Foreign Correspondence in the Early Telegraphic Era: The Herald, the Tribune, and the 1848 Revolutions

Abstract

In 1848, political revolutions were breaking out all over Europe simultaneously while new technological advancements were having significant and profound impacts on news gathering practices abroad. New forms of communication and transportation, including the telegraph, the railroad, and the ocean-going steamship, meant the faster transmission of news and a wider spirit of cooperation between competing, penny press newspapers that resulted in shared telegraphic dispatches. This study examines the foreign correspondence published in the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, and how the breaking news came in telegraphic dispatches that the two papers shared. This study reveals how correspondence became a way for both of publications to provide readers with unique material because both James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Horace Greeley of the Tribune thought European letters were valuable sources of an American perspective on world events that gave readers an eyewitness account.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Tribune, July 24, 1848, (Brisbane’s letter dated June 29).

2 See, for instance, Giovanna Dell’Orto, Giving Meanings to the World: The First U.S. Foreign Correspondents, 1838-1859 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

3 Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC, 1960), 551.

4 Robert J. Goldstein, Political Repression in 19th Century Europe (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983), 185; Charles Breunig, The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 252.

5 Breunig, Age of Revolution, 253; Goldstein, Political Repression, 184-85, 186-87.

6 Goldstein, Political Repression, 187-88; Melvin Kranzberg, ed., 1848: A Turning Point? (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1959), xvii; Breunig, Age of Revolution, 254.

7 Herald, February 28, 1848; L.U. Reavis, A Representative Life of Horace Greeley (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1872), 85; Richard Schwarzlose, The Nation's Newsbrokers, Vol. 1: The Formative Years, from Pretelegraph to 1865 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 124-25.

8 T.H. Giddings, “Rushing the Transatlantic News in the 1830s and 1840s,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 42 (January 1958): 54-58; Richard A Schwarzlose, “Early Teleghraphic News Dispatches: Forerunner of the AP,” Journalism Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 595-601; Schwarzlose, “Harbor News Association: The Formal Origin of the AP,” Journalism Quarterly 45, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 253-60.

9 See, for instance, the Mexican-American War discussion and references in a standard history such as Wm. David Sloan, Tracy Lucht and Erika Pribanic-Smith, eds., The Media in America. A History, 11^th ed. (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2020), 137, 142; see, also, John Byrne Cook, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23-42; Bennett had employed several correspondents as the Herald sought to cover an abortive uprising in Canada a decade before the Mexican War, see Ulf Jonas Bjork, “Latest from the Canadian Revolution: Early War Correspondence in the New York Herald, 1837-1838,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 71, no. 4 (December 4, 1994):851-858.

10 Richard W. Desmond, The Information Process: World News Reporting to the Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1978), 100, 144, 146: John Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 25-26; early biographies of Horace Greeley mention the coverage of the 1848 revolutions in very general terms; J. Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley: Editor of the New York Tribune (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855), 282-83; Reavis, A Representative Life, 84-85.

11 Dowling, “Reporting the Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and the Italian Risorgimento,” American Journalism 31, no. 1 (2014): 26-48; Dell’Orto, Giving Meanings to the World, 11, 31-32, 111-112, 114, 128.

12 Wallace Eberhard, “Mr. Bennett Covers a Murder Trial,” Journalism Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1970): 457-63; James Stanford Bradshaw, “George W. Wisner and the New York Sun,” Journalism History 6, no. 4 (1979-1980):112, 117-121; David Anthony, “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York,” American Literature 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 487-514; Mitchell Stephens, A History of News (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), 229-238; for the impact of the telegraph on journalism, see Richard Kielbowicz, “Electrifying News! Journalists, Audiences, and the Culture of Timeliness in the United States, 1840–1920,” Time & Society 28, no. 1 (2019): 220-230.

13 Stephens, A History of News, 221.

14 Herald, July 12, 1848; for Investigator’s contributions, see Herald, July 10, 1848.

15 Herald, July 22, 1836; histories of Bennett and his paper routinely stress the publisher’s interest in gathering foreign news, see, for instance, Don C. Sietz, The James Gordon Bennetts, Father and Son (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 60-61; Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), 201-02. General histories echo these accounts, see Desmond, The Information Process, 89-93; Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence, 33; and John Tebbel, The Compact History of the American Newspaper (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1963), 98.

16 Herald, December 6, 1837; September 16, 1837.

17 Herald, July 18, 1847.

18 Tribune, May 7, 1841; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690-1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 270; Sidney Kobre, Development of American Journalism (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1969) 247-50; Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley; Reavis; “Horace Greeley,” in Views and Interviews on Journalism, ed. Charles Wingate (New York: F.B. Patterson, 1875), 151-82; Francis N. Zabriskie, Horace Greeley, the Editor, rep. ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1890; Beekman, 1974). William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley: Founder and Editor of the New York Tribune (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903); Don C. Seitz, Horace Greeley: Founder of the New York Tribune, rep. ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1926; New York: AMS Press, 1970); Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley: Printer, Editor, Crusader (New York: G P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946); Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953); for examples of the Tribune’s interest in overseas news, see August 12, 1841; October 6, 1842; December 5, 1843.

19 Tribune, November 22, 1847.

20 Tribune, February 21, 1843; April 21, 1843; April 23, 1844; July 7, 1847; August 4, 1847; November 10, 1847; Herald, August 30,1847; September 4, 1847; October 5, 1847; Schwarzlose, Nation’s Newsbrokers, 48-53.

21 James E. Vance, Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 456; James M. Morris, Our Maritime Heritage: Maritime Developments and Their Impact on American Life (Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1979), 162-63; Schwarzlose, Nation's Newsbrokers, 47-48; W. H. Bunting, ed., Portrait of a Port: Boston, 1852-1914 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971), 396; Herald, July 9, 1847; Herald, July 1847-July 1848; Tribune, July 1847-July 1848.

22 Tribune, December 9, 1847; the Herald claimed it took an hour for an extra to reach the streets; Herald, July 5, 1847; Schwarzlose, “Early Telegraphic Dispatches,” 598-99.

23 Schwarzlose, “Early Telegraphic Dispatches,” 598-99; Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 53; Tribune, September 20, 1847; February 2, 1848; April 8, 1848.

24 Schwarslose, Nation’s Newsbrokers, 98-100; Herald, June 10, 1848.

25 Tribune, August 3, 1847; “letters” were contributions from correspondents, while “circulars” were market reports from brokerage firms.

26 Herald, April 19, 1848.

27 Tribune, May 1, 1848.

28 Herald, August 8, 1837; October 27, 1837; December 13, 1837; Herald, July-December 1847; letters from Paris numbered thirteen; Rome, eleven; Madrid, ten; Berne, nine; Constantinople, five; Dublin, Naples, Florence, Berlin, and Athens, four; and Bremen, Bologna, Lisbon, Milan, Turin, Ferrara, and Genoa, one letter each.

29 Herald, December 7, 1847.

30 Herald, July 31, 1847; September 29, 1847; October 5, 1847; for an idea of the type of correspondents working for the Herald, see the applicant suggested in an unsigned letter to Bennett, November 21, 1847, Bennett papers, New York Public Library.

31 Giddings, “Rushing the Transatlantic News, 59. In October 1847, the Tribune claimed to have two “European Correspondents” who would supply “regular dispatches from the Old World”; conceivably, Margaret Fuller in Rome counted as the other; Tribune, October 2, 1847.

32 A good discussion of the travel-letter genre is in Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), 30-31; between 1841 and 1845, no fewer than fifteen different writers contributed series of letters to the Tribune.

33 Reply to Taylor quoted in John A. Lent, “The International Horace Greeley,” Media History Digest 11, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1991): 21-22; Tribune, January 29, 1844.

34 For Fuller’s contributions, see Tribune, August 5, 1847; September 11; November 27; January 1, 1848; February 7; March 13; David Watson, Margaret Fuller, an American Romantic (New York: Berg, 1988), 34-42; Greeley to Emma Whiting, July 28, 1847, Greeley Papers, Library of Congress; another contributor, William C. Campbell, sent two letters—published in the same issue—from Switzerland, where a civil war between liberals and conservatives was attracting worldwide attention and foreshadowing the unrest across the continent a few months later, but he fell silent after that; Tribune, November 23, 1847; the Herald also published letters from a correspondent in the travel-writer vein in 1847, see Herald, July 11, 1847; August 19, 1847.

35 Herald, July 18, 1848.

36 Herald and Tribune, February 1 to July 31, 1848.

37 Herald issues with letters from Paris totaled thirty-eight; London, twenty; Dublin, nine; and Berlin and Milan, six each.

38 Herald, February 20, 1848; the latest Naples letter, dated December 1847, was published on January 19, 1848.

39 Herald, March 30, 1848; April 11, 1848.

40 Tribune, March 13, 1848 (Fuller letter dated January 27); the Sicilian revolution was first noted in the Tribune on February 17, 1848; Tribune, May 4, 1848 (letters dated March 29 and April 1).

41 Watson, Margaret Fuller, 41.

42 Herald, March 19, 1848.

43 Herald, March 29, 1848.

44 Tribune, March 31, 1848; given that an Atlantic crossing took two-three weeks each way, it was impossible for Greeley to have arranged for the contribution after hearing of the revolt; possibly, Peabody had on his own initiative, engaged the writer from London.

45 Tribune, May 1, 1848 (dated April 13); a letter by the Paris man of the Schnellpost had been published in the Tribune the previous year, see August 21, 1847.

46 Tribune, June 6, 1848; May 23, 1848; May 1, 1848; Herald, May 24, 1848; Patricia Herminghouse, “Radicalism and the 'Great Cause': The German-American Serial Novel in the Antebellum Era,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three- Hundred-Year History, vol. 1, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 307.

47 Tribune, July 11, 1848; a biography of Dana claims he was discouraged by Greeley from going to France because the Tribune publisher thought that his paper already had a capable correspondent stationed there; Janet E. Steele, The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 22-23; Tribune, August 16, 1848.

48 Tribune, April 21, 1848 (Vienna letter dated March 13); May 2, 1848 (Berlin letter dated March 31); Herald, May 4, 1848 (Berlin letters dated March 19-22, 23, 1848); May 16, 1848 (Berlin letter dated April 24); May 29, 1848 (Berlin letter dated April 4); Tribune, July 3, 1848 (Berlin letter dated June 9).

49 See, for instance, Herald, May 29, 1848; June 12; July 2; July 9; July 11; the Naples suppression was noted in the Herald, June 12, 1848.

50 Tribune, July 14, 1848 (Dana letter dated June 29); July 24, 1848, (Brisbane letter dated June 29).

51 Herald, July 18, 1848; July 14, 1848; July 16, 1848; July 18, 1848.

52 Herald, October 4, 1847; Herald, July-December 1847.

53 See, for instance, references to this in Tribune, May 15, 1848; June 1, 1848; Herald, May 23, 1848; July 24, 1848.

54 Tribune, April 24, 1848; May 9, 1848.

55 Herald, June 27, 1848; July 12, 1848.

56 Herald, March 30, 1848; March 29, 1848.

57 Herald, July 18, 1848.

58 Tribune, May 1, 1848; April 24, 1848.

59 Herald, March 30, 1848; June 4, 1848.

60 Tribune, May 1, 1848.

61 Herald, May 4, 1848.

62 Herald, March 30, 1848.

63 Herald, March 29, 1848.

64 Tribune, July 24, 1848.

65 Herald, March 30, 1848.

66 Herald, May 24, 1848; May 29, 1848.

67 Tribune, July 11, 1848; July 14, 1848.

68 Herald, March 29, 1848.

69 Herald, March 30, 1848.

70 Tribune, May 1, 1848.

71 Herald, July 15, 1848; Tribune, July 24, 1848.

72 Schwarzlose, Nation’s Newsbrokers; Blondheim, News over the Wires.

73 James W. Carey, “Why and How? The Dark Continent of American Journalism,” in Reading the News, ed. Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 151-52.

74 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1-17.

75 Ulf Jonas Bjork, “Sketches of Life and Society: Horace Greeley’s Vision for Foreign Correspondence,” American Journalism 14, no.3-4 (Summer-Fall 1997): 374-75.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulf Jonas Bjork

Ulf Jonas Bjork is a professor in the Department of Journalism & Public Relations at IUPUI in Indianapolis. His research interests include early foreign correspondence in American newspapers and the history of international organizations for journalists. He is the co-author of two books and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters.