Scrapbooking the Civil War

From the New York Times:  Scrapbooking the Civil War

Soon after the Civil War began, a Savannah, Ga., resident named Henrietta Emanuel Solomons – or someone in her household – began to clip items from newspapers. She pasted her clippings over the sheets of a used-up ledger from the family grocery business until sometime in 1863, when she ran out of space. When she finished, they covered 483 large pages.

Solomons’s scrapbook may sound obsessive today, but it was a common practice at the time. More important, it is a window into the emotions of a loyal Southerner living through the war. The scrapbook’s stiff pages are dense with stories about Confederate victories, poems and news reports. They assure readers that enslaved people want to help the Confederacy and would refuse freedom. They tell of women knitting for soldiers or spying for the Confederacy — cross-dressed or in their own clothing. Some are full of rage against the tyranny of Lincoln.

A newspaper-clipping scrapbook like this does not give us the direct information or expression we expect from diaries. Instead, it is a reminder that like us, Northerners and Southerners living through the Civil War relied on the media to tell them what was happening at a distance, or even across town. They looked to the media to support and express their feelings. And like 21st-century Web users sharing links, they saved items that mattered to them and sent them around again to friends, family or strangers.

Newspapers took a new place in people’s lives during the war. Everyone was hungry for information about family and friends on the battlefields, and for news of victories. Northern papers printed telegraphed reports from the battlefield. The “imperious” newspaper called to readers, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote, summoning people to buy it “at unusual hours … by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.” Union soldiers pounced on bundles of passed-along newspapers and paid high prices to newsboys who brought fresh papers to the camps, especially if they concerned battles they had been in. Civilians rushed to read newspapers posted in the street.

 

Beck Center at Emory UniversityPeople of different races and classes, including a pickpocket, crowd around to read newspapers on display, in “Reading the War News in Broadway,” London Illustrated News, June 15, 1861.

Confederates, too, sought newspapers. Even before the war, the South published fewer newspapers than the North, and the naval blockade meant that those newspapers had spottier access to information, while publications grew desperate for paper to print news on. Southern readers were as eager for newspapers as Northern readers.

At home, Americans on both sides made scrapbooks from their newspaper reading. They knew they were living through momentous events, and they felt they were saving history. Northern scrapbooks, flush with clippings, carry stories headlined “BY TELEGRAPH,” and include maps and an occasional engraving. Southern scrapbooks are a record of scarcity: the blockade kept out Northern newspapers, and Southern publications had almost no illustrations. The printer’s ink on the clippings is sometimes pale. To make a scrapbook in the South, even used ledgers like Solomons’s might be hard to come by.

And yet Southerners were just as avid about scrapbooking as their Northern counterparts. In Augusta, Ga., Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas wrote worriedly in her diary that newspaper clippings were displacing her diary entries and made it appear that she paid too much attention to events beyond the family circle. By July 1863 she lamented that she’d saved many more clippings beyond the two volumes she had already filled, but could not get another book to paste them into.

 

Thomas Nast’s illustration shows the character Ferguson, from William Mumford Baker’s popular novel “Inside: A Chronicle of Secession,” sharing his massive scrapbook, which he used for critical media analysis of war news.

Many newspaper scrapbooks proceed chronologically, like diaries. Others are arranged carefully by topic, or they group such items as obituaries or poetry. Solomons’ and some other Confederate scrapbooks, however, reflect the fact that with paper shortages, Southern newspapers were in short supply and editions were recirculated for some time before a scrapbook maker felt free to cut them up. Her scrapbook returns repeatedly to the same Confederate victories, clipped from different papers and separated by many pages.

Solomons’s choices of what to clip reveal how dramatically her attitudes toward enslaved people changed in two years. Early in the war she collected poems and stories about slaves so loyal to their masters that they refuse freedom. In the articles she saved, enslaved blacks captured by the Union express themselves “very anxious to get back to their masters.” In one poem, “Yankee Doodle, to the Georgia Volunteers,” “Uncle Tom” asks to “jine de boys” in fighting the Yankees, and gleefully narrates the Confederate victories at Bethel Church and Manassas (Bull Run). The poem offered the added bonus of being singable to “Yankee Doodle,” thus recapturing a patriotic American tune for Confederate use.

In another poem, from 1861, “A Southern Scene from Life,” the “little Missis” tells her “Mammy” that Lincoln means to free her, but Mammy explains that the difference between her coal-black face and the child’s “red and white … soft and fine” skin “with yeller ringlets” self-evidently results in Mammy’s slavery and the little girl’s liberty and wealth. Mammy declares that she’ll wait for freedom in heaven, and ends by insulting Lincoln.

Solomons was not the only white Southerner who wanted to believe that enslaved people hoped for a Confederate victory. “A Southern Scene from Life” was reprinted in Southern newspapers. The Macon Telegraph asserted it was the “versification of a conversation that actually took place,” and praised it for its “truth and feeling.” Other Southern scrapbook makers savored it, too. One liked it enough to carry it around before pasting it, so that it was heavily frayed and partially torn, and corrected by hand to make up for a tear.

But once the Emancipation Proclamation began circulating in the fall of 1862, a new strain appeared in Solomons’s scrapbook, beginning with an anonymous bombastic poem, “For Abraham Lincoln. On Reading the Emancipation Proclamation.” The poem worries that Lincoln “wou’st unband/the negro from his easy chain” and arm black people. Black figures are no longer asking to “jine de boys,” nor do they denounce Lincoln in her later items; rather, with emancipation on the horizon, they are armed and turning into “brutal fiends, whose reeking knives/Would spare nor sex, nor youth, nor age.” The result would be that “wholesale murder clot our land.” Solomons notebook presents a vision of the murder resulting from arming blacks as terrifyingly different from the bloodshed the war was already engaged in.

The Southern newspapers’ reports of brutal black fiends were, of course, no more accurate than their reports of slaves cheerfully giving their lives to protect their masters. In collecting both strains, Solomons hints at a Southerner’s increasingly conflicted beliefs about what enslaved people might actually think and feel, and what they might do if the Confederacy lost and the Emancipation Proclamation became effective.

Solomons’s scrapbook carries no notes or pointed juxtapositions to suggest that she took any of these newspaper accounts with a grain of salt, or thought they contradicted one another. But other scrapbook makers used their scrapbooks precisely to monitor and uncover the deceptions of the press – the press of the other side, of course.

Daniel Hundley, a Confederate officer and prisoner of the Union forces in Sandusky, Ohio, read the Northern newspapers he had access to with relentless skepticism. He bought a scrapbook in 1864 and proposed “to fill it with the newspaper history of the times, which if I can preserve it until the war is ended, will be of incalculable service to me” in showing the contradictions he had found among stories. He escaped from prison, presumably leaving his scrapbook behind.

Reading from the Union side, in William Mumford Baker’s 1866 novel “Inside: A Chronicle of Secession,” on the lives of Union sympathizers living in a Confederate town during the war, everyone is hungry for newspapers. Union sympathizers furtively pass Northern newspapers to one another, and fear they will be lynched if their leanings are known. Neither side wants to believe news of its side’s reverses. Ferguson, a Union man, compiles a scrapbook just to follow the “inaccuracy” of the Confederate news reports. Saving items and comparing the fanfare around each assertion of a battlefield or diplomatic victory allows him to notice the nearly imperceptible way it is dropped.

Ferguson retrieves the assertions from oblivion and pastes them into a record meant for critical media analysis. “Yesterday’s news is forgotten because to-day’s news is so much more glorious; then, yesterday’s rumor was false, it seems, but that of to-day is certainly true,” he explains to a friend, before he hides his scrapbook away in a safe. Evidence of paying too close attention to how news is reported could be dangerous.

For her part, Solomons did not forget yesterday’s news. Instead, she kept returning to it. Her scrapbook was an ideal newspaper, holding what she chose to pluck and remember from the swirling stream of the press.

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