During the Civil War, printers in Union regiments often commandeered local printing offices to start their own soldier newspapers. Turning the newspaper page into a print battleground, they symbolically occupied Confederate imaginative space just as they physically occupied the South. Soldier-printers grasped the cultural agency of print, using their papers to assert military authority over occupied towns, to critique Confederate leaders and generals, and to taunt Southern editors in the pages and with the abandoned presses of their once fire-eating news rags. However, the material constraints on printing—scarcity of paper and ink, ransacked printing offices, already-set type, untimely departures —had unforeseen effects along these paper fronts in the war. The formal particularities of a Union paper published on the half-printed detritus of a Southern newspaper office could destabilize and disrupt the very assertions of national reunion or martial authority for which the papers were printed. Such instability, prompted by the affordances of wartime printing and manifest in the material relationships on the page, demonstrates what Berkey argues is the material agency of print and periodical form during wartime.