How the Civil War Changed America's Newspapers

As the Civil War changed the face of America, it changed the face of American journalism. Never before had a war been reported so thoroughly, rapidly and graphically.

Harper's Weekly holds a prominent place on the desk of a Union staff officer, in War News, by James M. Sulkowski.  Soldiers were as hungry for news as civilians, and as many as 25,000 copies of a given edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer were sold in army camps.

The Southern people, driven to the wall, have no remedy but that of political independence," reported the New Orleans Daily Crescent on December 17, 1860. "Forbearance has not only ceased to be a virtue, but has become absolute cowardice."

Three days later, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed soon by six other Southern states. In less than four months, the first shots of the Civil War would be fired.

Not only did the Civil War change the lives of millions of Americans, but it changed the face of journalism as well. Even before the war began, the press had played an important role in the seemingly inevitable conflict. Although socioeconomic differences between the North and South and the states' constitutionally mandated rights to secede played major roles in the cause of the war, slavery was the single most divisive issue burning at the heart of the conflict.

It was through the nation's newspapers and magazines that the debate over slavery was brought home to the people both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line in a way that made the sectional differences immediately understandable to the average citizen.

In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and immediately began to speak out against slavery. Garrison insisted that opposition to slavery was more vital than the preservation of the Union, and because the Constitution protected slavery, he burned a copy of it in public, calling the document "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

Garrison channeled his strong beliefs through his press, using it as a platform to preach against the evils of slavery. "I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation," he declared. "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. And I will be heard."

So powerful was Garrison's press that in Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, free black subscribers were forbidden to pick up their copies of The Liberator at the post office. If they were caught doing so, the punishment was 25 lashes.

Many other abolitionists used the press to rally others to fight against slavery. However, this was not always a welcome stance. After the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy was run out of St. Louis, he continued to publish his weekly newspaper, Observer, in Alton, Illinois, and he continued to attack the "peculiar institution." Through his paper, he so adamantly opposed slavery that he was shot and killed by a mob for expressing his views.

Former slave Frederick Douglass also believed that abolition could be achieved through the rhetoric of the press. He edited The North Star in Rochester, New York, for 17 years, with the sole purpose of doing all he could to help bring about an end to slavery. Through his newspaper, Douglass tried to convey the idealistic belief that abolition could be obtained through "moral suasion" alone, without the need for concerted political action.

However, there were two sides to the issue of slavery, as well as other sectional debates, and rivalries were common among the papers. Two prominent New York papers were pitted against each other. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune opposed slavery, while James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald opposed abolitionists and supported secession. Clearly, the opposing factions used the slavery issue to arouse the country's sentiments and draw partisan lines, which, along with the economic differences of the regions, eventually tore the states apart. Once the war escalated, the New York Tribune and The New York Times remained loyal to the North and backed the Lincoln administration. The Herald, however, remained a thorn in the side of the Union. Although the paper claimed political independence, it was markedly sympathetic to the South. When the war began it became obvious that the nation's newspapers would continue to be vital forces in the midst of the conflict, debating the issues as well as attacking one another in print.

Before the war, nearly all the Northern and Southern newspapers used the front page for advertising and saved their editorials and news for the inside pages. As the war escalated, however, war news and editorials moved to the front of the paper, while advertising diminished and was placed in the back. With war news soon becoming the prominent force in selling papers, editors had to find new means of attracting customers in order to compete. One such method was to create larger, more significant headlines. Another method was the development of stronger, more fact-filled openings to stories, which led to the evolution of the classic "lead" for an article.

Since there was an increased demand for news about battles and casualties, papers turned to a variety of sources to gather the latest war news, including the telegraph. Before the war, newspapers printed between two and three columns of telegraph news per day. Soon after the war began, the papers began running between two and three pages of it per day, resulting in many newspaper offices' remaining open until the middle of the night in order to receive and monitor all the transmissions.

Still, the telegraph was not the most dependable method for receiving news from the war front. The lines were poorly insulated; during storms, the frequency became so weak that the messages would not transmit; and poles were often destroyed and knocked down. Therefore, reporters began putting the essential facts at the beginning of their transmission - the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story -  in order to create the lead. That way, if the message broke up in the middle of a transmission, the essential facts would already have been noted. This initiated the evolution of the so-called inverted-pyramid style of newspaper writing. The most important information was written at the beginning of a story, and the least important information followed at the end. This also allowed for the article's ending to be cut, if necessary, for lack of space.

Although technology played a greater part in the reporting of the Civil War than it had during previous conflicts, firsthand accounts from the battlefield were still the staple of the war's coverage. And it was this coverage that made receiving the telegraphed news so important.

The most noteworthy aspect of the Civil War, from a media standpoint, was that for the first time large numbers of reporters and photographers were present on the battlefields. During the Crimean War a few years earlier, war correspondents had been present in limited numbers to view the battlefields. By the Civil War, however, Shiloh, Bull Run, Gettysburg, and all the other major battles were covered by Northern and Southern journalists as the fighting occurred.

There had never been a war in history so thoroughly reported. Reporters were everywhere, and the competition was fierce to be the first paper in print with the latest battlefield account. In order to beat the competition, the larger newspapers built up extensive news organizations with representatives not simply in Washington, DC, and other cities near the war zone, but also in the field and with the fleets. With relays of stenographers, telegraphers and extra printers, these papers also strove to be ready for all emergencies in the home office. On one occasion, the news of a battle reached the New York Herald office at teatime. Twenty engravers were immediately put to work on a map, which they were able to complete in time to make the next morning's edition.

However, many of the smaller newspapers did not have the funds to spend on maintaining the necessary field correspondents to help fill their pages. Instead, they did the next best thing - they subscribed to The Associated Press in New York if they were Union papers, or to the Press Association of the Confederate States of America in Georgia if they were Confederate papers.

During the war, The Associated Press staff of war correspondents outnumbered any of its member newspapers. The Press Association did not have nearly as many correspondents in the field, but it still maintained at least 20 agents scattered throughout the area from the Potomac to the Mississippi.

Such massive coverage was necessary due to the frenzied public demand for up-to-the-minute war news. The fact that newspapers printed casualty reports was a major cause of increased sales. Add firsthand accounts of battles from well-known reporters traveling with the troops, as well as published letters from the men in the field, and it is obvious why a continuous flow of war news was always in such high demand.

Just as Americans tuned in to the television news every night during the Vietnam War to catch a glimpse of that conflict, people during the Civil War religiously bought the newspapers in their hometowns for possible reports on local servicemen. In the October 1, 1862, issue of the Monroe Monitor from Monroe, Michigan, the following was written about the 7^th Michigan Volunteer Infantry: "This regiment suffered severely in the recent fighting in Maryland. It is said that about half of the 500 engaged are killed, wounded or missing. Among the killed are Lieutenant John A. Clark, son of Thos. Clarke, of this city, and probably Capt. Zacharies, son of P.C. Zacharies, Esq., of Ida. Lieut. Col. Baxter, of Jonesville, well known to many of our Monroe people, is among those severely wounded. Company D was made up of Monroe County volunteers, and we find the following report...." The Monitor then listed numerous area soldiers either killed or wounded during recent battles.

To keep up with the flood of daily news, "extra" editions of papers had to be printed. Before the war, some Sunday papers existed but few had any connections to any of the daily newspapers. Many of the dailies neglected to publish on Sunday because such editions were thought to be of little importance. With war at hand, however, people needed to be updated on a more regular basis. Therefore, many dailies began publishing on Sunday, as well as printing multiple extra editions during the week. There were morning, afternoon and sometimes evening editions. Sometimes news from the battlefronts took up as much as one third of an issue.

In order to meet the demand for additional papers, it was inevitable that printing technology would have to improve. To meet the increased demand, publishers bought additional rotary presses containing a larger number of cylinders. In August 1861, the New York Tribune started using the process of stereotyping, which the field of book printing had used for years. Now it was possible to produce from a form of set type a page-sized solid plate of type curved to fit the cylinder. This increased printing speed without adding cylinders to the press. The Times and the Herald soon followed suit. Another development was the web perfecting press, which permitted both sides of a newspaper to be printed from one feeding. The first press of this type was put into use by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1863.

At the beginning of the war, newspapers sold for a penny or two. By 1862, however, the war boom was well underway, and rising production costs were offset by increased profits. Prices for the leading dailies increased by a penny per year. At war's end, many papers sold for 4 and 5 cents a copy, thus ending the era of the penny press. But regardless of the papers' price increases, newspaper circulation grew along with the public's hunger for war news. If a major battle report came over the wires, it was not uncommon for a large city newspaper to sell five times its normal print run. The market for newspapers in army camps was also important. As many as 25,000 copies of a single issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer were frequently sold in the camps, and the story was told that during a lull in the fighting at Antietam, rowdy little newsboys scampered along the lines bearing extras of the New York papers.

Hard news remained the key to sales. The New York Herald realized this fact and kept no fewer than 63 correspondents in the field at anyone time during the war. A representative of the newspaper accompanied each Federal army division, and, in addition, a Herald tent and a Herald wagon went with each army corps.

Sometimes, though, the press could be a problem. For example, Union General William T. Sherman had been bothered by reporters and did not like them around, believing that they were responsible for information leaks. (The fact that some papers reported early in the war that he was crazy did not sit well with Sherman, either.) In a letter to his brother, John, Sherman wrote, "Now, to every army and almost every general a newspaper reporter goes along, filling up our transports, swelling our trains, reporting our progress, guessing at places, picking up dropped expressions, inciting jealousy and discontent, and doing infinite mischief." One journalist, Thomas E. Knox, a reporter for the Herald, incited Sherman's ire when he transmitted information that clearly violated military censorship regulations. Sherman had him arrested and accused him of being a spy. Knox was acquitted of the charge but was expelled from the lines of the Army of the Tennessee and ordered not to return under penalty of imprisonment. The look on Sherman's face convinced Knox that such punishment indeed would be carried out. Eventually the incident set a standard that all correspondents had to be formally accredited, or recognized, journalists, and that they must be acceptable to the commanders in the field.

Although firsthand accounts of the battles were significant to journalism during the Civil War, photographic documentation soon became equally important. Weekly pictorials, such as Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, filled a niche for wartime journalism that the daily newspapers could not meet. Thousands of graphic illustrations provided concrete visual accompaniment for the verbal descriptions that appeared in the dailies.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, spoke for many when he described the photographs taken at the Antietam battlefield for the July 1863 issue. "Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations [referring to photos taken after the battle at Antietam]," Holmes wrote. "It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented....The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries."

Although Holmes' description was an example of the type of war reporting found in the magazines of the time, it also points up the impact of photojournalism during the Civil War. Two of the most famous photographers of the Civil War were Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. Even though photographs first had to be converted to woodcuts to be printed in the papers due to technological limitations, they were still the most notable contribution to pictorial journalism in the 1860s.

The photographic record of the conflict taken by Brady and his 20 associates was one of the finest examples of reporting during the war. Brady had mobilized a force of professional field photographers in 1861 and photographed Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg. Soon, unprecedented pictures of death and destruction were entering American homes and minds. One of the pioneering photographers was Alexander Gardner, an associate of Brady's who managed his Washington gallery while Brady tended his New York gallery. In May 1863, Gardner terminated his association with Brady and opened his own Photographic Gallery in Washington. Along with his resourceful cameramen, Timothy O'Sullivan and James F. Gibson, Gardner was the first to arrive at the Gettysburg battlefield - ahead of Brady.

Thanks to the work of Brady, Gardner and their associates, no other war prior to the 20^th century was as well documented photographically as was the American Civil War. The pressure of competition, however, led to some journalistic faux pas, as well to illustrate the fierce competition among the photographers and the impact the war had on photojournalism, it is useful to examine one falsified photo. The caption reads: "A sharpshooter's last sleep," and was used to describe a famous photo - probably taken by O'Sullivan - after Gardner's cameramen found the body of a young soldier of either the 1^st Texas Volunteer Infantry or the 17^th Georgia Volunteer Infantry dead on the field at Gettysburg. Judging from where the body was found, it is doubtful that the soldier had actually been a Confederate sharpshooter. Instead, according to Gettysburg expert William A. Frassanito, the young man was probably an ordinary infantryman, killed while advancing up the slope.

After photographing the young soldier, Gardner's men moved about 40 yards away and noticed a hastily built stone wall, thrown together by the Confederates, between massive boulders, with a portion of Little Round Top appearing in the distance. Even more important was the fact that this location was in Devil's Den, an area that had been occupied by the Confederates during the fighting at Little Round Top, and thus would have been an ideal post for a Southern sharpshooter.

However, there were no bodies available to complete the potentially historic photograph. Realizing the possibility for such a great photo, the cameramen returned to the young soldier, placed him on a blanket, carried him up the slope and positioned him on the ground. A rifle (not the type typically used by sharpshooters) was propped against the stone wall, and a knapsack was placed under the soldier's head. (Photographers often carried such guns and other accouterments to use as props in order to complete a picture.)

Frassanito proposes that Gardner's crew must have spent about an hour photographing the body for a total of six shots at two different locations. The resulting photograph later appeared in Gardner's two-volume Sketchbook of the Civil War, with a lengthy caption detailing how the soldier was shot and how he "laid himself down to stoically await his end." It went on to become one of the more popular photos from the Battle of Gettysburg, and indeed from the entire war.

The story of the falsified photograph illustrates the fierce competition that existed among Civil War photographers to produce memorable, historically significant pictures. Not only were the photographers concerned with recording the war but they also were concerned with being able to tell a good story with a photo - a maxim of photojournalism to this day. Since reporters and photographers were everywhere during the war, the competition between the newspapers to get the first accounts of the battles was as ferocious as the struggle between photographers who were constantly trying to outdo one another.

The newspapers were somewhat more objective than they had been during the Revolutionary War, when they were little more than colonial broadsides, but they still tried to steer opinion to one side or the other. During the Revolutionary War, papers were definitely used to manipulate or reinforce certain opinions. There were also some accounts of battles, such as that by Isaiah Thomas, co-founder of the Massachusetts Spy, who reported the first battle in the War of Independence.

Objectivity only went so far among Civil War journalists. Usually, the newspapermen wrote the battles' stories in a way that glorified their respective causes. For example, after the Battle of Gettysburg, a reporter for the Richmond Enquirer - who was with Robert E. Lee during his retreat - sent back a softer, more eloquent version of the three-day struggle to "soften the blow to the bereaved at home."

With the advent of photography, journalism evolved beyond mere propaganda. Scenes of carnage on a battlefield, however faked they might sometimes be, carried a visceral impact that no amount of flowery prose could equal. The invention of the newsreel camera later in the 19^th century allowed journalists to record actual battles on film. The newsreel camera evolved into television, which covered the Vietnam War and the war in the Persian Gulf and today continually provides us with up-to-the-minute news. Thanks to Cable News Network (CNN), all any viewer has to do to find out the latest state of the world is to turn on his television, 24 hours a day.

Still, it was Civil War reporting that established so many of the later standard journalistic practices. The New York Times reported on September 25, 1901 (its 50^th anniversary): "It was during the Civil War that the New York newspapers gained their first realizing sense of two fundamental principles that have made them what they are today - first, the surpassing value of individual, competitive, triumphant enterprise in getting early and exclusive news, and second, the possibility of building up large circulations by striving unceasingly to meet a popular demand for prompt and adequate reports of the day-to-day doings of mankind the world over."

Just as the Civil War was a turning point for the nation, so, too, were the reporting methods of the pioneering journalists a turning point in the history of mass media. Never before had a war been this well documented. For the first time in history, journalists realized that the purpose of newspapers was to report the news. Civil War journalism elevated professional standards to a level that would pave the way for modern journalism. From the battlefield to the living room, Americans have never been the same since.

Mark Bergmooser is a freelance journalist in Carleton, Michigan.  For further reading, see J. Cutler Andrew's two studies, The North Reports the Civil War and The South Reports the Civil War.

This article was taken from: Bergmooser, Mark.  “How the War Changed America's Newspapers.” (American’s Civil War, November 1995), 54-61. It is used with permission.

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