For a complete schedule, visit booktv. Org. Youre watching booktv. Next, Peter Carlson recalls the capture of journalists Albert Richardson and Junius Browne by Confederate Forces at the battle of vicksburg. The reporters were sent to multiple confederate prisons over 20 months until they escaped and made their way across the appalachians with the assistance of Union Sympathizers. This is about 50 minutes. [applause] thank you, david. Im thrilled to be here at the national archives. To be back here, i should say. Ive written three books, and i have researched all of them at the national archives. A place with buried treasures all over it. Theyve got a lot of boxes here, boxes filled with little folders filled with papers, and there are a lot of stories hidden b in those papers. In fact, if you get really quiet and you listen really closely, you just might hear somebody take a piece of paper out of a box upstairs and read it and go, holy cow. You dont have those holy cow experiences all that often, but when they come, it really, its really a thrill for a researcher, and its what keeps researchers going. So this book exists today because i gave in to one of those deep, dark desires that lurks in the depths of the human soul. I refer to the desire to prove that your boss is full of bologna. This happened in 2010. I was hired as a editor at American History magazine, and i immediately made a suggest to the honcho of the place who had just hired me. I said the 150th anniversary of the civil wars coming up, why dont we take a couple pages in each issue and run a newspaper story about some event in the civil war that happened 150 years ago. I thought it was a pretty good idea. Apparently, he didnt. He said, well, that would be a good idea, but civil war journalism was really lousy. And i thought to myself, you know, i used to be a reporter, and i couldnt imagine that all the reporters covering the civil war had somehow missed the biggest story in American History. And i thought to myself, this guys full of baloney. But i didnt know. I wasnt sure, so i checked it out. I went to the library, and i took out a couple books on civil war journalism. And i found out that a lot of civil war journalism was really lousy. And some was really great. And some was, most was mediocre. Sort of like todays journalism. But more importantly, i came across a synopsis of what seemed like a really great story about two reporters for the new york tribune who covered the civil war. Their named were Junius Browne and Albert Richardson. And one night in may of 1863 they were desperately trying to catch up to general grants army which was outside vicksburg ready to attack vicksburg. These two reporters, junius and albert, got on a barge that was going down the mississippi filled with bales of hay for grants horses. The barge set out at night, so the confederates wouldnt see it. But, unfortunately, it was a night with a full moon, and it was really quite visible, and the confederates fired cannons at it. One of the shells hit the barge, exploded, killed about a dozen Union Soldiers, set the hay on fire, and junius and albert jumped into the river and attempted to float away. But the confederates sut boats and captu th and imprisoned them in various prisons for the next 20 months. And then they escaped from a prison in salisbury, North Carolina, and with the help of slaves and prounion bush whackers walked 300 miles over the appalachians to the union lines. So i read this, which was only about as long as what ive just said, and i thought to myself, wow, that would make a great movie. Unfortunately, i dont make movies. But occasionally i do write books. So i thought, well, should i write a book about these guys . I suppose if i was a novelist, that little synopsis would have been enough, and i just could have made up the rest. But i write history, not fiction, so i had to do what nonfiction writers do in such circumstances which is do some research and find out if there are enough facts available to tell the story. So i did a Little Research and learned that, yes, indeed, fortunately for me there were such facts. There were memoirs and letters and diaries and newspaper stories. Some of them written by junius and albert, and some written by others who shared part of their story. All i had to do was dig them out of various archives in various places in america, including right here at the national archives. And that was great because that enabled me to have that great holy cow experience as i picked papers out of boxes. So i wrote this book. Its called junius and alberts adventures in the confederacy because its an adventure story. Its the kind of straightforward adventure story that keeps you awake late at night wondering whats going to happen next. Are these guys going to make it home, or are they going to get shot or hung or otherwise detained on the way . But its also a work of history, and i think it illuminates parts of the civil war that most people dont know about; the culture of reporters in the civil war, what it was like in confederate prisons, and most importantly, the guerrilla war that was fought by prounion folks in the mountains of North Carolina and tennessee and virginia. So the story has many colorful characters. But, of course, the main characters are Junius Browne and Albert Richardson. They were boast 27 years old when the both 27 years old when the war began, they were best friends, but they were very different. Albert richardson was a big, strapping, handsome farm boy from massachusetts. He grew up on a farm, but he hated farming. He was a romantic young fellow who wanted to be an explorer of the american west. So as a teenager, he headed west. And when he got to cincinnati, he took a job as a newspaper reporter. As it happened, he was a great natural reporter. He had the reporters ability to attract people to him and make them want to talk to him. Want to tell him things. During the war he managed to hobnob with ordinary soldiers and escaped slaves and generals and even president lincoln. He also attracted women, and when he was in cincinnati, he started dating a young bookstore clerk named mary lou pease. She soon got pregnant, so they got married, and when albert was captured, he was married with three children, and his wife was pregnant with a fourth. June yous was junius was very different. Junius was kind of a scrawny, gawky, prematurely bald guy with jug ears. He was a rich kid, son of a cincinnati banker. He was sent to st. Xavier college in cincinnati which was a very rigorous Jesuit School where he learned to speak ancient greek, latin and french. He thought of himself as an intellectual and a philosopher. In fact, one of his favorite pastimes was to read works of philosophy in ancient greek or french or latin. His friend al a bert used to kid albert used to kid him about that practice. Junius was not a particularly good natural reporter. He was too shy, and he would basically stand off, stand aside from things and watch them and then sit down and write these kind of flowery literary essays about what he had seen complete with a lot of quotes from ancient writers. And that was, and, actually, that was a pretty common practice in those days in journalism. It was much more flowery and purposing prose than we have now purple prose than we have now. So these two guys covered the war for the tribune. Sometimes they traveled together, sometimes they traveled apart with different armies. They were always looking for an army which was about to go into battle, which was hard to predict. Albert was better at figuring that out. Between them, they covered the battles of fort henry and fort donaldson, shiloh, fredericksburg and many of the naval battles along the mississippi. The first battle they covered was the battle of fort henry. They were in cairo, illinois, and hitched a ride with general grant as he put his army on a bunch of ships sailing down the Tennessee River to attack fort henry and fort donaldson. So i thought id read a little passage about that. Browne and richardson went ashore with grants troops, slogging through swampy, flooded woods. Browne accompanied the soldiers on their march while richardson climbed a tall oak tree on the river bank for a better view of the artillery battle. For an hour the ships and the fort pounded each other with shells until the air was so full of smoke that richardson could no longer see the gunships. When the confederates ran up a white flag of surrender, albert shinnied down the tree and joined the Union Soldiers as they warmed into fort henry. Quote our shots had made great havoc, he reported in the tribune, in the fort the magazines were torn open, the guns completely shattered, and the ground stained with blood, brains and fragments of flesh. Under gray blankets were six corpses, one with the head torn off and the trunk complete hi blackened with powder, others with legs severed and breasts opened in ghastly wounds, unquote. Richardson watched as Union Soldiers delivered the highestranking captive, confederate general lloyd tillman, to the conquerors of the fort, general grant and Commodore Andrew foote, commander of the federal gun boats. How could you fight against the old flag, foote asked. It was hard, tillman replied, but i had to go with my people. A chicago reporter interrupted to ask every journalists most prosaic but necessary question how do you spell your name, general . [laughter] sir, tillman replied, if general grant wishes to use my name in his official dispatches, i have no objections. But, sir, i do not wish to appear at all in this manner in any newspaper account. I merely asked it, the reporter said, for the list of prisoners captured. You will oblige me, sir, tillman replied, by not giving my name in any newspaper connections whatsoever. Of course, richardson included tillmans name in his story as well as that absurd dialogue. He wrote his article aboard a union ship heading back toward cairo where he dispatched it to the tribune. So, okay, albert heads back to file his story, and junius stays with the union army which then marched across 12 miles of swampy land in a snowstorm to attack fort donaldson. And they besieged the fort for four days, fought for four days and finally the confederate garrison at fort donaldson surrendered, and the union army took that fort and 12,000 prisoners. It was the first big victory for the union. Junius filed a long feature story about it which is really good, but what he became most famous for among his colleagues was an incident that occurred during the battle. On the last day of the battle, junius and a reporter for the New York Times were with a group of snipers, Union Snipers, who have who were trying to pick off the guys in a confederate artillery battery, and the confederates were behind walls made of logs, and they would sort of load the gun and then pop up and fire it. And the Union Snipers would try to shoot them when they popped up. Of course, the confederates tried the keep their head down. So the snipers were very frustrated, and finally one of them got so frustrated that he handed his rifle to junius and said, here, why dont you try it . So i suspected junius had fired a rifle before at some time in his life, but he was not a soldier, and he was not a marksman, and he certainly wasnt a sniper. But he figured, what the hell, and he crouched down, he aimed the rifle, and he waited until he saw somebody pop up, and he fired, and the confederate battery went silent. And the union sniper turned to him and said, well, i think you got him. And junius said, well, i wouldnt be surprised [laughter] although, of course, he was completely surprised. But he did have the presence of mind to sort of walk gallantly away before anyone could give him another rifle and expect him to do it again. That story kind of illustrates how journalistic ethics have changed over the years. I cant help suspecting that my old boss at the post, len downey, would not be happy to hear that one of his correspondents in afghanistan had put down his notebook and picked up an m16 and fired away at the taliban. But journalistic ethics didnt even exist at the time. I think if you had used the phrase in those days, people would have laughed. They would have figured it was an oxymoron. The next story i have illustrates just that. A couple weeks after the battle of fort donaldson, junius was in st. Louis, and he heard that a union army had left southern missouri to invade arkansas and attack a con fed be rate army there Confederate Army there. So he and a reporter of the new york world hopped on a train and tried to catch up with the union army to watch this invasion. And ill read now what happened next. Browne and coburn realized okay, they get to the town in missouri, and they learn that the battle has been fought. The union army has defeated the Confederate Army in what is now known as the battle of pea ridge. Browne and coburn realize that thomas knox of the New York Herald would scoop them in a rival new york newspaper. Frustrated, they devised a simple solution, they would wing it. Simply concoct accounts of the battle based on the brief reports and wispy rumors that had reached them. It was unethical, of course, but hardly unprecedented. Journalists in the is theth century 19th century were not finicky about facts. Newspapers routinely enlivened their meager amount of facts by garnishing them with political rants, vicious invective and the kind of prose that escaped the gravitational pull of truth and soared off into fancy. During the civil war, reporters routinely made soldiers dying words sound as lofty and eloquent as a shakespearean soliloquy. The dead soldiers never complained, nor did their kin. All these habits contributed to a slang insult that became popular during the war, he lies like a newspaper. But even by the lax standards of the day, what browne and coburn did was outrageous. They wrote long, vivid eyewitness accounts of a battle that occurred 200 miles beyond their eyesight. The pieces were so ludicrously overblown that perhaps the two men were competing to outdo each other in the art of fiction. It seems quite possible that alcohol was involved. Laugh will have [laughter] coburns story reeds like a parity of the style of first person journalism that stars the relater as the main character the reporter as the main character. And now, he began, the sound of booming cannon and the crack of rifle ring in my ear while visions of carnage and the flame of battle hover before my sight. Three days of constant watching without food and sleep and the excitement of the struggle have quite unstrung my nerves. That was hard to top. But browne topped it with a heartpounding you are there style of prose that reads like fiction. Which, of course, it was. Junius had learned that the union won its victory with a dramatic charge led by general franz siegel, so he cast siegel as the here eau of hero of his yarn. Never was better fighting done, bayonet, musket, sword and cannon all did their bloody work, and the earth was stained and slippery with human gore. Every soldier kept his eye for exampled on his fearless leader fixed on his fearless leader. They knew all was safe, that there was hope victory while he survived. Strange that siegel was not killed. He was well known to the rebels, and a hundredifles sought in vain to end hisarr. The balls wheeled about his head but none touched him. Though one carried away his spectacles, and a second pierced his cap. And on and on he went. The story filled the whole page in the tribune, and Horace Greeley wrote an editorial suggesting that the union army reprint it and give it to every union soldier. Of course, nowadays reporters would be fired for doing that, but in those days the other reporters thought it was a hilarious stunt, and it became even more hilarious when the times of london announced that it was the best story of the war. [laughter] so about a year later albert and junius were captured outside vicksburg, and they werent really that worried about it at the time because reporters were captured by both sides fairly often and were usually quickly released or traded for reporters or other prisoners. So they figured they would be quickly released. In fact, they were given their parole papers. But the confederates hated the new york tribune because it was greeleys abolitionist paper and because it, at the start of the war it had run a banner headline above each page saying on to rich monday. And somehow the confederate officials in richmond didnt can really like that. So the guy in charge of Prisoner Exchange said point blank, these are the most ab noxious obnoxious prisoners we have. So they moved them from one prison to another for 20 months. So before i did my research i thought, oh, 20 months in prison, people would get bored at that. Itll be just one grim thing after another. But that turned out not to be true. Actually, the prison stuff is really interesting. There are a lot of strange, weird incidents in the prison, and junius and albert met a lot of fascinating characters. First, for five months they were in cattle [inaudible] castle thunder prison in richmond. The warden had long black hair, a long black period, he wore a black shirt, black pants, black belt with two big recovers on it and a black revolvers on it and he set it off with a big red sash, and he would saunter around the prison with his 180pound black russian wolfhound dog who scared the hell out of the prisoners. Captain alexander looked like a pirate and, in fact, he had been a pirate, a confederate pirate who had seized boats on the, early in the war on the Chesapeake Bay and sailed them to richmond. He got caught doing this in 1861, was locked into fort mchenry, but he escaped, jumped off a pair pet of the parapet of the fort into the bay, swam to shore and somehow made his way back to richmond. When he got there, the confederate authorities, i guess, figured, well, be this guy knows how if this guy knows how to escape from a prison, well put him in charge of a prison. So they put him in charge of castle thunder. Now, in addition to being a warden and a pirate, captain alexander was also a poet and a playwright an