Why Reading the Newspapers Is Important for Studying Reconstruction - Heather Cox Richardson

Pat Young

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Heather Cox Richardson in her The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 writes about the importance of newspapers in understanding Reconstruction:

It seemed to me that, for an age before the advent of opinion polls and focus groups, newspapers, periodicals, popular books-even novels-might might yield an understanding of how the Northern people at large viewed the dramatic changes in their society between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the new century After 1850, the American can press mobilized the entire electorate, tying readers together as they read and responded to a variety of printed views. Government, private societies, and even individuals reported their actions and ideas to partisan san newspapers whose editors tried both to reflect and to shape the views of their readers; people gathered at newspaper offices to hear the latest information; key editors presented the news for their readers and fed them articles interpreting events. Just how central the press was to public debate was clear in Congress; frequently speakers referred to newspaper articles as sources of their information on a wide range of topics. The public conversation of nineteenth-century Americans went beyond newspapers to popular tracts designed for public consumption. Politicians, reporters, travelers, and reformers all wrote essays, stories, novels, and travelogues to inform the public about current affairs. Harper's per's Weekly added another dimension to popular debate by publishing Thomas Nast's line drawings, which, the paper editorialized, "are of an allegorico-political character, at once poems and speeches. They argue the case to the eye, and conclusively A few lines does the work of many words, and with a force of eloquence which no words can rival."5 Even the illiterate could follow a story in Nast's pictures (as absconding politician cian William Marcy Tweed discovered when he was captured by a man who had seen a Nast caricature of him).

The circulation of newspapers exploded by midcentury, and I concentrated trated on those with large audiences. The New York World was perhaps the most popular paper of the time, with more than 500,000 readers, but even the Washington Post, which came from a city dubbed "the graveyard of newspapers," boasted runs of 15,000 copies per day. In the wake of emancipation there was rapid growth also of black newspapers in both the South and the North, and many issues of even local papers like the Colorado Springs, Colorado, Western Enterprise are extant, providing a window on black attitudes toward the questions of the day. "What would any American community be without its newspaper?" asked Harper's per's Weekly, which itself was called by a rival "one of the most powerful organs of popular opinion" and claimed an 1865 circulation of more than 100,000 a week. Reflected Harper's New Monthly Magazine, "It is not easy to gauge the exact influence of a daily or weekly paper in moulding public opinion; but there is no question that the press is the most powerful of all methods by which opinion is enlightened and swayed."

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Kindle Locations 49-51). Kindle Edition.
 
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