Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
"Cowardly and Incendiary Partisans": Soldier Mobs, Loyalty, and the Democratic Press in the Civil War1338 views
Author
Lund, Stefan, History - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
Advisors
Varon, Elizabeth, Department of History, University of Virginia
Abstract
Over the course of the American Civil War, newspapers in the North affiliated with the Democratic Party suffered dozens of mob attacks by Union soldiers. Soldiers broke into offices, smashed presses, threw papers and books out of windows, scattered printing type in the streets and dumped debris in nearby rivers. These soldiers were participating in a new iteration of an established tradition of mob violence against the press in America. They deemed the Democratic newspapers they attacked traitorous and invoked their right as the representatives of an aggrieved national community to suppress the papers by force. This essay examines this tradition of mob violence against the press, how the Union soldiery came to believe the Democratic press deserved such violence, and how coverage of these incidents by Democratic papers consistently excused the soldiers and tried to fix the blame on unnamed, cowardly political rivals instead.
Degree
MA (Master of Arts)
Keywords
Union Army; Newspapers; Civil War Era Politics; Copperheads; Mob
Language
English
Rights
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
Lund, Stefan. "Cowardly and Incendiary Partisans": Soldier Mobs, Loyalty, and the Democratic Press in the Civil War. University of Virginia, History - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, MA (Master of Arts), 2019-04-24, https://doi.org/10.18130/v3-pf4g-0f61.
