Gen. Joseph Hooker invented the byline. As commander of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker was very security-conscious. Convinced that Northern newspapers were publishing sensitive information of great value to the South, he halted a practice his soldiers had followed of trading newspapers with the enemy during cease fires. To underscore his concern, he then prosecuted the New York Herald's correspondent, Edwin F. Denyse, for a story alleging that the Union Army was preparing to take the field for an offensive that would occur "at the earliest possible moment." Although the story was utterly wrong, the general had Denyse arrested because he might get the story right the next time. A military commission tried the reporter in the command's provost marshal's office, convicted him, and sentenced him to six-months of hard labor. Hooker commuted the sentence, but he had made his point. His next move was considerably more original. To that point, virtually all news stories had been anonymous. The redoubtable William Howard Russell, for example, was known to readers of The London Times only as "Our Own Special Correspondent." In order to force the press to be more responsible, the general ordered newsmen covering his command to put their names on any stories that saw print. If they or their editors failed to do so, the offending correspondent would be banished and his journal banned from sale to the troops. This was a considerable threat because newspapers often made big money selling their product to the troops before and after battles. The papers complied, and the byline came into being. You can find the whole story footnoted in Stephen W. Sears wonderful history, Chancellorsville (New York: Houghton Mifflin, Mariner Books, 1998), p. 75.
William M. Hammond
I hadn't heard this history before; I dimly thought that bylines had originated during the Penny Press era as had so much of current newspaper tradition. If anyone has a different citation, please add!
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