Civil War Reporter

MY DIARY NORTH AND SOUTH (268 pp. abridged)--by William Howard Russell, edited by Fletcher Pratt--Harper ($4). "There entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders and long pendulous arms terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions . . . He was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker's uniform at a funeral . . . His turned-down shirt collar disclosed a sinewy, muscular yellow neck; and above that . . . bristling and compact like a riff of mourning pins, rose the strange, quaint face and head, covered with its thatch of wild republican hair . . .

"The impression produced by the size of his extremities and by his flapping and wide-projecting ears may be removed by the appearance of kindliness, sagacity and the awkward bonhomie of his face . . .

The nose itself--a prominent organ--stands out from the face with an inquiring, anxious air, as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind; the eyes, dark, full and deeply set, are penetrating, but full of an expression which almost amounts to tenderness . . . One would say that, although the mouth was made to enjoy a joke, it could also utter the severest sentence which the head could dictate, but that Mr. Lincoln would be ever more willing to temper justice with mercy . . ." That is the way Foreign Correspondent William Howard Russell sketched President Lincoln in 1861. It was this extraordinary gift for writing closeups (in an age when the camera was in its infancy) that made Russell one of the most famous newspapermen of his day, and one whose work is well worth remembering.

"What Right Had I?" Reporter Russell was 39 when he came to report the U.S. Civil War for the ardently pro-Southern London Times--and, as it happened, for his own famous Diary North and South.* For 13 months Russell toured North and South, talking with Senators and their critics, generals and their recruits, planters and their slaves.

In Washington, the President invited Russell to the White House for dinner, and Mrs. Lincoln sent bouquets. Secretary of State Seward had him round for whist, showed him the day's confidential dispatch to the U.S. Minister in London, and painstakingly explained how the U.S.

would maintain its Union, short of war.

Reporter Russell was not impressed. "The Government appears to be helplessly drifting with the current of events," he wrote, "having neither bow nor stern, neither keel nor deck, neither rudder, compass, sails nor steam." In the seceding Southern states, where he was greeted as a friend and potential ally, Russell maintained strict impartially. On Morris Island, S.C., he was urged to drink to "something awful" for Lincoln and the North, but he sharply declined.

In Montgomery, Ala., the first Confederate capita], he was invited to join the Southern Congress in secret session. But on his way to the Capitol, Russell had driven past a slave auction, and he was so upset that he refused point-blank to sit with "a Congress of Slave States." One day beside the Mississippi River, an "an-thropoproprietor" insisted upon conducting him around an evil-smelling set of slave pens, beneath their canopy of flies.

"The poor creatures stood by," wrote Russell, "shy, curtseying, and silent, as I broke in upon their family circle, felt their beds and turned over their clothing.

What right had I to do so?" "I Look in Vain." From his position overlooking both sides of the line, Reporter Russell tried to forecast how the war would go. He became thoroughly impressed by Confederate pluck and toughness, but he deplored their equipment and their tendency to underestimate Northern power and loyalty to the Union. He also knew that the Union Army was not yet trained for the job of subduing the Confederacy. "I look around me for a staff," wrote Russell in July 1861, "and I look in vain. There are a few plodding old pedants with maps and rules and compasses who sit in small rooms and write memoranda . . ." Later in July, Russell packed some sandwiches and a flask of Bordeaux into a hired gig, and followed the Union Army out to the first Battle of Bull Run. The Union started well, but soon, from the fraying edge of gunsmoke, came a rabble and a cry: "We're whipped!" Russell was swept back to Washington in the rout he had expected. "Heat, dust, confusion, imprecations inconceivable," he wrote. "I felt an inclination to laugh, which was overcome by disgust ... I spoke to the men and asked them over and over again not to be in such a hurry. But I might as well have talked to the stones." "I Told the Truth." When his Bull Run dispatch got back to the U.S., in the .patronizing print of the London Times, impartial Reporter Russell suddenly found that he was a boiling Union issue.

Senators and infantrymen scowled at him in the streets; the President and his lady were cool; the New York Herald started an editorial campaign against "Bull-Run Russell." One day, a German-American sentry leveled his rifle at him and shouted: "Pull-Run Russell--you shall never write Pull's Runs again." Russell was thoroughly and lastingly embittered against the "ruffianly" Northerners, but he still kept his reportorial objectivity, predicted that Bull Run would stimulate the North to fight harder. For eight more months, Russell brilliantly reported the spreading war, but in April 1862, his U.S. assignment came to an unexpected end. The U.S. refused him accreditation for McClellan's Peninsular Campaign because in Washington he seemed too pro-Southern; the Times wanted him back because in London he seemed too pro-Northern. So Reporter Russell sailed off home to England, to cover five more wars in the next 20 years (including the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-German). "I told the truth." came his parting shot before he left the U.S. And he told it in a manner that makes his book a durable and worthwhile dispatch to posterity.

* Published in the U.S. and Britain in 1863, abridged by one-third.for this second edition.

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