Reading Communities: Civil War News Linking Home Front and Battlefield

On the day that Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, a Union adjutant encamped in Virginia wrote his father in Pittsburgh about a scribbling bunkmate. "H’s letters in the Chronicle, give you all this, and all the news in so much better ‘style’ than I can," he remarked, exasperated that his everyday life was so adeptly captured in print that it obviated his daily letters home. "We mess, sleep, and live together..., so that nothing much happens that I am not acquainted with before it appears in print." As Lincoln hailed a nation’s endurance, this soldier evinced a community’s persistence.

Such testimony abounds in our survey of reading practices, for a book in progress, found in nearly 800 manuscript diaries and letters. In them, we glimpse Civil War Americans, North and South, bridging the distance between quotidian experiences on homefront and battlefield through print. Needing to shore up face-to-face relations amid the war’s chaos, they thus improvised a virtual community space. This paper discusses the nature of that space as affording a unique vantage point upon evanescent community relations, as fleeting as conversations, seldom recorded before the war. However, we recognize that, in transferring this life to print, a new virtual community existence was born, analogous but scarcely identical to the old face-to-face one. Moreover, local cultures but their stamp on these new communities, spawning myriad variations, such as patterns in the Confederacy, unseen elsewhere, of oral verification of local printed news. Expanding upon the regional ethnographic approach to reading we pioneered in our award-winning 2006 book Everyday Ideas to encompass the entire nation in crisis, our paper delineates these new community formations and assays their divergent textures across class, gender, race, and region.