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How the Civil War gave birth to modern journalism in the nation’s capital

By Paul Farhi,March 02, 2012

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A few reporters, such as the Inquirer’s Uriah Painter, grew wealthy by trading on the inside information they gleaned from their work as journalists. By the end of the war, the profits from Horace White’s wartime speculation enabled him to buy a controlling stake in the Tribune. He immediately booted the paper’s legendary editor, Joseph Medill, and installed himself as editor in chief. (Medill returned to the job in 1874.)

Lincoln did his part to keep the press happy. One newspaper, the Washington Sunday Chronicle, lived off government printing contracts and bulk sales to the Army of the Potomac, and it “became as close to an official organ as the Lincoln administration would have,” according to “Press Gallery.” The president also spread printing contracts and advertising among other pro-Republican papers and handed out diplomatic and postal jobs to their correspondents. After two New York papers, the World and Journal of Commerce, unknowingly printed a fallacious story planted by conspirators to manipulate gold prices in 1864, Lincoln ordered the papers’ owners arrested and the papers closed. The proprietors were released, however, when detectives tracked down the actual perpetrators.

All told, modern readers might be a bit skeptical of how the Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin characterized early war reporting from Washington in 1861:

“We are living history in these exciting times, and the historians are the newspaper writers, reporters and correspondents. To be sure, some of them make mistakes at times, and each day’s paper is not always an exactly accurate record of each day’s events. But the future historian will be able to winnow the solid grains of fact from the chaff of fancy and rumor, and the very sheet which we print today, may at a future time be closely scanned by some patient student, in his search for the actual facts concerning the mad attempt at revolution got up by some of the Southern States of the American Union in the year 1861.”

Among those who came to town in that bustling era was 22-year-old Henry Adams, the grandson of a president (John Quincy Adams), and great-grandson of a Founding Father (John Adams). The young Adams served as an unpaid, unsigned correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser, the largest newspaper in that city at the time, according to Stegmaier, whose forthcoming book, “Henry Adams in the Secession Crisis,” dissects Adams’s previously uncollected “letters” from Washington.

Adams, who would later distinguish himself as a leading intellectual and historian (“The Education of Henry Adams”), had some good contacts, too. His father, Charles Francis Adams, was a congressman from Massachusetts and a moderate Republican who led a faction that maneuvered to keep border states such as Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia and Maryland from seceding in the months before the war. Henry Adams — whose newspaper pieces mirrored his father’s political positions — served as his father’s private secretary in Congress while he did his newspaper work.

News reporting had been revolutionized more than a decade before the war by the advent of the telegraph. The technology loomed even larger as the war spread. It also became a convenient means to control the boisterous Washington correspondents.

Since daily dispatches from Washington had to pass through telegraphs operated by war censors, the Union government found it easy to suppress stories unfavorable to the North’s cause. As a result, the day after the first battle of Bull Run in Manassas in July 1861, some Northern newspapers got the story wrong. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “A Great Union Victory” in its first edition. Reports of Union successes in the morning made it onto the wire, but not news of the arrival of Confederate reinforcements in the afternoon.

Journalists employed by Republican newspapers were more fortunate than those employed by Democrats; the latter often saw their work land at the bottom of a government wastebasket. The AP’s Gobright, whose wire service served Republican and Democratic papers alike, had no such trouble. “My despatches [sic] are merely dry matters of fact and detail,” he said of his success in beating the censors.

Ritchie calls Gobright one of the earliest “objective” journalists — impartial, unbiased, apparently untainted by fear or favor. In a city boiling with war, and frenzied news about it, the seeds of modern journalism had begun to sprout.

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