well, i'm going to do is turn

our attention to a particular farm event formation, which has come up a little bit during talks so far. but i'm going to really turn attention to focus on newspaper as a specific form of information and the time period i'm going to be looking at is actually mostly pre-civil war. so thinking how newspapers, what role newspapers played in the causes of the civil and the fight over slavery that ultimately led to military conflict and even though when i think of how civil war era

americans got information and shared information and i think of a lot of different things obviously word of mouth is just hugely in this somewhat pre-industrial society. personal correspondence, this is huge. we've heard about telegrams and other forms of information already this weekend. but when i think of how civil war americans got information. i almost always think first of the newspaper, i think it would be really difficult to overstate importance of newspapers in the information culture of the civil war era. really the whole 19th century, if you want to take my word for that, that's okay. but hopefully you'll accept the word of this guy. how many of you have seen the movie news of the world wi t hanks? a few. you may also have read the

novel, wchighly, both the movie and the novel. fantastic. and tom hanks plays confedete veteran and reconstructs an era texas who makes his living b going around from town to town, reading newspaper articles out loud to paying audiences. so this is not work of history. that's a work of fiction. it's not based on a story. this kind of some legends behind it, but no real truth behind this character who makes his living this way. but i really enjoy how the and the movie both convey the importance of the newspaper of the printed word. in the 19th century as a way for news to get around. this was really the of information of all kinds you know if you wanted to know what was going on certainly in the rest of the world, you look to the newspaper even to home. this was often you how people found out about what was going on in their own town, their own

county and their own state as well, was by picking up a copy of a newspaper and looking at it so one of the great ways that any one of us today can learn a little bit deep into the life of, the 19th century is by browsing through a copy of a newspaper and thankfully you no longer have to go into the archives. as i remember doing a lot when i was a graduate student poring over those microfilm readers, which seem to have been designed with the opposite of any kind of semblance of ergonomic efficiency. my back still sometimes twinges when i think of those things, but of course now, you know, the world is our fingertips and that includes the 19th century press. so you may be familiar with some of the paying sites, newspapers dot com, for example is a great place to go i'm sure some of you have searched for family histories, among other things, and by especially recommend

chronicling america, which is a free site from the library of congress. free is always and they've just got a fantastic selection of newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries, in fact, that you can just step into browse through, spend an hour learning something, what it was like to be alive back then. and the newspaper is a fantastic way to do that. you never know what you're going to find. i think you'd be surprised within five or 10 minutes of scrolling through one of these things, some of it you would expect to see in a newspaper, for example, you know, news the big military and political of the day, you're going to see that in newspapers very regurly and you're going to see back in the 19th century, lots of printed speeches. so a politician would a speech, they would print it often word for word or, you know, huge, significant excerpts from it in the newspaper. they would also include printed minutes of public meeting rooms.

so if citizens got togher, would often have conversations, particular reform movements, political iues, local people would give speeches, would come to resolutions, and ese would be printed word for word in the newspapers. so you look at one of these things, the text is kind of intimidating sometimes you'll see a front page with many words on it, including verbatim transcripts of speeches and these public meetings. it can seem like it's going to be a lot and it is, but it's a gold mine for history. and so i think you who are trying to find out about just all kinds of things in the civil war era, that's humor in these newspapers as well. and a lot of this humor, if you look back at this, is going to be outdated. i spent a long time finding just a few little examples that i thought i hope are not offensive

and. it would have been much easier to find examples that would be extreme offensive in various kinds of ways. but the humor these newspapers, i think, gives us a real a really great sense of how people and you know what, gave them a chuckle back then. these are just a few examples you may you may have come across others yourselves, but you see just, you know, poking fun at little aspects of life. gangel 94 year old who says he's started a family yet and that they're the woman who asks her husband, i don't know whether by his bad temper, not for me. i'm sure the husband replies. no, my dear, i don't perceive that you have lost any. and so there are all kinds of funny little jokes and quips in these papers and often these are actually to use this fella. so they often come at the bottom of the column. and what's happened is editor has printed, you know, the story

about the news of the day and there's some space at the bottom of the column. they needed to fill that space. so i like to think of them just kind rummaging around for something that would fill those four lines in one way or another. they actually their own name, which is kind of delightful they were called squibs and they were sometimes jokes. they were sometimes ims, you know, little recipes, life hacks, just observations, random observations about life. so it's not always the politics, the wars, the types of things that you often read about in the history books. it's about the daily life and sensibilities of the people. there are lots of out advertisements as well. you can find everything and this again you aat sense of the culture, the economy of the time. you nd ads for just about ything you could imagine. medicine, for example books, fue, dry, just anything

that was being and sold. you would see advernts for most of these ads were text based. so you can see there's some kind rudimentary images in these examples and. there are some ads that is slightly sophisticated ima but most them are text based. i really loved thin the middle. look here, look here. that's the ey got attention back in the 19 ntury. whereas very electoral look, look, look at this advertisement. i think the advertising techniques have gotten a little more over time, but you'll see lot of this kind of thing, the newspapers of the day. so ads are a fantastic re for daily life, for commerce, for everything that was being bought, sold and of course, on a much less humorous note, being bought and sold at this time, we're so people, enslaved people and so in many of these newspaper issues you will see

advertise segments that offering enslaved people for or trying to trying to recapture enslaved people who have managed to escape and there are a few examples of this up here as well in the top left, you've got an advertiser is meant for a 1on 17 year old girl being advertised sh'll be sold on the first monday in november next and then i find i find this very stking and poignant also a valuable saddle horse in the next line. so a really drives home e equivalency that slaveholders in their minds placed on enslad people, other forms of property, includg animals in. the top right. there's another kind of advertisement. this is about an african man who's been apprehended. he's caped from enslavement, been caught. he's been placed in a local jail. d then what would do is

adverte in the newspapers as to find the owner who would come and pay a fee an then their human proper bac and then, of course, in the middle you've got the type of ruway ad thai'm sure you've all seen before. somebody here escaped from enslavemen and tt's slave holder is is looking for them, trying to recapturthem and places an ad in the local paper. and you can find out all kinds of things from these ads. you know, you find out a lot about the mentality of the slave holders themselvesbutou can also often find out just little nuggets of information about the lives of the enslaved people as well. so f example, in this one, you can see there's speculation he may lurking about this neighborhood where he has a wife livi at david cocktails. so this tells us about the importance of marital relationships and slave people were not allowed technically,

officially by law to be married, but they did in practice. and this kind of document gives us a good insight into slave holders recognition that, you know, even though we're dealing with these people as a form of property, we also recognize that they have motivations just the same as any other human that can include these human relationships that are going to that that are going to drive their actions. so again, just another example, the varied value find in american newspapers and these slave related ads. also, i think remind us of something else which that slavery and important ways funded american newspapers, particularly in the southern states, you know, in colonial times, slavery was legal everywhere. these kinds of ads would be in papers in the northern colonies as well. and so this was going on everywhere in colonial times after slavery gradually ends in the northern, it becomes more

confined to the south. but here, even more so in the decades leading to the civil war, these ads helping keep these newspapers business out of the business of slavery is really bankrolling newspapers as well as everything else. but what you also find, and this is really the main area that i want to get into today outside of the advertising columns is lots of coverage of. slavery as the central political issue or at least one of the central political issues of the day. and so mostly what i want to do today is take a look at newspapers as a specific form of media and how they played into the conversation of slavery that led to the civil war. the first point i want to make is that obvisly i've already shown you how newspapers were an source of information. but en it comes to slavery before the civil war, newspapers

also weapo and they were used editors and people on both sides of the dividby thing they were used especially strikingly dramatically effectively by the abolitionists. and so the first part of my lecture is goi to focus on how abolitionists used newspapers and on the theme of newspapers as weans. there's no better way to kind of drive that home than this quotation up there from the anti-slavery newaper editor. well, benjamin lundy. and he talks about types as in the type that newspapers and book printers used at this time to print. and he talks about types as being potent implements of modern political and warfare. really driving home my idea and his idea that newspapers are weapon in this fightgainst in this fight over slavery and, the

group of abolitionists who who ended up using newspapers more than anyone else. we're a new generation of abolitionists who emerged in the 1830s. so before the 18th thirties, there absolutely been opposition to slavery in the united states. obviously, african are consistently opposed by also certain white people. even before the 1830s, mostly though, opposition to slavery had been fairly moderate. i most anti-slavery people had envisioned a kind of gradual end to slavery. you know, this is a problem but let's find a way so that we can bring it to an end in the period of years, even, rather than something that should ended immediately. one of the most prominent examples of that was colonies ation, which was the idea in order to end slavery, in order to get rid of slavery, we

actually get rid of african-americans, complete. lee so this was the mindset of, the colonization ists and the idea was we'll end slavery by sending african-americans places like liberia. and that way, you know, we won't have to deal with the problem of where african-americans might fit as equal citizens in american republic. we'll just get rid of the problem of slavery by getting rid african-americans so that was a very, very prominent mode of abolitionism in the early 19th century, very and of course, the northern states, they end slavery. they do it gradually over course of several decades. so in the 1830s, that's quite a drastic change when. the more radical abolitionists come onto the scene and, they became known as the immediate tests because as you know, kind of a nice phrase to use they demanded that slavery should be ended immediately. we don't want to wait around.

this is a moral problem. so severe, so serious that we need to bring it to end immediately by any means necessary. and so they took a much more radical approach than. previous generations of anti-slavery activists and they decided that they were going to try and do this as soon possible. and really, the main thing they started out by doing was trying to publicize the evils of slavery, try and expose the sense of slave holders. they saw this as a problem of information, which is where it fits into our theme for the weekend because for the most many white northerners at this time, they just ignored slavery. it was something that was happening elsewhere in the southern states. we don't we're not part of that. we don't need to worry about that. and so the abolitionists came along and they decided one of the first ways to change things, just by showing white northern

people how much of a problem this was and what the realities of enslavement were like. and they did this in a number of ways, lectures. they books, they sent in congressional petitions to washington, dc, but most they did it through newspapers. and i'm sure many people in the room already thinking about the poster by the best known of this generation this group of abolitionists william llo garrison. he established a new newspaper in 1831 called the liberator, and this was one of the main vehicles he used to get the message out. and kn, by the way, i'm kind of breaking all the rules of powerpoint presentations here with all that th out there. i know it's a lot to wade through. lots of words on screen. i cod't resist. i'm going to break the roll

anyway, because this quotation for me just so kind of illustrative of where garrison and others like him reoming from and just the sense of urgency they brought to this crusade against slavery so you can see he begins by talking about he wants to be uncompromisi. he does not wish to think or speak or write with. and he uses the analogy to tell a man whose house on fire, to give a moderat ocourse you wouldn't do that. tell the mother to gradually extricathebaby from the fire into which it has fallen. of course, he wouldn't do that. and so what 's saying ishis problem is so severe that it requires all of our teion. it requires and immediate response. you know, do not pass, go, do not collect $200. weeeto end this right no and so that's garrison response. garrison's approach to

abolitionism. you can see this a little bit visually. the kind of approach garrison took. this is the masthead, one of the early mastheads of deliberate. we can zoom in a little so you can see a little bit more closelyre. and you see message of this illustrate n is and slave people people they'reei treated as cattle you see the sign market slavess and other cattle to be sold. you see the enslaved people distraught. their families are broken up. so a lot of what garrison and the others were trying to do was to appeal to the theons, the sensibilities of their readers, to say, imagine if this was you. cally,s this is an evil institution that has these insidious effects on real peoples lives.

so, again, you can't just ignore this problem because you've never seen slavery in. we're going to bring the message to we're going to bring the evidence so that you can't ignore it. and then if you're if you've got really good vision, you may be able to see in the background here they building which is meant to be the capitol building with flag over it saying liberty. so of course there he's driving home the hypocrisy the contradiction between american ideals and the practice slavery. so masthead of the liberator went through a few different stages you c s he's added a lot detail this one comes from 1861. a lot of the m is the me some of the same visual elements over in this part, and then in the middle he's rely emphasizing the religious aspect oftionm. by 1861 as well. and so the figure of jesus the middle, he's saying i come to break the bonds of the oppressor, which by the way, includes an opprit person, as well as enslaved

black person. so often different kinds of reformtshand in hand, and was supported the same people. but thsisimilar is on the inhumanity of enslavement. american ideals. with political ideals, and in this case, the ideals of christian garrison's newspaper, the t there were quite a few more. there were around 44 zero different abolitionist newspaper before this. in the decades leading up to the civil war. and all of them were working towards that same goal, really, of slavery as quickly as possible, because they have different ideas about exactly how to do that. exactly what the problems are, which part of the problem to address first. but i'll kind of throwing in the same direction most of these newspapers were edited. white men like william lloyd garrison and benjamin lundy.

his picture i showed you before, but most of these newspapers actually relied on black subscribers to make to make enough money to survive. and there were many black writers who contributed articles even to newspapers like the liberator. there were for the pioneering black woman abolition act. maria stewart she was a to the liberator as there were also african-american editors. so there were about 20 different black editors at newspapers in america, the civil war. and of course, that's one of these newspaper editors who's well known to us all today, kind the equivalent of william lloyd garrison among the african american editors. he's frederick douglass. interestingly, douglass, as you say in the quotation up here, he he's inspired in part by the example of william garrison and the liberator. so douglass is working slavery

in many different kinds of ways he's he's published in his autobiography. he's giving these spellbinding lectures on the lecture circuit, trying to persuade northerners to oppose slavery, but then inspired in part by, the liberator, he decides in 1847 that he's going to start publishing his own newspaper. and you can see here he's picking up on on the the style of the liberator and goals of the liberator to express sympathy for african-americans in slavery. he's talking about this sympathy for my brethren in bonds. and he's talking about it's scathing denunciations of slaveholders, again, exposing those sins is much of what the abolitionist presses is trying to do is faithful exposés of slavery. all of this impresses douglass. and so he decides in 1847 he's going to create his own newspaper. and this is called the north star. it goes through several

different names for a while in the 1850s. it becomes frederick douglass, says newspaper, then it becomes, douglass says, monthly. and then after the war, he edited a different publication called the new national. but the ones before the war, we're all kind of thinking along the same lines are towards the same goal. some of you may be wondering how much of a reach these newspapers. while frederick douglass says paper, had at its peak, about 3000 subscribers, and that was about the same as the liberator as well. so in a population which in 1860 is about 33 million, having 3000 subscribers isn't huge. but of course, given that they they are a fringe movement, even on the eve of the civil war, the abolitionists gang, several thousand subscribers for first for many of these newspaper actually doing a pretty good job in getting the word out. so douglass follows along,

really following garrison's example in first and foremost, trying to expose this is what slavery is really like. we're going to make it impossible for you to ignore these facts. and so large parts of these newspapers were can of reports of brutality. these are just several examples. clips from one issue of the north star in the 18 in the late 1840s talking about three slaves were hanged in south carolina. another slave was hung in virginia for stealing some pork they were really pepper with example after example after example again the idea being to saturate the newspapers with evidence of of the realities of slavery so in all kinds of ways abolitionist were trying to use the power of the press to support their cause.

first and foremost, they wanted to expose the evils of slavery to white northerners who up until then were really successfully ignoring a lot of this. they also were trying to shame whites, so they did try and speak to slaveholders as an audience as well they wanted to shame them and get them to see the errors of their ways. they also hoped that their message would reach and slave people as well, inspiring them to seek their freedom and. of course, you may already have picked up on this. the title, the first title of douglass says newspaper the north star. that was common symbol, too, to indicate that destination point, that enslaved people escaped from slavery were working towards. and so the masthead of douglass newspaper, you can see that there's a the's an escape from slavery. clearly running towards the north star,hi is up in the top center there. so there's a lot of cycle

encouragement there. there's also some logistical encouraging for the underod railro. so a lot of these abolitionist newspapers, they would run reports ofeoe who had successfully escaped from slavery. they would identify people within their community who were able to help escape slaves and they even on some occasions were able to provide physical, practical help to escape is in their own offices, occasionally newspaper offices became a kind of haven for who had managed to escape slavery and made it to northern cities. so lots of different levels on which these newspapers are trying to do this work. so now i want to shift pace r shift gears a little bit and zoom out. because as these abolitionists

were doing all of this with the newspapers were creating the whole landscape of newspaper publication and communication in general was already beginning to change and. of course, this is where we get into some of the themes of the other lectures as well. america during the civil war era, really, than 19th century as a whole was, undergoing a kind of communications revolution. and as part of that the newspaper industry, it just explodes in 1840, there were. 186 million copies of newspapers in circulation during the year 40 in the us. by 1860, about 186 million had become 888 million. copies of newspapers circulate around the us. so that works out to be 26 newspapers per year. every single person in the country, which may not sound

like tons, but when you think about that's every single person enslaved or free child or adult lecturer are illiterate. you can see that these newspapers having a really big immediate impact on americans lives and the growth in the newspaper industry came about for several reasons. partly it was a technological story, and there were improvements in printing presses in the 19th century, the use of steam power, there was cheaper paper. so they were able to, first of all, just produce newspapers more efficiently, more cheaply, more quickly. there. also, the expanding railroad network. and a few of these elements are visible on and on that illustration, it's a postwar illustration, but kind of brings together a lot of these changes. so the railroad network is what allowed these newspapers to be carried efficient around the country as well. and then, of course, there was the telegraph we heard about that last night, and i really

want to emphasize picking up on what tom wheeler us, how fundamentally the telegraph transformed americans relations with information because before this information in significant quantities were was only able to travel pretty much as fast as a human being or an animal could travel. there were some exceptions. heard a little bit about signaling with flags smoke earlier. so there are a few exceptions. for the most part, significant amounts of information can only be carried along by by person, by horse, that kind of thing. and now all of a sudden, in the 1840s, you've got the situation where you can transmit, you know, large amounts of information. if you've got the personnel to sit there and decode that from morse code over huge distances, pretty much. so it's just a massive, massive shift. does anyone remember what the

first message? samuel morse and over the baltimore dc line 1844. what has wrong. yeah what have got and i think phrase captures you know really well how americans at the time were conceiving of this this is just an enormous shift in the landsce of how information gets transmitted how human beings relate to o another. so so this is huge. and by the way, this booby dani walker how if you're interested in a good introduction to a lot of this stuff, the communications revolution, this would be a great place to look. so as these technological changes are underway. the purpose the press and newspapers was changing as well back in th18th century newspapers had been, you know for the most part confined to an elite readership because literacy levels were lower,

prices were. so they were out of reach of many people. and so most newspapers had only reached very limited readership, but they'd also been mostly political vehicles. so newspapers for the most part were designed with the purpose of helping this in this canada, when an election, this in this group, this political party to prevail in the next election. so they had a very specific and kind of confined purpose. and of course, newspapers continue to be highly politicized that, you know, that never changed. right. but in the decades leading up to the civil war, some of these newspapers also began to kind of widen their scope and their ambition and to become much more commercial oriented, as well as being political. they wanted to make and they could do not only by doing the politics work, but also by running more human interest stories.

so more sensationalized reporting, those that could help them appeal more widely. and this was especially the case in the big cities like especially new york city. that's where the audience was. that's why there were enough people in in the geographical area to to support this new kind of commercially oriented paper. it became known as the penny press. of course, the low price, many of them for a while at least were priced at $0.01 per copy. so of the large readership, they're able to bring the price down. they appealed to the masses. they run about crime, sex, corruption, same kinds of things we read about in the news today, but also about slavery. and this is part of why i want to say is that slavery, i think, fit into this broad shift towards more commercially oriented news, because slavery itself provided exactly those of gripping human interest stories

on both sides of the divide that that newspaper had. it says, recognize, help them sell newspapers. so there's a lot of changes. journalism is becoming profession, you know, now that they're able to sell more copies, there's a bigger scale. people are actually able to make a living out of journalism in a way that used to be very difficult. there's more use of visual images in newspapers. and dr. gannon earlier showed us some examples of the woodcuts, the engravings that were used and. these early newspapers, even they during this time period were actually very expensive to produce and very difficult. so i've showed you a couple of examples from. the mastheads masthead, it was viable to use images because they used the same, you know, week after week. most of these newspapers were weekly, by the way. they use the same masthead image, so it was worth putting the time and labor into creating a woodcut that you were going to use day after day.

but if you're thinking about illustrating a one time news story about what happened yesterday, it was just too much to worth the expense and the time time. but this gradually begins to change by the 1850s, and especially the civil war era. that's really when you begin to see the interest in visuals. you see a lot of those sketches that often are in our powerpoints about various topics in civil war history, sketches from reporters in, the field make their way back to public, like harper's weekly and get reproduced. one of the ways they're able to do that by the way. so it's very expensive, very consuming to produce one of these engravings. and there's a guy named frank leslie, who is a british immigrant, comes over from he has experience in britain working on illustrated newspapers, and he's one of the pioneers of of using

illustrations more commonly in newspaper. and one of the ways he's able to do that, he figures out that if we get enough readers, if the are making enough money, we actually spend more money on creating these engravings. he still faces the problem of the time. it takes. so if something happens one day and it takes three days, let's say, for a talented engraver to actually turn a sketch into a woodcut that they can print by then it's going to be too late. so what he does is, is comes up with a method where they split the sketch into a into a grid and cut it up into as many as 30 to different squares and then hire 32 different engravings to work on a little piece of it. and then combine it all together at the end. so kind of ingenious. and that's one of the things that allows by the 1850s and especially 1860s, that allows these newspapers to to produce these sketches, print them in

the newspapers. so all of that is to say all kinds of changes, transform options in the newspaper industry going on at this time, which are happening at the same time as slavery is is is coming stage as a political issue. so abolitionists as i've already said, are using newspapers very heavily. they do persuade. some northern readers. they're still a small minority at the time of the civil war, but they do have some effect on other public opinion. the biggest effects they have, though, is actually in the south. and this is, you know, onef the ways you can gauge the success of a reform movement is how violently, how strongly your opponents react, what you're doing and. if we evaluate the abolitionists on these terms, they were doing a heck of a job in the 1830s because they inspired wave of

repression from the south, from slaveholding interests. and so, for example, in 1835, the abolitionists began this campaign. they mailed hundreds of thousands and i think around a million by the time all was said and done, items of abolition propaganda, basically newspaper pamphlets, all of this kind of thing. they mailed it down south to try and shame southern slaveholders into saying saying that what they were doing was wrong you can imagine what slaveholders of this in charleston and south carolina, for example, when these piles of abolitionist mail reached the post office in charleston, south carolina, a mob laid siege to the us post office there. and you can see in the illustration they pulled many of these items out from the post and set fire to them outside and

there's no way you can see this up on the screen but if you can look at this on a computer and zoom in some of the papers at the bottom there are marked with titles like the liberator the boston atlas another another paper from the north so this the kind of violent reaction the repression that they eliciting from the south. but that's actually wasn't confined only to the south. there was also a lot of people in the north and especially kind of in the middle portion of the country. a lot of white people who were supportive of slavery or at least were not supportive of abolitionists and did not like the way abolitionists were doing what they were doing. so in the decades leading to the civil war, there were at least two dozen violent attacks on anti-slavery newspaper personalities. most of these actually took place on supposedly freely territory in the north, and the most prominent, the most famous

one involved, this guy, elijah lovejoy. so he an anti-slavery newspaper editor. he was originally from maine. he moved to saint, missouri, and he began publishing this abolitionist newspaper. and missouri of course, was slave territory. and his opinions were not popular. he was threatened with violence and mobs would attack his equipment and all of this kind of thing. so eventually it got to the point where he thought, okay, i'll move in to free territory. pposedly into illinois, into the town of illinois. and this just on the other sid of the mississippi river. but why he found was that the majority white public opinion even in alton illinois was ant anti abolitionist. so they did not like what he was saying inepaper. they asked him stop with words. at first, but later with,

violce and there were several attempts attack his warehouse. he kept his stf. heado order a new printing presses and this kind of thing over the years. and in 1837 finally he ded his last new printing press because a mob assembled when that pre w delivered, you know, and destroying the prinng press, the point of atas, we want to put your wsper out of action. we don't want you to be able to print your ideas anymore. so in 1837, it finally got the point where lovoynd some of his friends were holed up and warehouse trying to defenth premises, the printing press equipment, and a mob was outsi gunfire was exchanged on both sides. and at the end of it, elijah lovejoy, was that so? thk that being shot that for being a newspaper editor just printing certain opinions it really made a big impression on

the reading public back then you know just as i think it would so lovejoy was hailed and celebrate said not everywhere in country, of course, but among anti-slavery folks, he was hailed as an abolitionist. and he also inspire some people were not yet converted. so there are examples like john, for example, he was already on a trajectory towards abolition. abraham lincoln was anti slavery to one degree or another, but for both of these guys, the lovejoy murder was kind of a red line. it like, you know, we recognize that the slaveholding interests want to protect. but this is a point it never should have come to murdering a newspaper editor and free labor territory for printing

abolitionist ideas. so you can see from that quotations up there that this is one of those moments in the 1830s that really electrified them and kind of sent them or propelled them further along opposing slavery. and if you go to alton today, by the way, and i know that people there, but there's a statue to elijah lovejoy. and the message of the statue is the same message. he's he's a martyr, a free speech and the freedom of the press. so his his memory lives on in that way. so after lovejoy's death, of course, typically happens in this kind of situation. the abolitionist even more committed to what they were doing. they were able to recruit more people to their cause. and so in a sense, it backfired against the people who killed lovejoy and kept destroying his press and just to give you one small example of how abolitionists continue to newspapers for what they were doing, uncle tom's cabin, you

knowhis as a novel, right? and what most people don't know is that the originally began lifes a newspaper serial. sot first came out as a serialized novel beginning i 1851, in the national era, and harriet beecher stowe wrote to edit of that paper, which was anti slavery, of course, and promised to paint a wordicture of slavery, a phrase which i really and kind of gets to my title of a war of words. so hriet beecher stowe, even though the novel goes on to have this great impact we all kno about it began life as in the of this newspaper so the power of in this struggle over slavery is really striking but of course as as the death elijah lovejoy suggests it wasn't just a war of words. you know, long before the civil war in 1837, when he was killed,

the war of words is already bleeding over into a war, a more physical as well. a little bit about the other side of the divide, pro newspapers and editors they, of course, used own newspapers to, get theipoint of view across to vilify abolitionists. one of the things i often talk about when i'm talking about the causes of the war is this growing sense of bng under from the other side and. editors on both sides becam masters of a kind of capital and that kind of feeng and creati it these examples from, the richmond enquirer, just give yoa glimpse into that abolitionist are crazy. they're insane they're out to get us they're out to destroy our way of life, our economy, even our physical safety. this is the way slaveholders were using newapers in the run up to the civil war.

so all of this culminated in the 1850s wi some polarizing incidents which became fodder for y me newspaper articles which kind of deepen the spiral of polarization and the two sides even more hostile each other. and one of these is the canon of charles sumner in 1856. and most of you know the story. if you don't, you can read my book when it out next year, which is on the subject. but you probably know that preston was the south carolina congressman here who assaulted senator charles sumner and so this was over slavery had given this speech very critical of slavery, critical of slave holders, including of preston brooks, his cousins, hence the caning and. of course, this was big news. how it not be. it spread rapidly by telegraph. you know, the newspapers at the

time, they often wanted to emphasize, hey, this is breaking just like on cnn today in this case received by a magnetic telegraph just showing off the fact that, you know, you need to get the news here because this is the very latest and, of course, accounts of the caning you know, as you would expect, were very different in the north versus the south. in the south, you see a lot of examples of sumner. sumner deserving it, basically with speech full of abuse, full he vilest and most appeals against the domestic institutions of, the south. it's kia code word fo slavery back then. so most southerners, there are alys exceptions, course, but most southerners are defend brooks blamed sumner, whereas most northern, even if they' not really abolitionist, they want to defend their man and want to def some way

charles sumner and blame preston brooks for what happened. so you see more phrases like outrageous, brutal assault and that kind of thing as they' reporting the caning. so it's a classic polarizing incident with these narratives coming from both sides. yeah, that's right. it's followed a few years by brown's and everything i said about caning is doubly soor brown's right. you know, the kinds of reactions get, but also the technology that's being used. and these headlines, i think, give you a sense of how newspapers are reporng kind of ick fire, quick bursts information. this is the latest. this what's going on and brow's raid attracted field reporters from, many of the bigger newspe in the north, harper ferry, they were able to get that because, of course, it it went on longer than 60 seconds

which is long. the caning went on for brown's raid lasted a stretch over a cole of days and then the ial, of course, lasts longer than that so. field reporters are going to harperfey. they're sending theirpdates back to these northern newspe first. and interestingly, th brown's raid, you also see change in northern public after the fact. so with many of this many of these stories, you see, you know, polar opposite narrates of the same event. what you see with brown's raid is a more gradual generation of northern sympay towards brown at first, most northerners are as horrified as white southerners. you know, they're terrified. the idea of a rebellion enslave people. race war is a term they used at the time. and so they're happy with what john brown did either. but what jim brown was able to do is show his mastery of the in

the weeks following the raid as he's awaiting trial, as is undergoing trial execution. he's able to massage the narrative in a way that i would have a made a modern pr executive quite proud. you know he's able to turn his image from this violent crazy man into a place beginnings of respect. some cases among white northerners and for his bravery, the face of sacrifice and kind of acknowledgment that even if they disagreed with the means he took the purpose for which he undertook his actions was, admirable. so brown, a great example of someone who is to actually look at what the newspapers are saying about him and change the story. by the way he acts by what he says and how he behaves. those weeks leading to his execution. all right that was a lot. i'm just going to as briefly

some things up now, turning things over to you. so what we want to leave on is the idea that by the time the civil war broke out in 1860, one, of course, this war of words, the struggle and the in newspaper columns had been underway for several decades. it was not just a war of words, it was also a very interconnected events like the murder, lovejoy, the caning of sumner brown's raid. so it wasn't just a war of words, but it was war that took place in in all of those columns of the nation's newspapers and i want to be careful to a little bit here. i don't think the newspaper caused, the media caused the civil war single handedly by any stretch. you know, you've got that underlying conflict to begin with between, slavery and free labor societies and economies. but i do think that newspapers

helped determine how that conflict would play out in politics and in culture and eventually as well? and this happened at a time when because of technological changes i've discussed, newspapers had a louder voice than ever before, a voice that carried further and further and this meant that all those countless little decisions that newspaper editors on both sides made, you know, the way they decided to spin the story the way they reacted to how people on the other side was spending the story. all of that helped an atmosphere where american were at least able to begin to imagine waging war against themselves. thank you. okay. i think we have good and ready for questions.

the source of. that said, there we are, that massive abolitionist, male, female in charleston, just the worst place it was it addressed anybody. yes. so they wanted to address it. it's the people whose names they were able to find. and so, in theory, would be delivered to a random in charleston, including prominent slaveholder, as you know, whose names would be out there. so, yeah, it had to be addressed and they you know they sent it the us mail and the regular way so it really presented the post office with a quandary and the federal government in fact with a quandary and you know that the us post office decided they weren't crazy about delivering abolitionist propaganda. you know, again, you know, this is kind of a radical fringe group in, the 1830s, but the government and the post also and this includes president andrew

jackson as well and they kind of recognize they're in a difficult they don't to be seen to be censoring free expression of ideas. they don't want to get into the business of determining which ideas can be transmitted. the us mail and which cannot. and so they kind of fudged and had a little bit and the official perspective. so they come up with a couple of different. one of them at first is to say, okay, we'll just like the states decide, even though the us post office is, a national institution, that didn't really fly, their solution they ended up with also was a fudge was to say okay we'll transfer this mail down to the southern post offices because charleston wasn't the only one but we will not proactively deliver it to the people to whom it's addressed unless, they come and ask for it. so was a way of in their minds going around that dilemma where

they didn't want to deliver it but they also didn't want to refuse to accept that. oh yeah, thank you for a great speech. you could you comment on the amount and type of newspaper coverage after nat turner's rebellion in the early part of the century. yeah exactly. so and nat turner's rebellion is early 1830s, exactly around the same as the liberator is coming being. and so a lot of newspaper this is seen, as you know a hot news item. so newspapers across the country run it and at this point most you almost all american newspapers edited and run by white people who even if they're in the north, they're so afraid of the prospect of a violent slave rebellion that they depict nat turner as rebellion in frightening terms, you know, they want to showcase how

dangerous enslaved rebellion could be and they wanted to and whether implicitly are explicitly justify repression that took place after after nat turner's rebellion. so it's interesting to compare nat turner's rebellion where john raid, you know, almost three decades later and at the time, if not turner's most newspapers in most of the country were not running the story of the day of the day after course, they had to wait for letters to come and before they had professional journalists for them, they would often rely on, okay, well, wait until we receive a copy of the local newspaper, so we'll find out the news from there are often they would have sort of a network of friends and correspondents called them who were not professionally employed, but were people who traveled or were resident elsewhere who would send, you know, lengthy letters back to the newspapers so that the kind

of coverage is for those technological reasons. but yeah absolutely, it's a very kind of negative sensationalize coverage of nat turner's rebellion. people also have looked at even earlier than that. and, you know, the 1790s with the haitian revolution, obviously this is taking place further away. but that's where you really to see those horrific verbal images of his why we have to be afraid. enslaved people rising up against us and especially in places like south carolina, like the mississippi, where black outnumber white. thank you so i'm not sure i quite understand something. you said there were the circulation of the abolition newspapers was 3000 said in a

well if given pension for only reading what people that agree us so you got 2995 people who are abolitionists and five people out of the 3000 who are not so how would they have this much influence or any influence at all really. yeah, an excellent point. and this is exactly what the postal campaign in 1835 was designed to get around. and it was designed bring the message into the south to to slaveholders, quote unquote, the enemy and get publicity that other newspapers would cover. the other thing is they would so one of the peculiarities, i think, of the newspaper industry in the u.s. at this time compared to other is that the u.s. post office had a free newspaper exchange system so that meant that any newspaper could send a copy of its newspaper to any other newspaper

for free. they wouldn't have to pay the mail. so abolitionist newspapers would do to other other papers. and of course, sometimes they would print, you know, even if they weren't abolitionist, maybe maybe they would with this small print, maybe they would disagree with it and say, you look at what these crazy people are saying. either way, the abolitionists get their message out. yeah. so that's really good point, too, to some degree the newspapers were preaching to the choir, but they tried to break out of that. and by the way, i didn't mention this, but by way comparison, you know, i mentioned the penny press that the mass market dailies in places like new york were the the most the highest circulation and i've ever read about was about hundred thousand readers per day most of the ones were per week. but the new york herald had about 200,000 per day. one last question.

yeah, yeah, sure go ahead. so you're talking about the advancement and the massive increase in copies of newspapers. and i'm wondering, like as that continues until 1860 or say, is there like a specific social pressure by people to say, like if you to be informed by newspapers just to be like a good and that drives a lot of increase in readership and like noticing these abolitionists newspapers or various other things and other larger newspapers as well. yeah i think that's a really good point to and it reminds me of a couple points we've heard in the previous lectures, you know, dr. gannon talking, about the stereoscope view as you if you were of a certain social class, it was expected that this was the you did, you know, of like going to a play or a show days. and so i think that was something of that in the increase in newspaper readership as well as you know, that really

came up a lot in thompson's talk, which is just the desire to be informed. you know, i want know what's going on. i want to be part of things. and newspapers were the way to do that. so i think that demand probably increased for those reasons. at the same time as it was becoming easier for the newspapers to provide more copies of their public audience as well. so thanks again for your attention. look forward to talking more.