John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[2] is of absolutely pure New England blood. A study of its genealogy shows that practically every ramification of it has its American root in the earliest immigration of the colonists, a fact that well accounts for Dana's character as one of the most intense Americans, one of the most stalwart believers in the American people, and one of the most devoted partisans of American institutions that the country has produced. While the family records show but little of unusual distinction, they are filled with the names of serious men and women of all occupations and callings. In common with their neighbors, some were farmers, some mechanics, some merchants, some soldiers, and some sailors, with here and there an author, professor, lawyer, doctor, general, judge, legislator, and even a governor. While they were mostly plain and unpretentious people, they seem to have been always abreast of the times in native intelligence, industry, scholarship, courage, and public spirit. Susanna Huntington, the great-grandmother, and Ann Denison, the mother of Charles, were women of unusual character and worth, to whom the family immediately connected with the subject of this memoir freely confess their obligation for much of whatever superiority of character or intellect its most favored members may be thought to possess.

Charles Anderson Dana was born August 8, 1819, at Hinsdale, a small town in western New Hampshire. His father was at that time a merchant in a modest way, but failed in business when his eldest son was only a few years old. This misfortune was followed shortly by the removal of the family to the village of Gaines in western New York. Here the father had charge of a warehouse on the banks of the Erie Canal for a while, but soon gave it up to cultivate a small farm which he had bought near by. But misfortune still followed the family. Nearly the whole fell sick of the ague, at that time the scourge of every new