Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy

March 11, 2013
Modern journalists scrambling to file before deadline have nothing on Junius Browne and Albert Richardson. While working as Civil War correspondents for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the duo were captured during the Battle of Vicksburg and spent 20 months in Confederate prisons before escaping behind Union lines. Like the late conflict photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who lived with close colleagues in a Brooklyn apartment dubbed “the kibbutz,” the sardonic Junius and gregarious Albert had their own clique of battle-minded journos known as the “Bohemian Brigade,” and though they were determined “to extract as much fun as possible from the grim business of war,” the pair’s luck ran out while trying to avoid the danger of blazing cannon by floating atop hay bales down the Mississippi. Former Washington Post reporter Carlson (K Blows Top) relates their ensuing odyssey in lively detail, from stints in multiple prisons, to an encounter with a certified pirate, a secret society called the “Heroes of America,” and an escape and flight over snowy mountains. Civil War buffs and historians of journalism will revel in this thrilling tale of two raucous, self-described “knights of the quill.” 2 photos & 2 maps. Agent: Scott Mendel, Mendel Media Group.

March 15, 2013
A rollicking story of imprisonment and escape during the Civil War seems a stretch, but journalist Carlson accomplished a similar feat with a Soviet premier in K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist (2009), and this is another entertaining, occasionally gruesome account. The author describes how New York Tribune reporters Junius Brown and Albert Richardson covered the war for two years until Confederate artillery sunk their boat as they tried to sail past Vicksburg, Miss., to join Gen. Grant's forces in May 1863. Confederate troops rescued the survivors. As civilians, they were paroled in Vicksburg until Confederate officials, knowing the two worked for the abolitionist newspaper, reconsidered. Protesting loudly, they traveled with other POWs by train across the South to Richmond to spend nine months in the notorious Libby and Castle Thunder prisons, furiously pulling strings for their release, sharing the soldiers' experiences but shielded from serious privation by an apparently steady source of money. In February 1864, they were sent to the far worse Salisbury camp in North Carolina, where they watched with horror as Union prisoners, with no shelter and little food, died by the thousands. Finally escaping in December, they walked more than 300 miles, hungry and freezing, through snowy mountains to Northern lines in Tennessee, aided by a surprisingly large number of Union sympathizers, black and white. Being journalists, they had plenty to say about their exploits. Carlson has taken full advantage of abundant material to deliver a vivid chronicle of two working Civil War reporters and their spectacular odyssey.

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