South Reports the Civil War

by J. Cutler Andrews

Overview

For the newspaper profession the problems confronted in reporting the Civil War were as catalytic as the war itself was for American society. Many of the problems encountered in reporting later wars were present in the Civil War, but they were new problems then: communications, transportation, Federal confiscation of printing presses, censorship, military personalities, and, after mid-1863, how to tell a proud people that it was losing the war.

Professor Andrews, author of The North Reports the Civil War (1955), now turns his attention to the South. He shows that Southern war reporting at its best was comparable in quality to that of the leading Northern war correspondents, that the reporting of news by the Southern press was an essential ingredient not simply of journalism but also of the Confederate propaganda effort, and that the South's newsmen contributed to the revolution of a profession, an industry, and a form of human communication.

Originally published in 1970.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691621166
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1278
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.50(d)

Read an Excerpt

The South Reports the Civil War

---

By J. Cutler Andrews

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04597-9

---

CHAPTER 1

Civil War in the Making

* * *

It was seven o'clock in the evening on Thursday, April 11, 1861. At the wharf in Charleston, South Carolina, a reporter for the Charleston Mercury was climbing aboard the steamer Seabrook, one of the two vessels comprising the navy of South Carolina, which was about to cruise off the Charleston Bar. Approaching a middle-aged, weather-beaten gentleman, the reporter inquired for Captain Hartstene.

"I am that gentleman," replied the mariner.

"I have a permit to visit Sullivan's Island to write an account of the battle for the Mercury," explained the reporter with a pleading note in his voice.

"We are not going to Sullivan's Island, sir," rejoined the captain. "We're going to sea, and the steamer will leave in a moment, and so you had better go ashore."

The reporter hesitated for a moment, then blurted out: "I must make my report, sir, and I'll go to sea with you, if I can obtain your permission."

"Well, you can go, sir," was the reply, "but we expect warm work, and you may be landed at Stono tomorrow morning, or find yourself shortly in New York with a halter round your neck."

"Aye, aye, sir. I'll take my chance," said the Mercury man gleefully as he waved a greeting to the crowd on shore, for the steamer was even then casting off and he could not have remained behind had he wished to.

As the Seabrook and the General Clinch sailed down the channel, their crews looked anxiously in the direction of Fort Sumter, which lay dead ahead on a shoal in the center of the harbor, about three miles from the city. The reporter and everyone else aboard knew that the commander of the fort, Maj. Robert Anderson of the First United States Artillery, had received a summons to surrender that afternoon by a deputation of officers from Confederate Brig.Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. It was rumored in Charleston that Anderson had already rejected the surrender demand, and almost everyone there believed that the Confederate shore batteries which ringed the harbor would open fire on the fort at eight o'clock that night. On board ship conjectures about the future course of events were cut short by the lookout reporting a rocket seaward. As all eyes focused in that direction, two red rockets burst in the air, followed by the burning of a blue light. The Confederate Fort Johnson on James Island, about 1¼ miles south of Fort Sumter, promptly recognized the signal that an enemy had made his appearance, and sent up the answering rocket almost the instant that the blue light displayed by the General Clinch disappeared.

Excitement mounted as howitzers were manned, decks stripped, and guns, revolvers, and ammunition distributed on both ships in preparation for whatever lay ahead. As they approached Fort Sumter's black shape in the distance, suddenly a hail was heard, and a hoarse voice shouted, "The pirates are off the bar!" "What steamer?" Captain Hartstene wanted to know. "The Harriet Lane, twelve miles out," announced the same gruff voice, adding that she alone of all the expected Yankee cruisers had been sighted. The authorities in Charleston fully expected that the Harriet Lane would attempt to land U.S. troops in boats to reinforce the Sumter garrison. It was the mission of Hartstene's South Carolina navy to prevent this.

A pilot boat, a little later, furnished confirmation of the arrival of the Harriet Lane, and at eight o'clock, when the Confederate batteries were expected to open fire, all eyes turned in the direction of Fort Sumter. Minutes passed, yet the stillness and blackness of the fort remained unbroken. The impression was now current on the Seabrook that Major Anderson must have surrendered.

In Charleston hundreds of spectators thronged Battery Square and the wharves until after midnight, waiting for the bombardment to begin. Most of them had gone home to bed, however, before it was known, about 3:30 in the morning, that a second attempt by Beauregard's aides to persuade Anderson to capitulate had failed and that the bombardment would begin within an hour.

In the stillness preceding the first gunshots, the aged editor of the Charleston Courier, Aaron S. Willington, remained sleepless at his home on New Street, contemplating the situation which seemed about to erupt into war. Dazed by the rapid course of events, vexed and distracted by his own increasing irritation, "astounded by the glaring treachery of our enemies, [and] lost in wonder at their egregious stupidity," Editor Willington had not found an opportunity until this moment to reflect seriously about the full extent of the crisis he and his fellow citizens in Charleston faced. To be sure, an editorial published in his newspaper only two days before had told the world that, "with implicit reliance on the God of Battles, we go forth to meet the deadly foe. Let the strife begin — we have no fear of the issue." But this was the kind of rhetoric Southern political leaders and the great majority of Southern newspapers had been mouthing for months. Now that the strife to which the Courier had so airily referred was about to begin, was it surprising that an elderly man who could not sleep should reflect and pray and seek to elevate his spirit with "glorious memories"?

Perhaps Willington recalled the time, almost fifty-nine years before, when as a young printer employed in a Boston newspaper office he had left Massachusetts to accept a position as a foreman in the plant of the newly established Charleston Courier. He might have remembered that it had been a fortunate move on his part, for within a few years Wellington, the printing foreman from Boston, had become the editor of the Courier; under his management the paper had emerged as one of the leading commercial newspapers in the South and as an exponent of Southern Unionism. In Willington's office, the famous editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, had been taught the essentials of the newspaper business, and during the last fifteen years Willington had been the president of the New England Society of Charleston, managing its affairs with wisdom and tact.

Life in Charleston had been good to Willington. Although his education had largely been confined to the printing office or the compositor s frame, he had played a prominent part in the political and business activities of the city. He had at various times been an alderman, a member of the state legislature, and a director in a number of leading banks and insurance companies. Also, he had made four European tours, during which he had climbed Mont Blanc and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, stood on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, and wandered, guidebook in hand, through various museums and art galleries. His last trip abroad in 1855 had provided the material for a book describing his travel in Europe that summer.

The Charleston for which Willington had come to hold a deep affection was in 1861 the largest American seaport south of Baltimore. The city had a population of 29,000 whites and 37,000 Negro slaves. It was a town of impressive beauty and grace, essentially English in tone and manner, and reflecting the prestige and influence of a landed aristocracy who were the nearest thing to a peerage in America. Charleston was located on a peninsula bounded by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers with the Battery Square at their junction. Characteristic of the layout of the town were its paved streets with brick sidewalks, crossing each other at right angles and fringed with rows of Pride of India trees along their outer edges. The architecture of this old seaport was predominantly red brick and white marble; its quaint old houses, generally separate from each other, were usually built at an angle to the street so as better to catch the breeze from the ocean. A striking feature of the houses were their verandas, constructed in a light Oriental style from the ground to the very top, so that the rooms on each story enjoyed the advantage of a shady open walk. Distinctive likewise were the high-walled gardens which surrounded the houses, abounding with flowers and shrubs of all kinds, with double and triple rows of orange trees, and displays of large white roses. On her thirty-eighth birthday the wife of Senator James Chesnut received from her friends the Rutledges an exquisite bouquet from their rose garden, which prompted her to write rapturously in her diary, "Are there such roses anywhere else in the world?"

Near the Battery at the lower end of the town were the fashionable churches, St. Michael's and St. Philip's, St. Andrew's Hall, where Louis Agassiz had lectured in the early eighteen-fifties when he was professor of science at the College of Charleston and where the Ordinance of Secession had been passed the previous December, and the Bond Street Theater where the world-famous diva Adelina Patti and an English troupe from the Royal Italian Opera House had performed the previous autumn. Near the Quay was the U.S. Customs House, whose unfinished structure was symbolic in some measure of the hostile attitude of South Carolinians toward the tariff policy of the United States government.

It had been the custom in Charleston for many years for the planter aristocracy from the up-country to come to town for the winter shopping and social season, the horse races in February, the St. Cecilia Ball in St. Andrew's Hall, and the theater. Hugers and Pinckneys set the tone for a cultivated and moneyed leisure class, whose social activities were mirrored in Mary Boykin Chesnut's famous diary. One of the elements of Charleston society that participated in these activities was the "codfish aristocracy" of transplanted Bostonians, to which Willington belonged. To Charleston over the years had come a number of foreign visitors — among them the Englishmen Capt. Basil Hall and novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Swedish traveller Frederika Bremer — to view the local scene and record their impressions in books that might expect wide circulation. What interested them most were the multitude of Negroes, the revolting slave auctions, and the public market with its stalls of fruit and flowers presided over by portly colored women and with its flocks of unsavory turkey buzzards.

To Charleston also had come a young college student from Massachusetts the spring before to enjoy a vacation and watch the proceedings of the first Democratic national convention ever held in South Carolina. The student, Edward G. Mason, had been impressed by and a little amused at the efforts of his hosts to convince him that slavery was the best possible condition for the black man. But he could not help but notice that at night the whole city was under martial law, that any Negro found on the streets after nine o'clock without a pass from his master was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The mounted police, mainly of Irish birth, were drilled and armed as soldiers and officered by graduates of South Carolina military schools. Between them and the younger and more active Negroes was a longstanding feud that erupted whenever a venturesome young Negro applied the hated epithet "buzzard" to one of the mounted police.

As a Southern Whig of Northern background, Willington had opposed both nullification and secession in South Carolina for more than thirty years. The Courier had been the leading Union organ in the state at the time of the nullification crisis in 1832; and in the midst of the threats of secession that the Compromise of 1850 only briefly checked, this venerable newspaper upheld the flag of the Union. In Willington's opinion, however, the election of a sectional president in 1860 had sounded the death knell of the Union, and he silently acquiesced when in December 1860 the State of South Carolina in Convention assembled took the lead in bringing about the secession of the Lower South. Other Charlestonians, including Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., of the Mercury, had expressed irritation at the continuing presence on South Carolina soil of a garrison of U.S. troops, which moved from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island to Fort Sumter on the day after Christmas.

Although Anderson, a West Point-trained officer of Southern birth and pro-slavery sympathies, had taken this step to ward off a possible attack from the mainland and thus avoid precipitating civil war, South Carolinians generally interpreted it as a warlike move. When President James Buchanan refused to disavow Anderson's action and order him back to Moultrie, commissioners representing the State of South Carolina and the newly-formed Confederate government, successively initiated negotiations in Washington for the peaceful withdrawal from Sumter of Anderson's garrison of artillerymen. Even so, war was narrowly averted in January when the Star of the West, a Northern supply vessel carrying reinforcements to Fort Sumter, was driven off by fire from a Charleston shore battery.

As time went on, the Courier's jingoistic competitor, the Charleston Mercury, began to lambaste Governor Francis Pickens for permitting Anderson to receive mail through the Charleston post office and fresh provisions from the local market. Pickens, a stout man with oversized head, watery eyes, and flabby features, was looked upon as something of a renegade for having deserted South Carolina in her hour of crisis to accept a diplomatic assignment to Russia from 1858 to 1860. It was party talk in Charleston that Pickens had been pressured into going abroad by his beautiful third wife, Texan Lucy Holcombe; a speech he was supposed to have made, in which he boasted that he was "born insensible to fear," only made his critics laugh the more. Yet it was Pickens and not the elder Robert Barnwell Rhett, who craved the honor for himself, whom the voters placed in the governor's chair when he returned from Europe. Willington must have smiled mischievously when he heard the story about Mercury editor Rhett rushing into Pickens' office on Meeting Street to demand that he stop shillyshallying and occupy Fort Sumter forthwith.

"Certainly, Mr. Rhett," Pickens was supposed to have replied blandly. "I have no objection! I will furnish you with some men and you can storm the work yourself."

"But, sir, I am not a military man!" Rhett shot back.

"Nor I, either," retorted the governor, "and therefore I take the advice of those who are."

Willington's Courier had reported the arrival in Charleston on March 3 of the Confederate Commander-in-Chief whom Governor Pickens had been requesting of Jefferson Davis for weeks. The Montgomery government's choice, General Beauregard, had been Superintendent of West Point and custodian of the lake defenses in his native Louisiana before he took command at Charleston of the South Carolina troops who were already gathering there. Beauregard had agreed with his engineering officer, Maj. William Whiting, that there would be no difficulty in overpowering Sumter's tiny garrison, and had recommended changes in the location of batteries in preparation for active measures.

Like many other Charlestonians, Willington must have pored over the columns of the Northern press for indications of the policy that President-elect Abraham Lincoln could be expected to pursue after March 4 toward the seven states that had already seceded, and toward efforts, Northern and Southern, to bring about a peaceful evacuation of Sumter. Back in 1855, at the age of seventy-five, Willington had been made almost totally blind when an operation for cataracts in both eyes, performed by a New York doctor, was unsuccessful. Then, following a restful summer at Swampscot on the Massachusetts coast, the aged editor gradually regained the sight of one eye. At length he was able to walk about Charleston without assistance once more and to read the newspapers with unflagging persistence and interest, often detecting typographical errors that had escaped the notice of full-sighted copyreaders."

At his "Woodlands Plantation" the eminent South Carolina author William Gilmore Simms had decided that Lincoln's inaugural address meant war and had written to a friend in New York in protest against the "lies" in the Northern press about widespread suffering and divided opinion in South Carolina. Moderates like Willington, who still hoped to avoid war, must have felt reassured when Lincoln's friends, Col. Ward H. Lamon and Stephen Hurlbut, arrived in Charleston on a peace mission on March 24. Although Lamon told Pickens he had come there solely to arrange for the removal of Anderson's garrison, he did not reveal that the real purpose of their mission was to assess at first hand the amount of Unionist sentiment in South Carolina.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The South Reports the Civil War by J. Cutler Andrews. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• List of Illustrations, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Map, pg. xiv
• 1. Civil War in the Making, pg. 1
• 2. A Bird's Eye View of Wartime Jovirnalism in the South, pg. 24
• 3. "A Great Battle Has Been Fought . . . and Won", pg. 59
• 4. Great Expectations and Minor Accomplishments, pg. 92
• 5. Alexander Exposes a "Lost Opportunity", pg. 126
• 6. Editor Daniel Sows Dissension among Lee's Lieutenants, pg. 161
• 7. "There Is a Smell of Death in the Air", pg. 194
• 8. Editor Forsyth Reports from Kentucky, pg. 232
• 9. Misleading Dispatches and Misspent Opportunities, pg. 264
• 10. "Is Gettysburg Another Antietam?", pg. 302
• 11. Bragg's Final Reckoning with the Press, pg. 337
• 12. "The War Absorbs All Other Topics", pg. 383
• 13. "Rover" Reports the Fall of Atlanta, pg. 429
• 14. Fewer Journals, Fainter Voices, pg. 478
• 15. Final Edition, pg. 506
• Appendix I. Who Was "Shadow?", pg. 543
• Appendix II. Southern Reporters, pg. 548
• Bibliography, pg. 553
• Index, pg. 587