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For good and bad, Civil War editor was man of his times

By Joe Stinnett Special to The News & Advance

Apr 18, 2015

This engraving of The Daily Virginian editor Charles W. Button (1822-1894) is from the 1880 “Cyclopedia of Methodism.”

This detail from an 1867 painting by Flavius Fisher, “Hog Island Picnic of the Hyena Club,” depicts a number of prominent Lynchburg citizens at a social gathering on an island in the James River. Charles Button, the editor of The Daily Virginian, is among them. Exactly which one he is unknown, however. The bearded man, left center, is the artist, Flavius Fisher, talking with another Virginian editor, Alexander McDonald, who appears to be taking notes. Button may be the man to the right of McDonald.

Lynchburg editor Charles W. Button was a pro-Unionist and anti-secessionist who despised Abraham Lincoln, a non-aristocrat amid Southern planters, a full-throated slavery supporter who owned no slaves. He took over the Daily Virginian in 1857 and ran it for nearly 30 years. 

The paper, one of the oldest in the state, had advertisers ranging from local stores to New York patent medicine manufacturers. It reported not only local happenings but also state, national and international news.

Button’s first editorial for the paper, published on April 24, 1857, and one of the few he signed, blamed hard-core slavery advocates who refused to compromise on the one side, and “unscrupulous abolitionists” on the other, for the emergence of slavery as the overriding issue of the day. The Virginian would have “no sympathy with those who counsel separation,” Button wrote.

He closed his first editorial with a wish for “friendly and cordial relations with his brethren of the press.” His brother was killed in a gunfight with rival editors a few years later.

The population of the Hill City was about 6,800 in 1860, including about 2,700 enslaved. Many of the African Americans were rented to the city’s tobacco factories, where the leaf was made into plugs and cigars. The Petersburg Express reported in 1859 that in Lynchburg, “one can scarcely see anything here for the tobacco factories …”

A railroad crossroad, Lynchburg was the largest city in Virginia west of Richmond. It was a tobacco and shipping center before the war, a military and hospital center during the war, a wholesale center after the war. The city had two daily newspapers during the Civil War, although only the Daily Virginian is preserved in toto.

“We hear a great deal about ‘Big Richmond,’ ‘Little Petersburg,’ and ‘aristocratic Lynchburg,”’ said a letter to the editor the year before Button moved to town from Harpers Ferry.

The elites here enjoyed a culture that included a performance of Richard III in November 1860 for several nights at Dudley Hall. Still, the rough nature of life was never far away. In 1859 a Bedford County slave, Wesley, whose speech impediment prevented his fully defending himself, was ordered to undergo 25 lashes for passing a counterfeit 50-cent piece.

The use of technology was increasing. “The telegraph is getting to be a more and more popular institution every day … It has become one of the necessities of the age … Within the last two years, the facilities of Lynchburg and of this section of the country in the way of telegraphic correspondence have greatly increased,” the Virginian noted in June 1859.

Printing the Virginian remained a labor-intensive process, with literally every letter set in place by hand. The compositors plucked tiny, reusable pieces of lead type for “c”, “a” and “t” to produce that word, for example. Although one of the Main Street businesses was a photography studio, the technology to print photographs in the newspaper had not come into use.

The papers were printed on a press driven by steam. Gas lights illuminated the newspaper office in the evenings as the staff got the paper out. News was received by telegraph from around the country. Button complained about the cost of this service, and the quality of the news transmitted to him.

Button was also a commercial printer, with Alfred Waddill, a longtime newspaperman who helped found The News, running that part of the operation. A large advertisement in 1859 headlined “Excelsior!” trumpeted the quality of the “Virginian Power Press Job Printing Office.” As the Confederate army made its place in Lynchburg, the Virginian supplied it with blank forms.

Slave auctions were held about a block away from the office. More than 70 stores, banks, and other businesses lined both sides of Main. The Virginian was an advocate of growth, manufacturing, and trade.

The white upper class lived a genteel, literary existence, as reflected in the columns of The Daily Virginian. Especially early in the war, advertisements for plays, lectures and musical performances were frequent. The bookstore on Main Street sold works by Thackeray. A Button brother sold the Southern Literary Messenger from the printing office. During the war, businesses occasionally advertised European goods received via blockade runners.

As an employer and businessman, Button was part of that culture. He frequently complained in print about the difficulties of publishing a newspaper and collecting payment from subscribers and advertisers. Getting raw materials, especially newsprint, and sometimes ink, was a struggle during the war. Wartime inflation pushed prices for paper and ink to absurdly high levels.

The size of the paper diminished as the war went on, from four pages down to only two pages, the front and back of a single sheet, by 1864.

The local content of the six-day-a-week paper was more of a blog than a collection of long news stories. News from around the country, and world, came not only by telegraph but also from the many out-of-town newspapers Button received by train each day.

Button sometimes did first-person reporting, interviewing Union prisoners or visiting the local battlefield. He observed strict standards of accuracy, which didn’t prohibit him from publishing rumors (listed as such) from time to time.

He had a sense of humor and liked wordplay, sometimes printing little bits of sarcasm or mockery, once joking about his oldest employee — Waddill — narrowly avoiding attack by a rabid dog outside the printing office.

Button was a good writer, though long-winded. In addition to religious metaphors, he often deployed classical and European references. In the April 24, 1857 edition, his first at the Virginian, he used a quote from Napoleon when asking readers to submit news tips — “As Bonaparte said when one of his Marshals had lost a battle: ‘Alas, I cannot be everywhere.’ “

Despite its Southern sympathies, The Daily Virginian’s reporting on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was straightforward. Prior to Appomattox, Button had taken to referring to Lincoln as an ape or a gorilla.

The Virginian was back in business a few weeks after the surrender at Appomattox and Button continued as its owner and editor into the 1880s.

He ended his newspaper career with a bizarre interlude in which he sold the Daily Virginian to one of his sub-editors who had earlier written a dime novel that may have sparked the Beale Treasure legend about a hoard of gold buried in Bedford. Then, Button bought the paper back.

Slavery and African-Americans

While Button did not advocate secession, he got right in line when it happened and wrote editorials endorsing slavery and giving economic, social, and religious justifications for it. In the news and advertising columns and daily life, the horror of slavery was taken for granted.

Lynchburg’s Robert Williams was born a slave in 1843. He was living on Taylor Street in 1937, when he told the Federal Writer’s Project:

“I seen them sell slaves on the block down on Ninth Street in Lynchburg. They used to give us a pass to come to town on Saturday some time, and that is how I got to see the sale. The block was a big rock that slaves would stand on so they would be up over the crowd. The seller would cry bids just like they sell tobacco: $150, who will make it a $160,” and so on. Some of the bids would start as high as $400, according to the condition of the person. The women would just have a piece around her waist (something like tights); her breast and thighs would be bare. The seller would turn her around and plump her to show how fat she was and her general condition. They would also take her by her breasts and pull them to show how good she was built for raising children. They would have them examined to show they were in good health. The young women would bring good money as much as $1,000 or more because they could have plenty children and that where their profit would come in. They sold my cousin and sent her down in the cotton fields of the deep South, because master got short of money …”

Button profited from advertisements for slave auctions, slaves for sale, and runaway slaves. J.B. Hargrove, the most prominent slave dealer and auctioneer in town, was one of his most frequent advertisers. When a black youngster stole some newspapers, Button asked the mayor to whip him.

Button also published frequent Northern denunciations of slavery, especially early during the war. The language he used about slavery, while demeaning, was semi-genteel, if there is such a thing. He referred to African Americans as blacks, or negroes, or colored, sometimes darkeys, and almost never used the N-word.

Despite their non-status as citizens, the important role African Americans played in the life of the city was apparent every day, especially in the newspaper advertisements, which ranged from businesses seeking hundreds of enslaved laborers to build and maintain the railroads and the canal to individuals seeking a family cook.

Lynchburg businesses relied on commerce with the North, and were generally anti-secession. Button continued to urge his readers and Virginians in general to proceed with caution as the states farther South began to secede.

In April 1861, Mary Blackford of Lynchburg wrote to her cousin that Button was having trouble keeping the newspaper in business: “The Virginian has battled so ably and so bravely for the Union since the Country has been in so much danger that the Editor is entitled to the thanks of every true patriot. I send you the two last papers, you see he needs encouragement, from men like you. You know he has suffered much here in having his brother shot like a dog before his eyes, and seeing nothing done to the murderers.”

Button was probably not the sole editorial writer. The Virginian is often cited in history books and articles with Button credited, but there’s really no way of knowing exactly which editorials he wrote.

The Virginian’s editorials took a sharper tone when the Union began using African Americans to fight the Confederates. A modern reader senses that Button believed blacks were not worthy opponents in combat and that the white Northerners had broken some unspoken code by allowing them to fight. He once called for the execution of white officers leading African-American troops.

Less than two months after Lee’s surrender, Button announced that the block of 8th Street between Church and Main, which included the Virginian office, was leading the way in the recovery of the city, with the office recently painted. By then, his advertising was coming back as well. With hundreds of thousands killed across the South, one of the first advertisers to return was a seller of gravestones.

And while Lynchburg seems to have accepted the fact that slavery was no more, stories about the misdeeds of the newly freed African Americans began cropping up immediately, along with a story from the Richmond paper claiming there was plenty of work for blacks there and implying that they didn’t want to work.

Early life

Charles Button was born at Harpers Ferry, then in Virginia but now in West Virginia, in 1822. His parents were members of the Methodist church, and Button “imbibed Reform principles from them and the early preachers who were visitors at his father’s house,” according to a Methodist history. His father died when he was young, leaving him to raise the younger brothers and sisters.

He apparently began writing for newspapers when he was around 19 years old, but earned his living as postmaster of Harpers Ferry. This was a lucrative government job and was awarded via political patronage, depending on which party was in power. Button generally supported the Whigs, the more traditional, conservative party of the pre-war era.

The postmaster position was frequently linked with that of newspaper publisher, since the prime means of newspaper distribution was by mail. In Lynchburg, Button’s rival, R.H. Glass — father of Carter Glass, longtime publisher of The News and The Daily Advance and a U.S. Senator — was the postmaster during the Civil War.

Button gave up the postmaster position in Harpers Ferry in 1853 to win election to one term in the Virginia House of Delegates on the Whig ticket.

The future editor of the Virginian married Mary Elizabeth Zollickoffer of Carroll County, Md., in Harpers Ferry when he was 21 and she was about 17. Her father, the Rev. Daniel Zollickoffer, was a farmer and Methodist minister.

The 1850 census for Harpers Ferry lists Charles, 28, and Mary, 23, living with Charles’s mother Jane, 47, and Robert, 10, a younger brother. His occupation is listed as postmaster, with a compensation of $1,000 annually.

By 1880 Mary had her hands full running the Button household, which according to the 1880 census included not only Charles and Mary but also two sons working at the paper, three other children, Button’s sister Marcy, and a 16-year old girl, probably Mary’s niece. Charles’ mother lived with the family in Lynchburg until she died in 1875. A two-year-old daughter, Annie, died during the war.

According to some sources, the Buttons may have first moved from Harpers Ferry to Maryland, Mary’s home, then to Bedford, where Charles worked at the Bedford Sentinel with his brother, Joseph, before buying the Virginian in 1857. Joseph announced in the Daily Virginian in 1857 that he had sold his interest in that paper a few days after Button bought it, and would be joining his brother in Lynchburg.

After the Civil War

“Mr. Button was a man of deep religious conviction and was never known to use an oath,” writes an unknown journalist in an anecdote about Button and his friend, Gen. Jubal Early, a frequent user of oaths.

The editor’s personal demeanor did not resemble that of the profane old Confederate, but Button shared his political philosophy.

“By 1867 what mattered most to him was electing conservative white men,” wrote John Kneebone in the Dictionary of Virginia Biography.

Button ran for the Confederate Congress in spring 1865 but whether the election took place amidst the chaos surrounding the surrender at Appomattox is not known. He lost his last run for elected office, to the state Senate, later in 1865.

In early 1866, Button wrote an editorial noting that Freedmen’s Bureau, set up to help freed slaves, was actually an ally of the white South, after seeing agents “forcing black refugees to sign labor contracts on local farms for the coming year,” according to historian Stephen Tripp. In 1867, Button editorialized against a strike by black workers at the city’s tobacco factories.

After the Civil War, the Virginian supported the Democrats, at that time the party of the status quo, against the Republicans — the party of Lincoln — and later the Readjusters. The Readjusters were a group of blacks and whites who favored devoting the state’s resources to its immediate needs, like public education, rather than paying off Civil War debt.

The Readjusters were led by U.S. Sen. William Mahone, a railroad executive who himself lived in Lynchburg for several years after the war. Mahone held a grudge against Button for years, and opposed his appointment as postmaster in 1885, blocking his confirmation. “Unable to overcome Mahone’s opposition, Button returned to the newspaper after only eighteen months in office,” Kneebone writes.

Button remained on better terms with Early, who moved to Lynchburg after the war. Button published the first U.S. edition of Early’s memoirs in 1867. According to Lynchburg historian Rebecca Yancey, Early, an unreconstructed Confederate, would drop by the offices of both the Virginian and The News to talk with editors and “to tell Mr. Glass and Mr. Button what he thought of their editorials.”

By 1869, Button’s fortunes had recovered to the point where he was able to buy property at 10th and Main for a new office.

About 10 years after his arrival in town, Button was among a group of Lynchburg notables depicted in an 1867 Flavius Fisher painting, “Hog Island Picnic of the Hyena Club.” This was a social club holding its first celebration since the war, on an island in the James River. A 1963 Fine Arts center exhibit in Lynchburg said, “It portrays gifted and influential men who suffered deep humiliation and defeat yet somehow managed to maintain their pride and courage.” McDonald and Fisher himself were also among the 20 Lynchburg men included.

Through the 1870s, Button continued as one of the more prominent residents of the town. In 1875, he was among the original board members of the Lynchburg Female Orphan Asylum, now the Miller Home.

For 1877, a national newspaper directory listed four newspapers in Lynchburg, including the Virginian. The others were the Lynchburg Press, the Lynchburg News, and the Evening Star. The News was published by Alfred Waddill, the former Virginian foreman.

In 1883, the Virginian building on Main Street, burned in a horrific fire that killed five firemen and destroyed many other business. Button sold the Virginian in 1885, returned for a month in 1887, and then sold it again to a group of local businessmen. The News took over the Daily Virginian in 1893, according to 20th century editor Phil Scruggs’ book of Lynchburg history.

By the last decade of the 19th century, even the newspaper world had changed in Lynchburg, despite the conservative nature of local politics under Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The city had an African-American newspaper, The Counsellor and Herald, published from 1891 to 1895, as well as a labor publication, The Weekly Labor Record.

The careers of both Button and his old foreman, Waddill, had spanned the most tumultuous period of American history. Waddill died in 1893, and Button himself passed away from pneumonia at 72 in 1894. He was prominent enough that The New York Times and Baltimore Sun both published obituaries. He and several family members are buried in Spring Hill Cemetery.

Stinnett is a retired editor of The News & Advance and The Roanoke Times.

https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/union_or_secession/people/charles_button

CHARLES WILLIAM BUTTON (1822–1894)

Charles William Button (7 July 1822–29 December 1894), journalist, was born at Harpers Ferry, the son of Charles Button, a blacksmith, and Jane Read Button. He obtained only a limited formal education and was most likely expected to take up a mechanic's trade. Such a fate must have seemed inevitable when Button shouldered the responsibility of looking after his mother and youngest siblings after his father died in 1843.

Nonetheless, Button's religious faith, voracious reading, and political enthusiasm inspired him to write for the newspapers, revealing a remarkable talent for journalism. By 1851, when he began pasting clippings of his published effusions onto the pages of his father's old account book, he was writing political articles for the Charlestown Virginia Free Press and contributing regularly to the Methodist Protestant, of Baltimore, Maryland. His parents were founders of the local Methodist church, and Button became a member in childhood. Through the church he met and by 1853 had married Mary Elizabeth Zollickoffer, the daughter of a Methodist clergyman and a native of Carroll County, Maryland. They had five sons and four daughters.

Button was an active Methodist layman, often attended the state's annual conference, and between the 1850s and 1870s regularly attended national church conferences as well, but a ministerial career did not suit him. His devotion to the Whig Party was also strong, and he served the party well enough to be appointed postmaster at Harpers Ferry in May 1849, an office he resigned in May 1853 to run for the House of Delegates. Button was elected and served a single one-year term representing Jefferson County, all the while reporting on politics to the local newspapers. As a member of the minority party he was appointed to the relatively insignificant Committee to Examine the Penitentiary.

The Lynchburg Daily Virginian
Soon after his younger brother Joseph Button purchased an interest in the Bedford Sentinel, a Whig newspaper, Button moved to Liberty (later the city of Bedford) to join him. On 24 April 1857 Joseph Button announced the sale of his interest in the paper, and on the same day Charles W. Button announced his purchase of the Lynchburg Daily Virginian, one of the oldest Whig newspapers in the state. He promised to continue the paper's advocacy of Whig principles, a pledge that proved difficult to keep as the sectional conflict worsened. The paper's masthead slogan, "The Rights of the States, and the Union of the States," concisely expressed the political ground on which Button stood, and in the 1860 presidential election the paper endorsed the Constitutional Union Party as preferable to the Democrats and the Republicans.

The Lynchburg Daily Virginian was very much a family affair. Button's three brothers worked there, and as of 1860 two brothers and four unrelated printers shared Button's home with his wife, his three children, his mother, and his sister. Journalism was both highly partisan and personal, and rivalries sometimes provoked heated and enduring animosities. On the afternoon of 23 June 1860, after angry editorials had passed between the Lynchburg Daily Virginian and the Lynchburg Republican, as the Button brothers walked home they encountered editorial writers from the other paper. An argument began, during which Joseph Button was shot and mortally wounded. The event deeply affected Charles Button, and five days later in an editorial he promised to be "more forbearing" toward others in the future.

Button published the Lynchburg Daily Virginian through the Civil War, although the paper had shrunk by 1864 to a single sheet without a masthead. The issue of 31 March 1865 printed a public appeal inviting Button to become a candidate for the Confederate House of Representatives following the resignation of William Cabell Rives. Button agreed to serve if elected, and four other candidates also announced their availability. The election probably did not take place as scheduled on 10 April 1865, one week after the fall of Richmond and one day after the surrender of the Confederate army at Appomattox Court House. Nevertheless, some accounts state that Button won election to the Confederate Congress. If so, the victory was an empty one.

By the beginning of June 1865, publication and delivery of the newspaper to city and rural subscribers had resumed, and the paper had grown to four pages. Button looked forward to amnesty and reconciliation, but in his paper of 15 June 1865 he pronounced the idea of enfranchising African Americans "preposterous." After Congress passed Reconstruction acts to provide such rights to blacks, Button abandoned any hope for cooperation with Republicans. In the autumn of 1865 he unsuccessfully ran for the Senate of Virginia from the district comprising Appomattox, Campbell, and Charlotte Counties, and thereafter he confined himself to supporting other candidates. By 1867 what mattered most to him was electing conservative white men. Thus, although the Lynchburg Daily Virginian retained its prewar masthead slogan, Button made it an outspoken advocate of the Virginia Democratic Party against the Republicans and, in the 1880s, the Readjusters. On 2 November 1875 he enjoyed the pleasure of purchasing his former rival, the Lynchburg Republican, and absorbing it into his own paper.

After the Democrats finally elected a president in 1884, Button was rewarded with a patronage appointment as postmaster of Lynchburg. In July 1885 he assumed his new duties and left the newspaper under the direction of his sons Charles Fletcher Button and Joseph Button (1865–1943). Senator William Mahone, leader of the Readjusters, opposed Button's appointment and blocked its confirmation. Unable to overcome Mahone's opposition, Button returned to the newspaper after only eighteen months in office.

Button sold the Lynchburg Daily Virginian a few months later, on 14 March 1887. He remained in Lynchburg for several years, looking after his properties and participating in Methodist affairs. Early in 1894 he moved to the Appomattox County farm of his son Joseph Button, who later served as clerk of the Senate of Virginia and the state's first commissioner of insurance. Charles William Button died there of pneumonia on 29 December 1894 and was buried in Lynchburg's Spring Hill Cemetery.

Contributed by John T. Kneebone

Quotations in Lynchburg Daily Virginian, 28 June 1860 (first quotation), 15 June 1865 (second quotation).

This biography, with a bibliographical note, appears in John T. Kneebone et al., eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 1998– ), 2:444–446.

Copyright 2001 by the Library of Virginia. All rights reserved.