hit 'em hard in a day or two. That on the Halifax
Railroad I shortened in order to get it in right off, and besides, it is rather
late in the day for such a radical sheet as the Trib. to say by way of
programme that it is going to keep in the golden mean betwixt red and white.
The thing is good to do perhaps, but I don't exactly like to say it along with
the Rochester knocking, and the No-Petticoat Movement. And so you'll forgive
the liberty I took with your Mss. . . . There's no other man I know of whom I
should like so well to come in as an associate in the toils, glories, and
profits of this newspaper, which I reckon to be at the beginning of its career.
I hope we can fetch it about. You will understand that I don't say this by way
of compliment. What I am after is the interest of the paper.
Yours ever truly,
C. A. Dana.
SOURCE: James Shepherd Pike, First Blows of the
Civil War: The Ten Years of Preliminary Conflict in the United States from 1850
to 1860, p. 83
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