The News Ecosystem During the Birth of the Confederacy: South Carolina Secession in Southern Newspapers
By Michael Fuhlhage, Jade Metzger-Riftkin, and Sarah Walker
Wayne State University
South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States on December 20, 1860. Newspapers carried reports of seemingly simultaneous celebrations that erupted first in Charleston and then throughout the Southern states where secessionists hoped to join a movement to break away from their Northern adversaries whom they believed threatened the foundation of their economy and culture: slavery. The rapid flow of information was enabled by the growth of communication networks that joined new technologies like the telegraph to longstanding systems such as the postal service and editorial exchanges. This viral spread of affirmation for the movement suggested a united Southern nation on the brink of emergence. However, our examination of news about secession in the Charleston Mercury, Alexandria Gazette, Macon Telegraph, and New Orleans Picayune illustrated that the South was not yet unified as a nation or as a single news ecosystem. Instead, the slave states comprised a constellation of Souths and multiple news ecosystems that varied in their scale and devotion to the cause of Southern independence.
The newspaper articles that we examined from December 13 to December 27, 1860, revealed how news from Charleston filtered across the South and responses percolated from distant newspapers throughout the region as people reacted to secession. These reactions ranged from careful consideration of the news from Washington to organizing local militias to fight for Southern independence. But by no means do the newspapers we looked at in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana represent the views of the entire South. And we have only scratched the surface concerning the spread of news about secession in other parts of the country. Students can discover the antebellum seeds for modern attitudes about racial equity and political tensions by studying the secession-era press of their own towns, states, and regions.
For the previous few decades before the Civil War, newspapers were viewed as the “organ” of one political party or the other, an image that derived from the instrument that monkeys danced to as their master turned a crank. The political party called the tune, the editor composed an opinioned symphony in support, and party members were expected to dance in time. Editorial pages were spaces for political combat, with editors using their columns to taunt one another and point at the weakness and hypocrisy of their foes. Reading them was a cultural ritual that offered subscribers affirmation and encouragement. When the Civil War came, the need for information in the form of news reports began to eclipse the desire for ritual affirmation that reading editorials fulfilled. Our study found that editors presented factual reports with their own opinion, thus putting news from afar into local context and contributing to the social construction of regionally and locally distinct visions of nationhood.
This analysis matters because it shows in detail how fragmented the South was as the United States was poised to erupt into armed conflict. Additionally, the exploration of information exchange and sourcing provides a stark contrast with the speed of the Internet age. The discussion questions below are designed to allow journalism, mass media, and historical classrooms to explore how the spread of secession press belies the mythos of a united South, contextualizing national fears to local concerns. Instructors are encouraged to compare globalized news ecosystems against the heavily local/region focused news ecosystems that the analysis found.
Resources
Several databases containing historical newspapers from 1860-61 are available. Some may be available through your institution’s library. Others are available for personal subscription. And it costs nothing to consult the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, a digitized online collection of historic American newspapers.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
https://www.genealogybank.com/
General Questions for Discussion:
In reading this article:
- What did you learn about the information types and sources available to readers of Southern newspapers?
- Before reading the article, what were your perceptions about the secession crisis and the start of the Civil War? What were your perceptions about Southern states/Southerners before the formation of the Confederacy? What are your perceptions of them after reading the article?
- What newspapers were examined by the authors in their analysis of Southern media systems? Who and what narratives do these newspapers exclude [Women, Abolition, Black presses]?
- While we have the benefit of the internet for quick exchange of information now, the United States did not in 1860. What were the barriers to exchanging information in the Southern news ecosystem [consider technology, transportation, geography, and political systems]? How might the delay in information exchange shape a news ecosystem? How would that ecosystem be similar or dissimilar to the news ecosystems we see today?
- Many of the newspapers in the article were localized to large cities or states but connected to broader news ecosystems. News ecosystems are more globalized now, taking national or international perspectives. What are the implications/consequences for this shift?
- Southern news editors had vast amounts of control over the information a community had access too. Compare this to current news ecosystems. What are the places of information control in today’s news ecosystems?
Exercise 1: The authors use the concept of networks to examine the flow of secession news, or in broad terms, any facts and opinions about the possible secession of slave states, in December 1860. The first reports about developments were identified, and then newspapers were searched for republication of those reports in other papers. This is a way of tracing the origin of a report and the spread of ideas contained in those reports across the South and within the states where reports about secession originated in Alexandria, Charleston, Macon, and New Orleans. We concentrated on South Carolina’s secession and reports about it in the newspapers of these four cities. The same can be done with newspapers in other parts of the United States. This can also be done about other significant events in the timeline of the birth of the Confederate States of America. The discussion questions and exercises equip students to explore this phenomenon in their own communities.
At your local historical society, your college’s special collections library or other newspaper archival service such as Newspapers.com, obtain several issues of your hometown paper(s) from December 13-27, 1860. In 45 minutes of a class period, break your students into groups of four or five and ask them to read them. When did its first reports about the South Carolina secession convention first appear? Where did that information come from? Who were the editors and how did those editors comment about those developments in editorials and commentary on the reports? If there was more than one newspaper published in your hometown, did they call each other out about their editorials and about members of the political party that they stood up for? How solidly behind the Union or the secessionists was your t? What perspective did your hometown take on border states? How does examining your town’s newspaper complicate or support the idea of a single unified South at the dawn of the Confederacy?
Exercise 2:
The authors demonstrated how Southern newspapers contested the development of a new imagined community, “the South,” against established imagined communities such as “the United States,” “the Union,” “Macon, Georgia,” and so on. Heroes, villains, myths, stories, symbols and artifacts were all employed by newspapers to characterize these imagined communities.
Newspapers continue be vital tools in reifying and changing the culture of communities and in communicating that culture to others. Using two or three issues of newspapers in your college/university’s rival city/town, seek out the tools and strategies newsmakers use to create an imagined community. Who are their “heroes” and “villains”? What myths or stories do they use to characterize their culture? What symbols and artifacts point to their uniqueness and importance? Which sections of the newspaper are these cultural markers found in most often Sports? Editorial? The top of page one? Compare these to cultural markers in your college/university’s imagined communities.
Instructors can either provide the newspaper articles in class or have students look them up. This activity might work well if the class is divided into teams, each taking a different aspect of culture-making and then reporting their findings after 20 minutes to examine the newspapers.
Additionally, this assignment is easily adapted to online/hybrid classes, potentially as a short essay or as a class discussion thread.
Exercise 3:
The authors indicated that editors of Southern newspapers had a few different options for the sources of their news – telegraph, exchanges, letters, and direct staff reports – each with advantages and disadvantages. The task of determining what news source to use fell to editors who each had their own audiences to satisfy, political outlooks and opinions, and business ledgers to balance. Editors of each of the different Southern papers chose to get their news in a combination of different ways, and to frame the news from afar with different lenses. For papers like the Mercury, the framing was more South approving, for the Picayune, more neutral. Does this kind of framing happen in local news sources today?
Have students look up local news sources and identify a few different articles that are listed as contributed to or written by the Associated Press. Stories can range be uncontroversial or have a partisan viewpoint to them, perhaps a few different topics could be presented for students to research. Have the students read the article on the local site, and then look up the article on the internet to see where else that article or portions may have appeared. Ask students to identify how the stories are framed, where they appear in newspapers or on websites, how much of the AP article is used or commented on. What kinds of news does the local paper rely on the AP for? Is the material used without remark, or are there editorials or opinion pieces agreeing with/countering the information in the AP articles? What other papers use this AP article? Do they frame the news item in the same way? Why or why not? Have the students do a sort of miniature analysis of the readership of the local paper. Who would they guess is reading this news? To what extent is the news catered to that community?
This assignment is easily adapted to an online/hybrid setting and could be used as a stepping-stone to a larger journalism analysis paper. It encourages students to think critically about the source of their news, and how events might be framed differently even if they come from the same news source.
Further reading
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).
William Barney, The Road to Secession (New York: Praeger, 1970), xvi, 11-16, 121, 146.
Michael T. Bernath, “Nationalism,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 1 (2012): 4-4. https://muse.jhu.edu/.
David Bulla and Gregory A. Borchard, Journalism in the Civil War Era (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 120-121.
Philip M. Napoli, Sarah Stonbely, Kathleen McCollough, and Bryce Renninger, Rutgers University, “Local Journalism Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of Three New Jersey Communities” (New Brunswick, NJ: Media and the Public Interest Initiative, 2015),
David P. Nord, Communities of Journalism: A history of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Debra Reddin Van Tuyll, The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War (New York: Peter Lang).
Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970).
Ford Risley, Civil War Journalism (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).