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America's First Black War Correspondent Reported from the Civil War's Front Lines (743 hits)

America's First Black War Correspondent Reported from the Civil War's Front Lines

Thomas Morris Chester, whose mother had escaped slavery, covered the final year of the war for a white-owned newspaper.

During the Civil War, hundreds of reporters from Union and Confederate newspapers published stories from battles on land and sea. Only one of those reporters was a Black man: Thomas Morris Chester, the nation’s first African American war correspondent.

The invention of the telegraph in 1844 by Samuel Morse had made it possible for newspapers to turn out editions in a matter of hours, quickly spreading war news around the country. The correspondents filing those front-line stories—and shaping Americans’ perceptions about the war—were mostly white men recording the conflict primarily through the lens of other white men and their families. Theirs were the only perspectives conveyed in the mainstream press—until the white-owned Philadelphia Press hired Chester in 1864 to cover the Black troops in Virginia.

Writing under the pseudonym “Rollin,” the 30-year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania native whose mother had escaped slavery, became the first and only African American correspondent during the war for a major newspaper. Embedded with the United States Colored Troops in the Army of the James from August 1864 until June 1865, Chester, who had recruited Black men to the Union Army, gave voice and dignity to the Black soldiers struggling for their right to fight, for parity with white troops—and for the right to be treated with the respect due to men willing to lay down their lives for their country. Writing in the Philadelphia Press, Chester said of Black troops, “Every man looked like a soldier, while inflexible determination depicted upon every countenance.”

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