By the 19th Century, there were hundreds of papers in the country, but until the Civil War, there was no such thing as a press corps. The coverage of the 18th and early 19th Centuries was almost entirely lacking in the kind of multi-sourced interpretive writing which defines modern media. Reporters, known then as correspondents, were eponymously named because their copy was either a reprint of a government release, the publication of a statute, or something like a letter to a friend. Editors made sure the copy of their often ill-educated amanuenses was formed into passable English while, as publishers, they sold the ads announcing ship arrivals, and cows for sale, that made up much of their paper’s news.
The Civil War changed all that. In the confusion of the war only rarely did one single informant know the full story of what was occurring, and this forced both the “correspondents” and their editors, for the first time, to work as teams to piece together a “story.” That, combined with technical advances in printing presses and the advent of commercial telegraphy, created the first national press corps.
