Journalism in the Fallen Confederacy

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137513311
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

During the American Civil War, several newspapers remained Confederate sympathizers despite their locations being occupied by Union troops. Examining these papers, the authors explore what methods of suppression occupiers used, how occupation influenced the editorial and business sides of the press, and how occupation impacted freedom of the press.

1

“Sic Semper Tyrannis”: The Alexandria Gazette under Union Occupation

Abstract: The Alexandria Gazette was one of the newspapers that refused to flee enemy occupation. Instead, it held its ground. The result was that the editors lost virtually everything they had before they war, suffered arson, arrest, and threats of exile. This chapter explains how newspapers tried to retain their Confederate sympathies while publishing under Union rule.

van Tuyll, Debra Reddin, Nancy McKenzie Dupont, and Joseph R. Hayden. Journalism in the Fallen Confederacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137513311.0005.

Despite its prominence as river city with a busy port, antebellum visitors to Alexandria, Virginia, found the city to be charming and refined. Its streets were lined with many fine churches, including the Presbyterian Church where Washington’s funeral had been held in 1799 and Christ Church with its “ ‘pepper pot’ steeple” and brass plaque that marked what had been the first president’s pew.¹ Alexandrians lived a more comfortable life than those in any other part of America, declared a visitor in 1860, and their comfort was only enhanced by the city’s beauty. The classical architecture of the city center, where Federal and Greek revival styles dominated, lent the town a refined air that was complemented by its elegant lecture hall, the Lyceum, and library that held more than 5,000 volumes.²

Alexandria had had time to hone and polish its image, for it was an old town in 1860. Hugh West established the first settlement here in 1732 when he built his tobacco warehouse and tavern on the bluffs overlooking the Potomac River. In 1748, those who had settled on that land petitioned the Virginia General Assembly for permission to establish a town they would name after John Alexander, an early landowner in the area. They set aside 60 acres for the city, and in 1749, Alexandria became an official town laid out between marshes on the southern shore of the Potomac River, about six miles south of Washington, D.C.³

Over the next 111 years, Alexandria grew into a thriving city and an active trading center that by 1860 could boast of a fire department, municipal gas and water services for citizens, four top-notch schools, five banks, and a diverse mercantile district. Alexandria’s wharves served both as the starting place for the exportation of local agricultural products—tobacco, in large measure, but grains and corn as well—and as a port of entry for foreign vessels bringing goods from Europe and beyond. Alexandria’s commercial success was not entirely due to agriculture, however; it also sustained a manufacturing component. Some 96 manufacturers were busy creating products in Alexandria in 1860. These included a steam engine foundry that supported the rail industry, a wheat mill, and a cotton manufacturing company. Alexandria’s commercial ventures extended to a more sinister business as well: the slave trade. In 1828, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established one of America’s largest slave trading companies in Alexandria, though the venture had essentially died out by 1860.⁴

In the decade before the Civil War, Alexandria had become the commercial center of Northern Virginia. Its population exploded in that decade, rising from 8,700 in 1850 to more than 12,600 in 1860. Those 12,600 souls lived in a fairly stratified society; the rich lived in close proximity to one another. The poor, including immigrants, slaves, and free blacks, were pushed to the fringes. Around 22 percent of Alexandria residents were black, and they were split evenly between slave and free: 11 percent each. Only seven percent of Alexandria households owned slaves; among Southern cities with populations of more than 10,000, only New Orleans had a lower slave-owning rate. Just over 40 percent of Alexandria’s free blacks, mostly those who worked as merchants or artisans, owned some real property. Those at the lowest end of the social stratum were more likely to work at the docks.⁵

Alexandria’s manufacturing and commercial interests benefited from the town’s status as a transportation hub. The Orange and Alexandria rail line ran west to Lynchburg and connected with the Manassas Gap Railroad, which brought in coal and produce from the Shenandoah Valley. In 1860, Virginia’s entire 38-million-bushel corn crop was transported to Alexandria by rail and shipped out to market through its ports.⁶

Despite its extensive industrial and commercial sectors, Alexandria remained a charming town, and despite its long occupation by Union troops, it retained a touch of its charm during the Civil War, at least as far as outsiders were concerned. The city’s wide streets, red brick houses, and wharves gave Alexandria a “distinctly English air,” according to Edward Dicey, a British travel writer for the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph during his visit there in 1863.⁷

Alexandria under enemy occupation

“Charm” was not a word dwellers would have used to describe their city after May 24, 1861, however. Residents had fully expected that their community might be a military target; they had watched with quiet alarm as federal troops massed in Washington following the assault on Fort Sumter. So long as Virginia remained in the Union, they knew Alexandria would be safe. But when, on May 23, 1861, Virginians voted 125,950 to 20,373 to ratify the state’s secession ordinance, many Alexandrians realized that their vulnerability to a Union attack had increased by an order of magnitude given their proximity to Washington.⁸

Like the majority of Virginians, Alexandrians also voted heavily in favor of secession. The vote in Alexandria represented an enormous change in public opinion on the question of disunion. In the November presidential election, Alexandrians, finding Southern Democrat candidate John Breckinridge too radical, had gone overwhelmingly for Constitutional Unionist candidate John Bell. National Democrat Stephen A. Douglas also had supporters in Alexandria.⁹

Even in the early spring, as so many other Southern states were seceding, most Alexandrians remained reluctant to break up the Union, but the tide of opinion was slowly shifting. February’s election campaign for delegates to the Virginia secession convention was dominated by Unionist candidates, including the editor of the Alexandria Gazette, Edgar Snowden, Sr. Snowden was nominated because he was considered “capable of taking calm news of [momentous] subjects, and, at the same time, of firmly upholding, at all hazards, the rights and honor of the state.” Snowden would later withdraw from the campaign in favor of another Alexandria Unionist, George Brent. As the delegate election neared, city Unionists turned out in droves to demonstrate in favor of the Union. Assembling at Heflebower’s City Hotel, where they were entertained “by an excellent band” and speeches in support of the Union, the multitudes then processed through town and stopped at the homes of the city’s prominent Unionists, who offered impromptu speeches supporting the Unionist candidates for convention delegate. Brent was among those who spoke that night. He argued that “the Union should be maintained as long as possible consistent with the interests and honor of Virginia.” Brent’s speech was persuasive enough to get him elected to the city’s delegation—along with secessionist David Fusten. By the time they were called to the polls to vote on the secession referendum, however, Alexandrians had concluded the Union was no longer a safe place for them or their town. They voted for secession 1,980 to 106. The city’s experience with occupying troops during the war would further cement its citizens’ loyalty to the Confederacy. D. D. Jones, a quartermaster with the 88th Pennsylvania, observed that secessionists were “more dominant in Alexandria than any other town or city this side of rebel lines,” but the cost of that loyalty would be great.¹⁰ During a visit to Alexandria in 1863, journalist George Alfred Townsend of the New York Herald contradicted his English colleague’s perception of Alexandria. Townsend observed that the city had suffered more than any place he had visited in his travels as a correspondent. All the city’s buildings had been absorbed for war uses, and the people were ruined. They seemed like strangers in their own homes. Townsend was viewing Alexandria through eyes more akin to those of its residents, who saw war and occupation result in the deterioration of their hometown into an armed camp for active duty soldiers and those who were convalescing in Union hospitals that had been set up in confiscated buildings.¹¹

The town’s degeneration had begun on May 24, 1861, the day after the secession vote. The day dawned bright, clear, and lovely, according to Alexandria diarist Anne Froble, but clouds of a non-meteorological sort would roll in with the masses of Union troops who were already moving menacingly toward Alexandria. The occupation of Alexandria was not entirely unanticipated. Earlier in May, the Gazette had taken note of the number of troops massing in nearby Washington, D.C., and had speculated that Alexandria might become a target.¹²

The paper’s prediction was prescient. Early on the morning of May 24, Union troops set off toward the city. Some marched in from the direction of Arlington. Others glided down the Potomac in transport steamers. By the end of the day the town would be fully occupied, and the Civil War would have its first two martyrs: Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the well-known commander of a New York Zouave unit, and James W. Jackson, proprietor of Alexandria’s Marshall House Hotel, a man who “thrived on controversy.” Jackson was known for proudly showing off the four-pounder cannon he had in the Marshall House backyard as well as a token he had collected from Harper’s Ferry: a portion of an ear from one of John Brown’s associates. The hotel proprietor, a renowned pugilist, was so quarrelsome that he had once fought a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Occupied!
• 1  Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Alexandria Gazette under Union Occupation
• 2  Ruling the Roost: The Occupied Press in Civil War Chattanooga
• 3  This Causeless War: The Transformation of New Orleans Newspapers during Union Occupation
• 4  Siege, Surrender and a New Age of Journalism in Occupied Vicksburg
• 5  Conclusion
• Index