Yet Northern poets reassured nervous readers of such reports that “Repulse may do us good, it should not harm; / Where work is to be done, ’tis well to know / Its full extent.” Readers were also reminded that although volunteers were registering for service by state, they would soon enter a national army, where the term of service was now three years, not three months; and that though many officers would continue to be appointed only because of their political or social connections, more and more of them would be appointed because of their army training or experience. The Battle of Bull Run had wakened the North to the work that needed to be done, and now it would go, better prepared, to the war that had already come.
AS LINCOLN REPUTEDLY remarked to the correspondent William Russell, the London Times “is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power—except the Mississippi.” Whether news came fast or slow, whether it urged armies forward or back, whether it praised or blamed or recounted, newsmen were very much part of the war.
Not only was news quickly disseminated by virtue of a steam-powered press and the steam-powered locomotive on which reporters could hop a ride, there was the telegraph. Simon Cameron, the secretary of war, had appointed the young Andrew Carnegie, superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, for Cameron had foreseen in a flash the importance of both railroad and telegraph. Carnegie was commissioned to organize the military railroad and telegraph service. The government also took temporary possession of the American Telegraph Company, and thereby the War Department largely controlled the news. While a battle was in progress, Lincoln practically moved into the War Department’s telegraph office to read the ciphered dispatches and rifle through the drawer in which they were kept.
Telegraph officers had been called to Washington to work for the Union shortly after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, and they were under pressure for the duration of the war. “I have seen a telegraph-operator in a tent in a malarious locality shivering with ague, lying upon his camp cot with his ear near the instrument, listening for messages which might direct or arrest movements of military armies,” Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs would recall. “Night and day they are at their posts.” During the Battle of Bull Run, battle news landed in the government’s War Department telegraph office, sent from the village of Fairfax, Virginia (northeast of Bull Run). Since the telegraph lines did not go much farther south than Fairfax, information had to come first from the couriers who had rushed to the village with their dispatches. So, like many Northerners, Lincoln initially heard glowing reports of the battle; he had known of the delays but not the rout.
News was not belated for long. Soon telegraph operators tapped out messages to the War Department to notify various far-flung troops of one another’s movements. After McClellan took over the command of the army, he wisely oversaw the development of insulated telegraph wire for a Signal Corps to organize communications, whether visual signs (flags and torches) or the electric telegraph. Of course, the telegraph worked for the Confederates too and, in the case of the Battle of Bull Run, better, for they were in close contact with Richmond and knew reinforcements were coming by rail.
When Sumter was bombarded, there was no ready-made apparatus for the gathering and distributing of eyewitness accounts of battles, even though papers such as the Democratic New York Herald had already identified strategic cities to which to send their correspondents. The Tribune posted two dozen men in or near Charleston. Soon every major city sent at least one reporter, called a “special,” into the field. William Russell dressed in Union blue and joined Stedman and Villard. The only “special” correspondent from Boston, writing for the Boston Journal, was the genial Charles Carleton Coffin, grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran, who stuffed a watch, a pocket compass, a pair of binoculars, and several notebooks under his large coat and covered the entire war. And from Pennsylvania came twenty-four-year-old, tight-lipped Uriah Painter, a Quaker, who wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Long on facts, short on description, Painter too had tried to rally the 5th Massachusetts at Manassas but, as he said, “we might as well have pleaded with the winds to stop blowing.”
These were just a few of the correspondents, a motley crew—a “hybrid,” said one of them, “neither a soldier nor a citizen; with the Army, but not of it; present at battles, and often participating in them, yet without any rank or recognized existence.” Scribbling at night by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, men such as George W. Smalley, Whitelaw Reid (later Greeley’s successor at the Tribune), and Samuel Wilkeson of The New York Times were on site, calling themselves the Bohemian Brigade. They wandered wherever the war took them, writing their copy on their knees, often paying their own way or for their own horses, courting danger. At Antietam, Smalley had two horses shot out from under him, his clothes ripped by bullets, and he then rode six hours to Frederick, where he wrote his story in the telegraph office after convincing the operator to transmit it. (Usually the summary of the news, not the longer version, was sent over the wire. In Smalley’s case, the reluctant operator finally relented but didn’t send Smalley’s dispatch to New York, as instructed, but to Washington and the president.) All this happened after General Hooker used Smalley to carry orders to a regiment that seemed to have fallen back. “Unthinkable,” a later commentator said. At Gettysburg, Samuel Wilkeson filed his story soon after learning that his nineteen-year-old son, Bayard, an artillerist, had been “crushed by a shell,” as he wrote, “in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay.”
Correspondents were not always welcome in the field, especially when they were critical of officers or strategy. Tall, slender, and fine-looking, his bright blue eyes darkened with worry, Whitelaw Reid rode with fellow Ohioan general William Rosecrans as his aide-de-camp and later covered the two-day-long action at Shiloh for the Cincinnati Gazette in April 1862, a year after Sumter. But Reid’s controversial allegation that Sherman was insane and that the Union victory had been a near disaster earned him Sherman’s everlasting wrath. To Reid, Shiloh was not an unalloyed success—not because the total casualties (an unimaginable 24,000 dead or wounded) exceeded all losses in all U.S. wars until then but because the Union forces, taken by surprise, had almost bungled it. The battle had begun at sunrise when soldiers were bayoneted in their tents, alleged Reid in a claim as contentious as his suggestion that Union defeats were by and large caused by poor generalship. When the Confederates, yelling frantically, flew into the Union camp, “Many, particularly among our officers, were not yet out of bed,” Reid scoffed. “Others were dressing, others washing, others cooking, a few eating their breakfasts. Many guns were unloaded, accoutrements lying pell-mell.”
Thirty years later, in 1892, Reid ran for vice president on the Republican ticket, but in 1862, General Sherman would have been happy to see him hanged. A bunch of buzzards who undermined the Union war effort with their scurrilous falsehoods, their brainless criticism of strategies they knew nothing of, their leaking of sensitive military information, and their spreading the malicious slander that sold newspapers, said Sherman, reporters were “the most contemptible race of men that existed, cowardly, cringing, hanging around, gathering their material out of the most polluted sources.” General Henry W. Halleck, the commander of all the Union forces, called the press a hive of unauthorized parasites and ordered them (without success) to leave the field. When General Ambrose Burnside suppressed the Democratic Chicago Times for disloyalty, Lincoln had to intervene. In St. Louis, Major Justus McKinstry issued restrictions on the embedded press and briefly muffled the Unionist St. Louis Republican; that earned him little applause, especially in Washington, though in early 1862 Edwin Stanton, who replaced the far more incompetent Simon Cameron in the War Department, consolidated control over the telegraph lines and tried to censor the papers from time to time.
Ironically, Sherman’s attack against the press showed that by the time of Shiloh, the press corps was no longer untested but ready to participate in the war effort as it saw fit—not as so-called objective reporters but as commentators, promoters, magpies, or boosters, depending on what they witnessed and their political point of view. The war hugely increased the profits of James Gordon Bennett’s widely read New York Herald, a Democratic paper that had as many as sixty correspondents and “specials” covering the military. The Democrat William Henry Hurlbert, for one, said that the Battle of Bull Run had been a useless slaughter prompted by the irresponsible breast thumping of newspapers such as Greeley’s (Republican) Tribune and newspapermen such as Greeley. He was not entirely wrong.
The idealistic Junius Henri Browne, who worked for the Tribune (and defended it), declared that a few bad war correspondents shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of the whole profession. The reporter was the crucial link between the military and the public. “The misfortune is,” he said, “that the unworthy, by their assurance, carelessness and lack of principle, give such false impressions of the entire tribe, that I marvel not a most wholesome prejudice exists against them on the part of many officers.” Bitten by mosquitoes, doubled over with hunger, and decimated by disease, the correspondents rode long into the night to catch a train or a steamboat to get back to Washington as fast as they could in the hours before the news bureaus opened. Quick to deliver battle news to their newspapers, even if only a shortened version by telegram, special courier, or pony express before supplying a report far longer, far more descriptive, as if battle news were a serialized novel, they wrote in camp, at night, in the morning, they wrote in ambulance wagons and when half asleep, all to get their news to their readers. But communication could be slow—mercifully so. When Noah Brooks, the Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, wanted to write about troop strength, Lincoln shrugged. “You can send that by letter to California, by and by, if you want. It can’t get back there in time to do any harm.”
As de facto combatants, correspondents were never out of harm’s way. Junius Henri Browne spent nearly two years incarcerated in one Confederate prison after another. He and three other reporters were captured outside Vicksburg in May 1863. (Hearing rumors that they’d been killed, Sherman quipped, “That’s good! We’ll have three dispatches from hell before breakfast.”) But danger and duty and the need for information notwithstanding, war meant commerce. The Northern press was adding morning and evening editions, even “extras,” to feed the public appetite for news about their local men away at war. Already the Tribune’s circulation had reached 200,000. In the Midwest, the Chicago Tribune published 36,000 of just its Battle of Bull Run edition. At the same time, the Associated Press, which had initially consolidated the New York dailies—there were seventeen papers in New York City alone and three in Brooklyn—collected news and dispatched it to far-flung places and also dispatched exclusive bulletins from the White House, which thus controlled some of what was deemed news. Yet readers knew that they were receiving skewed or partial reports. Besides, all newspapers were partisan; everyone knew that. So did Lincoln, who had secretly purchased the Illinois Staats Anzeiger in 1858 to promote Republicanism among German Americans. In his younger days an underpaid and disgruntled reporter for Greeley’s Tribune, Henry Raymond, the conservative founder and editor of The New York Times, had formerly been a Whig member of the New York state legislature and a lieutenant governor, and now he chaired the national Republican Party. Yet Elizabeth Blair Lee, the daughter of the old-time Democratic journalist Francis Preston Blair, loyally declared, “This is the Peoples war & as such the Press is a channel of communication with the people.” Harper’s Weekly put it this way: “News of the War! We all live on it. Few of us but would prefer our newspaper in these times to our breakfast.”
Often Southerners looked more favorably on the war correspondents than Sherman did, praising the “specials” as men possessed of a “personal courage often equal to their conceit, but who do not hesitate to attempt to make or mar the reputation of generals and admirals according to their fancy.” But the situation of the press was different in the South—not in terms of partisan politics but in terms of finances. As time went on, most Southern papers, including the powerful Richmond Examiner, couldn’t afford newsprint, ink, and postal expenses, never mind newfangled printing presses. Often Southern newspapers depended on rumor and hearsay. Yet the accounts of battle, atrocity, hysteria, and hardship were no less graphic than what was printed in the North. And nothing was more gripping, more suspenseful, more cruelly authentic than the rolls of the dead, the wounded, the missing. Men and women lived from edition to edition; the news was breathtaking, unbelievable, and very close at hand. Newspapers had become agents of elation and messengers of grief.
There were pictures, too. They rendered visible a war taking place in one’s very own country: in 1851, Frederick Gleason and Maturin Ballou established one of the United States’ first illustrated papers, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion; in 1854, Graham’s Magazine offered woodcut illustrations based on Brady’s work, and since 1855, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News had been touting pictures to supplement and ultimately supplant the written word. Ditto the New-York Illustrated News (1859) and Harper’s Weekly (1857). After 1861, their circulations surged; posting a sketch-corps at the battlefronts, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News reached an audience of 150,000.
Though the front-page pictures of Harper’s Weekly often displayed wood engravings copied from Mathew Brady ambrotypes (positive images on plates of glass), the magazine was sending its own illustrators into the field. Engravers in New York, who worked in wood, copied the artists’ sketches and then made a metal impression for publication. Sometimes the sketches arrived in New York in a jumble, with just a few illegible notes attached, and what subsequently appeared had nothing to do with what the soldiers had seen or done. “If all the terrific hand-to-hand encounters which we have seen for two or three years displayed in the pages of our popular weeklies had occurred,” said the Army and Navy Journal in 1864, “the combatants on each side would long ago have mutually annihilated each other.”
The irascible Sherman did not like the artists any more than he liked the press. Not only did he typically refuse to pose for his portrait, he also tried to bar artists from tagging along with his men. “You fellows make the best spies that can be bought,” he snapped. Eventually he relented, perhaps after hearing what his friend Ulysses S. Grant had reputedly told the illustrators. “We are the men who make history, but you are the men who perpetuate it.” And, like soldiers, artists were not immune to pneumonia, smallpox, bullet holes, or capture. Leslie’s John F. E. Hillen was caught by the Confederates at Chickamauga, and the ebullient Theodore Davis, who sketched the battle of the Merrimack and Monitor, had his horse shot out from under him at least once and was twice wounded, once at Shiloh and once at Antietam. When the surgeons wanted to amputate his legs, he slept with a pistol under his pillow.
The freelancer Winslow Homer had moved from Boston to New York, where Harper’s Weekly hired him as an engraver and part-time illustrator. During the first year of the war, Homer sketched often for the magazine, and in late 1862 he eerily depicted a sharpshooter on picket duty, sitting on a pine tree branch, his canteen slung on a nearby limb, his long-range rifle aimed to fire, his eye bright. “The above impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service,” Homer would say. War was not faceless to him, and he did not sketch with the candy-box stock types. He showed murder up close, personal, even technological. The sharpshooter’s rifle had a scope.
If technology would change war, with the invention of such weaponry as the Gatling gun, mounted on huge wheels for rapid firing, the minié ball, the torpedo, the underwater mine, and the ironclad warship, it also changed its depiction. This was the first war to be photographed from start to finish
and the first to be photographed by individual entrepreneurs with a mission. For though the Crimean War had had its photographers, particularly Roger Fenton, they had been hired by the British government. In America, ambitious men such as the self-employed Mathew Brady were on the cusp of a remarkable change in the reproduction of war images.
In 1859, in addition to his New York gallery, where Lincoln would be photographed, Brady had opened another studio, Brady’s National Photographic Art Gallery, in Washington, D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. There Walt Whitman met Brady, who was promoting the photograph as history, saying, “How much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians . . . if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits—very accurate—of the men: that would be history—the best history—a history from which there could be no appeal.”
War created that kind of history. After Sumter, soldiers flocked to Brady’s before heading to the front lines. Photographs had superseded daguerreotypes in popularity, and those soldiers wanted to have their photographs taken. Neatly clad in their blue uniforms, their buttons glossy, their coats new, their belts buckled, they walked up three flights of stairs for their sitting. Enlisted men came, generals came. In his full-dress uniform Winfield Scott, at seventy-five years, looks the tired, stern old soldier that he was, a bit pompous, perhaps, but a war hero, having been in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Scott is a decorated soldier, with sword and epaulets, but he seems out of place in a war of sharpshooters, bushwhackers, and appalling carnage.
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