Partisans of the Southern Press: Editorial Spokesmen of the Nineteenth Century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS67 Partisans oftheSouthern Press: EditorialSpokesmen oftheNineteenth Century. By Carl R. Osthaus. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Pp. xiii, 294. $39-95) Most readers of today's largest metropolitan Southern newspapers would be hard pressed to name the editor, or editors. To the casual perusers of today's journals, those who shape and control editorial policies are obscure individuals whose identities are hidden in small print somewhere inside the paper. More often than not, one does not even know the identity ofthose who have authored the editorials. In this respect, and in many others as well, Southern metropolitan dailies are very much like the great papers in other sections of the nation. Southern papers of the nineteenth century offer a sharp contrast with today's seeming anonymity in printjournalism. In a very real sense, the Southern editor in that period was the newspaper; that is, he defined the character, personality, and politics ofthe product. The newspaper he produced was as distinctive as his signature. In Partisans ofthe Southern Press, Carl R. Osthaus analyzes the careers of the journalists whom he calls the "editorial giants" of the nineteenth-century South. Organizing his work rather loosely by historical eras, the author deals with such diverse figures as Thomas Ritchie ofthe Richmond Enquirer and the Washington Daily Union ("Between Nationalism and Nullification"), George W Kendall and Francis A. Lumsden of the New Orleans Picayune ("The Rise ofa Metropolitan Giant"), Richard Yeadon ofthe Charleston Daily Courier and Robert Barnwell Rhett of the Charleston Mercury ("The Triumph of Sectional Journalism"), John M. Daniel ofthe RichmondExaminer ("A Study ofWartime Journalism"), and John Forsyth of the Mobile Daily Register ("Resisting Reconstruction "). Osthaus devotes two separate chapters to the New South ("Three Giants of New South Journalism: The Formative Years" and "Three Giants ofthe New South: Triumph in the Eighties"); both feature the same three "giants": Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Francis W. Dawson of the Charleston News and Courier, and Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution. The selected editors offered considerable contrasts in style and personality, but, as the author makes clear, they had much in common as well. As the title indicates, they were, with the exception of Lumsden and Kendall, partisans of their party or faction. When they strayed from four-square political allegiance —as Ritchie did in opposing Andrew Jackson's Nullification Proclamation —it was was usually over a specific issue and did not last long. They also aligned themselves with the elite of their areas, since it was primarily this element that subscribed to papers and read them. Thus, they generally expressed views that consistently conformed with the local power structure (again, the New Orleans Picayune, with its independent status and more cosmopolitan leadership, was a partial exception). Most of all, they faithfully represented conservative Southern views on social issues, most notably that of 68CIVIL WAR HISTORY slavery in antebellum times and white supremacy in the postwar period. When Francis W Dawson briefly broke ranks with most Carolinians in 1876 by advocating fusion with the Republicans and demanding prosecution of those whites who were guilty of antiblack violence during the Hamburg riots, the reaction was swift and the message unmistakable. The News and Courier's circulation evaporated almost immediately, and, to save his paper, Dawson did a quick about-face. Editors of the nineteenth-century South faced enormous obstacles to success. Relatively small circulations throughout the century made it difficult for most to hire the staffs necessary to produce a first-rate paper. The Civil War delayed in Southern journalism the adoption of the technological innovations that revolutionized Northern publishing in the second half of the century. In view of these and other problems that faced every Southern publisher, it is remarkable that the region produced a number ofimportantjournalists whose achievements placed them in the first rank ofjournalists nationally. Few will argue with the author's choices of editors, although this reviewer would like to have seen a few more included. Adding George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal, for example, would have given a Whig counterbalance to Ritchie's Democratic Richmond Examiner in the early period; and the inclusion of William Woods Holden in the secession/Civil War era...