Newspapers and Magazines
For most of the nineteenth century, newspapers in the United States were heavily partisan. Newspaper editors sat on party central committees, and they tailored their matter to promote a party line. Most of their news was copied directly out of other partisan newspapers, which editors exchanged for free through the mail. A typical editor with 500 or 800 subscribers might exchange with as many as a hundred other newspapers throughout the country, passing on bits of information and opinion from all of them and hoping that they too copied items from his or her paper. This party press system was remarkably open ended. Items could enter from any point, although they had to fit within the boundaries set by the agendas of the major political parties.
One issue that the major parties tried to keep out of the papers was slavery. Because they relied on votes from the South, political parties saw no benefit in even discussing slavery and took sometimes violent action to show their disdain for abolitionism. Canny agitators such as William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator and the best known of the abolitionists, turned this to their advantage. Garrison found that party editors—especially in the South—were eager to exchange newspapers with him so they could copy items they found outrageous. He in turn could show how important his newspaper was by publicizing how often it was copied. He exchanged with as many as 400 publications.
By demonizing its discussion, the party press system helped polarize the nation over the slavery issue. In the South, leading fire-eaters, such as Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, used their newspapers to feed proslavery news items into the national system. Rhett owned the Charleston Mercury, a Democratic newspaper that his son edited.
In the fifteen years before the Civil War, new technologies began to change the press. The telegraph allowed for news to be transmitted instantaneously and created a system of buying and selling news quite different from the traditional sharing of news in the party press. The telegraph also helped centralize the news system in New York City, home to powerful papers like Horace Greeley's Tribune and James Gordon Bennett's Herald. The popularity of photography, which was introduced in 1839, helped promote engraved illustrations in newspapers and newsweeklies such as Harper's and Leslie's. By the mid-1850s, the telegraph and illustrations allowed the entire nation to instantly and simultaneously know and imagine current events. John Brown's face, spread by the illustrated press during the troubles in Kansas, would spring to everyone's mind when the telegraph transmitted news of his Harper's Ferry Raid.
During the Civil War, both the Northern and Southern press played a central role in carrying news and opinion. The news kept people informed. The opinion, which produced a surprising amount of dissent, allowed governments to claim legitimacy by maintaining the habits and appearances of party competition. This was true in both the North and the South but was more pronounced in the North. In the South, print culture was less developed, with fewer newspapers and magazines having smaller circulations, penetrating to a smaller proportion of the population, and featuring less diversity in content and opinion. The Confederate government was also quicker to regulate the press, although Southern editors tended to be more uniform in their loyalty to their government. In the North, a vigorous copperhead press continually challenged the Lincoln administration. Occasionally the government took action against it, and often as elections approached opposition newspapers would be visited by mobs that included soldiers on leave. But the spectacle of interparty conflict remained an important confirmation that the government was legitimate.
Military secrecy was a major concern during the Civil War. No U.S. war has ever produced more eyewitness newspaper accounts—not just accounts from newspaper correspondents who traveled with the armies but also from ordinary soldiers, whose letters home were published in both local newspapers and national weeklies. Inevitably, generals blamed the press for leaking important details to the enemy, and some, including William T. Sherman, developed a real animosity to the correspondents in camp. To counter this hostility, correspondents often trumpeted the virtues of the generals whose armies they accompanied, helping to create cults of personality. Meanwhile, governments North and South took steps to control the telegraph system and censor reports from the armies. This vigorous control of military information contrasts starkly with the period's permissive attitude toward opposition politics.
The Civil War accelerated changes in the news system. The special correspondents of the period, known as the bohemian brigade, are often considered the first professional reporters. The circulation of illustrated papers expanded rapidly. Photographers such as Mathew Brady accompanied the armies, partly to document the war in photographs they hoped to sell later and partly to make money by taking portraits of soldiers for the soldiers to send home. Because of the long exposure times required for photographs then, the images that survive tend to be of posed soldiers, landscapes, and corpses.
After the war, some of the period's changes were incorporated into the news system. The inverted pyramid style, in which the main points of an article are made in the opening paragraph, was adopted from the style of military dispatches. The telegraph system, consolidated under Western Union, allowed the Associated Press to establish a national monopoly as a news provider. The war also reaffirmed the dominance of New York City as the national distributor of news, as well as the powerful position of the largest New York dailies.
Greeley, Horace; Humor, Political; Photography, Civil War.
Bibliography
Andrews, J. Cutler. The North Reports the Civil War. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955.
Andrews, J. Cutler. The South Reports the Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Blondheim, Menahem. "Public Sentiment Is Everything: The Union's Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864." Journal of American History 89 vol. 3 (December 2002): 869–899.
Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Marszalek, John F. Sherman's Other War: The General and the Civil War Press. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1981.
Starr, Louis Morris. Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action. New York: Knopf, 1954.
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