Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

Lorman Ratner and Dwight Teeter have attempted to study the newspaper press's rhetoric of sectional division during the years 1856–61. They use such divisive events as the Brooks-Sumner affair, the Lecompton Constitution, John Brofin's raid, Lincoln's election in 1860, and the firing on Fort Sumter to analyze the growing radical language that contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. With each successive event, the authors find growing radicalism in each section and an increased unwillingness to accept compromise on the issues that divided the country. Most carefully, the authors set the scene with a useful detailed study of the rise of the newspaper press as a factor in creating mass public opinion. In these ways, the book makes a major statement on how historians use political language to understand political and popular values and behavior.

The authors offer a thesis on the contribution of the newspaper press to inform popular and political behavior in that period of growing sectional division. They demur from the dominant theme of slavery as a cause of sectional unrest and the Civil War and instead offer a theory of republican ideology as the major cause of the war. They use Benedict Anderson's brilliant theme of "imagined communities" to assert that the press of each section in ever-heated language accused the other of violating the unity of republican governance. Ratner and Teeter thus make a careful and detailed reading of newspaper accounts of divisive events to claim that the North and South accused each other of destroying the very republic that they desired to serve. They also find it ironic that the press broke up the imagined republic that it had helped to create. The authors thus seem to support the old-fashioned revisionists, or the repressible conflict school, as they criticize the press for contributing to the avoidable rise of fanaticism that destroyed the Union.

Frustratingly, the authors admit that they have no way to prove that their republican ideology thesis discovered in heated editorial reporting of divisive events caused the Civil War. There are two flaws in this crucial admission. The first is that the authors, despite their excellent introduction to the rise of the newspaper press, neither analyze the press as political agent nor explore fully the continued divisions in the press within each section. To be sure, they hint at partisan newspapers in each section slowly hardening and uniting. These papers indeed often were party driven, and what appeared in editorials actually may have been calculated party opposition run amok. In addition, the authors claim that internal divisions within each section gave way to internal unity. There is, however, much evidence that the sections remained internally divided even into secession and the war. Fears of internal division may well have contributed to the need of political leaders to forge internal harmony. In short, rather than writing primarily on the threats to republican government, the politically divided editors within each section may have revealed their inability to create their ofin "imagined community."

Second, and perhaps even more problematic, is the authors' candid admission that they have no means to assess the role of newspapers in bringing on civil war. They merely show that anger and division grew along with the press's language of hostility. Historians of public opinion, however, do have ways to make reasonable judgments on the impact of newspaper rhetoric on events. Although the authors carefully assess how newspapers reported the John Brown affair, they do not look at the press's coverage of public reaction or opinion, the response of intellectuals, or politicians' use of Brown's martyrdom. That Emerson, Thoreau, and other antislavery advocates fueled radical sentiment in the South by praising Brown the authors ignore. Thus, they do not study the repercussions of specific reported events upon later contentions. Also, the larger, urban newspapers...