The Words of War: The Civil War Battle Reportage of the New York Times and the Charleston Mercury ...and what historians say really happened

By Donagh Bracken
Illustrated, bibliography, index, 294 pp., 2007. History Publishing Co., P.O. Box 700, Palisades, NY 10964-0700, $24.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Chuck Romig
Chuck Romig graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in secondary education and teaches history at Penns Valley High School in Spring Mills, Pa. He continues to read and research Civil War history.

Review:
Donagh Bracken has compiled the war reports of two mid-19th century media giants in his book The Words of War. Bracken includes 17 battles, most of which are battles that any Civil War lover would recite in their sleep if asked to name the war's most important fights.

Among the less-noted battles chosen by Bracken are Williamsburg and Opequon. Missing from the list are important engagements such as Chancellorsville, Stones River, Chickamauga and Chattanooga. The absence of these battle reports is peculiar and leaves one wondering about what people read in the wake of those battles, but does not detract from the overall effectiveness of the book as it is not meant to be a general history.

Readers will benefit from this book for a few reasons, but well-read war enthusiasts will gain little new information about the war. Again, though, Bracken's intent is not to present a new insight to the war - he is, rather, showing us the war as if it were contemporary, as though we were living through it.

And yet here we are living through our own war. Going through the pages of this book I found myself comparing Civil War reportage to the current reports we receive about our generations' struggle. To this end, the timing of Bracken's book is impeccable.

One learns that mid-19th century reporters recorded the vast events of the war with more favorable bias and flare than modern correspondents. This flare is in part due to the exaggerative Victorian style of the day. But I believe that another reason exists - reporters from both sections of the country felt a genuine connection to their nation's cause compelling them to use adjectives like brave and gallant to describe charges and other tactics.

One can easily tell the Mercury from the Times as both papers showed deep favoritism toward their respective countries.

Southern reports also tended to be short and more concise while Northern articles read a little like a Dickens novel.

Bracken's work is enlightening for yet another reason - one that links the Civil War to our struggle today. Reading one of the reports tell us very little of the battle. While the reporters' efforts were valiant (many were in the din of the fighting) they failed in accurately informing their readers of what actually happened.

Take, for example, the Charleston Mercury's report that the Confederate Army was 60,000 strong at First Manassas, or that Gen. Irvin McDowell was thought to be dead at the same battle.

This is not to say that correspondents lied in their reports, they just didn't have the luxury of reading a Bruce Catton book beforehand. This is not to fault them - but the point remains that the generations which read about the war as it unfolded were fairly ignorant of the war's reality.

In other words, a civilian in 1862 couldn't get the complete version of a battle from reading these reports. They didn't really know what was happening. Maybe we should wonder if their shoes are now on our feet.

One issue with the book is its format. One expects these newspaper articles to be patterned after the articles of today starting with a headline and running straight through to the end. This, however, is not how papers of the 1860s were fashioned. Many articles include extra headlines within the text that truncate the writing. In book form this can be confusing. It is hard to know where an article ends and a new one begins, or whether it's just one large article. A small primer on reading 19th-century newspapers, most likely in the introduction, would simplify things.

Also questionable are the "What Historians Say" segments at the end of each chapter. These short explanations of the battles add little to the overall work. Bracken has a great concept here but fails a little short in execution.

For instance, the explanation of the battle of The Wilderness is three small paragraphs and a one sentence conclusion - hardly enough to explain a monstrous engagement. But more than that there is no linkage to the correspondents' reports. Explaining where the reporters erred or were incomplete in reporting these battles would have meant much more to this reader.

Also, Bracken states that of the five newspapers circulating in New York City during the war only the Times espoused the cause of the Union. Reading a few reports from anti-war publications may have made this book more relevant to our modern times.

Overall, Bracken's work is a valuable resource to an enthusiast who loves studying the war from all angles as well as those interested in journalism or historical journalism. Allow me to reiterate through the book's weight regarding our current times - it will make you think and it will provoke questions - the mark of successful scholarship.