Mind-Munitions

War and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century 169
But the war also had international dimensions, as both sides
realized when they embarked on an overseas propaganda campaign
aimed mainly at Britain. Lincoln appealed to English northern
textile industrialists, whose sympathies naturally lay more with the
cotton producing Confederacy, by writing directly to them and
both sides organized lecture tours and inserted sympathetic articles
in the British press. But the North found it had a formidable enemy
in The Times. Russell was sent from London to cover the war and
although his own sympathies were against slavery he deeply alienated
the Union by reporting accurately the outcome of Bull Run.
Unable to secure permission to report the Union cause from the
front, and despite his pro-Northern disposition that urged restraint
on a warmongering Times following the Trent affair (when a
British steamer was boarded and two Confederate delegates to
Europe arrested), Russell’s dispatches were at odds with his paper’s
views and his influence began to decline. Other correspondents
fared little better when their pro-Southern line, though welcomed
in London, conflicted with actual events. Following the Confederate
defeat and Lincoln’s assassination, The Times sacked Charles
Mackay, Russell’s successor, because his reportage had been ‘one
sided and every remark spiteful’. But the damage had been done,
with the victorious North resenting the hostile role of the British
press for years to come.
If the experience of the Crimean War and American Civil War
had taught authorities that they must begin seriously to address the
question of military censorship as a weapon of war propaganda, it
also taught the press that it must observe more professional standards
in its coverage of wars. Both felt they were serving the nation,
but the major concern was to ensure that their respective sense of
responsibility coincided rather than clashed. To the military
authorities war correspondents were ‘newly-invented curses to
armies’ and it took time for them to realize that newspapers could
make valuable allies. In other words, both government and press
had to learn to unite in support of the same cause if a national
propaganda campaign in wartime was to be effective. This became
all the more important in Britain, for example, as newspaper circulations
continued to grow with improving standards of literacy
following the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and further acts
in 1881, 1891, and 1902. The same was true elsewhere. The press,
aided by the speed with which news could now be transmitted by