The Early Days

Before there could even be the job of "correspondent," America first needed newspapers- and they got off to a very slow start. British colonial authorities, unrestricted by any protection for "freedom of the press," were consistently repressive. In the 1670s, the royal governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley (who would face the nearly successful Bacon's Rebellion a year later), pronounced that: "I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy...and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both." In 1682, the British Crown informed its Virginia colony that "no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any occasion whatever"!

No less than future Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (who would make his fortune from printing) would feel this repression personally. In 1722 in Boston his older brother James, editor of one of the first American papers, criticized the authorities and was jailed for several weeks; Ben, just 16, became the official editor! Soon after, he left Boston for Philadelphia, which was rapidly becoming the population and cultural center of the colonies. There he played a crucial role in making the city the press capital as well. Papers began to flourish from the 1730s, and of course, after independence, benefited from the First Amendment to the Constitution as ratified by 1789 ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of the press").

But there were other major restrictions to the press at first besides censorship. For centuries after Gutenberg produced the first printed book in the Western world, in Germany in 1455, printing technology remained laborious, clumsy, and slow, consisting of pressing ink-stained lead type against a sheet of paper (which itself was scarce), one page at a time, by hand. And then there was the problem of communicating news. Roads were few, which meant that most news traveled by ship, and that could take weeks even along the East Coast (while news could take months to arrive from Europe!). The result was that early newspapers were very unimpressive in content until the early 1800s (typically no more than 4 pages, and with small circulations). Staffs were small also. Hence, while newspapers certainly carried war news throughout both of America's first two major wars (the Revolution and the War of 1812), there were no such thing as "embedded reporters" who were actually with the armies (or navies), sending updates to the papers.

The dramatic changes that would lead to this blog's topic, "war reporting," took place from the 1830s onward. The first giant step was the invention and spread of the steam driven rotary printing press, which could print up to 10,000 sheet per hour! And this massive boost to newspapers intersected with rising literacy in America, and with S.F.B. Morse's introduction in 1844 of the first practical telegraph- the first long-distance method of instant communication (through wires, with operators tapping out messages using his "Morse code"). In turn all of these innovations coincided with the next major American war- with Mexico (1846-1848).

Western expansion of course was integral to the development of the colonies and United States from the first, but in this case that expansion was planned at the top, on a continental scale. Democrat James Polk, a slaveowner from Tennessee, was elected in 1844 on a platform of "manifest destiny," the idea that God intended the U.S. to push all the way to the Pacific. He followed up on the recent acquisition of Texas (which had won independence from Mexico in 1836), by aiming to add the area we today call the "Southwest", and California (both owned by Mexico), and the "Oregon Country" (then shared with Britain, the colonial ruler of Canada). While the latter was bloodlessly split with Britain in 1846, Mexico understandably refused to sell the northern third of its territory to Polk. He reacted by provoking the Mexicans into attacking the US Army on the disputed border, and that started the Mexican-American War (which ended only after an American expedition captured Mexico City itself in 1847, and with a treaty in 1848 that gave Polk the land he wanted).

With newspapers mushrooming across the U.S., and now a distant and exotic war, the American public was obviously hungering for as much substantive news of our invasion of Mexico as possible. Unfortunately the new telegraph could not meet the need, as there was not yet a network (of poles and wires) that reached anywhere near the combat zones. A handful of journalists did get there; I will mention two (George Wilkins Kendall, the best known of the time, and a female pioneer, Jane McManus, who went by a variety of names).

Kendall was a man of wide travels and exceptionally varied careers. He came from New Hampshire, where he learned printing, but got his real start in New Orleans, where he cofounded the "Picayune" newspaper in 1837. But then he took a detour into one of his other favorite pastimes, amateur soldiering. Unfortunately he picked the Texas Santa Fe Expedition, which was routed by the Mexicans in 1841, and he spent a year in jail. Undiscouraged, he turned the experience into a best-selling book, and signed up to fight the Mexicans again as a Texas Ranger in 1846. But he skillfully combined his soldiering with creative journalism. With the outbreak of the Mexican War, he joined the headquarters of one of the two major American commanders, Zachary Taylor, and set up a field office that followed Taylor's army. The news was then carried by horseback to the Mexican port of Veracruz (the base for another American army), and transferred to fast boats. But not just any boats- he put technicians and presses on board, so that the stories were already printed by the time they docked in New Orleans!

Kendall would abandon journalism at war's end for an entirely new occupation, sheep ranching in Texas. Meantime Irish-American Jane McManus had also found her way from the Northeast to Texas, where she passionately embraced both "manifest destiny" (in fact she may have coined the term!), and the expansion of slavery. She was hired by three major urban newspapers, including the largest (Horace Greeley's "New York- Tribune"), to cover the Mexican War. Her stories, under the pen name of "Cora Montgomery," concerned the successful American siege of Veracruz in 1847.

Both of these early journalists showed clear differences from the job later described as "war correspondent." Both fervently believed in the war effort and had no pretense of journalistic neutrality in their writings; in fact Kendall participated in combat and was wounded, at the same time as publishing stories.

What would develop to be the "correspondent" role was, instead, a British innovation. While there were British forebears in the late 1700s and Napoleonic Wars, one man would come to serve as the role model, both in Britain and in the U.S., by the 1850s: William Howard Russell. Russell, then in his thirties and representing the London "Times," made his mark in the Crimean War (1853-1856), in which the French and British, allied with the Ottoman Turks and the Sardinians, landed in the southern Russian Empire and were victorious. The war also saw the effective beginning of a related profession: the war photographer. Russell was certainly not an aristocrat (a British soldier described him as "a vulgar low Irishman, [who] sings a good song, drinks anyone's brandy and water and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow. He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters"). But he readily mixed with all ranks, while winning respect from the ordinary soldiers and the British public (if not the government and generals) for his candid and vivid descriptions of disastrous mismanagement of the army, especially of its living conditions. His special fame came from his eyewitness account of a famous British disaster, the "Charge of the Light Brigade," when 600 horsemen, romantically and near-suicidally, charged into a mass of Russian cannons (only a third survived). Russell's dispatch was the raw material for a classic Victorian poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Overall Russell pioneered the standard image of the war correspondent: cool (and unarmed) in the midst of the chaos and gore of combat; an able, fast, and vivid writer; and someone with empathy for those paying war's price.

It was therefore not at all surprising that Russell should next be sent by his paper to cover the biggest war in the Western world between 1815 and 1914: the American Civil War (1861-1865). By then there were hundreds of reporters in the field, mostly with the Union armies, and Russell, with his status as the man they all wanted to imitate, got the red carpet treatment when he arrived soon after the outbreak. He was immediately ushered in to see Lincoln, who greeted him with a mix of flattery and humor: "Mr. Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world- in fact I don't know anything that has much more power- except

perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister." Unfortunately his time in America proved to be very unhappy. Russell arrived just in time for the first major battle, known later as First Bull Run, when in July 1861 the green Union army marched a short distance south of Washington. aiming to defeat the Confederates, capture Richmond, and end the war in an afternoon. Russell did not get to the battlefield itself, but he did see all too well how the Northern soldiers broke and ran in utter panic all the way back to Washington (known as "the great skedaddle"). His mistake was in telling just what he saw. As soon as his all-too-vivid report of the collapse was read in the North, Russell became an instant outcast, and even received death threats. He was instantly denied all access to the Union armies. He did not even try to cover the Confederate side (being firmly antislavery, though his own paper sympathized with the South). After a long period of frustration, he went home in disgrace in 1863.

Nor did the American reporters especially distinguish themselves in covering this war. Press coverage was chaotic, sporadic, and often full of distortions or outright inventions (or the stories gave away important military information). As in Crimea, war photography became an important new profession, thanks in particular to the work of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O'Sullivan, including the innovation of fitting out wagons as mobile darkrooms. But there were important technical limitations; the long exposure times of the

wet plate process of the time meant that human subjects had to be completely still (hence corpses worked well!). The technology to convert photos into newspaper illustrations did not yet exist either, which gave room to another profession (the war artist with sketchbook). Both the photos and sketches did provide a much more realistic sense of the war's carnage than the earlier medium of paintings.

There was one important development for the profession (and unknown to me until I worked on this story): that the Civil War was covered by at least one Black war reporter, Thomas (he went by "T.") Morris Chester. Chester was born free in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to ex-slave parents who ran a successful restaurant. He was thereby able to get a college-level education. He recruited for the U.S. Colored Troops (including the 54th Massachusetts, immortalized in the movie "Glory"), and late in the war got a job with the (white-owned) "Philadelphia Press," traveling with the Army of the James in Virginia in 1864-65 (which had many USCT units). His most exciting moment came when the unit he was with was one of the first in the Union Army to enter Richmond in April 1865. There a white reporter, Charles Coffin, recorded a memorable encounter. Chester, who was physically very imposing, entered the meeting room for the Confederate Congress, and sat down in the speaker's chair. Coffin watched as an outraged Confederate officer told Chester to move:

"Come out of there, you black cuss!" Mr Chester raised his eyes, calmly surveyed the intruder, and went on with the writing [of his dispatch]. "Get out of there or I'll knock your brains out!" The officer bellowed. Pouring out a torrent of oaths; and rushing up the stairs to execute his threat, he found himself tumbling over chairs and benches, and was knocked down by one well-planted blow to the eyes. Mr Chester sat down as if nothing had happened."

Chester, who had also lived in Liberia, moved to England after the war, and was the first Black person there to be admitted as a lawyer!

In the immediate aftermath of the war, journalism got another huge technological boost. In 1866, after many failures, American businessman Cyrus Field, with the help of massive British investment (including the largest steamship of the century), succeeded in successfully linking Britain to North America with a telegraph cable on the seafloor. Many other such cables soon followed, across the globe (along with the Transcontinental Railroad, which in 1869 linked both U.S. coasts). All of a sudden, messages (though still at this time in Morse code) could be sent in near-real time in both directions across thousands of miles. The telephone and typewriter also became essential tools by the 1880s, as did the linotype printer, which again dramatically speeded up production. All of this, plus dramatic population growth, industrialization, and immigration, contributed mightily to the "golden age" of newspapers that began at this time. By 1900, there would over 20,000 in the U.S. alone, in all sizes from small town to big rural operations, including dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, with some printed in multiple editions in a single day. Plus a wealth of magazines! This explosion of journalism led to two immediate situations: first, ferocious competition between the papers for readers, and second (and an issue all too familiar in the digital age), a desperate need for a constant stream of "content." The time of the "foreign correspondent," roving from country to country and conflict to conflict, had now fully arrived.

That concludes this first introductory post- I hope it's not too long! I've come up with so much material on this topic that I have split the subject into many more posts than I had originally envisioned! In the next one, I will introduce you to, among others, an Irish-American with an awesome name, who rode across the deserts of Central Asia with the Russian Army to present Uzbekistan, and whose reports on Turkish atrocities led to the independence of Bulgaria (where he is still a national hero!). And then there's the young woman who bullied the Secretary of War into giving her official permission to cover the war in Cuba, and had to get there by a coal barge. I hope to include more illustrations, etc. by then. Till next time!!

Bibliography:

Gordon, John Steele. "A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable." New York: Harper Perennial (Reprint Ed.), 2003.

Henig, Gerald S. "Thomas Morris Chester: First Black War Reporter on the Front Lines" (https://www.historynet.com/thomas-morris-chester) Accessed 10/12022.

"History of Censorship in America" (https://stacker.com/stories/5390/history-censorship-america) Accessed 9/30/2022.

"History of newspaper publishing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History of newspaper-publishing) Accessed 9/30/2022.

"Jane McManus," in "A Continent Divided: The U.S.-Mexico War," (https://library.uta.edu/usmexicowar/item?bio id=52) Accessed 9/26/2022.

Knightley, Phillip. "The First Casualty." New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Morris, Jr., Roy. "The Pen & the Sword: A Brief History of War Correspondents" (warfarehistorynetwork.com) Accessed 9/30/2022.

"Notable Visitors: William Howard Russell (1820-1907)", (mrlincolnswhitehouse.org). Accessed 10/3/2022.

Raab, Christopher. "History of the Book: Machine Press Period, 1800-1950." (library.fandm.edu/printing-machine-press-period)

Blog photo: (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File.Thomas-Morris-Chester.jpg) Public Domain.