Abstract
One hundred and fifty years ago, the Confederate states seceded, and two huge armies began a long and bloody struggle from the East Coast to the trans-Mississippi West. Thousands of Americans on both sides were killed and wounded at places such as Shiloh and Manassas. The Battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam) resulted in an astounding 23,000 casualties, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.
The Southern journalists who covered the biggest story in US history have never been widely recognized or celebrated. Knights of the Quill goes a long way toward changing that, fleshing out the lives and reporting of twenty-eight correspondents from eight Southern states, including two women writers known only as “Joan” and “Virginia.” These profiles, written by the three editors and fourteen other historians, are well researched, well written, and remarkably consistent.
Editors Patricia McNeely and Henry Schulte are former journalists and former journalism professors at the University of South Carolina; Debra Reddin van Tuyll teaches at Augusta State University in Georgia.
The title of the book is an allusion to the class identification of Southern correspondents of the period, many of whom were well-educated patricians, different from the working-class “bohemians” who reported for the Northern press. As van Tuyll notes in the book’s introduction, Southern journalists were also heavily invested in Southern life; as a group, she notes, they owned more slaves than the average Southerner.
The urgency of the Civil War brought changes to Southern journalism, shifting its focus from opinion to news. For example, John S. Thrasher, superintendent of the most successful of the Confederate news services, pushed his correspondents to write dispatches that were timely and free of opinion or comment. “Be careful . . . ,” Thrasher wrote, “and see that you do not send unfounded rumors as news.”
Given their various backgrounds, personalities, and talents, the Southern correspondents offer a number of distinctive views of the war. Many were fervent Southern patriots, defending the need for slavery and sharply denouncing the Lincoln administration’s perceived suppression of individual liberties and states’ rights. One enterprising propagandist, Henry Hotze, established a pro-Confederate newspaper in London in an effort to secure European support for the South.
The best of these chapters include the wider story of the war: context that helps the reader evaluate the quality and impact of each correspondent. Mark Dolan’s chapter on Alabama correspondent Samuel Chester Reid Jr., for example, reveals a man fully suited to the many hardships and occasional joys of war reporting. Reid was so dedicated to truth-telling that his reports angered Confederate commanders and caused his editor in Mobile to screen his reports carefully.
Surprisingly, the Southern correspondents faced less censorship than their Northern counterparts. Yet they, too, sometimes ran afoul of Confederate leaders, including the thin-skinned General Braxton Bragg. To their credit, several Southern correspondents aggressively defended the citizens’ rights to know about the conduct of the war, though most also recognized the need for military secrecy.
Georgian Peter W. Alexander was among the most prominent—and compassionate—Southern journalists. Following the second battle of Manassas in 1862, Alexander described the suffering of the victorious Confederate soldiers: “The army has not had a mouthful of bread for four days, and no food of any kind except a little green corn picked up in the roadside, for thirty-six hours. Many of them are also barefooted. I have seen scores of them to-day marching over the flinty turnpike with torn and blistered feet.”
Many Southern journalists were distinguished physicians or attorneys. Henry Timrod of South Carolina was a poet, and Virginian John R. Thompson was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, once edited by Edgar Allan Poe. For South Carolina’s “Joan,” covering the war paid her expenses as she traveled to Virginia to be closer to her enlisted son. The talented Tennessean Henry Watterson gained national acclaim later as editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.
One of the most conflicted correspondents was Charles DeMorse. Born and educated in the North, DeMorse nevertheless became a Southern partisan, although a moderate one. In his Texas paper, the Clarksville Standard, DeMorse was reluctant to promote secession. But when the war came, he led his men into battle against Federal troops in Indian Territory and turned a blind eye when his Indian allies massacred a group of black soldiers in Arkansas in 1864.
In the end, Knights editors conclude that Southern correspondents were similar to Northern journalists, working diligently to separate fact from rumor. The most important difference was more basic: resources. The Northern newspapers had them; the Southern press did not.
Knights of the Quill will be useful to undergraduate- and graduate-level journalism and Civil War students, who will find it rich in detail. In fact, the book succeeds in part by sheer volume. With twenty-nine chapters, as well as a preface, epilogue, appendix, index, and nearly 100 pages of notes, the book provides multiple examples of the successes and failures of Southern war reporting.
The book also includes numerous illustrations and photographs, although the editors unfortunately offer no explanations of these images or their meanings, information that would have added additional context to the volume. Nevertheless, the thoroughness of these biographies and the dramatic war stories described in these pages are powerful testimony to the journalistic passion and human anguish that marked the nation’s darkest days.