McDowell directed this particular witticism to one of the most gifted—but ultimately one of the most despised—battlefield correspondents of the entire Civil War: William Howard Russell of the London Times. Russell not only reported the Union defeat; he all but shouldered the blame for it. As it turned out, his painful experiences here would establish benchmarks for access by—and limits on—all the journalists who went on to cover the conflict.
Russell had no idea what obstacles awaited him when he crossed the ocean for America. A friend of Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray, the plump, flamboyant, and supremely confident Russell was already the most celebrated journalist in the world, having earned global fame covering the Crimean War. For the seven years before his arrival, most reports from America had been supplied to the London Times by a New York lawyer named J. C. Bancroft Davis, nephew of historian George Bancroft. For a time, young Davis’s antislavery views seemed to dovetail perfectly with his paper’s 1860 editorial declaration: “If we have paid a sincere homage to the rising greatness of America, it has not been to that which the Southerners are so anxious to conserve but that which they are striving to destroy.”60
The London Times was avidly read on both sides of the Atlantic even though its editions were nearly two weeks old by the time they reached the United States (and American news equally outdated by the time it got to England). By early 1861, the world’s most influential daily apparently decided it could no longer rely on a partisan American to supply it with American news, especially after London-based managing editor Mowbray Morris concluded that Lincoln’s alleged early timidity called to mind “Pontius Pilate—washing his hands of the affair and leaving both action and responsibility to whoever chose to take them.” Now Lincoln had become a dictator, Morris informed Davis, and “ought to be whipt down the steps of the great house at Washington.” When his American correspondent failed to adjust his coverage accordingly, Morris decided that his readers deserved a new reporter, as he bluntly advised Davis, “who has not been mixed up with your domestic politics, and whose sympathies are not engaged in the struggle now going on.” In mid-March, Bancroft Davis dutifully took himself to the Manhattan docks to greet his paper’s new war correspondent. Enter William Howard Russell.61
Russell spent a few heady days in New York, where he made the acquaintance of American journalists like Henry Raymond, Herbert Bayard Taylor, Greeley’s top deputy Charles Dana, and some nameless person whom the anti-Semitic Englishman dismissed as a “clever & humorous . . . Jew ed[ito]r.”62 Russell failed, however, to conquer the city as easily as he expected. Charging that “shrewd as he is,” the new arrival had fallen in with “a knot of practical jokers,” Horace Greeley objected when one of Russell’s early dispatches maintained that “New York would do anything rather than fight.” Should he remain “perverted in favor of a bad cause,” Greeley railed, Russell’s future reports were “sure to recoil upon himself, and to lose him the esteem in which he is so generally held.”63 Nonetheless, when Russell moved on to Washington, Secretary of State Seward greeted him like a visiting potentate, promptly inviting him to the White House to meet President Lincoln at a diplomatic reception. There, the Englishman caught his first glimpse of the “tall, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded by his feet.”64
“He was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black,” Russell observed, “which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral.” Above a “sinewy muscular yellow neck” adorned with “a rope of black silk . . . knotted in a large bulb” rose “a great black mass of hair, bristling and compact like a riff of mourning pins.” In Russell’s perceptive view: “A person who met Mr. Lincoln in the street would not take him to be what—according to the usages of European society—is called a ‘gentleman’ . . . but at the same time, it would not be possible for the most indifferent observer to pass him in the street without notice.”65
“Mr. Seward then took me by the hand,” Russell attested, led him over to Lincoln, “and said—‘Mr. President, allow me to present to you Mr. Russell of the London Times.’ On which Mr. Lincoln put out his hand in a very friendly manner, and said, ‘Mr. Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. 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 perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister.’ ” Lincoln enlivened their subsequent conversation with “two or three peculiar little sallies,” and Russell went away “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humour, and natural sagacity.”66
The very next day, Mary Lincoln invited Russell back to the White House for dinner, where the journalist heard the president tell another funny story, this time about a drunken Irishman. Later he met General Winfield Scott (who drank warm claret, seemingly oblivious to a serenade blaring outside his window).67 Even with the doors of official Washington thrown open to him, however, Russell could not resist irreverence. He confided to his diary that the overdressed Mrs. Lincoln looked “preposterous.” And when Russell posed for his own photograph adorned with the customary American copyright declaration—“Entered by Mathew Brady According to an Act of Congress”—he invented the lascivious tale that when the rustic president was shown a similarly stamped Brady image of his wife, he protested: “I really cant stand this. I wont have Mrs. Lincoln ‘entered by Brady’ according to an act of Congress or not.”68
Following a hastily arranged fact-finding tour of the South, where Russell recoiled at the horrors of slavery, the correspondent returned to the federal capital, secured a horse and rig, and then joined his American counterparts at Manassas. There he, too, witnessed the Union rout, later contending, “had I been able to file a despatch that night I would have stated that McDowell had been repulsed and that a panic had ensued among a portion of his troops.”69 Yet in the vivid report he ultimately did transmit, Russell stated precisely that and more, describing hysterical Union soldiers crying out “with the most vehement gestures, ‘Turn back! turn back! we are whipped!’ ” Russell painted a portrait of leaderless amateurs fleeing in fear and confusion over ground “strewed with coats, blankets, fire-locks, cooking tins, caps, belts, bayonets,” all asking “where General McDowell was.”70 Russell cautioned his London editors to publish his damning observations alongside a factual account of the battle, but the Times ignored him and ran his critique alone.
Though he added fuel to the fire by reporting over the next two days on the “unseemly and disgraceful” conduct of the defeated Union troops back in Washington (“streets were thronged with disorderly soldiers congregated round the drinking saloons”), Russell later acknowledged that authorities quickly restored order there, instilling a new determination that seemed “deeper than that which had taken place when the North was aroused by the echoes of the bombardment of Sumter.”71
The praise proved too little, too late, even after Lincoln appeared to place the blame for Bull Run and its aftermath where it belonged by relieving McDowell of command. When the “latest,” already outdated, copies of the London Times—bearing Russell’s unflinching account—arrived in the United States by ship a few weeks later, many readers concluded that the correspondent had done more than simply chronicle the battle. Perhaps in an insidious attempt to encourage British recognition of the Confederacy, critics charged, he had exaggerated his mortifying charge that Union troops behaved shamefully under fire, and that trained officers proved helpless to rally them. Anglophobe James Gordon Bennett responded by branding Russell a “snob correspondent” whose “sole pride and vocation” was to “deride, sneer at, and vilify everything and everybody.” In the resulting furor, Russell, almost as much as the Union high command, bore the brunt of public outrage, so much so that his editor worried that “some enraged patriot will shoot him through the head for telling disagreeable truths.”72 Fanning the f
lames, Count Adam Gurowski, a Washington gadfly who made his living by translating European newspapers for the State Department, whispered that “over a glass of whiskey,” Russell actually boasted “that the Times intended to destroy the Union!” Stung, the correspondent protested, “I never drank a glass of whiskey or anything with him in my life,” but his answer failed to appease detractors.73
London Times American reporter William Howard “Bull Run” Russell, the most famous war correspondent in the world.
Russell took the mounting criticism seriously, though he also basked in the resulting attention. “There is every chance of my being the best abused man in the U.S., and that means the world,” he boasted in the August 22 edition of the London Times, “for telling the truth as I see it.”74 The most famous war correspondent on the planet soon acquired a derisive and unshakable new nickname: “Bull Run Russell.” Although Horace Greeley offered that “it was not too late for Mr. Russell to write something about this country worthy of his better genius,” the “Forward to Richmond” crowd had found in the London Times correspondent an ideal scapegoat for a Union military failure that Russell had merely reported.75 Forgotten in the ruckus was that Greeley himself had dispiritedly called Bull Run “the shipwreck of our grand and heroic army.”76
General William Tecumseh Sherman, who helped contain the Union panic at Bull Run but loathed all journalists, foreign and domestic, confided to his wife that the correspondents who shied away from acknowledging the chaos that reigned at Manassas lacked the “moral courage to tell the truth.”77 Truth, however, was not what Northern readers wanted to hear after the federal catastrophe. It might be said that no other battle of the Civil War—certainly no loss—ever aroused as much emotional uproar as Bull Run. Antiwar newspapers would soon learn this bitter lesson for themselves.
For a time, Russell’s fellow British journalist, Edward Dicey of the Spectator, tried defending his compatriot. Dicey complained that with “utter unscrupulousness,” Bennett’s New York Herald in particular made Russell “the object of the most rancorous abuse . . . partly, because he had given personal offense to the editor, by declining his invitations; still more, because he had given offence to the American public.”78 (Bennett had urged that Russell be “belched forth from the community”; in turn, Russell judged Bennett “so palpably a rogue—it comes out so strongly in the air around him, in his eyes & words & smell & voice that one pities the cause which finds him a protagonist.”) Jealousy from American reporters was perhaps inevitable, but at least one fellow English correspondent, Frederick Edge of the London Morning Star, contradicted Russell, too, insisting that he had witnessed Union “heroism” at Bull Run. Russell dismissed Edge as a “revolting mucus.”79
It was no small accomplishment for any journalist to become persona non grata in America; even the unscrupulous and unlikable Bennett had long maintained his power and curious appeal. Russell, however, somehow managed to evolve into a pariah, for which he bore no small share of the blame, at least according to Ben Perley Poore. For one thing, except for pro-Confederate English illustrator Frank Vizetelly, whom he befriended, Russell did too little to win admirers among his fellow journalists. He privately assailed the Chicago Tribune over its “ludicrous” accounts of his activities, dismissing editor Charles Ray as “a fat elderly man” who “saw nothing of what I saw!” He stirred resentment by using his expense account to host ostentatious “supper parties,” and his leisure time to stage “private theatricals.” Then he feuded with Harper’s Weekly, insisting he had never authorized its artist Theodore Davis to travel with him into the South (where the New York pictorial weekly was considered toxic).80 Thereafter Russell grandly resolved “to have no words with any representatives of the local press as the falsehoods & misrepresentations which are the certain results are monstrous.”
Although Russell thought New York Tribune correspondent Edward House “a nice fellow,” he continued to arouse the enmity of House’s boss, Horace Greeley, largely because Russell simply failed to comprehend the fact that slavery had caused the war, and instead clung to what Greeley labeled “the mistaken idea prevailing in England concerning the nature of the present American difficulties.” Rather than offer an olive branch, Russell huffed to London Times editor-in-chief John T. Delane: “Horace Greeley is the nastiest form of narrow minded sectarian philanthropy, who would gladly roast all the whites of South Carolina in order that he might satisfy what he supposes is a conscience but which is only an autocratic ambition which revels in the idea of separation of the South as the best recognition of its power.”81
Among American editors, Henry Raymond stood virtually alone in commending Russell for giving “a clear, fair, and perfectly just and accurate, as it is spirited and graphic, account of the extraordinary scenes which passed under his observation. Discreditable as those scenes were to our Army,” Raymond admitted, “we have nothing in connection with them, whereof to accuse the reporter. He has done justice alike to himself, his subject, and the country.”82 Raymond’s voice was worth more than most on this matter, for he had witnessed Bull Run himself. On the subject of William Howard Russell, however, even the New York Times proved without influence.
Within the Lincoln administration, only the crafty secretary of war, Simon Cameron, seemed willing to forgive Russell and continue confiding in him. Reminiscing with the reporter one evening—no doubt over alcoholic refreshments—about his own start as a newspaper “printer . . . at 10 d[olla]rs. a week” back in Pennsylvania, Cameron shared a fact of American life that the London correspondent should already have absorbed. It fell on deaf ears. “He says the press rules America,” Russell noted. “I dont think it does[.] I’m certain it oughtn’t.”83 A few months later, under a barrage of escalating press criticism over allegations of ineptitude and corruption, Cameron himself would prove the point by losing his job. In January 1862, Lincoln replaced him as secretary of war and exiled him to distant St. Petersburg as American minister to Russia.
• • •
Henry Raymond filed his own initial report from the Manassas vicinity after a preliminary skirmish on July 18, writing in the first person, as any celebrity editor might. With an eye on his local readership, he focused at first on New York regiments whose families would surely crave reports about their activities at the front. (“I went out with the centre column. . . . The Sixty-ninth Regiments of New-York were thrown to the right,” went one such report.84) Like other reporters covering the first battle of the Civil War, Raymond sought no advance information from the Union high command, and used no sources to confirm or deny rumors. And although he owned a great city newspaper, he was no less reliant than his fellow journalists on the telegraph for transmitting dispatches to his paper. In this case, the nearest telegraph operated out of Washington, hours from the front, but Raymond had brought a “runner” with him to carry his stories to the capital, where they could be transmitted to New York.
Hoping to make the first edition of the next morning’s paper when the real battle began on July 21, Raymond sent his messenger galloping off with a dispatch early that afternoon. The copy read, in part: “I write this at 2-1/4 o’clock, and am compelled to close in order to avail myself of a special messenger to Washington. The fight is still going on with great energy. The rebel batteries have again commenced firing upon us, and their balls and shells fall thick upon the road and in the field which I had selected as my observatory.” The eventual outcome, Raymond conceded in his dispatch, “is not certain at the moment I write.” No nom de plume for this writer; he confidently signed his report: “H. J. R.”85
Less than an hour after his messenger rode off, however, the real “outcome” became painfully apparent. As the tide of battle turned, Raymond scribbled an updated story acknowledging Union defeat, but in the tumult was unable to secure another messenger. The editor had no choice but to retreat to Washington himself along with the battered and dispirited federal troops, revised dispatch in hand. He did not arrive at the capital telegr
aph office until late that steamy night, looking “sun-burned, dusty, and hardly recognizable.” There, the exhausted but determined editor handed in his new account of the Union rout, but the telegraph operator on duty took it upon himself to refuse to transmit it, claiming it would not be in the national interest to wire such a humiliating account.86
What Raymond did not know was that, as soon as the initial reports of McDowell’s defeat reached Washington, General Scott ordered that all further news from Manassas be kept off the wires for at least a day. Scott was no novice at censorship. Earlier, he and Secretary of State Seward had prevented Washington journalists from wiring the names of Massachusetts soldiers killed in an anti-Union riot that had broken out as they passed through Baltimore.87 Scott soon insisted that no accounts of troop movements go out over the telegraph without his specific approval.88 When that arrangement proved unwieldy he imposed rules that precluded correspondents from reporting or predicting any movements by the army. Bull Run brought out the iron glove. “We desire it to be distinctly understood that we are not in the slightest degree responsible for what, if done deliberately by us, would be branded a wanton and reckless trifling with the feelings of the public,” huffed the Times a few days later. “ . . . It was an act of the government—and not the conductors of the Times—who suppressed the facts of this most important case.”89 It would not be the last time censorship would deny the public access to vital war news. Telegraph censor Alfred Talcott later told a congressional investigating committee that Scott had forbidden him to wire any news about the Confederate victory at Manassas.90
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