RESEARCH General History

U.S. HISTORY
Newspapers fanned national tensions fueling Civil War

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

5/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Historians keep an assortment of theories in their toolboxes to explain the causes of major events – Marxism, the "Cyclical Theory," the "Great Man Theory," among them.

The authors of a new book about the national climate that precipitated the Civil War might call theirs the "Newspaper Theory."

In the new book, "Fanatics & Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War" (University of Illinois Press), Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr. plot a clear and direct route to the Civil War by analyzing the strong role newspapers played in six events that preceded it.

In particular, Ratner, an adjunct history professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Teeter, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, explored newspapers’ treatment of the Brooks-Sumner caning incident (May 1856); the Dred Scott decision (March 1857); the debates over Kansas’ Lecompton Constitution (winter 1857-58); John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry (fall 1859); Abraham Lincoln’s election (November 1860); and the firing on Fort Sumter (April 1861).

The authors contend that in each of the major events that they analyze, media rhetoric inflamed passions. Indeed, tracing political accounts and diatribes published in northern and southern papers, the authors conclude that papers, in their desire to be profitable and to promote their agendas, "stoked the fires that heated tensions between North and South."

And regardless of their positions, newspaper editors "played fast and loose with facts and logic."

Newspapers, for the first time truly "mass media" as a result of technological advances – in telegraphic distribution of news, printing presses and railroads – used their newly acquired power to help determine both the course of events and the perception of the course. Along the way, they exacerbated several festering issues, most notably slavery, and they torpedoed lives.

Perhaps no historical figure suffered more at the hands of U.S. editors than Lincoln.

Who he was and what he represented "varied dramatically" from paper to paper, region to region. "There was Lincoln the Black Republican abolitionist. There was Lincoln the ignorant and unsophisticated tool of evil politicians. There was Lincoln the simple, honest and direct but reasonable representative of the average American, a man in politics but not of it, and more. Because Americans knew so little about the man, it was left to the press to bring him to life."

The authors argue that in reality, Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong, that it shouldn’t be allowed to expand beyond its borders and that "by orderly and legal means, it should expire."

"Had the newspapers sought to find out about (his) position regarding slavery, that is what they would have reported to readers," the authors wrote. "But things had reached a point where … evidence was not what most newspapers sought. Passion had conquered logic and reason."

And the rest, as they say, is history.