While looking
through newspapers from the Civil War Era the thing that stuck out to me was
the amount of coverage on the war. Any bit of information they could get seemed
to make its way to the front page of The
New York Times. It was difficult for me to process all this information
given while the war was being fought; today they keep as much secret as
possible. We have to remember how different this time was and how involved
everyone was, it was a war fought solely on American soil. The people at home
wanted to know what the troops were doing; maybe they had a son and could keep
up with where he was at by reading where his troops were last at or where they
were moving to.
One article
I pulled was of a rebel group taking over a telegraph station used to transmit
Union messages. It is a very short entry; just two sentences but it gives
plenty of information. At the time they took the station they were sending
answers to the White House; luckily they didn’t get any valuable information.
Just little bits of information I can imagine was exciting for people to read
in the newspaper. If the newspaper didn’t print information I can also see how
crazy stories could be spread from people getting bits of information from
other people and turned into something horrible.
The next
article I read and found more interesting was “Deserters from the Rebels”. This
gives a detailed account of two men from the confederacy giving themselves up
to the Union. The two men in this article walked up to within a mile of the
White House and turned themselves in to some men posted in the woods. I think
if those men were not there they would have went straight to the White House
and turned themselves into Lincoln; maybe hoping for amnesty from the
president. The article gives the entire military background of one of the men
before it goes into detailed accounts of the battles. He was a “Lieutenant belonging
to the Fourth North Carolina Regiment, names James Evans”. Evans had been in the army since the war broke
out and “participated at Bull Run and the late battle at Fair Oaks”. The information
they get from Evans about his regiments movements after the battle at Fair Oaks
is all published in the paper with this article. It still surprises me at the
amount of information they would put out in the paper for anyone to read, it
seems this would put the Union at a disadvantage.
The last
article, which was from the same day as the previous two, was just a man’s
account of his ride to the white house. Different from the other two in that it
doesn’t over anything militarily but it was still a piece that made the front
page. The man is making the trip from Fair Oaks to the white house. It is still
early in the war, June 1862, but there is a lot of destruction and battles
being fought close to the white house. He describes the road as “the road
called the shortest and best to travel on, little better than a mule-path”; he
is only 20 miles from the white house. This article was part a daily writing
about the white house, it seems the paper wanted to give people something hopeful
to read among all the battles and list of the dead. The pieces covered everything
happening at the white house including what Lincoln was doing.
Even after
reading all of these articles and more I still find it hard to believe they put
all of this information out during the war. Information as new as what happened
yesterday and where the men involved in those battles were moving. Even though
it seems to us as a bad strategy it didn’t make that much difference then, it could
have been more of a comfort for the people of America at home wanting to know
what was happening or if fighting was getting close to them. It might have
encouraged men to join the fight for the Union, whatever it was it seems to
have done more good than harm.
“The
Telegraph and the Rebels”, The New York
Times, July 2, 1862. p 1.
“Deserters
from the Rebels”, The New York Times, July
2 1862. p. 1.
“A Dreary
Ride”, The New York Times”, July 2
1862. p. 1.
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