Hi -- the mod-team noticed that this is attracting a whole bunch of short, speculative answers and it's probably due to a typo in the body of the submission:

This article was published April 25 1856

I assume you mean 1865, not 1856, but unfortunately due to that right now all you're getting is people wandering in from r/all and dunking on you for the typo. We went ahead and removed the question temporarily.

If you can fix that, and reply here when you have, we'll restore it and you can have an actual shot at getting a good answer. Thanks!

The ability to access information (both more biased information and more factual) would have varied significantly based on where one lived at the time. The South was not a monolithic region that all had the same beliefs, practices, or allegiances to the CSA or the Union. Given the diversity that one could come across in the South, different 'newspapers' would often publish biased or distorted news. I use quotations around newspapers because some of these papers would have been literally a single page printed with a few stories. Take the Library of Congress's write up on The Rebel, " The first few issues of the Rebel had four pages but it was soon reduced to a single sheet. Content included general orders for soldiers, war news via telegraph dispatches, reports from other newspapers, local matters, and ads. "

For Southerners, the more modern infrastructure that benefited the North (early usage of telegraphs) was not as dependable. Historian Yael Sternhell wrote about the spread of news in the South. "Contemporaries enjoyed the advantages of a competitive press market and the availability of the two greatest technological innovations of their time, the train and the telegraph; yet in the wartime South, what should have been a moment of triumph for modern communication turned into an extravaganza of misinformation. News transmitted over the wires was often incomprehensible; train travelers spread stories that were blatantly wrong; newspapers functioned as rumor mills, and war correspondents admitted that they had no idea what they were doing." The rumor mill portion is important to focus on because many of these newspapers were published locally by people with locally vested interests or loyalties to the CSA. Additionally, there were not widespread standards (what we would call journalistic integrity today) that these private operations had have to hold themselves too.

That is not to say, however, that there were no reliable sources of news at the time, just that the smaller self-published papers like *The Rebel (*as the name alludes) were papers published with an agenda. The author of the article in Tri-Weekly News appears to be attempting to make the claim that France should be concerned about the imperialistic intentions of the United States should the Union and the CSA come back together (remember that France invaded Mexico during this period and placed Maximillian on the throne). The author is suggesting that the CSA had no intention of turning their eyes south towards Mexico, but that the ever-expanding United States may. He even boldly claims that the CSA would actually TEAM up with France to continue the fight against the United States. The author, of course, was in no position to make offers or deals with the French over Mexico so it appears to be written, in my opinion, as a fiery op-ed of sorts to continue rallying up whatever pro- CSA followers may have been left. As to how widespread these papers were also depended on where you were in the South. Some localities had papers that would publish more pro-Union papers.

I answered a slightly similar question about a year ago about what some people may have known about the war that were isolated from larger cities. I discussed that the difference in loyalties could quiet literally be separated by geographical differences as small as mountain hollers. (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dt9vfb/im_a_hillbilly_living_a_secluded_life_in/ if you're interested in that answer).

Sources:

Sternhell, Yael A. "Communicating War: The Culture of Information in Richmond during the American Civil War." Past & Present, no. 202

ANDREWS, J. CUTLER. "Misleading Dispatches and Misspent Opportunities." In South Reports the Civil War, 264-301.

I will leave it to the subject-matter experts to address the specific question of Southern attitudes in 1865. But I think this question touches on a really important historiographical point which ought to be addressed.

With the benefit of hindsight, historians (especially popular historians, and the ones who write textbooks) like to draw simple lines from A to B, and attach a nice neat date to major events. "The Norman Conquest was decided by the Battle of Hastings on 14th October 1066." "The Byzantine Empire came to an end after the fall of Constantinople on 29th May 1453." "The Second World War began on 1 September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland." Often, and particularly when dealing with events before the printing press became widespread, this simplification is forced by the limited sources available, but otherwise it just helps our human brains set convenient limits on a given event without having to put grey areas on everything.

The thing is, all of these are based on hindsight. They weren't necessarily obvious to the people living through those times. We define the Norman Conquest by the Battle of Hastings because there was no resistance on a similar scale after Harold Godwinsson's death - but an average Saxon in 1067 didn't know that. It took years, several further revolts, sieges of loyalist strongpoints such as Exeter, repulsion of raids by Harold's Ireland-based sons, the Harrying of the North and buying off potential Danish invaders before William the Bastard and his Norman barons actually consolidate control over England. Similarly, though Hitler's invasion of Poland prompted war declarations from Britain and France, it took until early 1940 for war to intensify in the west, and as far as an average civilian in those times was concerned, it could reasonably be argued that this was just an intensification of the earlier standoffs over Czechoslovakia, and the hostilities would soon peter out (leaving Hitler in control of Poland) when both sides were unable to face a re-enactment of WW1's terrible bloodshed. Even after a major historical event has occurred, it can take a long time for its consequences to be felt and for the parties involve to realise its significance. Often "major historical events" are only defined retrospectively, based on the events that did or did not happen after them. We look at Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933 as an event of terrible significance, but had Hitler died of a heart attack or failed to pass the Enabling Act, instead it may be looked at as a footnote in a long line of short-lived Weimar Republic governments. A German citizen in January 1933 could not know exactly how things would turn out.

Indeed, this sort of thing is one reason why this subreddit has a 20-year rule, since we have a similar blindness when it comes to the consequences of current or recent events, as they simply haven't had enough time to play out yet (I don't think I can exemplify this without breaking said rule). An event we may view as significant may be forgotten by historians; something we view as a crucial, nation-defining debate may be viewed by historians as settled years before today.

So for the Southerners in 1865, I would ask: does the defeat of Confederate armies in the field actually mean the end of the Confederacy? Can the Union armies realistically hold onto such a large, hostile territory or will they be forced to retreat and acknowledge the South's independence? Will the assassination of the Union's president, and his succession by a Democrat from the South, lead to a Union administration content to coexist with an independent Confederacy? Will foreign powers remain neutral, or will they now intervene to stop the war from ending and divide North America in their favour? Of course, 155 years later we know the answers to all these questions. But the average man on the street from Tennessee or South Carolina has no idea, and I'd suggest it doesn't even take a great deal of wishful thinking for him to come up with the conclusion that the Confederacy was there to stay.