Civil War, U.S.

The Immediacy of News

Broadsides offered people an opportunity to anonymously communicate ideas, announce meetings, or offer opinions on current events via one-sided sheets of printed media posted in the streets. New forms of visual representation brought the battlefront and the rhetoric of war along with immediate reports from Union and Confederate journalists to the home front that motivated citizens to respond as activists. Western Union Telegraph Company was the first company to complete a transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. Telegraph transcripts printed as broadsides brought headlines from skirmishes as quickly as news correspondents transmitted them. Journalists who gained access to the battlefield brought the immediacy of war to their constituencies.

Mathew B. Brady assembled a network of photographers and set up portable traveling darkrooms in order to photograph battles and politicize the violence of war. This unprecedented effort to emphasize the immediacy of the carnage with images of the Battle of Antietam on September 16, 1862, polarized social networking on both sides of the conflict. Visitors to his New York City exhibit, titled The Dead of Antietam, saw corpses piled up and destruction radically more real and violent than had ever been seen before.

Social Restructuring: Race, Class, and the Draft

Regiments quickly formed as news of good army pay reached working-class neighborhoods. The Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 took a heavy toll on Union forces, and hope for a quick victory evaporated. Social grouping realigned to reflect distinct lines of ideology, race, and class. Irish immigrant laborers, who harbored fears that freed slaves would compete for good jobs on the docks, gathered to protest. Northern Democrats and agents sympathizing with the south, known as Copperheads, favored a negotiated peace to preserve business interests.

When the Union suffered manpower shortages, Congress passed the first conscription act on March 3, 1863, authorizing a draft of eligible citizens to serve three-year terms of military service. Draft quotas grouped men [Page 127]together in ways that established new social networks. Likewise, drafted men hoping for exemption from service sometimes paid the $300 commutation fee. While the draft was enacted to spur voluntary enlistment, the commutation fee proved to be exorbitant for ordinary working families. Affluent men established clubs where friends, colleagues, and family contributed money to pay commutation fees, and enlistment statistics remained low. The commutation fee served as a means for securing financing for the war effort but spawned a new term, 300-dollar man, referring derisively to the sons of rich families who were spared from serving. Prior to the draft, Pennsylvania law provided an opportunity for Quakers to file for status as conscientious objectors, but some still enlisted.

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