South Carolina News
South Carolina Public Perception 1868-1877
The United States were torn apart from 1861 to 1865 as the Civil War pitted North against South and brother against brother. By 1868 the war had ended and the Union had begun reconstruction efforts in the south that included military occupation while other forces were sent to the West to deal with the Native Americans. Since these events occurred in close proximity to each other, the South would have different perspectives of the military forces they had just lost their war of independence to. Furthermore the southern press was not as widespread as those found in the North. While they are not necessarily wide spread, southern papers still played a important role in shaping public opinion during this century. The papers of the South reported on the Indians less so than the other parts of the United States, possibly due to the lingering bitterness from their defeat in the Civil War. As such there were fewer results for these states on the Chronicling America newspaper database. South Carolina had more results than the majority of southern states with forty nine results. Of these nine articles were selected from various papers and years to provide an analysis of roughly twenty articles and about 20% of those published on the cavalry and Indians at this time. These nine articles were converted into text documents and are examined using Voyant in the visuals below.
If any of the Voyant Tools below do not load, please click on the tool title to see an image file of the results, or go to the Sources page where all the visuals for this project are listed on the left hand side of your screen.
This TermsBerry tool shows the fifteen most frequently used terms in these articles. The Term Sheridan was added to this to see how the South referenced Sheridan in the news or if they did at all. He was very much disliked in Texas and Louisiana during his time as a military governor after the war and had caused destruction throughout Virginia with his cavalry during the Civil War. It is somewhat surprising that Sheridan only appears six times and in only two of the articles in this selection. Sheridan still held a very prominent position in the military and in the West so it is interesting to see him decline in news. The cavalry appear in all nine of the documents and the term Indian also appears in all of them in some form. Each of these words are the most frequently used words which is to be expected in the sources being examined. The frequency that the term killed and wounded appears in these documents in unique because they have not before been such a prominent word. Killed appears in seven of the articles and wounded is in six and it is likely that this is because the articles update the readers on the casualty lists from the West for both civilians and military. The TermsBerry shows further similarities between these articles and other sources previously examined in this project through the frequency that the term village appears. Upon closer examination however, village is only used in one document and is an outliner. The south appears in four of these articles. On the surface that doesn’t seem important but in context one of these articles discusses what the military will do in the southern states during this period. This is interesting because it shows a mental separation between the South and the U.S. as a whole during reconstruction and into the 1870s.
This Collocates Graph tool is being used to show how the frequently used terms of Indians and Cavalry are used in context of these articles and which words are most associated with them. The word Wounded was unique to this set of articles and it is being examined as well to see what wounded were being reported on in the South. These three terms appear in blue and the orange terms represent the words most frequently associated with these words in the articles. It is interesting that horses do not connect with Cavalry or Indians in these articles but connects with Wounded. Considering both the cavalry and the Indians rode these animals it would be logical for horses to connect with them but this raises the question of what wounded horses were being reported on in the South Carolina newspapers? The term wounded also connects with both cavalry and Indians which suggest that the articles were informing their readers on the losses from both sides in the armed conflicts being reported on. In these articles the cavalry are directly connected to the Indians which reflects the trend being seen in all the primary sources, that the cavalry were associated with fighting the Native Americans in the public eye. The negative presentation continues in these documents as the three most associated words with them are fight, killed, and came. The Collocates Graph tool above shows how that while the news of the South less frequently covered the West, they appears to have similar portrayals of the cavalry and Indians.
Using this Terms in Context tool on "Cavalry" and "Indians" provides a more detailed examination of how these two words are used in southern news articles and allows them to be compared to not only each other but also the other articles and works examined in this project. In context, the cavalry are used only twenty six times in these documents and do appear in all nine of them. The majority of these mentions refer to the units of cavalry and the fighting that they participated in the West against the Native Americans. The actions of the cavalry in the West also includes their pursuit of Native Americans, the military attacks and campaigns against against them, and the casualties the cavalry sustained in these efforts. In this way the South has similar representation of the cavalry as the other regions of the U.S. that are examined (the West and Mid-West and North). The context tool reveals that the Indians were mentioned in a more diverse way in these Southern articles than has previously seen. While there are still similarities and they are shown fighting against the soldiers and portrayed in a negative way, there is also a discussion of their locations and their weaponry, as well as their ability to escape the U.S. forces and avoid being captured. Furthermore they were able to at times avoid fighting with the U.S. in open combat, causing the cavalry to chase them across the plains. Southern articles also discuss the origins of these tribes, some of which came from Mexico. There are also references in this list to a massacre of Indians and both Indians killing innocent people and innocent Indians being killed. This is interesting because while most of these are negative things associated with the Native Americans, this tool revealed that there was a much broader conversation associated with the in the South compared to the other parts of the nation.
What they thought in the South
While the former Confederate states of the South were going through reconstruction, their newspaper articles and their editors reported less frequently on the events taking place in American West and the conflicts between the Army and the Indians. Throughout reconstruction events took place in the South that illustrated tensions between the South, the North, and the newly freed African American population in the years following the Civil War like the riots in New Orleans that Sheridan put down in 1867. With these conflicts and disputes taking place in various parts of the former Confederacy it is understandable that the newspapers of the region would report on these topics rather than the events in the West like how Montana Newspapers emphasized events in Montana during this period. When the newspapers did publish reports and articles on events in the West, the newspapers in South Carolina depicted the cavalry in similar ways that other papers throughout the country did. They chased the Native Americans across the West and were fighting against them. What sets the South apart is the way in which they negatively described the Indians. While many papers presented the Indians as villains and in a negative light, the papers of South Carolina did not depict the situation so plainly. There was a multi-layered depiction of the Native Americans who were more than just savages on the plains but they also avoided capture, were massacred, killed innocents and had innocent people killed by the Army. While many of these depictions still were negative and supported the national view of Native Americans, these papers differ from the others examined in the variety of ways these Native Americans are described negatively. The southern narrative of the Indian was not as blatantly villainized as other papers did at this time.