Originally aired on December 05, 1997 - In part 171 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses how access to information played a major role in the Civil War.
#171 – Communication
Today we take communication for granted to get in touch with one another there is at our disposal the telephone, fax machine, email, postal service, automobile, bus and airplane. And, of course, newspapers and magazines exist in unlimited numbers to offer information of highly varying quality.
Communication at the start of the Civil War consisted almost exclusively of the written word; private correspondence was the order of the day. Only in urban communities was there the luxury of a daily or weekly periodical.
The Civil War became the first newspaper war. A curious group of about 150 semi-professional adventurers calling themselves field correspondents descended on the armies and filed dispatches from the front lines to eager and quite gullible readers back home.
Some of these reporters, James Redpath, George Alfred Townsend, and Henry Bullard, quickly come to mind, were conscientious and quite good at what they did. On the other hand, far too many correspondents became pawns at the hands of generals, politicians, and editors. They wrote what was advantageous for them to write in a given moment.
As a group, these men were courageous and resourceful. As a group, too, they spied, lied, contrived, and invented situations when those situations were there. The thousands of stories they filed were full of patriotism, pathos, atrocity, self-glorification, and petty propaganda.
Not until weeks after the fact did Northerners learn that the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg was a Union defeat. Southern readers were likewise shocked to learn six months after the fighting that the 1863 so-called “big victory” at Gettysburg had been no victory at all.
In short, newspaper correspondents of the Civil War period too often seemed more comfortable with fiction than with truth. They carried “Freedom of the Press” to an extreme that would not be equaled until late in this century.
The war was also a boon for art. Many so-called “special” artists worked for newspapers and attached themselves to field armies. Among that number were Winslow Homer, Frank Vizetelly, and Edwin Forbes. The principle field artist for the powerful Harper’s Weekly Illustrated Newspaper was Alfred Waud. The best illustrator at Harper’s of course was Thomas Nast. He became the father of editorial page cartoonists.
In the mid-nineteenth century, another art-form appeared. It was called photography. The coming of civil war provided a splendid opportunity for picture-taking. Dozens of photographers followed the example of well-known New York portrait maker Matthew Brady, who explained, “a spirit in my feet said GO and I went”.
Brady and his assistance Alexander Gardner and James Gibson were the first to reach the front lines. They took a number of photographs of dead soldiers at Antietam. Suddenly the general public had a visual concept of the horrible presence of death on the battlefield.
In October, 1862, a month after the battle of Antietam, a large number of Brady’s images went on exhibit in New York. One observer at the showroom commented; “Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along streets he has done something like it.”
That same writer added this final thought to the new form of communication, “but there is one side of the picture that the sun did not catch it is the background of widows and orphans. Homes have been made desolate and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All of this desolation imagination must paint, broken hearts cannot be photographed.”
