The age-herald., 1898-01-23

 MAR DISPATCHES

From the Philadelphia Times
 The story of the war correspondents which the exigencies of our great civil war called into existence has never been told, writes J. T. Scade. Faithful to the journals they represented, untiring in the pursuit of such news the public required, and sharing all the harships and dangers of campaign life, without military rank or honors, they not infrequently played the double part of soldier and civilian with credit to themselves and. to the profession to which they belonged. They witnessed every phase of the struggles for the Union from the secession of South Carolina to it's restoration, from the fall of Sumter to the fall of Fort Griffin at Sabine Pass, from the murder of Ladd and Whitney by the mob in Baltimore on April 19 1861, to the assas- sination of President Lincoln April II, 1865. They accompanied our armies and fleets and accurately recorded the stirring feats of arms and the noble examples of valor, patriotism and self-devotion with which our brave soldiers and sailors illu- minated the history of the war.
 At the outbreak of the war the leading newspapers placed a corps of war cores pondents in the field. They were fitted out with horse and equipments, field glasses, waterproof sabrechte, cot blankets and bedding. The instructions were brief but comprehensive. They were to obtain the most accurate information by personal ob- servation, and forward 1t with the utmost dispatch regardless of expense, labor or danger.
 Some of these men became as well known through their pen-names as any general in either army, and when peace came they found little difficulty in sliding into snug berths in the editorial rooms, for which some of them were not half so well fitted. In order to develop to the highest point the literary ambition of the corps of correspondents who were trained in the army, their respective journals pub lished their names at the heads of the letters which they forwarded from the armies. In this way they established inti- mate personal relations with the public. and they made the fullest use of their opportunities to win regulations for them- selves. Some of them contributed to the literature of the country some of it's best and most esteemed writers and are the real historians of the war; for without their army correspondence the true history of the war cannot be written.
 Finley Anderson, one of the correspond ents, was promoted to major and assistant adjutant general on Gen. Winfield s. Han cocks staff. While acting as correspondent he was captured on the Queen of the West, and confined for fourteen months in IeAaS cOnItu1aIe pFiSOn, ten udyS or WHICH were in dungeon into which not one ray of light found its way, and in which he had for companions five desperate murder CTS, two of whom were negroes. He was wounded in the arm by a shell at the battle of Spottsylvania Court House. May F, 1863, but with characteristic pluck he continued to take notes in the thiclxest of the fgh and pushed on to Washington, where he dictated his dispatches in time for the next days issue of his paper.
 I tA1,o Browne were captured while floating on bales of hay in the Mississippi river, op- posite Vicksburg, son the night of May 5, 1863, after their boat had been exploded and burned by the confederate batteries, and half the persons on the expedition killed or wounded. They were confined in seven different confederate prisons, the Richmond authorities refusing their ex- change, declaring that they should be held during the war as hostages and for re- taliaton. Richardson and Browne escaped from the confederate prison at Salisbury, N. C., on the night of December IS, 1864, in company with William D. Davis, clerk of the Ohio senate. They travelled 34O miles through marshes, brush and forest and over mountains in the snow at the peril of their lives before reaching the Union lines, fifteen miles from Knoxville, Tenn.
 L. A. Hendrick and George H. Hart were captured by Mosby in November, 1868, and confined in Castle Thunder, Richmond, where they enjoyed the company of their confreres, Solomon T. Bulky. Ravenwood and Schloss. Anderson and Gatchell, two other war correspondents, and J. H. Vos- burgh who was taken prisoner in May, 1868, on the Rappahannock, were detained as prisoners in other parts of the confed- eracy. During General Banks campaign in the Valley of Virginia George W. Clarke, another correspondent, fell into the hands of the confedrates at Winchester, but after short detention was released by Stonswan Jackson. J. c. Fitzpatrick, S. Cadwallader and l.. L. Crounse were captured by Mosby's guerillas near Fred ericksburg, while striving to reach Wash ington with full reports of the battles in the Wilderness also complete lists of the killed and wounded. Their pa1ezs were taken from them but they succeeded in making their escape, and having reached Washington, wrote their journals detailed accounts of the batthes they had witnessed from memory.
 .Gen. John Morgan captured William F. G. Shanks and Edwin D. Westfall in the