Charles Carleton Coffin was one of the most celebrated American war correspondents of the nineteenth century, reporting from Civil War battlefields for the Boston Journal and producing popular histories of the conflict for general readers. William Elliot Griffis’s biography traces Coffin’s long career as journalist, travel writer, popular historian, and Massachusetts legislator, capturing the figure of the Victorian man of letters who shaped public understanding of American history through vivid firsthand reporting.
As journalism history and as a window into the popular transmission of Civil War memory, this biography is a valuable document. Download this free EPUB for a portrait of one of the most prolific and widely read American journalists of the nineteenth century.