Appendix – Student/Teacher Guide

Your Mission: Be a Civil War News Correspondent

by Abigail Elizabeth Reynolds

Student/Teacher User’s Guide

In the midst of battle, somewhere on an American battlefield, the war correspondent was surrounded by danger and death. His or her mission was to report on the events of the day, but as the battle ensued they realized that getting the story to press depended upon their very survival. Here, on the battlefield, survival seemed a matter of fate, not only for the soldiers engaged in the fighting, but for anyone caught in this humanly contrived storm. Armed only with pencil and paper, the correspondent went about the job of recording the news of the day – an observer of the battle as well as a brave participant.

A war correspondent is a person who risks personal safety by going onto the field of battle to record the events that occur there. The American Civil War was one of the first wars in history in which reporters filed stories from the field. With bullets whizzing by, a correspondent’s only weapons might have been pencil and paper. Yet, with little regard for the dangers of battle, these brave reporters wrote first hand accounts for eager readers back home.

As you and your family visit the historic battlefield sites of the Civil War, you might want to actually become a Civil War correspondent. Do you think you can handle the job? You must be a brave and accurate observer, willing to do what you must to report on the war. You will need to patiently await the start of battle, and then quickly write about and sketch all that you see. You will want to interview soldiers and officers, as well as civilians in the local towns. Their stories will be a vital part of the story you write.

This is an important job - your readers will depend upon you and your pencil alone, to tell all that has occurred. The stories you write will need to include who was in the battle, where the battle took place, when the battle occurred, exactly what happened on the battlefield, why the battle took place, plus the interesting and exciting details that you will surely witness.

If you think you may be ready for the challenge, welcome. As you visit the battlefields and perhaps see reenactments, take along your book and pencil and begin doing one of the most important and dangerous jobs of the war – being in the line of fire as a Civil War correspondent.

Good luck and best wishes as you report on the war!

Introduction

At the start of the American Civil War, which began in (circle the correct year) ‘1812’ ‘1917’ ‘1861’, there were 2,500 newspapers being published in the United States.

Many of the news stories that were printed were sent from far off locations using a relatively new invention called the ‘magnetic’, more commonly known later as the (circle the correct name) ‘telephone’ ‘telegraph’ ‘television’.

The magnetic was used to send messages through wires over long distances, using a special code invented by (circle the correct name) ‘Samuel Morse’ ‘Alexander Graham Bell’ ‘Thomas Edison’.

The code is sometimes still used today, and is comprised of a series of dots and dashes.

At the start of the war there were nearly 100 war correspondents, sometimes also referred to as ‘special correspondents’. Their pay was about $27 per week. Most of the correspondents were white males, but there is evidence of at least a dozen women and one African American reporter during the war. Later, as the intensity of the war heightened, nearly 500 correspondents were filing stories from the field – about 350 for the north and 150 for the south.

A war correspondent’s life was not an easy one. There were long periods of inactivity between major battles. During these times, the correspondent might look for human interest stories – interesting stories about the people affected by the war, like the soldiers and officers, or the civilians in towns where battles may have occurred. It was a constant challenge for the special correspondents to find warm and dry places to sleep and adequate food to eat. Not only was there danger from the obvious hazards on the field of battle, but there was also the danger of being captured by one side or the other and charged as a spy. During any war, information (also called intelligence) is crucial – correspondents who gathered information were sometimes viewed with suspicion.

To help one another with the challenges and hazards of reporting on the war from the battlefields, a social and working organization of correspondents and artists was formed, called the Bohemian Brigade. This band of brave reporters shared the many challenges of writing stories from the field of battle. Among the more difficult problems was actually getting the stories to press. The telegraph was a new and amazingly fast means of communication, but its availability was not always assured. Not only were telegraph lines controlled by the military, but the competition with other reporters wanting to transmit stories was fierce. It was a long and arduous journey for the news of the war to travel from the correspondent’s pad on the battlefield to the printed page of the newspapers. But the stories were recorded by the brave war correspondents stationed out in the field for their audience of readers around the world.