NY Times 11-20-1864
150 years ago today The New-York Times wasn’t sure where Sherman’s army was headed, but it knew he was sweeping and destroying. It published a table of distances for possible destinations and reprinted an article from the November 18th Cincinnati Gazette that hoped Sherman could eventually drive through North Carolina “thus making Eastern Virginia a prison and a grave for Lee’s army and the rebel Government.”
That same front page included news from the South, including an impassioned Richmond editorial that pleaded with the rebel Government not to detail newspapers editors for military service. The editorial claimed it would be better to draft editors for the trenches than to have them at the whim of the government detailing them for temporary service.
From The New-York Times November 20, 1864:
FROM THE SOUTH.; The Southern “Peace Party” Conscription of Editors The War in Georgia Richmond Gossip Enlistment Negroes.
Our files of Southern papers furnish us the following additional extracts: …
From the Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 9.
The Constitution of the Confederate States extends to the Press the ???gi of ils??? protection, and, selecting it out from all other professions, gives it an honorable security against even the Congress of the Confederacy. Coupling it with the free worship of Almighty God the Constitution connects it also with the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Its place in the Constitution is between the Vox Del and the Vox Populi, subordinate to the one, superior to the other. This could not have been mere accident; there must have existed some reason for this protection and for the immediate conjunction with religion and popular petition.
We find this same importance given to the press in the 16th section of the Bill of Rights, reported by Mr. WYTHE. of the Virginta Convention, to the Federal Constitution, as follows: “That the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and ought not to be violated.” What sort of a bulwark of liberty would the press be with detailed editors — the underlings of an underling? It is to this degraded position that the President has deliberately recommended the Congress to reduce the press. He does not say that the army needs their services, but that the exemption by law should be repeated, and that “a discretion be vested in the military authorities” to detail the editors, whensoever and wheresoever those authorities may regard them as “essential to the public service.”
Editors, as individuals, deserve no more consideration from the Congress than “shoemakers, tanners, blacksmiths, printers, millers, miners, physicians and telegraph operators,” but as the Press, without editors, would be playing Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted, there is something due to the intelligence of the people, which demands at the hands of Congress that the Press of the country be not wholly prostrated at the foot of the Executive power, and forced to petition for existence, and to receive it upon such conditions as the Executive, or his detailing subordinates, may choose to impose.
Exemption by law gave an honorable position to the Press, secured its independence, and left no red suspended over its head, but such as the people raised by their support or rejection. But an editor emerging from that cesspool of corruption, the detail system, would be an object of offence to the virtuous people of these States, and the paper he conducted cease to be an organ of public opinion, and become the miserable conduit of those to whose favor be owed his exemption from the ranks.
No! for God’s sake put us in the army, the trenches, anywhere; but save us from the degraded position of a detailed editor. …
For sixty years the Richmond Enquirer has existed a newspaper, free, unbought, unpurchaseable, and never shall it exist other wise with our consent. The support we have heretofore given the President and the cause, has been conscientious and free; no other support can we ever give it. If the Congress considers that the bone and muscle of the press are worth more than its brains to the cause, send us all to the ranks, there we may do some service to the country, but as detailed editors, we may become the tools, the minions of power, but we should cease to be the agencies of expression for a free people. …
The first step toward despotism will have been taken when the press of the country is put under the control of the Executive details. The army will not receive one hundred retruits from this recommendation to subititute detail for exemption of the press, but the world will soon learn what value to set upon the voice of a press whose conductors owe their exemption from service to the favor of a detail. …
Under the Virginia Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press is guaranteed. We do not believe that the State of Virginia will quietly permit her press to be wholly destroyed. The only pleasure yet left to conductors of the press is the kind and cheerful support given them by the people. They have uncomplainingly borne with all the embarras???ments that have beset the press, and aided and sustained us in all our difficulties. We do not believe they will permit this last disgrace to be visited upon the press.
Once again the theme is the squeeze on the South’s resources.
