How often do you see a memorial to war reporters?

The National War Correspondents Memorial, part of Gathland State Park in Maryland, is a memorial dedicated to journalists who covered the Civil War. Civil War correspondent George Alfred Townsend built the arch in 1896 as a tribute to his fellow journalists, and it was dedicated October 16, 1896.

The monument contains the names of three men who reported the war for the Mobile Register: Peter W. Alexander, Felix G. de Fontaine, and Henry Watterson, famed editor of the Louisville Courier Journal after the war.

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.