(Editor’s Note: Bill Hendrick and I worked at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution but did not know each other during the years we were there together—Wendy Parker)
An idea that was more 25 years in the making came to fruition this fall for East Cobb resident Bill Hendrick when he became a first-time book author.
A longtime journalist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hendrick reported in 1994 about some artifacts that were discovered at a construction site in downtown Atlanta, including an unexploded shell fired by Union General William Sherman’s troops during the battle of Atlanta.
Hendrick’s curiosity also was piqued by something else: The discovery of Atlanta’s leading newspaper during the Civil War years.
A visit to that construction area with legendary Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett introduced Hendrick to the story of the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer.
The book he co-wrote with local historian Stephen Davis, “The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War” was published this fall by the University of Tennessee Press.
Hendrick and his wife Laura raised two sons in East Cobb, and they graduated from Walton High School and the University of Georgia. Jordan is an attorney in Decatur and Stuart is a writer and teacher in Atlanta.
While Hendrick researched the newspaper issues, Davis, a former East Cobb resident and author of other Civil War-related books, supplied the larger historical backdrop.
They began their collaboration in 2017, and met nearly daily to discuss their work, often at Goldbergs Bagel on Johnson Ferry Road (where this interview was conducted).
The result is nearly 500 pages of text with extensive footnotes and bibliographical information.
“I wasn’t thinking about making any money when we started,” said Hendrick, who left the AJC in 2008 and also was a reporter for the Associated Press in Atlanta.
“I just thought it would be interesting to see how a newspaper covered a war.”
By contemporary standards, the look, feel and reportage of the paper is dramatically different. The Daily Intelligencer published four broadsheet pages each day of pure text. There were no photos but plenty of front page ads and obituaries, and many of the bylines were pseudonyms.
A typical front page during the war (see below) included battle reports, dispatches first published in other newspapers and ads for land, “desired goods” and slaves.
Atlanta’s population during the Civil War was around 10,000 (a fifth of them enslaved), and the newspaper’s circulation was around 3,000, Hendrick said.
The publisher of the paper, Jared Whitaker, was prominent citizen and city council member when the war broke out, and a devout supporter of the Confederate cause.
Those views were frequently reflected in the newspages, which Hendrick said bluntly was a pro-Confederacy, anti-Lincoln propaganda organ (here’s an excerpt).
The Daily Intelligencer struggled to purchase newsprint after its supplier, the Marietta Paper Mill, was burned by Union troops as they approached Sope Creek in July 1864. The mill was targeted because it also printed Confederate currency.
Much of the war-related content in the Daily Intelligencer came from other newspapers that received battlefield reports from correspondents.
The newspaper exchange program that was a forerunner of the modern newspaper content syndicates included the Atlanta paper sending copies even to their Northern counterparts for a time.
But in the Daily Intelligencer, Hendrick noted, “there was hardly any coverage of the the Battle of Atlanta.”
That was due in part to the newspaper evacuating its operations to Macon as Sherman’s troops laid siege to Atlanta.
After the Daily Intelligencer staff returned to town, the building where its office was located—above a liquor wholesaler on Whitehall Street in what’s now Underground Atlanta—had been destroyed by the Union bombardments.
A correspondent filed a dispatch of that incident, writing of a shell fragment that “should I go to Macon soon, I will have it with me, as a moment of the love that is borne for us by our Northern brethren.”
John Steele, the newspaper’s editor, thundered from Macon about Sherman and his troops that “their success in battering to pieces the impenetrable fortress Atlanta, must have given them great satisfaction. The murder of women and children, by fragments of their barbarous shells, will be a gory blot on the savage and unsoldierlike campaign of Sherman the flanker.”
“The news was always late,” Hendrick said of the Daily Intelligencer, including news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln shortly after the war ended.
During the Battle of Gettysburg, he said, the paper “didn’t admit for days that the South had lost. Initially, they said it was a great victory. But you can only deny it for so long.”
What also foiled the Daily Intelligencer’s narrative were the letters written home by soldiers, as well as messages sent via telegram, from troops and others who witnessed the combat first-hand.
The book includes a telegram the newspaper printed from a Southern soldier writing home to his father that he lost an arm in Gettysburg. That soldier, Lt. William Nesbit, recovered from his wounds and lived to be an old man in Alpharetta and Cherokee County.
When civilians on the home front started getting a different story from what was in the press, Hendrick said, “they started asking questions.”
As to why correspondents didn’t want to use their own names, Hendrick said “I think they didn’t want to take crap from the people they interviewed.
“I’m sure the generals knew who they were talking to but they never saw their names in the paper.”
Hendrick maintains ownership rights to the trade name Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, which was the only newspaper in Atlanta to survive the war.
But it didn’t last long, ceasing publication in 1871, as Reconstruction continued and as Atlanta was becoming, in the words a decade later of Henry Grady, the publisher of The Atlanta Constitution, “the capital of The New South.”
Hendrick updates his registration for the Daily Intelligencer every year with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
“I own a newspaper that doesn’t exist,” Hendrick cracked.
The research for the book was grueling—he spent nearly six months combing through the microfilm copies of the Daily Intelligencer at the Atlanta History Center.
“I almost went blind,” he said with deadpan humor. “But it was fun. I was fascinated with how newspapers operated.”
At the age of 75, Hendrick is taking on a new book subject that he’s doing by himself, a history of American newspapers in the 19th century.
“If I live to finish it,” he joked.
Hendrick says the research is a lot easier due to the wealth of information available online. He said he was ecstatic, for example, to find a story about the Alamo on newspapers.com.
“If it takes another four years,” Hendrick said of his current project, “I may be dead.”
Get Our Free E-Mail Newsletter!
Every Sunday we round up the week’s top headlines and preview the upcoming week in the East Cobb News Digest. Click here to sign up, and you’re good to go!
