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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