Wherein an extinguished political career helps launch a newspaper's
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| Ad for Baker's Philadelphia funeral march, November 7, 1861 |
The newspaper of record in Washington City in 1861 was the Evening Star, sometimes called the Washington Star outside of the city, a name it wouldn't take officially until 1970s and would keep until it closed in 1981. Its presses and building (and the contracts of many of its staff, including Mary McGrory, Howard Kurtz, Fred Hiatt, and Jonathan Yardley, as well as rights to those soap comics that still run) were purchased by the Washington Post. The building at the corner of 11th and Pennsylvania now houses Fogo de Chao, among other tenants, but the paper's original 1861 building stood across Pennsylvania Avenue. The paper was small and new then, it had only been in operation for ten years, but the boom in population in Civil War Washington would build the paper, and the evolving, sensational news surrounding Ball's Bluff and the death of sitting U.S. Senator Edward Baker would be part of what caused the paper's circulation to explode.
On October 23, the paper reprinted George McClellan's General Orders No. 31 commemorating Baker, and added its own report, which would subsequently be forwarded by newspapermen around the country:
The remains of the late gallant Col. E.B. Baker have not yet reached Washington. They are to be taken to the residence of Major J.W. Webb, at the corner of Fourteenth and H streets--No. 363. We learn incidentally that his body was pierced with six balls, either of which would probably have been fatal; thus showing that his person on the field was a shining mark indeed. On leaving his quarters at his friend, Major Webb's for the field of his death, he remarked to that gentleman that he expected to be in action in less than forty-eight hours, and felt that he should lose his life; closing the conversation with a request that Major W. should send for his body if his presentment proved true.
