By JOE LAKER

For the Sunday News-Register

Wheeling’s two newspapers, the Daily Intelligencer and the Daily Register, offered their readers competing interpretations and answers for national and state problems in September 1864.

The Intelligencer, published by Archibald Campbell and John McDermot, favored the Union; the Republican party, the Lincoln administration, and West Virginia’s separation from Virginia. The Register, published by Lewis Bake and O.S. Long, supported the Democratic party, frequently criticized Lincoln, and favored a more conciliatory policy toward the Confederacy.

As national and state electioneering in 1864 heated up, the Daily Intelligencer published, each day, the slate of the Union (Republican) national, state, and local ticket and printed many articles critical of the Democratic platform and its presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Gen. George McClellan and Sen. George Pendleton of Ohio. The Register, on the other hand, daily printed the Democratic ticket, praised its nominees, and claimed “Abraham Lincoln is striving by the exercise of force and bribery and fraud to perpetuate and strengthen his power over the lives and liberties of the people.” The Register claimed Lincoln was responsible for the deaths of Union soldiers in Confederate prisons because he refused Confederate requests to exchange prisoners.

Both newspapers carried out election polling on trains, at train stations, and among soldiers, but their results showed opposite results. People polled by the Daily Intelligencer overwhelmingly favored Lincoln; those surveyed by the Daily Register strongly preferred McClellan.

After being suppressed by the army for more than two months, the Register resumed publication on Sept. 22 with a long story about the paper’s suspension. At 3 p. m. on July 9th, Captain Ewald Over, with three armed Union soldiers, showed up at the Register’s building and arrested the newspaper’s editors, Baker and Long, and put them in the Atheneum. An armed soldier was placed at the door to prevent entrance; employees were forced to leave.

Over acted on orders sent by Gen. David Hunter. No charges were filed against the editors and their letters to generals Hunter, Crook and Kelley asking for an explanation were ignored until after Hunter was dismissed from his command. Hunter’s replacement, Gen. Philip Sheridan, ordered the editors released on Aug. 30. Once freed the editors learned that while the Register’s office was closed and under armed guard, their private papers had been searched and destroyed. The Register’s editors speculated that Hunter had suppressed the newspaper because of the Register’s criticism of Hunter’s military tactics against the Confederates at Lynchburg and because the Register was the only Democratic paper in West Virginia, some abolitionists wanted the paper destroyed.

During September. Union armies and the navy made significant gains against the Confederates, which helped ensure Lincoln’s election to a second term in November. Sheridan won a series of battles against the rebel forces in the Shenandoah Valley and by the end of the month had begun to destroy the food supplies there that were so vital to the Confederacy. On Sept. 1, Sherman seized Atlanta, soon forced all civilians from the city and then destroyed it by fire. He then began his march to the coast to eliminate rebel resources.

The Confederacy responded by launching offenses in Tennessee and Missouri to force the Union armies to abandon their strategies, but by the end of the month these attacks had failed. On Sept. 18 a band of 34 Confederate rebels seized two steamboats on Lake Erie as part of a plot to seize a federal warship. The attempt failed.

Wheeling was racked by violence during much of September 1864. The police struck for higher wages and while one chamber of the city council agreed to raise salaries, the other chamber refused. Citizens demanded a tripling of the number of police. At one point only one officer was on active duty and the army briefly took over the job of maintaining order. Among the violent acts facing the citizens were a foiled attempt by Confederate prisoners to escape by tunnel from the Atheneum, and the beating and robbery of a number of soldiers who had received bounties to enlist in the army.

The Daily Intelligencer reported on Sept. 17 that rebel prisoners in the Atheneum were catching, cooking and eating rats due to limited rations. Capt. Over investigated and found that some young men, not due to short rations but curiosity, were eating rats, which they claimed tasted like squirrel. Over gave the men permission to continue to do so.