Narratologies of Autodiegetic Undercover Reportage: Albert Deane Richardson’s The Secret Service

Abstract

Narratologies of Autodiegetic Undercover Reportage: Albert Deane Richardson’s The Secret Service Katrina Quinn (bio) Working on behalf of Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, correspondent Albert Deane Richardson (1833–69) reported from the Confederacy in the weeks immediately preceding the American Civil War. Before making a last-minute escape to the North, Richardson traveled to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, providing Tribune readers a firsthand account of Southern life and psyche at a time when political tensions were running high. Richardson’s memoir of the journey was later published as the first part of the widely read volume, The Secret Service, The Field, The Dungeon, and The Escape (1865), which sold more than 90,000 copies, making it one of the most popular wartime memoirs. But Richardson was no common traveler, nor was his text simple reportage,1 for Richardson had been an undercover correspondent for one of the most despised Northern newspapers of the time, making his endeavor quite risky. From a narratological point of view, the text provides a useful example of the narrative strategies and structures that not only deliver, but also enable the reportage. On one level is the reported narrative which is the published text itself, a memoir of Richardson’s travels as an undercover reporter in the antebellum South. In many ways, this narrative presents structures we might expect of works of nonfictional participant reportage generally. It is largely chronological, as is common for a travel narrative, and it is autodiegetic—that is, written in a first-person voice with the author [End Page 1] positioned as the main character and focalizer. But as an undercover reporter entering hostile territory during the tense spring of 1861, Richardson had to, as would other undercover reporters who wish to observe without being observed, obfuscate his identity with another fictive narrative: an oral narrative operational in the experiential world of his trip. Using The Secret Service as a subject text, this study suggests a theoretical framework for the narratologies of undercover reportage. It charts the unique relationships of narrative journalism to multiple reader contingents and the use of an oral narrative to secure reporting space for undercover reporters. The study further proposes a binate narrative structure that signifies, first, the nonfictional narrative presented in the written memoir, and second, the fictional oral narrative the reporter maintains in the experiential world of his trip. Richardson and His Vagabond Ways A growing body of scholarship in recent years has examined Civil War journalism from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but little has been written about Richardson’s work, despite his strong reputation during the 1860s as a Western correspondent, Civil War special reporter, and prison camp escapee.2 Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, on October 6, 1833, Richardson went west as a young man, securing his first job with the Pittsburg Journal in 1851 and continuing on to Cincinnati in 1852, where he wrote for the Daily Unionist and various other newspapers for five years. His work with the Boston Journal took him west in 1857 to report on conflict in Kansas following the improvident Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. After meeting Horace Greeley on a stage coach to Colorado in 1859, he was retained as a special correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, reporting from the West and later from the South, both before and during the Civil War. Captured by the Confederates at Vicksburg in May 1863, Richardson was a prisoner of war until December 1864, when he and a fellow journalist made a daring wintertime escape on foot from the Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, to Union lines in Knoxville, Tennessee, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. During his imprisonment, his wife and infant daughter died, but the experience made him a wartime hero and one of the best-known war correspondents of his day. Following his escape from Salisbury, and despite lingering health issues, Richardson [End Page 2] couldn’t renounce his itinerate habits, traveling to the Pacific in 1865 with Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax. At home in New York City in 1867 and again in 1869, Richardson was shot by Daniel McFarland, the...