Living in times of division
On September 29, 1868, a headline in the Daily Star screamed, “The Ku Klux Klan at work in New London.” There was no byline, but the writer identified himself as a senior editor at the newspaper. He recounted how one evening he and a friend had been beaten near the corner of State and Bank Street by three thugs. He alleged, without offering substantiation, that the assailants were Klansmen, and expressed outrage that New London was “infested with a gang of Democratic roughs who take all opportunities to assault and attack Republicans.”
During the Civil War, Republicans were Unionists, while the Democratic party was aligned with the South, so the piece may have been political name-calling rather than a serious assertion about the KKK. (After the war, both parties would redefine their ideologies.)
The article was puzzling, though. In the run-up to the Civil War and during the early years of the conflict, the Star’s owner/editor, David Ruddock, had been a Democrat, a vocal supporter of the Confederacy, and an unabashed racist. If he penned this piece, what accounted for the radical change of heart?
Ruddock, who took the helm of the Star after its previous owner left for the Gold Rush, wasn’t a very pleasant man. One contemporary, struggling to find something nice to say, wrote that he successfully hid his good qualities “behind his outward manifestation of crankiness.”
He made the Star an advocate for the Democratic Party, while taking potshots at the Chronicle, a rival newspaper that supported the North. In 1860, when the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher made a speech in New London, Ruddock wrote that Beecher “spit out some of his dark colored wormwood” and characterized the talk as “an incendiary abolitionist harangue.” He made a project of attacking Augustus Brandegee, a judge and future mayor of New London, who opposed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act When Lincoln won the presidency, Ruddock was surprised and horrified.
Ruddock wasn’t alone in his political opinions. The region’s close economic ties with the South made the coming conflict a contentious topic. Local businesses manufactured cotton gins for the South, relied on Southern pine for shipbuilding, and sold guano obtained during whaling voyages to plantation owners for fertilizer. As the inevitability of war grew increasingly obvious, these and other trade interests sparked considerable acrimony.
(The era echoed the discord decades earlier during the War of 1812 when embargos of British goods hit New England states especially hard. A less than proud moment occurred at the Hartford Convention in 1814 when the possibility of secession from the Union was discussed. Some historians think this was political theater rather than a serious proposal, but still ...)
As time went on, New Londoners became more united in their support for the war. It wasn’t lost on Ruddock that other papers, reporting on soldiers deploying from Fort Trumbull and publishing news from the front, were selling briskly, and that the Star’s sales were slumping. In fact, some people were so outraged by his anti-war stance that there were protests outside his office and even a threat to burn the building down. Ruddock was so unnerved that he hired a bodyguard to protect him when he was out and about the city.
Motivated by fears for his safety and seeing a business opportunity in the growing war fervor. he began to change the paper’s tone and rehabilitate his image. In 1866, he hired John Tibbits to assume editorial responsibilities and try to reverse the paper’s decline. Tibbits was a Union veteran who’d been wounded at Gettysburg and Antietam; I bet he, not Ruddock, wrote the article about the alleged KKK assault.
We live in divisive times, too, where vehemently held political views make civil discourse challenging. It helps to know that times like these have come — and gone — before.
“The Day Paper” by Gregory N. Stone, published by The Day in 2000, provided much of the information for this column.