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Available August 2002
Retail $45.00s, Hardback,
Civil War
672 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 978-0-86554-764-3
MUP/H576
Illustrated, Index
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The Moving Appeal
Mr. McClanahan, Mrs. Dill, and the Civil War’s Great Newspaper Run
How America's most derring-do daily newspaper and its Hoe press survived and thrived despite bombs, shortages, and rivals.
B. G. Ellis
The Memphis Daily Appeal rallied civilians and soldiers in the Deep South from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, thanks to its doughty owner John Reid McClanahan and scheming staffers Carolina Dill and Benjamin F. Dill. Their scrappy backgrounds enabled them to exasperate and outwit generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and James H. Wilson who chased them across four states, yet never could silence the "Voice of the Confederacy". That took McClanahan's post-war murder and Dill's immediate and mysterious death—and Mrs. Dill's stealing the paper and its profits.
Gypsying around five towns—Memphis, Tennessee, Grenada and Jackson in Mississippi, Atlanta, and finally Montgomery, Alabama-the national paper had several affectionate nicknames, among them "The Moving Appeal", "The Greatest Rebel of Them All", The Bible of the Confederacy", and "Old Reliable". Yankee officers labeled it either "that damned Rebel rag", or "hornet's nest of the Rebellion". But they and their men still read it avidly because it was a far superior news product than officers' announcements, out-of-date and biased Northern publications, or camp newspaper accounts about what was happening at home, on battlefields, and in the hostile countryside they occupied.
Dr. B. G. Ellis, a former journalism professor from Louisiana's McNeese State University and Oregon State University, is a specialist in Confederate journalism. She is a two-time winner of the Shearman Research Fellowship, the Burlington-Northern Faculty Achievement Award, author of academic articles and papers in journalism history and three books, most recently the copy-editing companition to the Perseus Books' AP Stylebook. She has been a reporter for LIFE magazine and served on five newspapers, including the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star and the Beirut (Lebanon) Daily Star. She is now the principal at Ellis & Associates,
a writing group.
Under the Southern Cross: Soldier Life with Gordon Bradwell and the 31st Georgia
Pharris Deloach Johnson
288 pp. Hardback. $32.95t. 0-86554-667-3. H496.
Letters to Amanda: The Civil War Letters of Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, Army of Northern Virginia
Jeffrey C. Lowe and Sam Hodges, editors
256 pp. Hardback $29.95t. 0-86554-591-X. H444.
This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor
Ann K. Blomquist and Robert A. Taylor, editors
320 pp. Hardback. $32.95t. 0-86554-654-1. H487.
Call us tollfree at 800-637-2378, ext. 2880 or 800-342-0841, ext. 2880 (in GA)
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