Charles A. Dana is best known as the independent editor of The New York Sun from 1868 through 1897, but his principal philosophies and interests were formed during the antebellum period. Dana was a man of contradictions: he was an idealist who insisted on practicality, a humble person whose ego led to damaging encounters with employers, an advocate of education who respected the uneducated masses, and a Republican who edited the most successful Democratic-based newspaper of the 1870s and 1880s. While this periodical--often termed "the newspaperman's newspaper"--is what formed Dana's reputation, according to Janet E. Steele in The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana (1993), the key "to understanding Dana as an intellectual lies in the ideas that he developed at Brook Farm" in the 1840s and "that evolved into the Free Soil crusade of the 1850s."

Charles Anderson Dana was born...