The “Sound of an Extra”: Representing Civil War Newsboys by Pen and in Print

Abstract

By the time the Civil War began, newsboys had become fixtures of America’s urban landscape. Many people who bought their daily newspaper on the street wrote about newsboys in their diaries and letters. Their writings shed light on the lived experience of wartime journalism. Newsboys were the only representative of newspapers that most readers encountered in person. With their shouts about the latest news, newsboys created a collective listening/reading experience. This meant that the popular urban reception of war news was generated not only individually but in public as well. Reception of the news was greatly influenced by the newsboys who put their own spin on events and generated mass reaction from street crowds.

Notes

1 Jane Eliza Newton Woolsey to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland and Georgeanna Muirson Bacon, July 22, 1861, in Letters of a Family during the War for the Union, 1861–1865, 2 vols., edited by Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon and Eliza Woolsey Howland (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1899), 1: 123.

2 “A Glance at New York,” Daily National Republican, November 19, 1864, 2; Sari Edelstein, “‘Metamorphosis of the Newsboy’: E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and the Antebellum Story-paper,” Studies in American Fiction 37, no. 1 (2010): 29–53. Vincent Richard DiGirolamo, “Crying the News: Children, Street Work, and the American Press, 1830s–1920s” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1997), 3. Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 155. We use “newsboy” and not similar terms such as “carrier” or “newsie” because it was most commonly used in everyday speech and in the wartime press to describe this type of job, regardless of gender. David E. Whisnant “Selling the Gospel News, or: The Strange Career of Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” Journal of Social History 5, no. 3 (1972): 269–309, and for the timing of the term’s emergence, 272–74.

3 We searched our database of transcriptions of 5,583 letters and diaries written between 1860 and 1866 by 1,106 Americans for references to newsboys. The database is described in Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Research Essay: A Database of Civil War Readers,” AJHA Intelligencer 31, no. 3 (2015): 2–3. Journalism historians have used similar sources to study the Civil War. See, for example, Mary M. Cronin, “‘The North Is to Us Like the Grave’: Albert D. Richardson’s and Junius Browne’s Confederate Prison Letters,” Journalism History 39, no. 2 (2013): 66–81; Alfred Lawrence Lorenz, “‘With Bowed Heads and Brows Abashed’: The Press of New Orleans under General Benjamin Butler,” Journalism History 36, no. 2 (2010): 72–82; Debra Reddin van Tuyll, “Necessity and the Invention of a Newspaper: Gov. Zebulon B. Vance’s Conservative, 1864–65,” Journalism History 34, no. 2 (2008): 87–97. Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1372–85.

4 We consulted 3,247 articles in 260 newspapers from 35 states that mentioned Civil War newsboys. We searched in GenealogyBank.com and augmented the results with non-redundant items in Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers.

5 Our testimony about newsboys comes mainly from civilian residents of cities, including New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Chicago, but also from soldiers stationed near Richmond or Vicksburg, or whose regiments were visited by newsboys.

6 Vincent DiGirolamo, “Newsboy Funerals: Tales of Sorrow and Solidarity in Urban America,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 1 (2002): 7. Chicago had two hundred in 1865; see “A ‘Newsboys’ Home,’” Lowell Daily Citizen and News, February 10, 1865, 2.

7 During the war, the number of street vendors, including newsboys, increased (DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 176). On news obsession in New England during the war, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books: Reading and the Disruption of Social Ties on the New England Home Front,” in The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, edited by Joan E. Cashin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 237–61, esp. 251–56.

8 “United States Urban and Rural Population: 1790 to 1990,” www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf.

9 Only one of the many discussions by editors in the middle of war gives the flavor of the whole: “It costs us just about double to run our paper now, with an equal number of subscribers, [than] it did two years ago, while we furnish our paper for the same price as before” (“Close of the Third Volume,” Crisis 3, no. 52 [January 20, 1864]: 412).

10 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades, 1789–1850: A Statistical and Geographical Analysis,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, edited by Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 258. The cheaper and free-floating entity of the modern newsstand would not come into existence until the late 1860s (Richard R. Wells, “The Making of the New York Penny Press: An Ethnographic History of a Mass Cultural Form” [PhD dissertation, New School for Social Research, 2003], 5). With faster, cheaper, more extensive transportation awaiting the future, newspapers had to be delivered in horse-drawn carts through often densely packed city streets to brick-and-mortar retailers; Ted Curtis Smythe, “The Diffusion of the Urban Daily,” Journalism History 28, no. 2 (2002): 77.

11 Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 322.

12 David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. chapter 5; DiGirolamo, “Newsboy Funerals”; Whisnant “Selling the Gospel News”; Jon Bekken, “Crumbs from the Publishers’ Golden Tables: The Plight of the Chicago Newsboy,” Media History 6, no. 1 (2000): 45–57; idem, “Newsboys: The Exploitation of ‘Little Merchants’ by the Newspaper Industry,” in Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File, edited by Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 190–225.

13 DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 176–189; see also Herman Bleyer, “Milwaukee’s Civil War Newsboys,” Milwaukee History 14 (1991): 70–72.

14 J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955); idem, The South Reports the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); R. J. M. Blackett, ed., Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); David W. Bulla and Gregory A. Borchard, Journalism in the Civil War Era (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Hazel Dicken-Garcia and Giovanna Dell’Orto, Hated Ideas and the American Civil War Press (Spokane, WA: Marquette Books, 2008); David B. Sachsman, ed., Press Divided: Newspaper Coverage of the Civil War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014); David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, eds., Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008); David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Debra Reddin van Tuyll, eds., The Civil War and the Press (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000); Debra Reddin van Tuyll, ed., The Southern Press in the Civil War: American Wars and the Media in Primary Documents (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005); idem, The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War (New York: Peter Lang, 2013); Ford Risley, Civil War Journalism (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012).

15 Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War, 27, 33, 148–49, 207, 582–83. Barbara G. Ellis, The Moving Appeal: Mr. McClanahan, Mrs. Dill, and the Civil War’s Great Newspaper Run (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 128, 157, 164–65, 204, 226, 253, 257, 314, 338, 496n58. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690–1960, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 115–16, 314, 657. Robert S. Harper, “The Ohio Press in the Civil War,” Civil War History 3, no. 3 (1957): 234. See also William E. Huntzicker, “Picturing the News: Frank Leslie and the Origins of American Pictorial Journalism,” in Sachsman, Rushing, and van Tuyll, Civil War and the Press, 309–24. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, in her Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 43, gives proper due to the newsboy for facilitating efficient newspaper distribution during the mid-nineteenth century.

16 David Kaser, Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 29, 63, 88.

17 James M. McPherson, “‘Spend Much Time in Reading the Daily Papers’: The Press and Army Moral in the Civil War,” Atlanta History 42 (1998): 7–18. David Anderson, “Dying of Nostalgia: Homesickness in the Union Army during the Civil War,” Civil War History 56, no. 3 (2010): 269; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 153.

18 There are few studies by historians that focus on Civil War reading, among them Zboray and Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books”; idem, “‘My Unsocial Habit’: Reading and Emergent Youth Subcultures in Civil War America,” in Lost Histories of Youth Culture, edited by Christine Feldman-Barrett (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 17–34; idem, “The Bonds of Print: Reading on Homefront and Battlefield,” in Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion, edited by Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 195–223. Ford Risley’s Civil War Journalism gives due attention to newspaper readership throughout; see, for example, xiii, xv, 5, 15, 28, 77, 100, 107, 114, 119.

19 Norman H. Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). McPherson, “Spend Much Time,” and the three aforementioned Zboray and Zboray essays are exceptions to the rule. Eric Gardner’s “Remembered (Black) Readers: Subscribers to the Christian Recorder, 1864–1865,” American Literary History 23, no. 2 (2011): 229–59, reconstructs readers from subscription lists.

20 Zboray and Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books,” 249–50.

21 DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 36–37; 176–77.

22 See, for example, “The Mysterious Newsboy,” Sun, September 24, 1861, 2; “Railroad Accident,” Hartford Daily Courant, August 24, 1863, 2; “Miscellaneous News,” New York Herald, October 23, 1863, 6; “Stealing from His Mother,” Evening Star, February 17, 1865, 3; “Young Rogue,” Daily National Republican, April 20, 1864, 2nd ed., 3; “Naughty Johnnies,” Evening Star, September 16, 1864, 4.

23 DiGirolamo, “Newsboy Funerals,” 7.

24 DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” chap. 3.

25 Potomac, “Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun, Washington, March 4,” Sun, March 5, 1863, 4. DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 127–29.

26 Second Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: M.B. Wynkoop, 1855), 13. Emma Brace, ed., The Life of Charles Loring Brace: Chiefly Told in his Own Letters (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1894), 153–58, 186–91.

27 “Mr. Morrill, of Vermont,” Age, May 25, 1864, 2; “Congressional,” Evening Star, May 25, 1864, 1.

28 “Local Intelligence,” Evening Union, March 31, 1864, 3; “Local Intelligence,” Evening Union, June 1, 1864, 3; “Local Intelligence,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 1862, 6; “New York Items,” Salem Register, December 3, 1863, 1; “Christmas at the Newsboys’ Home,” New York Herald, December 26, 1861, 5.

29 “Local Intelligence,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 1862, 6.

30 “Christmas at the Newsboys’ Home”; “A Hartford Newsboy’s Christmas,” Times Picayune, January 22, 1865, 3; “A Present to Newsboys,” Sun, June 5, 1863, 4. Some wealthy people left donations to newsboys’ societies (e.g., “Personal,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 5, 1861, 12).

31 “To Newsboys,” Hartford Daily Courant, December 14, 1861, 2. “News from the North,” Times-Picayune, June 9, 1863, 1.

32 “The Newsboys Enjoying Themselves,” New Orleans Times, April 28, 1865, 4.

33 “The President’s Message,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 4, 1861, 8.

34 “How the Reverse at Charleston was Received at New York,” Macon Daily Telegraph, April 28, 1863, 3.

35 “How the News of the Fall of Fort Donelson Was Received in New York,” Charleston Mercury, February 27, 1862, 1.

36 An Anxious Lovyer, “A Word to the Newsboys,” San Francisco Bulletin, February 8, 1862, 2.

37 “City Intelligence,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 29, 1863, 4.

38 “The Effect of the News,” New York Herald, May 9, 1864, 1.

39 Potomac, “Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun,” Sun, February 11, 1863, 4; “Our New York Letter,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 8, 1861, 4. “A Day in the Country,” Hartford Daily Courant, July 13, 1861, 2; “Washington as It Was, and Is—Concluded,” Richmond Examiner, May 31, 1862, 1; “Ludicrous Scene,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 1862, 8.

40 “City Intelligence,” Hartford Daily Courant, June 25, 1864, 2. “City Intelligence,” Richmond Examiner, February 18, 1862, 3

41 “City Intelligence,” Richmond Examiner, February 18, 1862, 3.

42 The profit was calculated for 1860; see DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 178.

43 “Newsboys… refused to sell us Forney’s Press for less than five cents, when the printed retail price on it is only two cents” (“Adventures of an Editor,” Alleghanian, February 27, 1862, 2).

44 “Richmond, Texas, July 8,” Houston Tri-weekly Telegraph, January 12, 1863, 2.

45 “Price of the ‘Extra’ Bulletins,” San Francisco Bulletin, April 19, 1865, 3.

46 “Our Sunday Edition,” New York Herald, April 27, 1861, 4.

47 “The Great Battle,” New York Herald, July 22, 1861, 8.

48 “Richmond, Texas, July 8.” The Augusta Constitutionalist in 1861 charged newsboys three dollars per hundred papers and sold them at five cents apiece; Debra Reddin van Tuyll, “Gray Ladies of the Confederacy: Newspaper Culture in the Old South, 1860–865” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2000), 220, and 220n50.

49 John Beauchamp Jones, October 1, 1862, Diary, in A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1866), 1, 161. The Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel hawked by newsboys cost half a dollar in March 1865; van Tuyll, “Gray Ladies of the Confederacy,” 220. Some newsboys in Memphis refused payment in Confederate money; “Memphis,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 5, 1862, 3.

50 “Letter from Antelope,” Times-Picayune, March 3, 1863, 4.

51 “‘All About’ the Meeting of the Newsboys,” Daily Ohio State Journal, February 10, 1865, 4.

52 “Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun, Washington, May 17,” Sun, May 18, 1863, 4.

53 “City Intelligence,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 3, 1862, 2.

54 “The City,” Times-Picayune, May 29, 1863, 2.

55 “Newboys’ Thanksgiving,” New York Herald, November 28, 1861, 2.

56 See DiGirolamo, “Crying the News,” 181.

57 “Local Intelligence,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 1862, 6.

58 “Black Side of the Picture,” San Francisco Bulletin, August 6, 1861, 3.

59 “War Excitement in Philadelphia,” Daily Delta, September 17, 1862, 1.

60 Horatio Nelson Taft, January 13, 1863, Diary, Horatio Nelson Taft Diary, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

61 John Seymour Walton, September 11, 1862, Diary, Seymour Walton Journals, Newberry Library, Chicago.

62 Maria Lydig Daly, April 10, 1865, Diary, in Diary of a Union Lady, 1861–1865, edited by Harold Earl Hammond (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1962), 351.

63 Ibid.

64 Cornelia Oatis Hancock to Ellen M. Hancock Child, May 13, 1865, in Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 1863–1865, edited by Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 172.

65 Abigail Howland Woolsey to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland and Georgeanna Muirson Bacon, June 2, 1862, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 2: 387. Sarah Butler Wister, June 17, 1861, Diary, in “Sarah Butler Wister’s Civil War Diary,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102, no. 3 (1978): 271–327, quote on 308. Taft, March 22, 1862, Diary.

66 Parmenas Taylor Turnley, Reminiscences of Parmenas Taylor Turnley, from the Cradle to Three-score and Ten: by Himself, from Diaries Kept from Early Boyhood, with a Brief Glance Backward Three Hundred and Fifty Years at Progenitors and Ancestral Lineage (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1892), 334; Charles F. Read, July 26, 1863, Diary, Charles T. [sic] Read Diary, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans; Cornelia Oatis Hancock, “Battle of the Wilderness,” [c. May 7, 1864] in Jaquette, Letters of a Civil War Nurse, 83. Taft, March 10, 1863, Diary. Walton, March 18, 1863, Diary.

67 “False Alarms,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1862, 8; “A Proper Course,” North American, May 3, 1862, 1. “Violation of the Sabbath,” Boston Daily Advertiser, January 27, 1862, 2.

68 Abigail Howland Woolsey to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland and Georgeanna Muirson Bacon, June 2, 1862, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 2:387. The “hideous” phrase originated in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 4).

69 Walton, September 23, 1862, Diary. Susan Matilda Middleton to Harriott Middleton, July 6, 1863, Harriott Middleton Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.

70 Charles F. Read, July 26, 1863, Diary.

71 Daly, July 15, 1861, Diary, 35.

72 Daly, April 10, 1865, Diary, 351.

73 Susan Matilda Middleton to Harriott Middleton, July 6, 1863.

74 Zboray and Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books,” 253. Thomas Francis Galwey, May 2, 1863, Diary, Thomas Francis Galwey Diaries, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

75 Walton, March 18, 1863, Diary.

76 Wister, June 17, 1861, Diary, 308.

77 Daly, July 15, 1861, Diary, 35–36.

78 Elizabeth Virginia Lindsay Lomax, July 20, 1862, Diary, in Leaves from an Old Washington Diary, 1854–1863, edited by Lindsay Lomax Wood (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1943), 205.

79 Lomax, August 31, 1862, Diary, 211.

80 Taft, January 24, 1863, Diary.

81 Georgeanna Muirson Bacon to Margaret Elizabeth Aspinwell Hodge, July 8, 1861, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 1:110.

82 Ibid.

83 Galwey, May 5, 1863, Diary.

84 Abigail Howland Woolsey to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland, April 14, 1861, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 1:37.

85 Caroline Carson Woolsey Mitchell to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland, April 15, 1865, in ibid., 2:660.

86 Lomax, August 31, 1862, Diary, 211.

87 Newsboys thus participated in what Richard D. Brown has called “the dynamics of contagious diffusion” of information (see his Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 245–67).

88 Julia Ellen LeGrand, March 31, 1863, Diary, in The Journal of Julia LeGrand, New Orleans 1862–1863, ed. Kate Mason Rowland and Agnes E. Croxall (Richmond, VA: Everett Waddey, 1911), 295.

89 Turnley, Reminiscences of Parmenas Taylor Turnley, 334.

90 Albert Metcalf Harper to John Harper, July 4, 1862, Harper Family Papers, Library and Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh.

91 Mari Boor Tonn, “‘From the Eye to the Soul’: Industrial Labor’s Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones and the Rhetorics of Display,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2011): 236, 248.

92 Virginia Lafayette Woodbury Fox, July 2, 1862, Diary, Levi Woodbury Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Martina Lauster, “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the Flâneur,” Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (2007): 139–56.

93 Matthew S. May, “Hobo Orator Union: Class Composition and the Spokane Free Speech Fight of the Industrial Workers of the World,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 156.

94 Charles Wright Wills, August 29, 1864, Diary, in Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, Including a Day by Day Record of Sherman’s March to the Sea: Letters and Diary of the Late Charles W. Mills, comp. Mary E. Kellogg (Washington, DC: Globe Printing, 1906), 293.

95 Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey to Margaret Elizabeth Aspinwell Hodge, July 8, 1861, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 1:110.

96 Robert R. Grimes, “Come Buy Hot Corn!: Music Sentiment and Morality in 1850s New York,” Journal of the Society of American Music 5, no. 1 (2011): 39.

97 Cornelia Oatis Hancock to Ellen M. Hancock Child, May 13, 1865, in Jaquette, Letters of a Civil War Nurse, 173. The newsboy in this case was not simply voicing a printed headline, for in a search through GeneaologyBank.com we found only one that was even similar: “Jeff Davis Captured in His Wife’s Clothing!” Green-Mountain Freeman, May 16, 1865, 3.

98 Daly, April 10, 1865, Diary, 351.

99 Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne, March 14, 1862, Diary, Browne Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

100 Taft, February 19, 1862, Diary.

101 Taft, December 14, 1864, Diary.

102 Walton, May 11, 1863, Diary.

103 Zboray and Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books”; on earlier newspaper reading by women, see idem, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History 22, no. 1 (1996): 2–14; idem, Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010), passim.

104 Daly, April 10, 1865, Diary, 351–52.

105 Caroline Carson Woolsey Mitchell to Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland, April 15, 1865, in Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family 2:659.

106 On Confederate women’s wartime rhetoric, see Kimberly Harrison, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013).

107 “Army of Virginia,” New York Times, July 19, 1862, 1. Lomax, July 19, 1862, Diary, 204–5. She refers to Oliver Goldsmith’s book-length poem, The Deserted Village (1770). On the operation, see “Gen. Pope’s Department,” Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, July 19, 1862, 1. It is unclear as to whether Gordonsville was actually occupied. See “Reported Occupation of Gordonsville,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1862, 4.

108 Lomax, September 6, 1862, Diary, 213.

109 Cornelia Oatis Hancock, “Battle of the Wilderness,” 83.

110 Mary A. Henry, March 7, 1863, Diary, Joseph Henry Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC.

111 Henry, April 10, 1863, Diary.

112 See Note 4.

113 On the Congressional debate over the Washington, DC, newsboy home that escalated into a fierce exchange about the Lincoln administration’s suppression of the press, see “Newsboys: Spicy Debate in Congress,” Daily Ohio Statesman, May 30, 1864, 1.

114 “Effects of the News,” New York Herald, April 13, 1861, 8.

115 “A Hartford Newsboy’s Christmas.”

116 William J. Mahar, “Black English in Early Blackface Minstrelsy: A New Interpretation of the Sources of Minstrel Show Dialect,” American Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1985): 260–85.

117 “Amusements,” New York Herald, January 24, 1865, 4.

118 For a reception study of mass media in one time and place, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), esp., for newspapers, 252–57.

Additional information

Funding

Research used in this article was funded in part by a Joseph McKerns Research Grant Award, American Journalism Historians Association, October 2009, and by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Professors [FA-56646-12], 2012.

Notes on contributors

Ronald J. Zboray

Ronald J. Zboray is a professor and Mary Saracino Zboray is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, 1433 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, [email protected], [email protected]

Mary Saracino Zboray

Ronald J. Zboray is a professor and Mary Saracino Zboray is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, 1433 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, [email protected], [email protected]