When the newspaper was founded, October 28, 1864, the United States was in the throes of its greatest crisis. The nation was fragmented, and the Civil War was raging. Publishers Townsend and Blumenthal threw their support behind the Union and the president, Abraham Lincoln, who was struggling for re-election, by naming the newspaper the Grass Valley Daily Morning Union. That courageous act is memorialized in the newspaper's motto, "Founded in 1864 to preserve the Union--one and inseparable." That act took no small measure of courage because, while California remained part of the Union, Confederate sympathesizers abounded in the gold-mining town …