Book Review: The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War, by Debra Reddin van Tuyll

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The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War. Debra Reddin van Tuyll. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 344 pp. $99.95 hbk.Debra Reddin van Tuyll of Georgia Regents University is an accomplished historian, and her study of the Confederate press during the Civil War is based on primary sources-newspapers, Confederate government records, letters and personal commu- nications, and contemporary documents of all kinds. Author or editor of several other books, Professor van Tuyll has written a superb book that will have its readers enthralled by the pace and delights of its story and impressed by its documentation. Consuming The Confederate Press is rather like eating a piece of roasted corn from the outside toward the middle.This book goes a long way to solving that conundrum of not knowing what you do not know. Probably few readers have read the J. Cutler Andrews volumes about the Civil War coverage by the Northern and Southern presses. The Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has estimated that there were approximately ten thousand battles, from the First Manassas through the Seven Days, to the fall of Atlanta and retreat to Appomattox, if all the skirmishes and small battles in the flatter lands to the West, the mountains and swamps of the East, and along the rivers with their forts, and elsewhere are included. There has been on average, Gallagher estimates, the publication of a book, article, news story, pamphlet, film, novel, or other such media product every day since the opening of the war at Fort Sumter in April 1861. The Civil War goes on. The literature on the war and its causes are vast and growing. But the literature on the press is really neither. This is an important and overdue addition to the literature produced by American historians.Professor van Tuyll presents newspapers in a comprehensive way. The book is not just a review of how battles were covered but examines how hard it was for newspa- pers to hold onto printers and journalists who were drawn to the patriotic attractions of duty at the front (early in the war). The study presents a case of study of newspaper subscribers (from whom editors found it challenging to collect payment). One in fifty was of the planter class, while one in ten was a merchant, and about four of ten were farmers. Those planters' views, though, permeated-or contaminated, depending on your perspective-the region and propelled the nation to war. Of course, railroads spread across the North far more than in the South, and mail was slower in rural regions. Still, Southern newspapers published stories that had appeared in Northern newspapers in a week or less. Of course, the reverse was true, but battles took place along the Mississippi and in Virginia and other border states in the beginning.As in the North, Southern military leaders often kept reporters at a distance for fear that they would leak important military information, through a contempt of journalists that remains. Southern newspapers, like the region as a whole, cherished individual freedom-ironically, despite slavery-and there was no shortage of criticism of President Jefferson Davis as Davis gathered more power in the presidency in the late war years. A few newspaper editors, especially in North Carolina and Georgia as well as in the Confederate capital, were thorns in the side of Davis, along with the gover- nors of those two states. Some newspapers sought to find peace, but not surrender, with the North. Because the South eschewed political parties, the criticism seemed individual and uncollected-and dangerous. But for the most part, it was tolerated. Throughout the war, editors and correspondents balanced what they could say versus what they should say, in-generally-an atmosphere that favored a good degree of press freedom but a respect for authority. …