Last Updated: December 29, 2000
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Book review
Ushering in the era of modern journalism
Civil war reporters were labeled as spies, blocked
from using telegrams and sometimes got it wrong, but they also showed great
heroism in keeping the nation informed
By Dave Boyer
Newspaper errors, so awful to confront the morning after, achieve a
certain quaintness over time.
Take, for example, the Richmond Daily Dispatch’s front-page report on
July 6, 1863, informing its readers of the fate of the Confederate army
in the great battle at Gettysburg, “It is evident to me, at any rate, that
our troops have gained a great victory.”
That was three days after the calamitous Pickett’s Charge, from which
the South would never rise again.
In his new book, “A Bohemian Brigade: The Civil War Correspondents,”
James M. Perry has done an admirable job rehabilitating the seemingly nameless
rabble that informed readers North and South about the greatest conflict
in the country’s history, as it was happening. Or at least, in that era
before filing centers and wireless modems, they were
able to inform readers days and weeks after the news.
Mr. Perry, senior political writer emeritus for the Wall Street Journal,
has written that rarest of books about the Civil War: One that is faithful
to history, gives us a fresh look at a relatively forgotten aspect of the
war and still manages to be an easy read. The author focuses on the individuals
— businessmen and adventurers, ideologues and drunks — who ushered in the
modern era of journalism under the most difficult of circumstances. The
telegraph, then the quickest way to get news into print, was often several
days of horseback riding away from the scene of a battle. And even when
a telegraph line was accessible, reporters’ dispatches were often blocked
by military authorities.
The battles themselves were frequently confused, smoke-shrouded events
with many tentacles that defied quick and definitive reports. That’s difficult
to understand for the modern visitor at the Gettysburg or Antietam battlefields,
where the open ground conveys the action in easy-to-grasp panoramas. But
the sequence of fighting at many other battlefields was so tangled that
it is still being debated today.
And so Mr. Perry is, if not forgiving, at least sympathetic to those
glaring front page errors of yore. He points out that the New York Herald
goofed in the worst way by proclaiming a “Brilliant Union Victory!” for
the federal army at the first battle of Bull Run because its correspondent
left the battlefield while the Union forces were advancing but before Confederate
Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson earned his nickname with a stubborn repulse
of the enemy.
Irresponsible and incomplete? Well, yes. But the author reminds us that
today we are “bombarded by wild tales from Web sites on the Internet” that
become recycled by mainstream journalists with a few caveats. And we don’t
have Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman threatening to shoot us all as spies.
“Bohemian Brigade” tells us of the celebrity journalists of that era:
Horace Greeley, irrational and self-important editor of the New York Tribune;
and Henry Raymond, the ambitious and clear-eyed power at the New York Times.
But the better tales belong to the less well-known battlefield correspondents.
There was Sylvanus Cadwallader of the Chicago Times, who rescued Gen.
Ulysses Grant from a wicked drinking binge in 1863 and did not report it
until his memoirs were published posthumously in 1955. And there was Henry
Wing, reporter for the New York Tribune, who left the Wilderness battlefield
in 1864 in northern Virginia and, on three hours’ sleep, rode a horse all
day through Confederate patrols, was arrested by Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton as a spy, and still managed to deliver a message from Grant to
President Lincoln that there was “no turning back.” The president kissed
him on the forehead and Wing filed his scoop. A footnote: For his efforts,
Wing didn’t even get a byline.
Boyer is the Capitol Hill bureau chief for the Washington Times.
