W

CHAPTER XX

Newspapers Since 1860

HEN the sudden beginning of the Civil War changed the whole current of national life, the newspapers of the country were in many respects prepared to report and interpret the great event. Had the war been clearly foreseen for a decade, more adequate preparation could hardly have been made to adjust the service to the momentous changes which came so swiftly. Ingenuity and aggressiveness in the gathering of news, the rise and growth of which has been sketched in another chapter,' had quickened the whole profession. The telegraph, which was little more than an experiment when the Mexican War came on, had by 1860 been extended to all parts of the country directly affected by the war. The revolution thereby created in methods of gathering, transmitting, and vending news had been accomplished in the interval of twelve or fifteen years, and journalism was becoming accustomed to the new order. The growing use and expensiveness of the telegraph had already led to the formation of press associations. And at almost the same time the invention of the modern papier maché process of stereotyping, together with improvements in printing presses, removed mechanical obstructions which until 1861 had curbed the production of newspapers. With all these general developments there had been, until a few weeks before hostilities began, little detailed preparation to meet the actual crisis; the press was not on a war footing; there were no experienced war correspondents.

Newspapers had spread over the whole country, flowing into the Central valleys and plains and down the Western slopes See Book II, Chap. XXI.

along with the most enterprising of the early settlers. When Lincoln read his first inaugural, only four states or territories in the Union were without newspapers to report it; twelve years later, not one was without a newspaper to chronicle the defeat and death of the great journalist who sought the Presidency. News style had taken essentially the form still to be found in the more conservative papers of the country; headlines were still inconspicuous, never more than one column wide, and seldom revealing the news they topped. The custom among many papers of sending correspondents throughout the South and the Far West to report conditions and events was now to prove useful preparation for the period when the South became the greatest source of news in the world. Foreign correspondence after its rapid spread in the forties had been somewhat more fully organized, although it was no more ably conducted. The pressure of domestic events led to some neglect of the foreign field, just before and during the war, and it was not until the short Franco-Prussian conflict that European affairs again received much attention from the American press.

Never before was a war so well reported as was the American Civil War-so fully, promptly, and accurately. Although it is generally believed that Englishmen in the Crimea virtually created modern war correspondence, its real beginnings had been made years before by American reporters in the war with Mexico, and the whole system of reporting the progress of war and presenting it fully and promptly to the public was developed very nearly to perfection by American journalistic enterprise in the Civil War. The problems confronting the newspapers when the war began were the greatest ever faced by journalists. The size of country to be covered, the number of armies and of widely separated actions, and the still primitive means of communication tested the valour and ingenuity that sought to overcome them. When the first gun was fired no paper had a system for reporting from the front, though in the weeks before that event several of them had begun to send men to important places by way of precaution. Before Sumter fell, the New York Herald had received enough papers from its correspondents to furnish a roster of the Southern army which convinced the leaders that there was a spy in the Confederate war office, and in a short time after Sumter a net of reporters was spread all

over the South, placed at every important point, and sent with every army. The Herald quickly built a great news-gathering organization, with the Tribune and the Times following as close competitors, while every important paper in the country sent at least one correspondent to Washington or to the front. These men, nearly all inexperienced in their special duties, but called upon to report a more rapid and long-continued series of military movements than had ever before been recorded, not only accomplished a remarkable series of individual achievements but set a new standard in that type of journalism.

The task of organizing such corps of correspondents as were sent out by the Herald, Tribune, and Times, of New York, of discharging the normal functions of the papers, and of supplying the unprecedented demand for newspapers, extraordinary as it was, did not lead to many important advances in journalistic practice. The changes due to the war were mainly economic. In the South, which had depended almost entirely on the North for its supplies, the lack of paper was soon felt and before peace came had caused the suspension of many papers. Many others were suppressed by Northern military authorities. The press of the South, indeed, lost much and gained little or nothing by the war. A rigid government censorship and news bureau deprived those papers even of such opportunities as other circumstances might have permitted. Less enterprise was manifest in news-gathering than in printing official communications and editorials. But it may be said that, although before the war began there was much difference of Southern editorial opinion regarding the advisability of secession, after the decision was made, a united press supported the Confederate authorities.

Censorship in the North was unorganized, spasmodic, sometimes oppressive, and generally ineffectual. The Post Office Department then, as more recently, denied the privilege of the mails to papers adjudged to be treasonable, even to some which criticized the use of force against the seceding states. Correspondents were in some cases welcomed and trusted by the military authorities; in others they were excluded. Early in the war a censor was placed in the telegraph office at Washington; but official oversuppression finally brought about a reaction which led to a more liberal policy. The natural desire of the authorities to prevent the circulation of information that might be useful to

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the enemy, and the nervousness caused by the many Copperhead papers opposed to the war, friendly to the South, or unfriendly to the government, led to much official criticism of mere news enterprise and to acts of suppression by the authorities. For instance General McClellan requested the War Department to suppress the New York Times for printing a map of the works and a statement of forces beyond the Potomac, no part of which had, in fact, come from other than public sources. The New York World and Journal of Commerce were suspended for several days because they unsuspectingly published a bogus presidential proclamation. The Chicago Times, a leading Copperhead paper, was forced to suspend publication for a short time because of disloyal utterances. The strong feeling engendered by the conflict led to many acts of mob violence against newspapers, most of them in smaller towns, and in the aggregate, scores of them were as a result suspended or destroyed, though relatively fewer fatalities resulted than from the earlier acts of violence against the abolitionist press. The most important mob attack on a great city paper was directed against the New York Tribune during the draft riots on 13 July, 1863.

It was not mere editorial arrogance or vanity that James Gordon Bennett displayed when at the outbreak of the war he assured President Lincoln of the support of the New York Herald. Lincoln's subsequent offer of the French mission to the erratic journalist vouches for that. For editorial influence was then at its greatest, and the power wielded by the leaders in the great era of personal journalism-such men as Greeley, Bennett, Bowles, Raymond, Bryant, Schouler-made government by newspapers something more than a phrase. The country was accustomed to a journalistic leadership in which it had faith. Not a few editors felt competent to instruct the government in both political and military affairs, and some undertook to do so, notably Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, to the clamour of which paper is attributed the ill-advised aggression which led to the defeat at Bull Run. Of all the editorials written during the war, Greeley's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," printed in the Tribune on 20 August, 1862, is probably the most significant, not only because it indicates the tone assumed in many papers, but especially because it drew from President Lincoln a reply which defined more clearly than ever before his

position on the question of slavery and made unmistakable the relative positions of President and editor. There is a resemblance between this encounter and an earlier and less public one between Lincoln and Seward, and the two events are not incomparable in importance. After that exchange of ideas the newspapers of the North supported the President more completely than before. As the war progressed, however, the editorial gradually came to occupy a less important place than news, and by the close of the conflict the authority and influence of the great personalities of journalism had appreciably declined.

The war produced one immediate economic change which proved the beginning of a revolution still going on. The great demand for news brought a tremendous increase in circulation to those papers able to furnish the fullest accounts of the war, and contributed to the prosperity of the larger papers at the expense of the smaller ones. Although great numbers of papers were set up to meet the demand for war news, still more suffered extinction, with the result that in many states there were fewer in 1865 than in 1861. In Illinois, for instance, 144 papers were begun, and 155 were discontinued in the four years. Part of the decrease was due to lack of labour, a condition which led to the invention of the "patent insides." Contrived as a means of economy, this device led to important developments in country journalism in later decades by reducing the cost of printing.

Reconstruction was accompanied by still further mechanical improvements in stereotyping and in presses which made possible great growth in the industry. The extension of co-operative news-gathering was rapid after 1865, when the Western Associated Press was formed, largely through the initiative of Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune. This association, co-ordinated with that of New York, greatly broadened the news resources of both Western and Eastern papers. The rapid growth to the West and in the great Central valleys continued, accelerated by a decrease in the price of paper towards the end of the period, as well as by the increase in population. In the South, where the business had suffered most, the dozen years following the war were a time of restoration, as well as of extension. Many of the leading papers had survived-in Louisville, Memphis, Nashville, Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans-and