Scribblers & Generals

REPORTERS FOR THE UNION (316 pp.)--Bernard A. Weisberger--Little, Brown ($4.50).

Being a war correspondent in the 1860s was in some ways tougher than being an infantryman. The foot soldier had to contend with nothing worse than mud, hardtack and the enemy's shot & shell. The war correspondent had to face all these things plus the wrath and distrust of such generals as William Tecumseh Sherman: "Dirty newspaper scribblers." Sherman called them. "They come into camp, poke about among the lazy shirks and pick up their camp rumors and publish them as facts ... I will treat them as spies, which in truth they are."

The general was as good as his word. In 1863 Thomas W. Knox, correspondent of the New York Herald, wrote a story blaming the failure of an attempt to outflank the Confederate defenders of Vicksburg on Sherman's faulty disposition of troops. The general's orders were so confused, wrote Knox, that "discussion . . . with respect to his sanity was revived with great earnestness." This was too much for Sherman. He arrested Correspondent Knox on charges of spying, did his irascible best to have him hanged. A court-martial saved Knox from the gallows, but he was banned from Sherman's command with a personal warning from the general that if he showed his face again, he would go "down the Mississippi floating on a log."

Wrath Deserved. Another general, Ambrose Burnside* seized a New York Times correspondent and ordered him shot. The Timesman was saved only by the intervention of General Grant. General George Meade had the Philadelphia Inquirer man ridden out of his headquarters on a horse bearing a sign: "Libeler of the Press.''

This kind of treatment was the order of the day for the Civil War reporter. The surprising thing is that in spite of it, as Bernard A. Weisberger notes in his lively, fact-backed study, Reporters for the Union, the 18605 led to the recognition of war reporting as a respectable and lasting profession.

The Civil War newspaperman often deserved the generals' righteous wrath. Efficient security censorship was at first unknown, and reporters gave away more military secrets to the enemy than a flock of spies. A typical dispatch from Illinois in the Chicago Tribune in 1861: "Our forces at Bird's Point now consist of the following regiments . . . [the] Eleventh Illinois . . . Twelfth Illinois . . . Eighteenth Illinois . . . also 17 pieces of artillery, consisting of six 24-pound siege guns, three 24-pound howitzers, two 12-pound howitzers and six 6-pound brass pieces." In October 1861, a New York Tribune correspondent in Missouri wrote what amounted to an invitation for a Confederate attack: he described a concentration of 15,000 troops, "waiting for the remainder of the army to join them." During the Peninsular Campaign, Harper's Weekly printed detailed sketches of General McClellan's siege works.

Devoted Readers. The Confederacy took full advantage of such readymade intelligence. Southern sympathizers and agents floated copies of Northern newspapers down the Mississippi in bottles, or simply crossed the lines with them. Shortly before the battle of Chickamauga, Confederate General Braxton Bragg was delighted to read in the New York Times a story about a scheme for bluffing part of his forces out of their positions around Chattanooga. Bragg, forewarned by one of the country's most reliable journals, refused to be bluffed out.

General Robert E. Lee also read the Yankee newspapers with devoted attention. When the War Department in Washington tried to dam the leaks, the Union papers cried "freedom of the press." The Chicago Times denounced Government censorship of the telegraph lines as a "most odious tyranny, with no parallel in the annals of free nations." But by the end of the war, the press had accepted the Army's insistence that it show some responsibility. On their side, most of the generals recognized the correspondent as at least a necessary evil; they began to accredit him officially, supply him with fodder for his horse, bivouac for his tired bones, and, every now & then, even a tot of whisky.

*Who gave both his name and a twist on his name to the style of cheek-whiskers he affected: burnsides and sideburns.

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