matters which emanated from Washington. Secretary Stanton's reports regarding the operations around Richmond in 1864 were discounted and represented as deliberate falsifications.
It is enough to make me shudder [wrote their Washington correspondent], to read the flaming bulletins of victory that Mr. Stanton has recently telegraphed from here. Is the public to be regarded as thoughtless children … that they can be made to believe in victories like these? ... Is it so long since the great and bloody victories of Grant over Lee, all the way from the Rapidan to Richmond, in each of which the rebel army was annihilated? When the public remembers the glowing accounts of these victories, and how much was promised on account of them, and when they see now that they were of no account at all as affecting the general result of the war, they may be pardoned for incredulity about … present victories. [And again] The country is favored with a repetition of the stale report that the rebel army is broken up, and its efficiency destroyed, but the people are not gullible enough to be deceived by it.[1]
Such utterances lead us to conclude that among newspaper "disclosures" at the North we should include the disclosure of editorial disappointment at Union success.
In considering the remedies for newspaper abuses which were available during the Civil War, it should be noted in the first place that correspondents accompanying an army were within the range of military law, and were liable to discipline by court martial.[2] The general principle that camp followers or army retainers were subject to military jurisdiction would perhaps have sufficed to cover the case of news-writers, and in addition there was a clear provision in the fifty-seventh Article of War[3] against "holding correspondence with, or giving intelligence to, the enemy, either directly or indirectly". Offenders under this article were to suffer death "or such other punishment as shall be ordered by the sentence of a court martial". As an amplification of this article a general order of the War Department was issued, declaring that all correspondence, verbal or in writing, printing or telegraphing, concerning military operations or movements on land or water, or regarding troops, camps, arsenals, intrenchments or military affairs within the several military districts, by which intelligence might be given to the enemy, without the sanction of the general in command, was prohibited, and that violators should be proceeded against under the fifty-seventh
- ↑ New York Daily News, December 20, 1864.
- ↑ Offic. Rec., first series, vol. XLII., pt. 3, p. 706; Digest of the Opinions of the Judge Advocates General, p. 1082; E. S. Dudley, Military Law and the Procedure of Courts Martial (second ed., New York, 1908), p. 375.
- ↑ An Act for Establishing Rules and Articles for the Government of the Armies of the United States, approved April 10, 1806. Statutes at Large, II. 359.
