By Rachel Grant, University of Florida, Membership Co-Chair, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu
Dr. Michael Fuhlhage, an assistant professor at Wayne State University, recently wrote a book titled Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets: Journalism, Open Source Intelligence, and the Coming of the Civil War.
Q: Describe the focus of your book.
A: Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets reveals the evidence of secessionist conspiracy that appeared in American newspapers from the end of the 1860 presidential campaign to just before the first major battle of the American Civil War. This book tells the story of the Yankee reporters who risked their lives by going undercover in hostile places that became the Confederate States of America. It shows that by observing the secession movement and sending reports for publication in Northern newspapers, they armed the Union with intelligence about the enemy that civil and military leaders used to inform their decisions in order to contain damage and answer the movement to break the Union apart and establish a separate slavery-based nation in the South.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: My broader research question
at the beginning was, “How did information about the secession movement flow
from Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in November 1860 to
Tennessee’s secession as the 11th and final slave state to join the
Confederacy in the summer of 1861?” I was intrigued by questions that John
Nerone had raised in American Journalism
about how information went viral in a time that predated the rapid-fire social
media of our own times, namely the mid-nineteenth century heyday of the
telegraph. Thinking about the technological and craft development of journalism
in the 1800s, I wanted to look at information flow about a topic in a time when
the nation’s communication and transportation systems were approaching maturity
in the sense that they were starting to pull the entire nation together from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. Little did I know that the confluence of that
would have me looking instead at the ways they contributed to the nation
falling apart. I was interested in how reporters and editors shaped coverage of
labor, a natural outgrowth of my previous work on the prehistory of stereotypes
about Mexicans and other Latina/os in news media. Slavery was the biggest labor
issue of the period, and the Civil War was the biggest story of the century. In
the beginning, I was simply interested in exploring how secession info erupted
at the epicenters of the secession crisis. With Robert Darnton’s model of the
communication circuit as a guide, I built out from analysis of content to
exploring the motivations and actions of journalists, some undercover, and the
ways their reports were used to guide decisions and actions.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: I started with historical
newspapers in the American Antiquarian Society, Library of Congress, and
scholarly databases. Those enabled me to examine coverage of secession and Southern
political and military preparations for war as the secession winter broke into
the springtime of the rebellion. I relied on unpublished papers of Cabinet
officials, secessionist leaders, reporters, editors, and military leaders at
the University of Rochester, New York Public Library, Library of Congress,
National Archives, and special collections libraries at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, the University of Missouri-Columbia,
Michigan State University, and the Missouri History Museum, to name the most
significant archives that I visited.
Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: First, it shows that not everyone in the corps of Northern reporters known as the Bohemian Brigade were as sloppy and unprofessional as previous scholarship suggested. Many were exceptions to that version of history, committed to facticity and committed to their country. Second, Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets is relevant because it shows that facts mattered to decision makers then just as devotion to the facts matters to decision makers now. My book also demonstrates the benefits of faithfulness to the facts and the consequences of wearing ideological blinders as the American press moved from a partisan model devoted to supporting the opinions of political parties to a market model where facts were emphasized over sensationalism and slant.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: Be open to possibilities and when the archives whisper something to you, listen closely, ask what that intriguing document means, and then ask follow-up questions of it until you can figure out whether you’ve run across something intriguing but random or stumbled upon the edge of something much larger and underexplored.