[Homer_J_Simpson]

Free Republic University, Department of History presents U.S. History, 1861-1865: Seminar and Discussion Forum
The American Civil War, as seen through news reports of the time and later historical accounts

First session: November 21, 2015. Last date to add: May 2025.
Reading: Self-assigned. Recommendations made and welcomed.

Posting history, in reverse order

https://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:homerjsimpson/index?tab=articles

To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by reply or freepmail.

Link to previous New York Times thread

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4071212/posts

[Homer_J_Simpson]

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[FarCenter]

Sherman’s Other War

Review of “The New Sherman Letters” by Joseph H. Ewing, in American Heritage (July-Aug. 1987), 60 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011.

The American military’s relations with the news media have often been strained. But recent confrontations between brass and press pale beside the battles that Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-91) fought against journalists. Nowadays, senior commanders may chastise reporters. Sherman actually courtmartialed them.

War correspondents, Sherman complained, were “dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.” “A cat in hell without claws.” wrote a rueful New York Tribune correspondent, “is nothing to a reporter in General Sherman’s army.”

Ewing, a free-lance writer, inherited letters written by Sherman to the author’s grandfather (who was Sherman’s stepbrother) and great-grandfather. The letters trace Sherman’s rising impatience with the press.

In October 1861, the New York Tribune printed the Union “order of battle,” listing the strength and location of Sherman’s forces. A year later, during the first battle of Vicksburg, Sherman’s officers intercepted journalists’ letters and refused to mail them. New York Herald reporter Thomas Knox then rewrote his account, charging that Sherman’s actions were due to “insanity and inefficiency.” “You are regarded as the enemy of our set,” Knox told Sherman after his arrest for espionage. “We must in self-defense write you down.”

Knox was tried by a military court, but found not guilty of espionage. This did not alter Sherman’s low opinion of the press, however. Journalists, he wrote in February, 1863, “eat our provisions, they swell the crowd of hangers on. . . they publish without stint. . . accurate information which reaches the enemy with as much regularity as it does our People.” For the remainder of the war, Sherman threatened “instant death” to reporters he suspected of espionage. This, he wrote, made journalists “meek and humble.”

Sherman continued to chastise the press after the war ended. Yet, in his memoirs, published inl875, he concluded that “so greedy are the people at large for war news, that it is doubtful whether any army commander can exclude all reporters, without bringing down on himself a clamor that may imperil his own safety.”

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL11_W_1987_Periodical_17.pdf