News from the Civil War: The Spigot Starts to Open

By Gary Far­row, Mem­ber of the Danville His­tor­i­cal Society

Pri­or to the Civ­il War, rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­o­gy remade the news­pa­per busi­ness so that infor­ma­tion could be deliv­ered from far­away places faster and cheap­er than ever before. The Octo­ber ‘61 edi­tions of the North Star brought home opin­ion from a Boston Jour­nal cor­re­spon­dent, the sen­ti­ments of a Danville sol­dier at the Vir­ginia front, and news of mil­i­tary activ­i­ties on the Gulf Coast,

North Star October 5, 1861

Why McClellan Holds On

The Wash­ing­ton Cor­re­spon­dent of the Boston Jour­nal writes… It has been two months since the advance of the Fed­er­al troops from Bull Run to Washington.…the peo­ple are anx­ious to have some­thing done by the large army to blot out the dis­agree­able part of that affair…

…It was sup­posed that every­thing would be in readi­ness by the first of Sep­tem­ber and that by the present time we should have made a tri­umphant march towards the very heart of seces­sion, but instead here we are throw­ing up entrench­ments with rebels flaunt­ing their hate­ful burn­ing in our face with the great dome of the cap­i­tal in full view of their work at Munson’s. It is pro­vok­ing to the blood…

…But the beau­ty of his [McClellan’s] hang­ing on… He has, by remain­ing qui­et com­plete­ly frus­trat­ed the plans of the rebels. They intend to attack us, but found we are get­ting very strong… They have con­quered all in vain… When he sees that the prop­er time has come to let go, I am con­fi­dent that he will do it in a man­ner that will win admiration.

The above flat­ter­ing pic­ture … was pub­lished in the Boston Jour­nal… We trust that the pre­ced­ing sketch of his posi­tion was not exag­ger­at­ed… If Gen. McClel­lan is pur­su­ing a course that will, in the end, jus­ti­fy all our high hopes and expec­ta­tions, to his mil­i­tary genius and watch­ful dis­ci­pline will much cred­it be due, for any favor­able result that may crown our army now entrenched on the Potomac.

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The North’s cry for ret­ri­bu­tion and redemp­tion fell on the shoul­ders of Gen­er­al McClel­lan. They found the loss at Bull Run “pro­vok­ing to the blood,” want­ed action and weren’t get­ting it. So the jour­nal­ist offers this ratio­nal­iza­tion. “He has, by remain­ing qui­et com­plete­ly frus­trat­ed the plans of the rebels.”

The pret­zel log­ic of the Boston Journal’s spec­u­la­tion is laugh­able. After a bit­ter defeat, the cor­re­spon­dent seems to be say­ing, “We have ‘em right where we want ‘em”. The last para­graph of the arti­cle reflects the North Star’s restrained but pos­i­tive “wait and see” atti­tude about McClel­lan. As it turns out, they would be wait­ing a long time.

Dur­ing this peri­od in his­to­ry, news­pa­pers were mak­ing a tran­si­tion from being mouth­pieces for a par­tic­u­lar point of view, such as The Lib­er­a­tor, an abo­li­tion­ist paper, to includ­ing more fact-based news report­ing which was demand­ed by the pub­lic. It was the begin­ning of mod­ern journalism.

Through the tech­nol­o­gy of the cop­per wire tele­graph, which had expand­ed out to the West coast, news could be col­lect­ed by major news­pa­pers in a mat­ter of hours rather than days. Trains also increased the web of news­pa­per dis­tri­b­u­tion by car­ry­ing metro week­ly edi­tions, such as Horace Greeley’s New York Tri­bune, to the hinterlands.

In order to han­dle tele­graph­ic dis­patch­es, a col­lec­tive of major news­pa­pers, formed to share sto­ries, evolved into the Asso­ci­at­ed Press. While changes in paper and print mak­ing allowed the price of a news­pa­per to decline from six cents in 1830 to a cou­ple of cents in 1850.

Cir­cu­la­tion increased twice as fast as the pop­u­la­tion with news­pa­pers rid­ing an infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion to become the most influ­en­tial means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the coun­try. By 1861, Amer­i­ca was wired. The world had sped up.

North Star October 12, 1861

Camp Advance Fair­fax Co., Va

Let­ter from a Danville Sol­dier of the 4th Regiment

Edi­tor of the Star — We have at last, after all the delays required to the mov­ing of large bod­ies, reached the seat of war and those of which we have read so much in the papers, in con­nec­tion with the great strug­gle now pend­ing we have viewed with our own eyes and tra­versed with our own feet.

…Dur­ing our jour­ney from Ver­mont… The men were very enthu­si­as­tic and enjoyed them­selves well, gen­er­al­ly … except a lit­tle dis­sat­is­fac­tion which arose on account of not receiv­ing their reg­u­lar rations while enroute.… The rations now fur­nished are good as any­one could ask for, com­pris­ing fresh meat, good bread, rice, beans and coffee.

… An expe­di­tion was sent to Falls Church, and through some mis­un­der­stand­ing on the part of the offi­cers our troops fired upon each oth­er killing 10 and wound­ing over 30. We have var­i­ous reports in regards to the mat­ter, and I should not won­der if none of them were true, for in fact we can­not get the truth half as quick here as we can in Vermont.

Yours uncon­di­tion­al­ly,

S.H.S.

Home­sick and heart­sick by the loss of his com­rades, the veil of cyn­i­cism begins to descend upon a young Danville man now caught up in the life and death machi­na­tions of a large imper­son­al war.

North Star Octo­ber 19, 1861

Ben­jamin Green­bank, of Danville, has we under­stand received a large order from Gov­ern­ment to man­u­fac­ture a lot of army blue cloth, and he has already com­menced the works.

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In 1849, Mr. Green­bank bought the mill in what is now known as Greenbank’s Hol­low and found­ed Ver­mont Val­ley Woolen Mills which was the largest such enter­prise in North­east­ern Ver­mont. Clus­tered around the mill was a “com­pa­ny” town­let called Greenbank’s vil­lage which had about 12 hous­es, a store and a post office.

The com­pa­ny oper­at­ed at its peak dur­ing the Civ­il War when it was pro­duc­ing as much as 700 yards of cloth per day. The mill burned down in the 1880’s and was nev­er rebuilt.

North Star October 19, 1861

Intel­li­gence from the Gulf squadron says the whole coast from Galve­ston to the Flori­da reefs was com­plete­ly blockaded.

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This small bit of news sig­ni­fied a large part of Union Gen­er­al-in-Chief Win­field Scott’s Ana­con­da plan to win the war against the South. As a mil­i­tary man Gen­er­al Scott, who led Amer­i­can forces in the war against Mex­i­co, was sec­ond only to George Wash­ing­ton in pub­lic esteem. His scheme was to imple­ment a naval block­ade along the South’s entire coast­line and con­trol the length of Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er with men and gunboats.

Scott felt that ‑in time — the eco­nom­ic costs and abject bore­dom of this con­stric­tion would encour­age the rise of Union­ist sen­ti­ment in the South and bring the Region to its sens­es. He want­ed a war that would min­i­mize the loss of blood, avoid the ruina­tion of the South and mit­i­gate the sec­tion­al dif­fer­ences that would take gen­er­a­tions to heal.

How­ev­er, the press and public’s cru­el log­ic, a con­coc­tion of hubris, naivete and blood lust, would not abide the old General’s plan. If it was blood atone­ment they want­ed, the politi­cians would give it to them on a scale not seen before or since: 620,000 peo­ple would lose their lives in this con­flict. The equiv­a­lent num­ber today would be 15,000,000 dead.

A news­pa­per is a social arti­fact. It reflects how we see and feel about things at the time. The North Stars of Octo­ber, 1861, are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a peo­ple strug­gling to adapt to the speed of infor­ma­tion brought to them by new tech­nol­o­gy and a new world where life as it had pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ed was blown apart.

Through the lens of his­to­ry, we can laugh at the silli­ness of a cor­re­spon­dent who fills up a news­pa­per col­umn try­ing ratio­nal­ize what Gen­er­al McClel­lan is not doing and expe­ri­ence how a young Danville man felt about being thrown into some­thing much larg­er than he imag­ined. Take note of how a young man goes off to war and a rich man prof­its. See an impulse for blood ret­ri­bu­tion that would over­ride a war plan that min­i­mized death and destruction.

All these frag­ments of his­to­ry are about peo­ple in a par­tic­u­lar time and place, but their expe­ri­ence is time­less and uni­ver­sal. They are us.