Daniel Sharp Ford was an American editor, publisher, philanthropist.
Background
His father, Thomas Ford, a native of Coventry, England, came to the United States about 1800. Like his more distinguished son, Thomas Ford was a devout Christian, and a generous helper of the poor and unfortunate.
He died when Daniel was only six months old, and the boy grew up in a family which, though never in actual poverty, had continually to contend with narrow circumstances.
Education
The son had only a common-school education, but he supplemented that with constant reading and careful practise in writing.
Career
He learned the trade of a printer, and was employed first as a compositor and later as a bookkeeper in the office of the Watchman and Reflector, a prosperous weekly Baptist journal, published in Boston.
Before he was thirty he had, with borrowed capital, bought a share in the firm which published this paper, and in 1857 he and his partner, J. W. Olmstead, bought the Youth’s Companion, which had been founded thirty years before by Nathaniel Willis.
Not long afterward the firm dissolved partnership: Olmstead kept the Watchman and Reflector, apparently the more profitable of their publications, and Ford devoted the rest of his life to the editorial and business management of the Youth’s Companion. Therein he displayed very unusual abilities. He took it, as a small Sunday school paper for young children, and gradually developed it into the most popular and successful family journal in the country.
Its circulation grew from seven thousand in 1857 to more than half a million copies at the time of Ford’s death. Carefully avoiding the didactic tone in the stories and articles which he printed, he succeeded in establishing the paper as a powerful influence for high literary and moral standards.
Yet so modest and self-effacing was the editor that the paper was published under the assumed firm-name of Perry Mason & Company, and it is said that his own name never appeared in any part of the paper until the article announcing his death was printed early in 1900.
The six volumes of Series Four were published from 1837 to 1846, and by 1833 three volumes of the Fifth Series had appeared. These nine covered the years 1774-1776.
At that point the work suddenly stopped; Secretary of State Marcy refused to approve Force’s plans for the completion of the undertaking, and no more volumes appeared. Marcy’s decision was a serious blow to Force, and to the cause of historical study in America.
Basing his hope of reimbursement on a definite contract, sanctioned by Congress, Force had gone heavily into debt in order to secure his material.
Now, at the age of sixty, he was faced with actual hardship. He might have sought relief through a petition to Congress, or by judicial process, but this he refused to do. Fortunately his situation was not as bad as it had at first seemed. In compiling the Archives he had procured an extraordinary mass of historical material, much of it extremely rare. Although he was inspired by the collector’s urge to accumulate, he had shown good business judgment in his purchases.
Religion
Ford was always deeply interested in religion and was a generous helper of religious enterprises. For many years he supported the Ruggles Street Church, a Baptist missionary institution in the Roxbury district of Boston, and during the later years of his life he often gave, always unostentatiously, as much as $30, 000 a year to church project involved the publication, in twenty or more folio volumes, of important original materials of American history from the seventeenth century through 1789—official documents of various kinds, legislative records, and private correspondence of special significance.
The work was begun under contract with the Department of State, under authority of an act of Congress.
Views
Quotations:
Ford himself declared in his will that he wished his gift to stimulate the interest of the members of the Social Union “in the welfare of those who are dependent upon the returns from their daily toil for their livelihood, ” adding that the moment demanded closer personal relations between Christian business men and the American workingmen, because of the workingman’s “religious indifference, his feverish unrest and his belief that business men and capital are his enemies. This attitude of mind, ” he concluded, “forbodes serious perils, and Christianity is the only influence that can change or modify them. ”