9. News magazines grew in popularity before and during the American Civil War
During the antebellum period and Civil War American newspapers did not carry illustrations alongside their articles though some advertisements did. Editorial cartoons became a new art form as well. Artwork accompanying the articles was simply too expensive to produce, took up too much space, and did little to advance the story being told in the opinion of most editors. Illustrated magazines emerged to fill the void, among them Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, launched in 1855. Leslie had previously worked on a failed Illustrated Newspaper, which had been launched by P.T. Barnum. He took the lessons learned by that failure and started both a fashion magazine and a journal of fiction before launching his Illustrated Newspaper. The latter nearly failed as well, before the drama of John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry gave it a boost in circulation.
Only Leslie’s had pictures of the events surrounding Brown’s attack, surrender, arrest, and execution. During the Civil War which followed, Leslie’s appeared weekly with drawings and woodcuts of battles, encampments, fortresses, maps, Confederate and Union leaders, and other dramatic depictions of events as they took place. Leslie’s and its competitors, including Harper’s Weekly, brought the Civil War into the parlors and offices of the civilians. Leslie’s was so popular it was often smuggled into the Southern states and exchanged between Union and Confederate troops along with coffee and tobacco. Americans saw the war, or at least pictures of the war, as it happened. The illustrations amplified the descriptions of battles in the newspapers, as well as the casualty lists they routinely published. The well-known image of Uncle Sam first appeared in Leslie’s, which continued to publish until 1922.