Harrisburg's Civil War Patriot and Union: Its Conciliatory Viewpoint Collapses

By the autumn of 1864, the editors of Harrisburg's daily Patriot and Union had written themselves into journalistic trouble. Their staunchly Democratic newspaper was read throughout the Commonwealth, but especially in Dauphin, Cumberland, and Perry counties. In its columns, they advocated a conciliatory approach toward the South. Then the Confederates raided Chambersburg, showed no bent for conciliation, burned the heart of the town. The editors printed dispatches calculated to prove that the Republican administration's military performance was a failure. William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta. They hailed George Brinton McClellan as a leader who could put the war to rest, who would follow a party platform that called for a prompt truce. McClellan repudiated the platform.

This is the story of how those positions came to be taken by the Harrisburg editors, and how they affected the vote.

The Patriot and Union was not a newspaper to take advantage of its proximity to the fighting war, not even doorstep proximity. At least 45 newspapermen were on or near the battlefield at Gettysburg-not one of them from Harrisburg.¹ In quieter times, the paper would usually give space to the routine events of Mechanicsburg and the rest of eastern Cumberland County. During the 1863 invasion, for firsthand news from the West Shore it had only reports from travelers straggling in; and, the editors reported, the military soon refused passes even to cross the Susquehanna. They were left to rely upon the same telegraphed dispatches that reached every daily newspaper in the East.² Their best original coverage, an imaginative squib about "The Burning of Carlisle," was written in Harrisburg from "[t]he riverbank -lined with anxious faces, all lighted with the unnatural glare of the western sky;" in fact the shells from Jeb Stuart's horse artillery set only Carlisle Barracks afire.³

The Patriot and Union shrank from real combat reporting partly, no doubt, because of the cost-but partly also by editorial design. The newspaper was primarily a political sheet, tightly aligned with the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. The two men publishing it in 1862 had come to their posts in 1858 from a background in purely political journalism. Oramel Barrett and Thomas C. MacDowell had been the publishers of a weekly journal of opinion, The Key Stone, printing early reports and comments on the evils of Black Republicanism. Barrett-his name was always printed "O. Barrett"-was later to be recalled as "a man of quiet, unobtrusive disposition, but of considerable decision of character." MacDowell was a practicing lawyer, known in political circles around the state.⁴

How closely their paper was tied to the Democratic Party appears in the report it ran about the "State Editorial Convention" that met with the state Democratic nominating convention, June 18, 1863: the agenda called for "an arrangement by which more perfect concert of action between the local presses of the State will be secured, and greater efficiency in the conduct of political campaigns attained." The editorialists from around the state elected as their secretary the Patriot and Union's writer Harry Ward. Then in his mid-twenties, Ward was the scion of a prominent family in Towanda, Bradford County. He was, it was said, a "very bright man," but overly given to drink.⁵

The newspaper was a private business venture—its newsstand price two cents, a year's subscription five dollars, two dollars to legislators when the General Assembly was in session. The editor-publishers paid for their up-to-date steam-driven press with commercial advertising—half or just slightly less of the four broadsheet pages every day. Barrett was not above running puff pieces about his advertisers, stories praising the "civil and accommodating" clerks at Eby & Kunkel's new grocery story, Fifth and Market, and the "exquisitely painted" art at Knoche's music emporium, down the street.⁶ By a rough survey, the Patriot and Union in 1862 was carrying more local advertising than its everyday rival, the Pennsylvania Telegraph, published since 1855 by German-born, fiercely Republican George Bergner.⁷

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