A Civil War reporter races to get the latest news from the battlefield.

The Civil War was the first modern conflict to attract huge press coverage. At least 500 journalists covered the conflict, including 150 who dared to venture out on the front lines and travel with the armies. The New York Herald alone had 63 men in the field.

Military men still considered the press a nuisance, or worse — Gen. William T. Sherman, for example, blamed the Union defeat at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861 on Northern papers revealing too much of the Union's battle plans. (Actually, Confederate commander G.T. Beauregard had help from a spy in Washington.) Virtually from the start, Abraham Lincoln's administration tried to exercise control over what the press was writing, seizing control of telegraph lines, confiscating editions of newspapers and even threatening journalists with trials before military tribunals if they revealed anything considered too sensitive.

But Lincoln also recognized, wisely, that the right sort of war coverage could help hold together the politically divided North. Indeed, articles such as the New York Times' story of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 — a "Splendid Triumph of the Army of the Potomac," as the headline proclaimed — undoubtedly helped rally support for the Union cause.

While much of Civil War reporting consisted simply of generals' public recitations of skirmish locations and casualties, there was the occasional breathless dispatch from a correspondent caught in the fray. "We had a brisk little time here Yesterday morning," wrote an unnamed New York Times journalist from Cold Harbor in 1864. "The enemy made a dash at our pickets, with the intention of gaining control of the entire line of rifle pits ... little did they dream of the treatment in store for them."