civil war newspapers--9/21/26

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Today's selection--from Empire of Ink by Alex Wright. Newspapers published by Civil War armed forces themselves helped accelerate the transformation of the American press from a hodgepodge of small-town partisan papers into an increasingly nationalized press:

“One morning in July 1861, the Ohio Seventh Regiment of the Union army rolled into the sleepy town of Weston, Virginia. There, they discovered the abandoned offices of the town's newspaper, The Weston Herald. The previous owner had fled town in a hurry, leaving behind a scattered mess of papers and a functioning hand-crank press. Four of the officers promptly decided to commandeer the printshop–and publish their own newspaper. On July 4, the inaugural edition of The Ohio Seventh appeared. 

“Opening with a patriotic reprinting of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ the newly minted soldier-editors announced their intention to keep publishing the paper ‘as often as circumstances admit.’ They also included a, rousing letter written by an anonymous soldier: ‘Now that the Regiment; can boast of running a press on their own hook, I can see no possible reason why we should not avail ourselves of the opportunity of expressing our sentiments, in regard to the Union and all its glories.’ They also took the occasion to address the remaining town residents, reassuring anyone who might happen to read their paper that they came not as enemies but ‘as long absented friends,’ and that they harbored no intention to ‘war against any of your institutions, not even against the institution of slavery.’

“As the soldiers thumbed through the previous publisher's papers scattered around the office, they stumbled on a particularly damning artifact: a draft story describing the town's invasion–before it happened. The headline read: ‘Fiendish Work! Defenseless Women and Children Outraged and Butchered!!’ It went on to recount a series of gruesome and entirely fictitious outrages: women raped, children murdered, and ordinary citizens hanged by the dozens on their own doorsteps. Not a single word of it was true. The editor had apparently written the article and set it in type long before the Union soldiers ever arrived and had prepared to send it out via telegraph to other Southern newspapers. But the editor never executed the plan. He had apparently fled in a hurry without transmitting the dispatch. Enraged, the Union soldiers decided to print the article in its entirety, along with a scathing rebuttal to counteract the libel: ous propaganda, using their newly acquired literary artillery to defend their regiments honor. 

“Alongside the bloody national reckoning of the Civil War, a quieter revolution was taking place. The conflict unleashed a torrent of print, powered by telegraph wires, railway lines, steam presses–and a new breed of portable presses designed expressly for military use. On the front lines, soldiers could now publish their own dispatches from the field, while correspondents wired stories from the battlefields to city papers at unprecedented speeds. Together, these developments helped accelerate the transformation of the press from a hodgepodge of small-town partisan papers into an increasingly nationalized press chronicling the war in real time–and laying the groundwork for the professionalized, industrialized mass media of the postwar era. 

The Telegraph printing house in Macon, Georgia, c. 1876

“On that same July 4 of 1861, Private Henry Peterman launched a similar editorial foray: printing the first issue of the Pennsylvania Thirteenth. Two weeks earlier, he and a few fellow soldiers had pooled funds to buy a used Adams Cottage Press from a local editor, Reverend Charles H. Russell, who was preparing to enlist. Unlike The Ohio Seventh–which was written and edited by members of the officer corps–the Pennsylvania Thirteenth was produced entirely by enlisted men, with little in the way of top-down military pronouncements. Instead, the paper traded mostly in the day-to-day minutiae of camp life: humorous anecdotes, light verse, and occasional jibes at the harsh lot of the soldier's life. 

“One of the paper's early poems, ‘The Knapsack Drill,’ neatly encapsulated the newspaper's everyman ethos: 

“A soldier's life is hard enough–

He takes the smooth part with the rough;

‘Tis nothing strange, but it's a bitter pill–

He's oft put through the 'knapsack drill'

Should he perchance go off to town 

To see the sights and run around, 

And with ‘goodies’ there his jacket fill, 

He thinks not of the 'knapsack drill.’ 

The guard comes up and reads his pass–

The time is up, and then, alas?

There–to pay; the colonel will 

Put him through the ‘knapsack drill.’

The officers, so nice and fine, 

Whene'er they choose will have a time;

Their goblets to the brim will fill

And never fear the '’knapsack drill.’

Our three years' time will soon be done,

And if we live we'll all go home; 

Of pleasure then we'll drink our fill,

And fear no more the '’knapsack drill.’

“The campy poem set the tone for the rest of the newspaper's run, which balanced similarly witty, irreverent fare with more prosaic reports about regimental goings-on. One issue described a New Year's dinner where the soldiers feasted on roast turkey, oysters, and lemonade–only to see their dessert course interrupted when word spread that the company was about to mobilize for battle. In another issue, an anonymous soldier-scribe chronicled the doings of their adopted dog Jack, who ‘continues to take greater interest in the regimental drills and dress parades than some of the officers and men.’

“Elsewhere, the paper tiptoed toward weightier topics like temperance, but with characteristically arch wit. Three new voluntary associations had recently formed in response to the problem of overindulgence: a ‘Patriotic League’ whose members pledged to abstain altogether; a group of ‘Covenanters,’ who vowed to practice moderation, on the premise that ‘one should eat when he's hungry and drink when he's dry, but neither get drunk nor swear’; and, finally, the ‘Hoodoodens,’ ‘a select association’ consisting of just two soldiers, who ‘walk in and say nothing, eat, drink and pay nothing.’ Yet it appears that despite the presence of these associations amid the troops, the whiskey continued to flow. At one point the editors bemoaned the tragic departure of a beloved roving liquor seller: ‘No More shall we hear the cheerful whisper of ‘First-rate whisky–only a dollar a bottle.’

“Despite its often lighthearted tone, the Pennsylvania Thirteenth took its publishing business seriously. The paper sold out its initial press run of 1,500 copies per issue. Peterman and his compatriots vowed not to take a profit, however, turning the newspaper's revenue (at three to five cents a copy) back into funding the enterprise. Over the next fourteen months, they managed to produce fourteen issues. The final edition, dated September 12, 1862, carried an ominous report: ‘Something's up.– Judging from appearances, our regiment will be on the march in a very few days .... [E]re another week we will see the spires of Richmond.’ The story was wrong. They were marching to Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in American history. The Pennsylvania Thirteenth had breathed its last.

“As the war continued, these homespun camp newspapers proliferated. In November 1861, a group of Illinois Volunteers under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant seized a printing press in Bloomfield, Missouri, and published the first edition of a newspaper that lives to this day: Stars and Stripes. Most soldier papers came and went quickly, however–sometimes in as few as one or two issues–as their editors stayed on the march. 

“Many of these papers seem devoted to lifting the troops' spirits with stories of pranks and assorted merriment. An 1862 edition of The Camp Gazette at Camp Joe Hooker in Massachusetts recounts the tale of several "boys in the Irish Brigade" who had stolen a barrel of ale from the nearby military depot and set off into the woods, where they promptly emptied its contents. Suitably emboldened, they decided to go on an impromptu turkey hunt with their pistols, achieving little success in such a lubricated state–until the sound of their gunshots attracted the attention of the camp watch. The men, ‘while engaged in this delectable undertaking were pounced upon by the provo guard,’ and promptly returned to quarters.”

author:	Alex Wright
title:	Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper
publisher:	Basic Books
date:	Copyright 2026
pages:	157-161