What did readers of Richmond’s press in late November of 1863 learn of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the events attending to the dedication of a new National Cemetery? Not much, not even a reproduced text, which, we’ve been reminded in recent days, totaled but 272 words.
For the editors of the Richmond Enquirer, Dispatch, Examiner, Sentinel and Whig a fuller journalistic experience (after four days of perilous navigation through a war environment) was in hand: five pages of detailed reportage in the New York Herald. These editors paid close attention the Herald output. Below is what the Daily Dispatch decided to deliver:
The Gettysburg Commemoration as reported by the Daily Dispatch, Nov. 25, 1863.
And, with special vitriol directed to the comparably verbose Edward Everett, here’s the choice of The Examiner:
The Gettysburg Commemoration as Reported by the Daily Richmond Examiner, Nov. 25, 1863.
Other members of the Confederate press took their cue from Richmond and distributed similarly censored, sketchy accounts of the day. A speech reminding citizens of the Union’s loyalty “to the proposition that all men are created equal” was not a message deemed germane to the day.
Nor was it in 1913, when the fifty year anniversary coverage of the Times Dispatch republished its old inaccuracies without correction. Another newspaper that same year in its marking of the date did publish the complete Gettysburg Address-the black owned and operated Richmond Planet.
For more detail of the Virginia press response to the Gettysburg Address try this link to a book published just last month.
