Virginia because the troops were sorely needed to oppose Grant. He referred to the alarming proportion of men who were "absent without leave", and called upon the deserters to return. To freshen the hopes of his people he announced the plan of harassing Sherman's communications by cavalry raids and declared that soon the enemy would be driven beyond Chattanooga.[1] The various speeches made on this visit were published in Southern and copied in Northern papers, so that Sherman could anticipate the promised attacks and take the proper precautionary measures. Here and there we find other news disclosures at the South, and occasionally in the issuing of a sharp order reference would be made to the unfortunate publication of valuable information, but it appears that, on the whole, the South surpassed the North in the discretion of its editors and the effectiveness of its methods of dealing with the press.
In our consideration so far, we have been taking into view those journalistic faults which are consistent with loyalty and patriotism. In the North, however, during the Civil War, there were many powerful papers whose malignant attitude toward the administration amounted to disloyalty and active sympathy with the enemy. The utterances of such papers as the New York World and Daily News, the Baltimore Exchange, the South, the Maryland Daily News, the Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, and the Chicago Times were so vicious that suppression or the arrest of their editors seemed but mild forms of punishment. The publicity which these papers gave to military information was as pernicious as in the case of the "loyal" or "administration" press, and there was the added vice of deliberate purpose to undermine the government's plans. In such sheets the whole conflict was denounced as a "Black Republican" war, governmental measures were characterized as tyrannous attempts to overthrow civil liberty in the North, the President was referred to as an imbecile or despot, and the secessionists were applauded. While continually denouncing the attacks on the "freedom of the press", their unrestrained abuse was itself the best evidence that such freedom had been allowed to proceed to the point of shameless license.
One of the favorite tricks of the New York Daily News was to undermine confidence in the official statements touching military
- ↑ The Proper Relationship between the Army and the Press in War (Army War College pamphlet, Washington, November, 1915), p. 5. Davis's Macon speech appeared in the Macon Telegraph and Confederate, September 24, 1864, and was copied in the Philadelphia Inquirer of October 8. See also C. A. Dana and J. H. Wilson, Life of U. S. Grant (1868), p. 314.
