Book Report: “The North Reports the Civil War” by J. Cutler Andrews

J. Cutler Andrews’s The North Reports the Civil War is not only a fascinating lens into the Civil War from the perspective of what information was being told to the public- and therefore the public’s perception of the Civil War as it was happening- but an extremely important historiography on the history of news writing itself. This collection and analysis of journalistic activities, papers, and government files sheds light on the origins of stylistic decisions in news writing by contextualizing the circumstances under which the reporters of the North were writing their news stories, and thus gives origin to the formatting and stylistic decisions put into news stories today. One of the overlying themes of Andrews’s work focuses on the evolution of news writing ethics, which Andrews claims to be the fault of multiple different factors, from quality news reporting to more fantastical accounts.

In chapter five, entitled The First Fruits of Censorship, Andrews uses the reporting done over the Battle of Bull run to exemplify the shift in stylistic choices present in news reporting to one of a hurried, incomplete story told from one person’s perspective rather than clean, concise depictions of events as w whole. Reporters often found themselves watching battles from a safe distance, having to rush to write down everything they could personally see about each event regardless of accuracy or completion of events in order to send as much of the story they could off to the press to be printed as soon as possible. This resulted not only in incomplete and inaccurate reports, but caused the emergence of singular perspectives of events being reported in the news. Whereas nowadays, a newspaper story covering an event that took place in war would include general, important information such as casualty numbers, the time span of the battle, and which side won said battle, the news stories that came out of the Civil War tended to instead include specifics that, while they did happen and were worthy of documentation in their own rights, did little to affect the general outcome of the battle and thus made for poor news stories in regards to informing the public about the outcomes of battles.

The excuse made in the book for the rise in popularity of shorthand, personal accounts riddles with inaccuracies that were passed off as news stories was that the heightened excitement of the public over the Civil War convinced both the press and the government that “it was neither wise nor safe to reveal the exact truth” of the events of the Civil War to the public for fear of widespread panic (pg. 77). While this most likely was a legitimate concern worthy of consideration during the Civil War, as not many in the U.S. had ever been exposed to horrors equivalent of warfare in their lives before and were thus grossly unprepared to learn them, it is also worth considering the fact that reporters put their own lives at risk to report what they witnessed on active battlegrounds with extremely limited resources aside from their personal experiences, and it is therefore not surprising that their reports were often incomplete and inaccurate. Oftentimes, even the information gathered from personal interviews with witnesses of events was wildly inaccurate- and as Andrews mentions in the book, a reporter could only ever be as accurate as their sources. The information gathered by reporters during the Civil war, especially under the extreme conditions of battle, could hardly be expected to surpass their own experiences considering their lack of resources to broaden and verify their knowledge of the war in general. 

The significance, then, of Civil War- era newspapers as historical evidence is put under scrutiny. Andrews asks in his book a series of questions pertaining to the validity of these news stories, as well as whether or not they were written with any objectives or as propaganda versus for the sole purpose of informing the public in an unbiased manner. Also in question was the influence of these news stories over army administration and politics. The book offers no definitive answer for any of the prior raised questions, and instead presents contextualization for each and leaves the task of determining up to the reader. In any case, it is made clear by this book that the most important aspect of Civil War- era news, rather than content and accuracy, was the sheer length of news reports and how quickly these reports were delivered to the press. It is left for the reader to determine whether these news reports have significant value as historical evidence outside the realm of journalism history and development. 

Andrews uses hundreds of sources for this book, organized in sections in his bibliography in the following order: bibliographical ads; manuscript sources; newspapers; government documents; books and articles written by Civil War correspondents; bibliographies, autobiographies, diaries, and letters; books and articles dealing with the press; books and articles pertaining to the Civil War; and miscellaneous books and articles. The precision in which Andrews deals with his sources speaks to the accuracy of the book as a whole; however, the sheer number of sources he utilizes both could potentially overwhelm the reader and leaves plenty of room for the presence of inaccurate source material. Andrews, having anticipated these grievances, does a thorough job examining the context of each source and, as previously mentioned, is sure to disclose any possibility of bias present in each source for the reader to discern on their own. While this is an interesting stylistic choice that involves the reader themselves in Andrews’s research, there is still an almost overwhelming presence of sources in his book. If I were to rewrite the book myself, I would filter through Andrews’s sources to choose the most relevant and reliable sources I could, and then use the remaining space to add my own analyses of any implicit biases present in the sources I chose for further contextualization purposes. Inviting an audience to participate in research, while engaging and interesting to the reader, is not the equivalent of a PhD- level professional analysis of sources, and the latter would provide a more precise look into the relevancy and accuracy of each source than an untrained opinion would. 

News reporting has come a long way since the Civil War, and yet aspects of the stylistic tendency of Civil War- era news reporting can still be found in today’s newspaper articles. Too many times have I come across enticing and exciting headlines of news stories, only to read the article and find their story is baseless and irrelevant to society and pop culture today. While professional news reporting; the likes of which can be seen in The New York Times, on CNN and FOX News, and other major news outlets; is less afflicted with this sort of “fluff” in their collections of news stories, they are no less susceptible to the urge to over- exaggerate their stories for the sake of spiking public interest. This trend, using Andrews’s book as evidence, can be seen  emerging during the Civil War- and, whether or not this evolution of news ethics is objectively moral or not, still has a tremendous impact on the way that news is reported to and consumed by the public to this day.