Loyal Readers: Coastal Southern Newspapers Under Union Occupation in the Civil-War Era

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the content and ideology of Civil-War era newspapers that were published in the Confederacy, focusing on the coastal Atlantic areas under Union occupation. Such periodicals reveal a great deal about shifting Union war aims as well as the evolving agenda for the postwar South. This article argues that newspapers printed under Union occupation were early and important venues for discussions about suffrage, the possibilities of land redistribution, and other issues that would become central to the New South under Reconstruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil War
• New South
• newspapers
• reconstruction
• suffrage

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On Custer’s experiences as a leader during the Civil War, prior to his notorious exploits against Native Americans and his infamous attack at Little Big Horn, see Jeffry D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Gregory J. W. Urwin, Custer Victorious: The Civil War Battles of General George Armstrong Custer (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983). On the conditions of Confederate Virginia at the end of the war, see Kristin Brill, The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022); Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and A. Wilson Greene, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

2. “The Yankees in Charlottesville,” Daily Constitutionalist (Augusta, GA), March 30, 1865; and “The Third Cavalry Division Chronicle,” Cleveland (OH) Morning Leader, March 20, 1865.

3. “Ourselves,” New South (Port Royal, SC), August 23, 1862.

4. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); LeeAnna Keith, When it was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2020); and Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). According to historian Richard H. Abbott, more than 400 Republican Party newspapers emerged in the South between 1857 and 1877. Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights: Republican Newspapers in the Reconstruction South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).

5. There is considerable evidence that White Southerners did, in fact, subscribe to a range of newspapers and magazines published in the pre-Civil War North. Though records remain spotty, reports maintained by Southern postmasters demonstrate convincingly that Southerners read popular Northern and European authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles Dickens. They also subscribed to popular New England and New York magazines such as Harper’s. On the dissemination of Northern works in the South, see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2004); Cindy A. Stiles, “Windows into Antebellum Charleston: Caroline Gilman and the ‘Southern Rose’ Magazine” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1994); and Michael O’Brien, “Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism,” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 2 (August 1986): 165–88.

6. The New South, published weekly beginning in 1862 from Port Royal, South Carolina, is available in digital format from the University of South Carolina library website. For access, see https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/NSN/search?_gl=1*1g9ua1m*_ga*MTE2Nzk0NTcyMC4xNzA4MTgzMzc2*_ga_ZGG9QXHNZF*MTcwODE4MzM3Ni4xLjAuMTcwODE4MzM3Ni4wLjAuMA. The Free South, published in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1863 and 1864, is available online at the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website at https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84026962/.

7. On free speech and slavery in the antebellum South, see Michael Thomas Smith, “‘A Traitor and a Scoundrel’: Benjamin S. Hedrick and the Making of a Dissenter in the Old South,” North Carolina Historical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1999): 316–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23522659; and Judkin Browning, ed., Letters From a North Carolina Unionist: John A. Hedrick to Benjamin S. Hedrick, 1862–1865 (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2001). Interestingly, Northern communities also proved violently intolerant of the abolitionist press, as the infamous 1837 incident involving Elijah P. Lovejoy attests. See Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (New York: Pegasus Books, 2021).

8. “To the People of Virginia,” American Union (Martinsburg, VA), July 4, 1861.

9. On antebellum southern print culture, see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Timothy J. Williams, Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On older views of the region’s supposed intellectual backwardness, see, for example, W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941); and Rollin Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949).

10. Postal records demonstrate the extent to which Southerners subscribed to Northern periodicals. See, for example, Helen R. Watson, “A Journalistic Medley: Newspapers and Periodicals in a Small North Carolina Community, 1859–1860,” North Carolina Historical Review 60, no. 4 (October 1983): 457–85.

11. On the modernism of the White antebellum southern middle class, see Stephanie Brower, Kentucky Countryside in Transition: A Streetcar Suburb and the Origins of Middle-Class Louisville, 1850–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016); Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Curtis J. Evans, The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Tom Downey, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Michael Gagnon, Transition to an Industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830–1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, eds., Southern Society and its Transformations, 1790–1860 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006); Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class of the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Jennifer L. Goloboy, Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

12. On the spread of news within Black communities, see Thomas Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Sergio A. Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2016), Chapter 5; and Patricia A. Turner, I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

13. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 176.

14. The Kaleidoscope, edited by Rebecca Brodnax Hicks between 1855 and 1857 in Petersburg, Virginia, was just one of many antebellum southern magazines edited by women that emphasized the importance of educating women. There is a vast literature on southern women’s education. See, for example, Judith T. Bainbridge, “‘A Nursery of Knowledge’: The Greenville Female Academy, 1819–1854,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 99, no. 1 (January 1998): 6–33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27570279; Robert E. Hunt, “Home, Domesticity, and School Reform in Antebellum Alabama,” Alabama Review 49 (October 1996): 253–75; Anya Jabour, “‘Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated’: Female Education in an Antebellum Southern Family”, Journal of Southern History 64, no. 1 (February 1998): 23–64, doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2588072; and Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

15. Michael Thomas Smith, A Traitor and a Scoundrel: Benjamin Hedrick and the Cost of Dissent (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); and H. Edward Richardson, Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976).

16. On proslavery apologists, see Alfred L. Brophy, University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery was called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918 (New York: Praeger, 1985).

17. Equally importantly, a number of historians have identified an active pro-Union sentiment within the Confederacy, suggesting that the Confederacy could hardly count on a unified citizenry to support its cause. In North Carolina, the Appalachian region, and other areas, unionism was especially strong and a thorn in the side of southern leaders. Barton A. Myers, Rebels against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

18. For more on the Southern Literary Messenger, see Alexander J. Ashland, “Documenting Novel Sources in Antebellum U.S. Literature,” South Atlantic Review 85, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 19–36; Erika J. Pribanic-Smith, “Two Magazines and the Fight to Save Mount Vernon, 1855–1860,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 26 (2016): 92–107; Christopher P. Semtner, “Poe in Richmond: The Sale of the Lost Lenore House and Other Poe Sites,” Edgar Allan Poe Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 73–83; and Robert D. Jacobs, “Campaign for a Southern Literature: The Southern Literary Messenger,” Southern Literary Journal 2 (Fall 1969): 66–98.

19. Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights, 7.

20. “Books for the Soldier,” New South, May 2, 1863.

21. On the Tennessee press during the war, including the fall of Memphis, see Dianne Bragg, “An Affair of Words: Tennessee’s Civil War Press and the Confederate Nation,” in A Press Divided: Newspaper Coverage of the Civil War, ed. David B. Sachsman (London: Routledge, 2014), 115–40; and William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Louisville: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997).

22. Judkin Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

23. Browning, Shifting Loyalties, 79.

24. Notice in Salem Observer, May 10, 1862.

25. See, for example, “The News,” New Bern Daily Progress (New Bern, NC), September 22, 1862.

26. “To the People of Virginia,” American Union, July 4, 1861. This editorial was reprinted in subsequent issues as well.

27. “Wanton Destruction of Property,” American Union, July 6, 1861; and “The Result of this War,” American Union, July 11, 1861.

28. “Ourselves,” New South, August 23, 1862.

29. “Ourselves,” New South.

30. “Inaugural,” New South, March 15, 1862.

31. “Dedication of the Negro Church,” New South, October 18, 1862; and “Arrival of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” New South, June 6, 1863.

32. “The Heroes of Wagner,” New South, October 24, 1863.

33. “Evacuation of the Peninsula,” New South, August 30, 1862. This was not the only time Sears used his editorial powers to denounce McClellan. A few months later, Sears charged the Union general with having “failed to fulfill all the bright hopes entertained of him,” and supported his ouster by President Lincoln. See the untitled editorial, New South, November 22, 1862.

34. “The Feeling at the North,” New South, December 27, 1862. See also Sears’s editorial questioning Union military leadership: “Have We a General Among Us?,” New South, January 31, 1863.

35. See notice in New South, September 20, 1862.

36. “Jaundiced,” New South, October 4, 1862.

37. Sears praised the conduct of the Second South Carolina Volunteers in “Operations of the Colored Troops on the Georgia Coast,” New South, June 20, 1863. On the Massachusetts 54th, see “Arrival of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” New South; and “The Heroes of Wagner,” New South.

38. “Emancipation,” Free South, January 17, 1863.

39. Abbott, For Free Press and Equal Rights, 11.

40. “The Land Question and the Negroes,” Free South, January 17, 1862.

41. “The Land Question and the Negroes.” See also, “Rights of Free Negroes under the Homestead Law,” Free South, August 29, 1863; “The Sale of Protected Lands,” Free South, September 28, 1863; and “The Lands and the Negro,” Free South, January 30, 1864.

42. “Negrophobia,” Free South, January 17, 1862.

43. “Emancipation,” Free South. See also, “Justice to the Blacks the Interest of the Nation,” Free South, July 4, 1863.

44. See, for example, “Our New England Letter,” Palmetto Herald (Port Royal, SC), March 24, 1864.

45. “The Loyal Georgian,” Massachusetts Spy (Boston, MA), January 4, 1865.

46. On the copperhead press, see Bryon Andreasen, “Copperhead Christians and the Press,” in Sachsman, ed., A Press Divided, 269–78; Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 4 (1982): 6–28; and Jonathan Daniel Wells, “Inventing White Supremacy Race, Print Culture, and the Civil War Draft Riots,” Civil War History 68, no. 1 (March 2022): 42–80, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2022.0003.

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Notes on contributors

Jonathan Daniel Wells

Jonathan Daniel Wells is professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge University Press, 2011); The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2011); and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth Century America (2nd ed., 2016). His most recent books are Blind no More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War (2019); and The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020).