The Antebellum Press

Setting the Stage for Civil War

David B. Sachsman, Gregory A. Borchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367196820
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515767
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War reveals the critical role of journalism in the years leading up to America's deadliest conflict by exploring the events that foreshadowed and, in some ways, contributed directly to the outbreak of war.

This collection of scholarly essays traces how the national press influenced and shaped America's path towards warfare. Major challenges faced by American newspapers prior to secession and war are explored, including: the economic development of the press; technology and its influence on the press; major editors and reporters (North and South) and the role of partisanship; and the central debate over slavery in the future of an expanding nation. A clear narrative of institutional, political, and cultural tensions between 1820 and 1861 is presented through the contributors' use of primary sources. In this way, the reader is offered contemporary perspectives that provide unique insights into which local or national issues were pivotal to the writers whose words informed and influenced the people of the time.

As a scholarly work written by educators, this volume is an essential text for both upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates who study the American Civil War, journalism, print and media culture, and mass communication history.

1

Newspapers, Agenda Setting, and a Nation Under Stress

Donald L. Shaw and Thomas C. Terry, with Milad Minooie

Historians understand their fields the way Søren Kierkegaard says we all understand life: We live forward, but can only understand life backward. After April 1861, when the guns opened up on Fort Sumter, everyone—suddenly and obviously—could see the war coming. And it seems, many historians claim, war was inevitable. But was it? If Abraham Lincoln had not called for volunteers after Fort Sumter, would a quiet have settled on the land until someone had found a less disruptive solution? And if Lincoln had lost the 1860 election, would there ever have been a civil war?

Was the Civil War “irrepressible,” “inevitable,” or “avoidable?”¹ President James Buchanan believed extremist agitators were to blame for the conflict. In his first inaugural on March 4, 1861, Lincoln observed, “in your hands, my dissatisfied [Southern] fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” Lincoln’s November 1860 election had spurred South Carolina’s December secession, which was soon followed by the secession of the six other Deep South states and the establishment of the Confederate States of America in February 1861. Virginia did not secede until two days after the call for volunteers. Arkansas and North Carolina followed in May, Tennessee in June.

While the North blamed Southern secession for the Civil War, Southern historians would blame the fanaticism of the Republican Party for the conflict. The idea of an avoidable Civil War gained adherents among historians in the 1920s and 1930s. Historian James G. Randall, who was born in Indiana and taught at the University of Illinois, did not perceive any differences so fundamental in the social and economic systems of the North and South as to require a war.² In The Coming of the Civil War, Iowa-born Avery Craven of the University of Chicago argued that slave laborers were not much worse off than Northern industrial workers, that the institution was already on the road to extinction, and that war could have been averted if skillful and responsible leaders had worked to produce compromise.³ Historian David Goldfield, in America Aflame, contended the war was “America’s Greatest Failure,” because slavery was simply replaced by Jim Crow and 150 years of racial control.⁴

On the other hand, Charles and Mary Beard in their influential The Rise of American Civilization argued that the Civil War was a question of economic competition and that slavery was a labor system.⁵ Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins in his eight-volume work The Ordeal of the Union insisted the Civil War came about because the peoples of the North and South were becoming dramatically separate societies.⁶ Historian Gary Gallagher believes there is an “Appomattox Syndrome,” compelling most historians and other observers to look at “Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward.”⁷

There are also some historians who find the causes for disunion and civil war to be mutually exclusive, though interrelated. While disunion and disagreement and Lincoln’s election led to secession, these historians maintain that the causes of the combat of the Civil War were something else entirely. Miscalculation and machismo loom large in this interpretation. James McPherson’s magisterial and Pulitzer-Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era equivocates on the inevitability of the Civil War.⁸ This is in the tradition of many trained historians who believe nothing in history is inevitable and that explanations occur when trying to put together an organized, logical narrative.

American newspapers in the Antebellum Period reflected the nation as a whole, while also reflecting their regions. They reflected sectional perspectives when reporting about important events, such as the 1820 Compromise, the 1831 Nat Turner revolt, the Mexican War of 1846–1848, the 1850 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and the John Brown raid in 1859. These newspapers were filled with controversies and tension, but until the 1860 election their coverage generally did not predict a war. Observers can find a thread of events in the Antebellum years that seemed in hindsight to be leading to war, but newspaper coverage for the most part did not demonstrate a country unraveling towards dissolution and civil war. Nevertheless, secession and civil war did occur, and so the question remains as to whether newspapers played an agenda-setting role, and when the coming of civil war could be discerned in their coverage.

Newspapers in History

Historians have long acknowledged the value of newspapers in documenting events. In 1966, political scientist Richard Merritt sampled colonial newspapers to see if he could detect the emergence of an American community in the years before the Revolution.⁹ Donald Shaw’s analysis of 3,000 newspaper articles from 1820 to 1860 saw an increase in “local and state news at the expense of foreign news,” which declined from 28 percent to 18 percent over those 40 years. He attributed this to “an increase in interest in local communities as they grew in size” and “the emergence of an American community.”¹⁰ He wrote, “The content of … newspapers reflects the day-to-day judgments of the press at one level and the intrinsic values of a social system and culture at other levels.”¹¹ It is to “sketch the frames of events.”¹² Whatever a newspaper may claim is its agenda, a content analysis will lay bare what is that agenda and how it frames that agenda.¹³

Agenda Setting Theory

Walter Lippmann entitled a chapter in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.”¹⁴ The media placed those pictures there, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw hypothesized in 1972, by “influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues.”¹⁵ The agenda-setting theory of McCombs and Shaw “revived Lippmann’s conception” of the media’s contributions to creating those “pictures in our head.”¹⁶ Bernard Cohen declared in 1963 the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”¹⁷ And in 1966, Kurt and Gladys Lang noted, “the mass media force attention to certain issues…[by] constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals…should think about, know about, have feelings about.”¹⁸

In 1993, McCombs and Shaw asserted, “agenda setting is considerably more than the classical assertion that the news [media] tells us what to think about.”¹⁹ The media, they emphasized, also tell us “how to think about it.”²⁰ Agenda setting performs a “linking function” in democratic societies, between “citizens and policymakers,” according to Stuart Shulman.²¹

Historical agenda setting is a backward approach, not only because it looks back into history, but because no explanatory theoretical model exists underpinning it. It is quite different from other agenda-setting approaches because it cannot rely on the same empirical basis. It requires counterparts for polling and survey data that did not exist much before the 1930s.

Historical scholars direct their agenda-setting research light backward into history, but it is neither a laser beam, nor is it Lippmann’s “searchlight.”²² The prism of hindsight mediates the light and changes it. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin remarked, “The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.”²³

S. Kittrell Rushing took a quantitative approach to agenda setting during the 1860–61 secession crisis preceding the Civil War.²⁴ He examined the sixteen Antebellum newspapers published in twenty-eight East Tennessee counties in the seven months between the 1860 presidential election and the 1861 secession referendum to determine their political slant. “A standard interpretation,” he wrote, “is that after Lincoln’s election Southern newspapers led the way in altering Southern attitudes toward the Union,” fomenting anti-union and secessionist sentiment.²⁵ Rushing studied the correlation between the newspapers’ political views and the results of those two elections in East Tennessee. East Tennesseans voted two-to-one against secession, bucking the statewide trend that propelled the state to “officially” secede.²⁶ By applying “twentieth century agenda-setting theory to 19th-century press influence,” Rushing argued, “a more complete understanding may be achieved of the relationship between the antebellum press and its readership.”²⁷ The political leanings of twelve of the newspapers Rushing looked at could be gleaned and were split evenly between the Southern wing of the Democratic Party (which supported John Breckenridge in 1860) and the regular Democratic Party (which nominated Stephen Douglas). However, both the state and East Tennessee went for the Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.²⁸

While “some visible relationship…between the presence of newspapers and county election returns” was “apparent,” it was not always in the direction anticipated.²⁹ Only one comparison “closely fit the hypothesis of a direct relationship between newspapers and voting,” Rushing found.³⁰ And that had more to do with the “influence of a prominent, aggressive editor [Knoxville’s Parson Brownlow] than the editorial content of his papers.”³¹

Rushing’s statistical analysis detected only...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Newspapers, Agenda Setting, and a Nation Under Stress
• 2 The “Irrepressible Conflict” and the Press in the Late Antebellum Period
• Part I Nullification, Abolition, and Division
• Part II The Election of 1856, Dred Scott, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
• Part III The Election of 1860 and the Crisis of Secession
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Index