Marketing the Blue and Gray

Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War

Lawrence A. Kreiser

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780807171578
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr.'s Marketing the Blue and Gray analyzes newspaper advertising during the American Civil War. Newspapers circulated widely between 1861 and 1865, and merchants took full advantage of this readership. They marketed everything from war bonds to biographies of military and political leaders; from patent medicines that promised to cure almost any battlefield wound to "secession cloaks" and "Fort Sumter" cockades. Union and Confederate advertisers pitched shopping as its own form of patriotism, one of the more enduring legacies of the nation's largest and bloodiest war. However, unlike important-sounding headlines and editorials, advertisements have received only passing notice from historians. As the first full-length analysis of Union and Confederate newspaper advertising, Kreiser's study sheds light on this often overlooked aspect of Civil War media. Kreiser argues that the marketing strategies of the time show how commercialization and patriotism became increasingly intertwined as Union and Confederate war aims evolved. Yankees and Rebels believed that buying decisions were an important expression of their civic pride, from "Union forever" groceries to "States Rights" sewing machines. He suggests that the notices helped to expand American democracy by allowing their diverse readership to participate in almost every aspect of the Civil War. As potential customers, free blacks and white women perused announcements for war-themed biographies, images, and other material wares that helped to define the meaning of the fighting. Advertisements also helped readers to become more savvy consumers and, ultimately, citizens, by offering them choices. White men and, in the Union after 1863, black men might volunteer for military service after reading a recruitment notice; or they might instead respond to the kind of notice for "draft insurance" that flooded newspapers after the Union and Confederate governments resorted to conscription to help fill the ranks. Marketing the Blue and Gray demonstrates how, through their sometimes-messy choices, advertising pages offered readers the opportunity to participate—or not—in the war effort.

CHAPTER 1

The War as the Lead

Created in the 1840s, the telegraph helped to transform the American newspaper business by offering readers almost instant access to the news. Editors could now claim to have the scoop on stories that otherwise might have taken weeks to arrive and, when they had, been already out of date. “By Telegraph! Important!! Read!!!” screamed more than one front-page headline. There was some grumbling that perhaps too much news came over the wire. One editor complained that recent dispatches informed the nation that a man had broken his arm while crossing the street and that a grocery store had been “robbed of four wooden hams.” The public, however, was hooked on the breaking news. Writing in the autumn of 1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described the almost irresistible pull of the newspaper. “If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go,” he wrote. “If it finds us in company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.” Holmes believed that Americans might sacrifice much, but “We must have something to eat, and the papers to read.”¹

Over the next four years, advertisers exploited the public’s demand for news. In part, they created war-themed headlines that had little, if anything, to do with their products and services. In 1860, “Lincoln Elected! War Anticipated!!” helped to sell dry goods. The next year, “75,000 Soldiers in the Field” and “South Carolina in Arms” led into pitches for groceries and tinware. Beneath the large type, salesmen clamored for customer loyalty. They explained why shopping at their store allowed an individual to strike a blow for the war effort. The layout of the newspaper only helped these merchants because the news and the advertisements often mixed on the same page. As one scholar has recently noted of mid-nineteenth-century public reading materials, the juxtaposition of items “tended to deny (or at least to suppress) their differences.” Merchants often blurred the commercial and the political, and their notices provide insights into Union and Confederate perceptions about nationalism, identity, and the war.²

THROUGH THE EARLY WAR

White southerners believed that they must accomplish any number of things to gain their independence, but George Fitzhugh argued that winning the advertising war was among the most important. Writing for De Bow’s Review in late 1860, the southern-born intellectual believed that his “countrymen” had too often fallen victim to northern marketers. With the rise of inexpensively published newspapers in New York, Boston, and other northeastern cities, Yankees had taken to hawking “cheap and worthless literary and manufactured wares.” Wanting to stay current with the latest fashions—be they in habit, literature, or clothing—southern readers were “continually deceived, duped, and cheated.” Fitzhugh believed that the solution was to begin “fighting the devil with fire.” Southerners must “advertise and puff, and drum, too.” They must no longer stand on their “excessive Southern dignity, but learn, like Northerners, ‘to stoop to conquer.’” This did not mean writing half-truths and flatteries. Rather, “in this jostling, struggling, pushing world, all men of business must push themselves and their trade into notice, or they will be overlooked and downtrodden by their eager and unmannerly competitors.” The stakes were high. Should northerners continue to dominate the advertising pages, they “would impoverish equally our minds and purses, and gradually reduce us to the savage state.” By Fitzhugh’s way of thinking, southern advertisers were in the vanguard of the effort to establish a Confederate nation.³

Southern merchants found motivation in the same logic during the winter of 1860–61, when they embraced the secession movement. The commercial incentives were great, with tremendous public enthusiasm among white southerners for the so-called Confederate States. Only weeks after Louisiana had seceded in late January 1861, a distributor of a “coal oil lamp” in New Orleans had recognized the changed political climate. His business was “by far the largest and most complete in the CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA.” That spring, the maker of a horse tonic in Richmond was uncertain whether Virginia might secede. Until the politicians reached a decision, he assured readers that his ointment was sold by all “Druggists in the late United States and in the Southern Confederacy.” Other store owners wanted their wares associated with the new nation and marketed “Southern Confederacy” cigars, “Southern Star” cotton gins, and “Southern Confederate” boot polish.⁴

When they attempted to explain why a customer should shop for southern-made products, merchants were eager and ready. Many reminded their readers that they were native to the region. A dry goods dealer in Montgomery advertised “Southern Trade from a Southern Market Purchased by a Southern Man.” A Louisiana merchant believed the time he previously had spent working in the North should not be held against him. “I am a southern man by birth and education,” he assured his customers. Other salesmen claimed to understand the home market better because they were southerners. A hardware merchant in Tallahassee, Florida, sold tools shipped from Charleston. These items were the best suited for the “southern life” because they were made “expressly for the southern trade.” Thomas Smith sold “southern boots and shoes” in Thomasville, North Carolina. He knew that he could meet the needs of his customers because his footwear was “particular adapted to the southern market.” The claim was short on specifics, but Smith’s goal was to bring customers into the store through a shared sense of identity.⁵

Store owners also played upon their readers’ perception that northerners were out to gouge them. That Yankees placed profit above almost anything else had deep roots in the South by the mid-nineteenth century. One merchant announced that he had a “wonderful discovery” for catching fish that literally had the bass and carp biting at the hook. To assure readers he was not telling a long tale, he declared, “This is no Yankee humbug or catch penny.” Based in Atlanta, the Southern Life Insurance Company provided a specific for what they saw as the “humbug.” They sold family policies with “no extra premiums charged as northern companies do.” A carriage maker in Houston combined worry over northern greed with pride in southern workmanship. He asked why his neighbors and friends continued to buy “northern shams.” Saddles and harness made in the North were “half made” and “come to pieces in the first shower.” His items were reliable because they came from “good, honest home made work.” Southern merchants stopped short of full-out libel, however, not wanting to alienate any potential customers. Newspaper editors shared no such concerns. During the secession winter, many of them castigated Yankees as abolitionists, infidels, and with any number of other seemingly extreme epithets.⁶

Whether southern-made goods were of a higher quality than a comparable “imported” item depended upon the advertiser. A Mr. Philbricks offered a qualified response for his book and gift store in Charleston, South Carolina. At the “Home Institution,” shoppers would find his products “equal, if not superior, to those ordered from northern houses.” More merchants responded in the affirmative. One salesman asserted that his soap was “better” than that offered by the Yankees, while another declared his jeans “superior to any northern goods.” At the Mississippi Foundry in Port Gibson, Samuel Gilman sold sawmills, gristmills, and other machinery. He reminded potential customers that his equipment was “of Southern invention and manufacture” and possessed a “style and quality unequaled by any Northern importations.”⁷

Where Rebel merchants again found agreement was in challenging their readers to put action behind their talk of Confederate independence. The people at home who encouraged their young men to rush to the colors might also strike a blow in defense of the fledgling nation through their pocketbooks. Customers who supported “Equality and Protection” and “No Compromise with Anti-Slavery” should shop for their clothing at stores in Alabama and Florida. Families who believed it necessary to “protect southern rights” should purchase a sewing machine in New Orleans. In Dallas, “Southern Rights and Good Bargains” headlined a promotion for fall and winter goods. Another merchant turned to verse:

Ho! Southern men, who raise your voice,

And loudly shout for Southern rights,

Yet send your money north, from choice,

And thereby strengthen northern might!

These blowhards might demonstrate their support of the Confederacy by shopping for, among other items, a “coat, hat, and boots!” According to a craftsman in Georgia, the time had come for men and women who talked about buying southern goods to “prove it.”⁸

That any white southerner might help to build the Confederate nation through their shopping decisions offered a broader understanding of citizenship than many politicians and newspaper editors could imagine, or at least express. These officials made clear that they envisioned a white man’s republic by casting the southern independence movement as the realm of husbands and fathers. To them, talk of “the people” in building a slaveholding republic was tightly circumscribed by gender. Merchants adopted a more inclusive tone and often appealed directly to women. Notices for ladies’ shoes and fashions declared support for “Southern Enterprise and Industry!” and “Southern Goods” that the “South should encourage.” In Texas, Mrs. A. M. Kinnen made sure her store was in the forefront of the independence movement. By offering only bonnets made in the South, she was “Ready to do her part in the way of self protection.” Female readers were, too, and they supported their fledgling nation by wearing the “Home Manufacture,” especially a “secession bonnet.” According to one newspaper, the “latest fashion” was made of white and black cotton and ornamented by streamers “with palmetto trees and lone stars, embroidered in gold thread.”⁹

Shopping as a political activity carried some risk, and advertisers warned that buying northern-made products only empowered the “black Republicans” to incite racially based violence in the South. A carriage maker in Lynchburg, Virginia, claimed that orders placed with his Yankee competitors went to “enrich and enable the Abolitionists to make Sharpe’s Rifles and Spears to send our negroes to kill us.” The reference to Sharpe’s rifles and spears carried especial significance in the Shenandoah Valley, where John Brown had hoped to use these weapons in his failed attempt to incite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry. Yet, merchants never exploited the image of black sexual violence that often streamed forth from the political halls and editorial pages. Rooted in the patriarchal mind-set of the secession movement, politicians and newspaper editors raised the fear that abolitionists would incite the slaves to rape and plunder should the South remain in the Union. From their perspective, secession was a conservative movement because it protected white women from black slaves.¹⁰

Even amid the talk of civil war and racial violence, southerners should continue to shop, but, according to two Tennessee druggists, just with the right merchants. They ran a notice in the Memphis Morning Enquirer cautioning readers to avoid patronizing any of their northern-born rivals. Money spent among these men might as well be sent to “Yankee Emigrant Aid Societies” to buy weapons. At their store, however, potential customers would find only medicines made from the “simple plants that grow in our woodlands, on our river banks, bayous and lakes.” Reinforcing the determiner “our,” the druggists reminded their readers that they “were born, reared and educated under the benign influences of SOUTHERN INSTITUTIONS.”¹¹

By early 1861, southern merchants offered their readers a commercialized version of a Confederate identity. Like many other white southerners, they had moved with a remarkable suddenness to embrace their newly formed nation. But, as many recent studies have suggested, Confederate public officials offered historical, social, and even religious rationalizations for secession. Merchants touched upon few of those justifications. Instead, they used the breakup of the American nation to argue that their goods were at least the equal of, if not superior to, those of their northern...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1. The War as the Lead
• CHAPTER 2. The Millions
• CHAPTER 3. The Vote
• CHAPTER 4. The Armies
• CHAPTER 5. Slavery and Race
• CHAPTER 6. Battlefield and Home Front
• EPILOGUE: Memories
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX