Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/328

318 Article of War. It was understood that war correspondents as a class were so far under the authority of the commanding general of the army which they accompanied that he might issue rules and regulations to govern their conduct. As in all wars, intercourse with the enemy was interdicted, except under flags of truce or on the basis of special executive permits. A system of correspondence maintained between Northern and Southern papers by means of publications entitled "Personals" was held to be illegal as an evasion of this rule. Editors might be subjected to summary arrest for disloyalty or under the elastic charge of "resisting the draft", and other methods were available such as excluding correspondents from the lines, withholding facilities for news-gathering, denying the privilege of the mails, prohibiting the circulation of papers, seizing an edition, and, in extreme cases, suppressing the paper.

In a number of instances newspaper correspondents were disciplined by the military authorities. This discipline usually amounted to exclusion from the lines of a military command. General Canby, in 1864, found it necessary to order the dismissal of two reporters, representing the New York Herald and Tribune, because they had disclosed military secrets, and had engaged in a controversy calculated to disturb the harmony of his troops. Grant arrested and dismissed the Tribune correspondent whose "false and slanderous" copy had misrepresented Hancock's movements near Petersburg in June, 1864. After the battle of the Wilderness a Cincinnati paper published the untrue statement that Meade had counselled retreat. Under Meade's order the offending correspondent was appropriately placarded and paraded through the lines, and afterward expelled from the army. Sherman in 1861, finding his operations in Kentucky greatly embarrassed by the publication of his movements in the press, banished every newspaper correspondent from the lines, and promised summary punishment to all who should in the future give information concerning his position, strength, or movements.

Another instance of the more or less constant friction between Sherman and the correspondents occurred early in 1863 during the operations near Vicksburg. A Herald writer, T. W. Knox, having