GDG- Re: wartime newspapers

[Biggsk at aol.com]

Tom Ryan writes:

>>>Thanks for the description of the work that you are doing with  
newspapers. Good luck with your projects.>>>

Thanks very much.  I also dream of a series of books called "How The  Press 
Looked At the Civil War (Insert name of state here)", which would be a  state 
by state review of the critical events of the period.  The plan is to  use one 
or two big city papers; one or two middle sized town papers and one or  two 
small town papers.  Then I would review what they editorialized and  reported 
about certain events starting with Lincoln's first election, secession,  Sumter, 
battles of Summer 1861, Antietam, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg,  
Vicksburg, Atlanta, etc.
 
I got the idea from reading the small town Ohio paper from the war of the  
town where I used to live, Celina.  The paper back then was a weekly and  was 
virulently anti-Lincoln in both 1860 and 1864.  Then as I worked in the  bigger 
Ohio papers like Columbus and Cincinnati, I saw their perspectives and  they 
were different from those of small town Celina.  The capper was when I  spent a 
week in Baltimore some years ago working on a program that I was to give  at 
the Star Spangled Banner House Flag Symposium on "Baltimore's Military Flag  
Makers of the Mid-19th Century," that I learned of how the pro-South Sun and 
the  pro-North American reported news in the same city!  This can also be  
extended to Louisville, KY and St. Louis, MO, for both of those cities had  
pro-South and pro-North papers.  Such pockets can also be found in  Philadelphia 
(which for a short time had a paper called the Palmetto Flag -  guess what side 
they chose.) and even New York City (the Herald had somewhat  pro-South 
sympathies).
 
If this series, which will cover the war state by state, ever gets done,  who 
knows?  But Powerball is up to $180 Million now so if I win  that....
 
 


>>> Related to your comments about how fast  newspapers traveled from place 
to place in those days, the Confederate Secret  Service was able to deliver 
papers to Richmond from Baltimore/Washington in  one day and from New York in two 
using their so-called "Secret Line" system  that went down through Southern 
Maryland.>>>


I was in Alabama some years ago working on flag makers that advertised in  
the newspapers for business and noted how Mobile flag maker Jackson Belknap was  
getting business from all over Alabama as well as Mississippi for making unit 
 colors as well as his pre-war business of political banners.  I then found  
things like rail schedules, steamboat schedules for the internal rivers of  
Alabama as well as the inter-coastal steamers that ran several times per day  
from Pensacola-Mobile-New Orleans and back, and deduced that each day the Mobile 
 paper was going out to all of these places and that the papers of all these  
other places were coming to Mobile the same way.  So being the very good  
businessman that he was, Belknap started to advertise in them and he got  
business from that.  The local papers that got the other papers also "took"  news of 
local interest from them citing the original sources, which was the  courteous 
thing to do then.
 
I live in Clarksville, TN and we were not only a rail connection, but we  are 
also on the Cumberland River.  I have been through both of the  Clarksville 
wartime papers (both deleted when Grant showed up in February, 1862  after 
Donelson fell) and they cite news from Nashville, Memphis and Louisville  daily, 
because of the daily trains, and other places like Evansville, IN,  Paducah, 
KY, etc. because of the river commerce.
 
On March 4, 1861, the CSA hoisted its new national flag over the capitol in  
Montgomery, AL.  I have found in my research that a copy of this flag was  
made and hoisted in Charleston, SC the very next day because the telegraph  
carried the news and described what the flag was to look like.
 
That was an interesting post on the CS Secret Service and their use of  
newspapers as well as their system and its speed.  I was not aware of that  detail 
and I thank you for mentioning it here.
 
Greg Biggs