Register's battlefield reporters suffered with Confederate troops

To cover news from Civil War battlefields, The Mobile Register equipped reporters with a horse,

spyglass, writing materials and other materials they needed for the field.

Peter W. Alexander

A reporter faced many hardships. He spent most of the day observing a battle then wrote his report and filed it at the nearest telegraph station or railhead, often traveling many miles to do so. Then he headed back to the battlefield and maybe rest before beginning another day.

Suffering along with Confederate troops made the Register’s correspondents sensitive to the needs of the ordinary soldier. Peter W. Alexander in one of his letters to the Register told of how the troops in Virginia left the banks of the James River fighting pitched battles and then marched to another battlefield to once again face the enemy: “And let it always be remembered to their honor, that the men who performed this wonderful feat,

one-fifth of them were barefooted, one-half of them in rags, and the whole of them half famished.”

Alexander, who used the pen name “P. W. A.,” was the South's best known war correspondent. You can read more of his reports as well as those of other Southern reporters on the website Dispatches from Dixie, where the images on this post came from.

Civil War-era editor largely remembered for poem

The poem “The Bivouac Of The Dead,” which appears at all U.S. national cemeteries, was written by

an editor of The Mobile Register, Theodore O’Hara.

O’Hara wrote the poem in memory of the Kentucky troops killed in the Mexican War.

O’Hara came to the Register in 1856 after President Franklin Pierce appointed Register owner John Forsyth to replace James Gadsden as U.S. minister to Mexico. The colorful, but highly erratic and alcoholic O’Hara wrote editorials in Forsyth’s absence.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, O’Hara raised a company called the Mobile Light Dragoons. Its members elected him company captain, but O’Hara then joined the 12th Alabama Volunteer Infantry where he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He later served on the staff of General Albert Sidney Johnston and General John Breckenridge. Civil War blogger David A. Powell has written on his Chickamauga Blog about a myth that has grown up about O’Hara being at the Battle of Chickamauga.

After the war, O'Hara became a merchant in the cotton business in Columbus, Georgia, until wiped out by a fire. He retired to a friend's plantation in Alabama where he died in 1873 from malaria. The following year, his remains were re-interred in the cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky.

If you want to know more about O’Hara, read Theodore O'Hara: Poet Soldier Of Old South written by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Thomas Clayton Ware.

Compare impact of telegraph with impact of Internet

This being the 150th anniversary of Civil War, it is a good time compare the impact of the telegraph in the 1860s with the impact of the Internet today on newspapering.

By the time the Civil War started, many newspapers, including the Register, had been using the telegraph for nearly 15 years to gather news. But the war greatly expanded its use. The war also marked the first time military leaders used electrical communication.

The Register organized one of the Confederacy’s best systems of special correspondence by both telegraph and mail, as well as a special express for news outside the Confederacy. The Register sent correspondents called “specials” to every major field of battle. The specials usually transmitted their stories by telegraph.

Without a doubt the telegraph helped the Register gather the increasing amount of news about the war. For example, the front page of the Register before the war had been reserved for advertising, but war news began to push all other matter aside.

But the telegraph, unlike the Internet, didn’t do anything to help newspapers distribute the news. Newspapers couldn’t deliver their news to their readers over the telegraph.

Many journalism historians hold that the telegraph inspired a telegraphic news style. The heavy expense of telegraph tolls, the traditional view says, forced reporters to be concise and led to the rise of the summary news lead.

But a new book by David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920, says there was no telegraphic news style. He points out that most newspaper editors rewrote the copy reporters telegraphed to them into longer and more detailed stories.

What about the Internet’s impact on writing? Is there an Internet news style?

When cutting-edge technology for newspapers meant a pair of sharp scissors

During the early 1800s, cutting-edge technology for newspapers meant a pair of sharp scissors.

The most significant source of news for the Register came from other newspapers with which the Register exchanged subscriptions. The most important sources, often just called the exchanges, included mostly

American Antiquarian Society

Eastern newspapers that arrived by the latest mail.

The Register, like most other newspapers, depended on its exchanges for important information from the economic and political centers of New York, Boston and Washington and the major cities of Europe.

Often derided as “scissors and pastepot journalism,” this highly organized system of gathering news had its own set of rules and understandings among editors. One of those understandings was that editors were to give credit to the source newspapers.

When the editor of The St. Stephens Halcyon violated that rule, the Register chided that “To the Halcyon, our debt of gratitude is easily paid—the only notice it has condescended to take of us, is to copy about a column and a half from us without giving the usual credit.”

The Register complained that it took two days’ labor to collect the information from about 300 pages and arrange the matter for publication.