Not until July 26, by which time Raymond presumably returned to New York by train to take control of the story back at his desk, did the Times publish a full report on the Union catastrophe. For four full days until then, unless they consulted friends or rival newspapers that published the truth first, its readers were led to believe that the Battle of Bull Run had ended with a Union victory.
One New York–based Times reporter never forgot the effect on local residents “when the first dirty newsboy whirled through the streets shrieking at the top of his ominous voice, ‘Defeat of the Union Army.’ . . . It was regarded as a smart commercial fraud, which ought to be put a stop to by the police.” By noon, its revised headlines had convinced most New Yorkers that a disaster had indeed occurred, leaving readers “panic stricken”—and no doubt less sanguine about the reliability of their newspaper.91 Professional as ever, Raymond ate humble pie—and worried aloud about British opinion—by reporting frankly that “the first and foremost thought in the minds of a very large portion of our people after the repulse of Bull Run was, “What will Russell say?”92
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No truly accurate audit can ever be made to calculate the size of the army of newspapermen that subsequently mobilized to cover the rest of the Civil War—both from government epicenters in Washington and Richmond and alongside Union and Confederate troops in the Eastern and Western Theaters of combat. The numbers were simply too vast, the range of publications too broad, and the printed records too immense. Indisputably, however, the war’s Bohemian Brigade ranked as the largest cadre of war correspondents ever to take to the field anywhere in the world up to that time.
Their supply of information nourished an insatiable demand. The public appetite for battlefield news proved boundless from the outset. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., put it: “We must have something to eat, and the papers to read. Everything else we can give up. . . . We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the newspaper we must have.”93 Even before the war started in earnest in July 1861, all three major New York dailies dispatched correspondents to Southern cities, sometimes under cover of disguise, to take the temperature of anti-Union sentiment. The New York Times’s George Forrester Williams, for one, passed himself off as an English tourist when he turned up in Richmond, later escaping safely to Washington but only one step ahead of suspicious Confederates. A colleague made it back to the North only by traveling through Virginia by night.94 Their exploits thrilled New York readers.
Like William Howard Russell, these reporters soon achieved considerable fame of their own. Horace Greeley sent the talented writer Samuel Wilkeson to become his Washington bureau chief, but both that journalist and his celebrated editor were soon eclipsed by battlefield correspondents who provided the Tribune with vivid, almost daily details of military engagements—and casualties—to a breathless home-front public. Wilkeson, the son of a well-known Buffalo politician and the father of two boys who eventually served in the Union army, went on to earn his own greatest renown by escaping from his desk job and taking the field to write about battles himself.
Henry Raymond found his own star correspondents in men like William Swinton (brother of John Swinton, one of his New York associate editors) and the intrepid Lorenzo Livingston Crounse, who committed himself to “the single object of getting the news, and getting it first, too.”95 The Times retained a twenty-nine-year-old freelance newspaper veteran named Franc Bangs Wilkie to cover the Western Theater for the paper after learning that Wilkie had usefully attached himself to the First Iowa Infantry as its embedded correspondent. When Wilkie encountered difficulty collecting the promised $7.50 per column (plus expenses) from New York, he began publishing his reports concurrently in the Dubuque Herald to make ends meet. Known by the pen name “Galway,” Wilkie covered the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, among other early Union setbacks, earning headlines of his own when he was imprisoned as a spy after crossing Confederate lines in pursuit of a story.96
It proved difficult for Wilkie and other reporters operating in the West to dispatch timely copy to New York. Transmission sometimes required days-long horseback rides to the nearest telegraph office, followed by the wiring of news that was already cold. Typically, reports from the Western Theater did not reach Eastern newspaper readers for a week or more. Critics sneered that Wilkie was particularly slow to see his coverage into print; he loved describing the action, but was not too reliable about getting stories to his editors.
That kind of sloppiness would never do for the Herald. James Gordon Bennett wisely named the well-organized Frederic Hudson to supervise his paper’s battlefront coverage from New York. Hudson later asserted that he employed some sixty-three different correspondents during the course of the war. “Never did any journal in any country maintain so vast an expenditure for news,” journalist James Parton agreed in 1866. “ . . . A reporter returning from the army laden with information, procured at lavish expense, was received in the office like a conqueror coming home from a victorious campaign, and he went forth again full of courage and zeal, knowing well that every man employed on the Herald was advancing himself when he served the paper well.”97
Veteran journalist Ben Perley Poore agreed that most battlefield reporters were “quick-witted, plucky young fellows, able to endure fatigue, brave enough to be under fire, and sufficiently well educated to enable them to dash off a grammatical and picturesque description of a skirmish.” But because most were relegated to the rear, there to await scraps of news, the curmudgeonly Bostonian sniffed, “There were honorable and talented exceptions, but the majority of those who called themselves ‘war correspondents’ were mere scavengers.”98
Imperfect and untimely it may occasionally have been, but comprehensive war coverage reached more readers than ever, and at a staggering financial cost to the publishers. Herald correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader was probably not exaggerating when he claimed that, early in the conflict, he often had a special railroad locomotive at his disposal to speed stories north when the telegraph wires were monopolized by the military.99 Another of Bennett’s hirelings secured a pass “to accompany naval expeditions in any staff capacity,” almost anywhere on the rivers and seas regardless of cost.100 The Herald claimed that during a single week in the summer of 1861, it allocated $1,000 just for receiving telegraphic news from sources other than the Associated Press. Indeed, the cost of sending a two-thousand-word dispatch just from Washington to New York usually ran around $100. The Herald later estimated that overall it spent between $500,000 and $750,000 covering the four years of war.101 For titans like Bennett, money was no object. Major events often inspired editions boasting bonus pages, and the Herald soon routinely adorned its front pages with battle maps. The Herald and Times introduced the novelty of stacking headlines and subheads atop major stories, so busy readers could almost instantly get the sense of the main news, as if reading a handbill, before diving into the dense text. The professionals called these big, bold titles “banks” or “decks.”
Newspapers unable to afford staff to position at every flash point in the field of war often relied on the New York correspondents for adaptable reports. According to one account, George Smalley’s original report on the Battle of Antietam for the New York Tribune eventually appeared in some 1,400 newspapers nationwide.102 Bennett was justified in reminding readers that his own reporters always covered battlefield action in person. “Bombs burst above their heads, and cannon balls whiz past their noses and scatter their papers,” he boasted. “This gives their letters such vivid, graphic interest. . . . Homer and Milton did very well for old times; but the present age requires the HERALD’S staff.”103
Raymond and Greeley could not muster the financial resources to invest so heavily in battlefield coverage, but each still managed to deploy some twenty correspondents at any given time. “What a busy place the editorial office of the Times was!” marveled correspondent William Swinton of this period. “ . . . We were constantly
receiving packages from correspondents at all points of the compass, special dispatches from the front, or from many a front, official documents or advices; covert news from army officers, visits from wire-pullers or pipe-layers, information from the departments at Washington, and gratuitous suggestions from men of all sorts and conditions.”104 Its roster of reporters included Adam Badeau and Joseph Howard. Most prominent of all were the principal correspondents for the Eastern Theater: the onetime preacher Crounse and the daredevil Swinton.
Charles Dana, succeeded by the young Boston abolitionist Sydney Howard Gay (once Dana left the paper in 1862 to accept a job in the War Department) managed coverage for the New York Tribune. Greeley’s correspondence corps boasted hardworking professionals like William A. Croffut, Albert Deane Richardson, and at least one female reporter, Jane Grey Swisshelm. If the Tribune never managed to field quite as large a battlefield contingent as Bennett or Raymond, Greeley’s own editorial commentary exerted perhaps the greatest influence. Greeley worried at first that the burdens of war coverage would break him financially. “We are all poor as John’s turkey,” he confided in June 1861, adding: “Advertisements are scarce as saints, and don’t threaten to be plentier.” The Tribune survived, raising its prices to cover costs, seeing circulation expand, and by August installing its first stereotype press, which made it possible for an entire broadsheet page to be printed on a single plate.105 Most Union commanders trusted Greeley’s reporters more than any other correspondents; one general even assigned a Tribune correspondent to transmit orders and messages during battle.106
Non–New York papers endeavored as best they could to keep pace. Continuing to manage Philadelphia Press coverage from his perch in Washington, for instance, John Wein Forney authorized his deputy John Russell Young to spend the considerable sum of twenty-five dollars a day to secure war news for his home paper.107 Forney’s rival Philadelphia Inquirer meanwhile found a new audience among soldiers in the field by sending newsboys to hawk copies in army camps. Papers that for generations had shunned Sunday publication on moral grounds now unashamedly introduced Sabbath editions to keep pace with a war that knew no days of rest. The Western dailies soon wearied of relying on the East Coast–based Associated Press for news that often appeared first in New York and Boston. (“Telegraph fully all news you can get,” the Chicago Times’s Wilbur Storey alerted his correspondents, “and when there is no news send rumors.”108) Their publisher soon organized a Western Associated Press to speed more reliable stories to Chicago and other outposts more quickly. Such was the demand for news, even in the economically deprived South, that a Confederate News Association sprang up by 1862 to make sure that news of battlefield victories made its way expeditiously into the new nation’s daily papers.
Many famous Civil War–era bylines later faded into obscurity, but they were widely read and broadly recognized during the conflict and, in many cases, long after. Typical of the breed of battlefield correspondents who collected their observations for postwar reminiscences, the Herald’s George Alfred Townsend later produced a highly popular memoir of his wartime experiences. The Times’s William Swinton wrote several (famously describing Bull Run as the battle that “made known that the contest was to be a war, not a ‘sixty days’ riot”).109 So did the reporter once assigned to cover Lincoln in Springfield: Henry Villard, who switched from the Herald to the Tribune mid-war.
Like the raw Union recruits he first covered in July 1861, the experienced Villard cut his teeth as a battlefield correspondent at Bull Run—and nearly paid for the experience with his life. During the early hours of the fray, a famished Villard paused with the Tribune’s Edward House to pick ripe cherries at an abandoned Manassas farmhouse. Suddenly a swarm of Confederate shot began riddling the trees, sending twigs, leaves, and fruit splashing onto their upturned faces. After that close call, Villard boasted with affected sangfroid, “the music of bullet, ball, and grapeshot never had much terror for me.” Villard found himself severed from McDowell’s headquarters during the chaotic Union retreat. “My newspaper instinct was fully aroused,” he remembered. “I saw a chance of outstripping the rival correspondents with a report of the battle by reaching Washington as quickly as possible.” Villard still had a horse at his disposal, so he cantered his way through the retreating mass of soldiers toward the capital and there supposedly filed the very first report on the disaster published in New York. Bennett ordered an extra edition to feature the exclusive.110 Villard fared much better under fire than the Tribune’s bookish Adams Hill, who reportedly fled from the battlefield in a panic after a bullet came dangerously close to his skull during a preliminary skirmish. His fellow war correspondents never let him forget that he had shown the feather under fire.
In a pinch, the Tribune and most of its rival papers could rely on dispatches from the Associated Press, whose own cadre of wartime correspondents, supervised by Washington bureau chief Lawrence Gobright, probably exceeded in number even that of the Herald. The seasoned Gobright had been covering the national capital since the age of Jackson, and no matter how furious the bloody fighting became over the next four years, always joked that the “battles” he once covered inside Capitol Hill committee rooms were far more brutal than those he later observed on the fields of war.111
Eventually, the full roster of wartime journalists grew to gigantic proportions. In the 1950s, the enterprising historian J. Cutler Andrews identified the names of some 350 different war correspondents who worked in the field for Northern newspapers alone between 1861 and 1865, and tracked the work of another ninety-five who labored for newspapers published in the Confederacy.112 The actual number was undoubtedly far greater.
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No newspaperman ever expressed more hysteria over the Bull Run catastrophe than Horace Greeley. The editor who, in rapid succession, had urged Lincoln to accept dissolution of the Union without war, but then to march aggressively to Richmond, took on yet another role after the Union army fled from Manassas: that of hand-wringing penitent. Bull Run nearly unhinged him.
Until the battle, Greeley had devoted much of his Lincoln correspondence to setting himself up as the sole arbiter of New York patronage—chiefly, he unconvincingly maintained, “to consolidate and strengthen the friends of the Administration” in the metropolis. Back in April, just as Raymond began publicly expressing disappointment in the president, Greeley wrote Lincoln confidentially in an effort to prevent the Raymond-Seward clique from filling either of the two biggest federal vacancies in the city: the plum jobs of collector and surveyor of the port. However timely the appeal, and whatever his recent displeasure with Raymond, Lincoln was not ready to empower Greeley alone. The president dismissed the editor’s proposal with a Western-style comment: “Greely,” he drawled, misspelling the editor’s name, was “ . . . in favor of having the two big puddings on the same side of the board.”113
After Bull Run, Greeley turned on Lincoln. The federal defeat drowned out earlier thoughts of capturing Richmond, and rekindled the editor’s earlier instinct that the North should let the South secede. To his credit, he abjured from stating his anxieties editorially, but in a feverishly written July 29 confidential letter to the president, Greeley left little doubt that he again preferred abandoning the fight, and moreover would hold Lincoln responsible for any further bloodletting. The editor signed his morbid letter, “Yours, in the depth of bitterness.”
This is my seventh sleepless night—yours too, doubtless—yet I think I shall not die, because I have no right to die. I must struggle to live, however, bitterly. But to business.
You are not considered a great man, and I am a hopelessly broken one. You are now undergoing a terrible ordeal, and God has thrown the gravest responsibility upon you. Do not fear to meet them.
Can the Rebels be beaten after all that has occurred, and in view of the actual state of feeling caused by our late awful disaster? If they can—and it is your business to ascertain and decide—write me that such is your judgment, so that
I may know and do my duty.
And if they cannot be beaten—if our recent disaster is fatal—do not fear to sacrifice yourself to your country. If the Rebels are not to be beaten—if that is your judgment in view of all the light you can get—then every drop of blood henceforth shed in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly shed, and the guilt will rest heavily on the soul of every promoter of the crime. I pray you to decide quickly, and let me know my duty.
If the Union is irrevocably gone, an Armistice for thirty, sixty, ninety, 120 days—better still, for a year—ought at once to be proposed with a view to a peaceful adjustment. Then Congress should call a National convention to meet at the earliest possible day. And there should be an immediate and mutual exchange or release of prisoners and a disbandment of forces.
I do not consider myself a judge of any thing but the public sentiment. That seems to me every where gathering and deepening against a prosecution of the war. The gloom in this city is funereal for our dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scowling, black despair.
. . . This letter is written in the strictest confidence, and is for your eye alone. But you are at liberty to say to members of your Cabinet that you know I will second any move you may see fit to make. But do nothing timidly nor by halves.
Send me word what to do. I will live till I can hear it at all events. If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the Rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that. But bear in mind the greatest truth—“Whoso would lose his life for my sake shall save it,” do the thing that is the highest right, and tell me how I am to second you.114
Lincoln never replied to this tortured missive, and certainly never told Greeley “what to do.” If he ever shared the letter with his cabinet, as its author advised, no evidence survives.115 Instead, Lincoln sealed it with a piece of red ribbon and filed it away in his desk, telling not a soul about its existence. Hidden or not, it surely had the immediate impact of reducing Lincoln’s confidence in Greeley. Not only was the editor’s loyalty now in question; so was his stability.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press Page 44