"There's a famous sketch showing the men flocking around The Inquirer news seller in the camps in Northern Virginia," Waskie said. "It was the most popular paper for Pennsylvania troops, but others liked it, too, because it favored and supported the Lincoln administration. They received praise instead of the criticism in other papers, like the Ledger."

Southern soldiers "loved to get Northern newspapers to see what the North was saying about them," said Rolph, author of My Brother's Keeper: Union and Confederate Acts of Mercy During the Civil War.

"They felt sometimes that their own newspapers were slanting what was occurring. There were plenty of accounts in diaries and letters describing how lots of soldiers swapped newspapers along the picket lines."

The soldiers wanted to feel connected to the homefront and the cataclysmic events unfolding around them. "They were desperate for reading material and newspapers were the reading material of choice after the Bible," Miller said. "People were gobbling up The Inquirer."

Competition among newspapers was fierce.

The Inquirer's chief rival, the Philadelphia Press, was said to have complained that Inquirer correspondents seemed to know more about the war than did most of the generals.

John Forney, editor of the Press, hoped to catch up to The Inquirer's surging circulation and pushed his reporters to give him "not sensation inventions, but real news . . . We must be behind no longer."

President Abraham Lincoln once said he didn't have to visit the battlefield because he read the reports of George Alfred Townsend, at 20 one of the war's youngest correspondents, who worked for The Inquirer and other publications, Waskie said.

Lincoln was not the only leader who appreciated The Inquirer and other newspapers. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee "once boasted that he had the best intelligence of anyone because he read the Northern papers," Miller said. "Some of the reporting was bad. There was a rush to get stories out. Mistakes were made in a hurried and harried atmosphere.

"People were learning by doing. They never had war correspondents who had to do so much under duress," Miller said. "And The Inquirer did pretty well. It helped shape public opinion."

The Inquirer's "on-the-spot war reporting was fair and balanced, and generally well-respected by the troops," Waskie said. And on the home front, "it provided fair reporting to the black community, while the Ledger rarely mentioned it.

"There were stories on the Colored Ladies Aid Society, which gathered goods and bandages for the troops. And there were stories on [abolitionist and civil-rights leaders] Frederick Douglass and Octavius Cato. Douglass was in Philadelphia at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg and it was reported in The Inquirer."

Several Inquirer reporters stood out during the war but not always for roles they sought.

Henry Bentley, a skilled, sometimes comical, war correspondent known for loquaciousness, was captured by the Confederates when they surprised the Union camp at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862. He escaped the next day during a federal counterattack, briefly telegraphed the paper, then traveled to Philadelphia to turn in his story in person.

Another Inquirer reporter, Edward Crapsey, wrote a story in 1864 that embarrassed Union Gen. George Gordon Meade, a Philadelphian and hero of the Battle of Gettysburg. Crapsey reported that Meade had been timid and that Ulysses S. Grant was making the decisions.

Meade was angered by the story, saying it was based not in fact but on "camp rumors," and he ordered Crapsey expelled from the camp. The newsman was placed backward on a mule and paraded through the camp to the tune of "The Rogue's March." A placard reading "Libeler of the Press" was placed around his neck.

The Inquirer and other newspapers retaliated by ignoring whatever accomplishments Meade could claim over the next six months and attributing them to Grant.

"Meade later remarked that [Crapsey's expulsion] was one of the greatest regrets he ever had," Waskie said. Though a beloved hero in Philadelphia, "it contributed to his loss of stature."