Pale and Bloody Faces are Everywhere Upturned: The Story of War Correspondent George Smalley and the Technology that Changed News Reporting Forever

Over seventy thousand men at arms begin to slaughter one another amidst the tranquil Maryland countryside in the late summer heat.  The date is September 17, 1862--the single bloodiest day in all of American history.  The Battle of Antietam has begun.

Dressed in Federal blue and stationed just behind the front lines, behind the cannons and among the rows upon rows of supply wagons, most of which will soon be converted into impromptu ambulances for evacuating the wounded, stands a twenty-nine year old young reporter named George W. Smalley.   As the smoke of battle rises into the humid summer air and the sound of gunfire reaches a deafening crescendo, George Smalley feels as if he’s about to jump out of his own skin.

George Smalley, despite his relatively young age, is the Chief War Correspondent for America’s then most widely read and circulated daily newspaper, the New York Tribune.  In modern terms we would say that George Smalley has been embedded with the Union Army of the Potomac, at or near the frontlines, since the beginning stages of the American Civil War back in July of 1861.

On this September day in 1862 Smalley was joined by dozens of his fellow journalists on both sides of the line, Union and Confederate.  The American Civil War was then the most widely reported on, and written about, war in human history to date.  A widely literate and voracious reading public, both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, literally demanded and devoured information about all aspects of the brutal conflict--whether it was true or not!

However, unlike George Smalley, in the year 1862 most journalists were gentlemen (or ladies) with literary or business inclinations.  Few of them wanted to see actual combat and almost none of them were willing to be injured or to die just to report the news.  At the time, most all of them would have agreed that the best thing about being either a newspaper reporter or editor was that it was considered a job that exempted you from conscription and military service, because both Union and Confederate leaders considered journalists to already be an integral part of their respective war efforts.  However, young George Smalley was not one of those types of newspaper reporters.  He was literally chomping at the bit to get in on the action and to report on what he saw at the frontlines.

In the midst of the artillery and gunfire, Smalley mounted a dead Union officer’s requisitioned horse and turned to his journalistic compatriots and said, “C’mon men!  Any of you coming forward with me?  You can’t see the war from back here!”

And then, as the cannons boomed and the rifle fire thickened on September 17, 1862, on a battlefield just outside the small village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, George Smalley Chief War Correspondent for the New York Tribune galloped off on a dead man’s horse into the heat of the action.

Before sunrise on the next day, George Smalley thanks his own daring and to the use of a brand new technological innovation, would revolutionize the way and speed at which the news was reported forever.

The American Civil War witnessed a literal explosion in the sheer number of newspapers, and in their corresponding circulation among members of the general public, both North and South.  A highly literate public with increasing levels of education combined with innovations in printing technology by the year 1861 produced a literary and journalistic boom-time.  A voracious American reading public wanted the absolute latest news from the front, both to find out about the progress of the war and the fate of their loved ones, as soon as the Civil War began.

At the beginning of the war in an effort to produce copy and fill space in their ever expanding newspapers editors across the country relied on recycled news reports that originated mostly from the major newspapers in the warring capitals of Richmond and Washington DC, which were closest to the frontlines of the opposing armies.  Sometimes these recycled news stories took days, or even weeks, to reach the insatiable reading public in America’s most populated cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta or Nashville.

Some large newspapers in the northern states like the New York Herald Tribune or the New York Times, and even some papers in the South with large readerships like the Atlanta Journal Constitution, attempted to develop ways to get the news from the smoke and blood of the battlefield and into people’s morning and evenings newspapers faster than ever before.  Hundreds of correspondents from major newspapers attached themselves to the North’s Army of the Potomac and literally travelled along with the men in blue.  A smaller number of journalists did the same thing in the south and attached themselves to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.  In modern terminology these Civil War journalists would be considered the first ever “embedded” reporters in the history of warfare.

And among all of these “embedded” war reporters during the American Civil War, to this day George W. Smalley is the most remembered and perhaps, the best of them all.  Trained as a lawyer, and a graduate of Harvard University, George Smalley, unlike most young men in the 1860s, came to journalism not to make a quick buck, but out of a true thirst for adventure and a true sense of civic responsibility.  George W. Smalley believed that he could best serve the American public by reporting on the war that he saw as quickly and as accurately as possible.

When the smoke of battle cleared on the evening of September 17, 1862, George Smalley the only reporter who’d had the courage to ride to the front while the battle raged, attempted to forward his report on the battle to his editors up north at the New York Tribune but he found that, due to the chaos and confusion of war, all of the telegraph lines out of Sharpsburg were down.

The nearest working telegraph line was miles away in Frederick, Maryland.  As the sun set George W. Smalley jumped on his warhorse and rode hard for Frederick.  He reached the telegraph station just as night was falling and filed a preliminary report that spoke of the Union’s victory at Antietam and told his editors in New York to hold on; he said that he would have the whole story in their hands, and on the frontpage of the New York Tribune by the next day’s evening edition.

And then George Smalley did something that had never been done in history by any journalist before--he jumped on a military transport train, just like a hobo or a stowaway, and he rode north through the night all the way to New York City.  As the train rattled along in the night Smalley wrote his story by the flickering light of an oil lamp.  His train pulled into the station in New York City, in Manhattan, at five o’clock in the morning on September 18, 1862 less than ten hours after the Battle of Antietam had officially ended with the Union Army of the Potomac in control of the field.

George Smalley ran from the train with his handwritten report to the offices of the New York Tribune.  His story was converted to print and it ran on the front page of the day’s paper--the first ever report from a field of battle less than twenty-four hours after the action had taken place.  The horror and immediacy of George Smalley’s reporting from the Battle of Antietam was unprecedented and shocking for the time and it remains one of the best pieces of combat reporting in history.  In his article Smalley wrote:  “The Field and its ghastly harvest which the Reaper had gathered in those fatal hours remained finally with us.  Four times it had been lost and won.  The dead are strewn so thickly that as you ride over it you cannot guide your horse’s steps too carefully.  Pale and bloody faces are everywhere upturned.”

It took only two hours for the Tribune to publish Smalley’s sensational story and to distribute tens of thousands of copies of their newspaper across the streets of New York City.  The immediacy of George Smalley’s report from the battlefield of Antietam--in all of its horror--would change the public’s perception of the war, and the way that warfare was written about and reported on, forever.  The public began, in many ways, to look more closely at the actions of their leaders and to question the validity of all the senseless slaughter inherent in modern warfare in ways that it hadn’t ever before.  Some historians have argued that George W. Smalley’s dispatch from Antietam, thanks to his innovative use of the railroad, may have directly contributed to the New York City anti-draft riots that took place the very next summer in 1863 and that Smalley, and other war correspondents like him, may have in effect created America’s first antiwar movement whether they had ever intended to or not.

Civil War Military Train Depot

As author and historian Alex Wright stated in his recent seminal work Empire of Ink published in 2026 with regards to the effect on the war of George Smalley’s reporting, “The New York papers played an outsized role in framing public perceptions of the conflict--and in shaping the views of the political and military leaders who would determine its course.” (p. 173-174)

The effect of the George W. Smalley’s article in the long run is debatable, but one thing is certain and that is that by using the new technology of the railroad and rapid transportation to report on current events, George W. Smalley had inadvertently changed the pace and speed of humanity’s newscycle forever and from that moment on---right on up to the present era of seemingly instantaneous news--the world would never move quite as slow, or be quite as innocent, as it once had been.

 After the American Civil War George Smalley would be dispatched by the New York Tribune to Europe in 1866 where he would go on to report from the frontlines of the Franco-Prussian War in France from 1870-1871.  He would go on to have a long and distinguished career in journalism before retiring in 1906 as the London Times chief American correspondent.  George Smalley passed away at the age of eighty-three in 1916.