The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of The New York Times - Hardcover

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9780312331238: The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of The New York Times

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312331231 ISBN 13: 9780312331238

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2004

It was a war that shaped America more than any other in our history since the Revolutionary War, and its effects were perhaps even more far reaching. More lives were lost and more domestic property destroyed than in any other conflict in which this country has been involved. More, in fact, than in all other past struggles combined.

Much has been written about the Civil War since its conclusion nearly a century and a half ago; those five bloody years have proven a seemingly inexhaustible source and inspiration for films, novels, documentaries, and works of history. We are drawn to the period, and return to it ceaselessly, for we have come to acknowledge the war as the crucible in which the nation's identity was forged by fire, defining what the country was and what it would become. Harpers Ferry, Fort Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Appomattox, Ford's Theatre--far more than names or places, they are epic moments in a drama of courage, sacrifice, and profound change.

But what was it like to have been there? To have watched John Brown hang and Pickett charge and Lee surrender and Abraham Lincoln assassinated? The Most Fearful Ordeal contains The New York Times's original coverage of these and other crucial events of the Civil War, offering today's reader history as it was first being transmitted, via the newly invented telegraph, by reporters and other eyewitnesses on the scene. Here are the accounts that people at the time would have read as these events were unfolding. Indeed, the coverage provided by The Times and other newspapers was their only connection to what was happening. Every word was pored over, every article read again and again. "The American flag has given place to the Palmetto of South Carolina"---so begins, with ominous solemnity, the coverage of the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., declared that August, when his son and namesake, the future Supreme Court justice, prepared to depart for Virginia, "We must have something to eat and the papers to read."

Here are the legendary figures and events as they first appeared in print, giving readers history's first draft: urgent, alive, reporting the passions and tensions of the moment, raw and unpolished. Often the words and events that have endured the longest in our national memory (such as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) received only brief note, and occasionally there are 0mistakes in initial assumptions (believing that Bull Run was a major Union victory rather than a catastrophic defeat).

With introduction and notes by Pulitzer Prize--winning Civil War historian James McPherson that puts each major event and dispatch into historical context, The Most Fearful Ordeal is enhanced by period photographs and maps that explain the strategies behind the major battles. Most of all, it brings to life the fearful days, and makes the Civil War a vivid presence in this new century.

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About the Author:

James M. McPherson is a professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of Battle Cry of Freedom, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfction, as well as other works on the Civil War, including Ordeal by Fire, Marching Toward Freedom, and most recently, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam.

From Publishers Weekly:

If journalism is the first draft of history, Civil War journalism is a very rough draft indeed. This anthology of New York Times articles from the era amply catalogues the profession’s many shortcomings and its few strengths. Included are reports from most of the major battles and campaigns, along with coverage of war-related political and domestic events like the Emancipation Proclamation, the New York City draft riots and Lincoln’s assassination, and commentary by historian McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom. The Times battle dispatches demonstrate the blinding effects both of the fog of war—the paper regularly inflated Confederate numbers by a factor of four and announced the death of Stonewall Jackson 10 months ahead of time—and of a fog of bias that rarely distinguished between facts and Union propaganda. Coverage of the disastrous Union defeat at Chancellorsville, for example, extols Northern generals’ "brilliantly audacious" leadership, celebrates an insignificant night skirmish as "the most grand and terrific thing of the war" and spins the battle as "in our favor, but not decisive," while a dispatch from Gettysburg concludes with Christ summoning the Union dead to Paradise. More reflective are the pieces on slower-moving events off the battlefield, including a terse and moving narrative of John Brown’s execution, mordant accounts of the death-bed vigil over Lincoln and the grim procession to view his body, and a trenchant obituary of Jefferson Davis analyzing the Confederate president as the embodiment of the South’s failed society. Although such flashes of insight and perspective are rare, the collection as a whole illuminates the volatile, jingoistic climate of public opinion that the war engendered. 60 b&w photos, 6 maps.
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