ABSTRACT
The eighth of June in 1863 was a cool late spring day in New York. In the Astor House Hotel, at one o'clock in the afternoon, sixteen journalists representing approximately two million readers assembled for what one New York paper called one of "the most remarkable and important meetings which has occurred since the war" started. New York journalists had met in 1848 to respond to their depiction in a play titled "New York in Slices." Reporters had gathered at the Capitol in Washington, DC, at the start of the war to protest Winfield Scott's decision to limit newspaper transmissions on the telegraph lines without his approval. The editors at the Astor House were standing up for their profession. They drew up nonpartisan resolutions that declared freedom of the press to be a bedrock principle of democratic society, even in wartime—even in time of civil war.
