MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This study intends to examine and describe the sorts of accounts that Civil War correspondents sent home to Philadelphia and the ways in which those correspondents, and their reports, were unique. Philadelphia newspapers provided excellent war coverage and much of what a reader found on the front page was very similar to what any other reader of Northern papers would find; but Philadelphia papers were exemplary in several ways: they employed some of the best war correspondents in the North, their reporters had both the best, and the most abysmal, relationships with the War Department and her generals, and they covered unique topics to which readers of other papers lacked access. This paper, then, is a discussion of the skilled writing of Edward Crapsey, the crack reporting of Uriah Painter, the unique perspective of Thomas Morris Chester, their relationships to the military, and the legacy that Philadelphia’s Civil War correspondents left to the future of their profession. The career of each of these field reporters was exemplary. Crapsey brought his sly humor and evocative writing skills to bear on his dispatches for the Inquirer. He also criticized what he saw as a failing of a prominent Union general, although doing so ended his career prematurely. Painter’s aggressive scouting brought his Inquirer readers details and stories before any other reporter could. His keen and responsible fact gathering earned him the respect, and some of the privileges, of the Secretary of War. Chester traveled with the black regiments headed toward Richmond and shared their previously-untold stories, along with the stories of a Southern black community facing the end of slavery, to the readers of the Press. Their eye-witness dispatches produced an amazing set of accounts that made what happened “at the war” a living, breathing experience for their readers at home.