Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/327

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Confederate armies. Later, General McClellan, in a dispatch to the War Department, called attention to the violation by news- papers of the agreement not to publish, "either as editorial or as correspondence, any description, from any point of view, any matter that might furnish aid or comfort to the enemy, " and suggested that editors be held responsible for its infraction. Major-General Benjamin F. Butler, in a communication ad- dressed to the newspaper correspondent connected with the Army of the James, asserted that, while he had never interfered with the quality or the quantity of the communications of the correspondents, he wanted them to speak only of acts done and not of movements in preparation or in progress, because in forty-eight hours at the farthest the enemy had such news in printed form. Offering to put at the disposal of the correspond- ents many public and official documents, he cautioned them es- pecially against describing the movements of officers of high rank mentioned therein. Major-General Foster, in command of the Department of North Carolina, complained in September, 1862, that The New York Evening Post had betrayed the numbers and positions of his troops and asserted that "such information from our friends was more injurious than that gained by the Rebel spies."

SUSPENSION OF SOUTHERN SHEETS

Union generals did not hesitate to suppress any newspaper in the South whenever they thought such papers were guilty of treason. In New Orleans, for example, The Bee, The Delta, and The Crescent were suppressed at various times. Northern gen- erals when they suspended a newspaper occasionally allowed a continuation of the sheet under the editorial supervision of war correspondents from the North. Such was the case when General Wallace suspended The Daily Argus, of Memphis, for publishing a "fake" item about the capture of Cincinnati by Confederate troops. He put the paper into the hands of A. G. Richardson, a correspondent of The New York Tribune, and Thomas W. Knox, a correspondent of The New York Herald. In other cases, where newspapers published editorials in "an incendiary or treasonable spirit," the resignation of the writer of the editorial