Background
William Conant Church was born on August 11, 1836, in Rochester, New York. He was the son of Pharcellus, a minister, and Chara Emily (Conant) Church.
William Conant Church was born on August 11, 1836, in Rochester, New York. He was the son of Pharcellus, a minister, and Chara Emily (Conant) Church.
Church attended Rochester Collegiate Institute, the Mayhew School in Boston, and Boston Latin.
Church’s first experience in the field of publishing was when, at the age of nineteen, he joined the staff of the New York Chronicle, founded by his father and his father’s colleague, J. S. Backus. Church soon bought out Backus’s interest in the paper, becoming co-publisher of the religious weekly with his father. Soon, however, Church was ready to move on, and in 1860, he joined the staff of the New York Sun. Prior to Church’s arrival at the Sun, the paper had built a reputation for yellow journalism, but it had recently been purchased by W. C. Conant and Archibald Morrison - both churchly men - who sought to convert the paper to a religious organ. Church was quickly hired on in the capacity of editor and publisher. In fact, however, Church served only as a figurehead - Conant himself performed both those roles, and Church was only his assistant. It was only Conant’s desire for anonymity that placed Church’s name on the masthead.
Church quickly grew disillusioned in his new position. He had deep misgivings about the direction in which Conant and Morrison were taking the paper, arguing that the new policy was attempting to accomplish too much change too quickly and was sure to end in disaster. By mutual agreement, Church embarked on a tour of Europe, contributing pieces as a foreign correspondent, while Conant and Morrison continued in their efforts to rid the Sun of its morally suspect advertisers for tobacco, liquor, and the theater.
While abroad, Church suddenly found himself unemployed - the Sun had folded. He returned to New York in 1861, to take up assignments for the Evening Post, the Sun, and the New York Times. His new journalistic brief was to provide coverage of the Civil War, he filed his stories under the pseudonym “Pierrepont”, which duties he combined with a military commission serving the Union cause. After seeing action in several campaigns, including the Battle of Williamsburg, where he was injured, and two promotions, ultimately to the rank of lieutenant colonel, Church resigned his commission and returned to publishing.
Church had affiliated himself with a group of New York patriots, The Loyal Publication Society, who together founded the Army and Navy Journal (1863), a newspaper dedicated to publishing “tracts, papers, and journals of unquestionable loyalty.” The Society’s goals were in strong accord with Church’s own philosophy, and he quickly became editor of their new Journal. Under his direction, it became the unofficial organ of the United States military establishment, and soon achieved a broad circulation as well as no little prestige. Church brought his brother onto the staff of the Journal at its inception, beginning a professional collaboration with Frank that continued on and off for the rest of the brothers’ lives. Frank left the paper after two years, although William remained its editor until his death in 1917.
In 1866, William and his brother took up a joint enterprise once again. They co-founded the Galaxy, which they hoped would become New York’s answer to Boston’s acclaimed literary journal, the Atlantic Monthly, then the nation’s pre-eminent literary publication. While the Galaxy never attracted the New England literary elite, it attracted the major writing talents of the rest of the country and, according to Ralph Frasca in Dictionary of Literary Biography, “printed history, fiction, science, and topical comment by some of the most prominent authors of the day.” Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Bret Harte were just a few of the luminaries whose works graced the Galaxy’s pages. Mark Twain contributed a regular ten-page column (“Memoranda”) to the journal from May 1870 to March 1871. The Galaxy’s success soon prompted the birth of rivals - Lippincott's Magazine was founded in 1868, and Scribner’s Monthly appeared on the scene two years later. The Galaxy’s strength was in its serialized stories, from Anthony Trollope’s “Claverings” to General George Custer’s “Life on the Plains,” and it soon came to rival the Atlantic Monthly. By the mid-1870s, however, its circulation began to suffer as the field of its competitors grew and its revenues from advertising began to dry up. It closed its doors in 1878, and Churches sold its subscriber list to the Atlantic.
During the Galaxy years, the Church brothers had found the time, in 1870, to found yet another publication, the Internal Revenue Record and Customs Journal, a specialty magazine with a very small circulation. This and the Army and Navy Journal, which as Frasca notes in his essay, “was an assured success virtually devoid of competition and with a weekly circulation of between three thousand and thirty-five hundred,” now consumed the bulk of Church’s time. In 1871, however, William found time to act on another of his causes. Convinced that America’s security depended upon a strong militia skilled in the arts of riflery, he founded the National Rifle Association.
In his later years, Church turned his hand to writing biographies. In 1891, he published The Life of John Ericsson, and in 1897, he brought out The Life of Ulysses S. Grant. These were followed by a history of the post-Civil War years in the South, Reconstruction (1897), and in about 1914, he brought out a slim volume containing reprints of two of his Army and Navy Journal essays.
Church was also one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an original member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion, and became a director and lifetime member of the New York Zoological Society.