Republicans started labeling anti-war Democrats "Copperheads" after the eastern copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix), a species of venomous snake. Those Democrats embraced the moniker, reinterpreting the copper "head" as the likeness of Liberty, which they cut from Liberty Head large cent coins and proudly wore as badges.[2] By contrast, Democratic supporters of the war were called War Democrats. Notable Copperheads included two Democratic Congressmen from Ohio: Reps. Clement L. Vallandigham and Alexander Long. Republican prosecutors accused some prominent Copperheads of treason in a series of trials in 1864.[3]
Copperheadism was a highly contentious grassroots movement. It had its strongest base just north of the Ohio River and in some urban ethnic wards. In the State of Ohio, perhaps in contrast with Indiana and Illinois, the counties that had Peace Democrat majorities tended not to be along the Ohio River, but more in the central and northwestern portions of the state.[4] Historians such as Wood Gray, Jennifer Weber and Kenneth M. Stampp[citation needed] have argued that it represented a traditionalistic element alarmed at the rapid modernization of society sponsored by the Republican Party and that it looked back to Jacksonian democracy for inspiration. Weber argues that the Copperheads damaged the Union war effort by opposing conscription, encouraging desertion, and forming conspiracies. Still, other historians say that the draft was already in disrepute and that the Republicans greatly exaggerated the conspiracies for partisan reasons.[5][6][pageneeded]
Historians such as Gray and Weber argue that the Copperheads were inflexibly rooted in the past and were naive about the refusal of the Confederates to return to the Union. Convinced that the Republicans were ruining the traditional world they loved, they were obstructionist partisans.[7] In turn, the Copperheads became a significant target of the National Union Party in the 1864 presidential election, where they were used to discredit the leading Democratic candidates.
Copperhead support increased when Union armies did poorly and decreased when they won great victories. After the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, Union military success seemed assured, and Copperheadism collapsed.
A possible origin of the name came from a New York Times newspaper account in April 1861 that stated that when postal officers in Washington, D.C., opened a mail bag from a state now in the Confederacy:
A day or two since, when one of the mail-bags coming from the South by way of Alexandria, was emptied in the court-yard of the Post-office, a box fell out and was broken open, – from which two copperheads, one four and a half and the other three feet long, crawled out. The larger one was benumbed and easily killed; the other was very lively and venomous, and was dispatched with some difficulty and danger. What are we to think of a people who resort to such weapons of warfare.[8][9]
Agenda
Copperhead pamphlet from 1864 by Charles Chauncey Burr, a magazine editor from New York City
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union and strongly opposed the war, about which they faulted abolitionists. They demanded immediate peace and resisted draft laws. They wanted President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the President as a tyrant destroying American republican values with despotic and arbitrary actions.[11]
Some Copperheads tried to persuade Union soldiers to desert. They talked of helping Confederate prisoners of war seize their camps and escape. They sometimes met with Confederate agents and took money. The Confederacy encouraged their activities whenever possible.[12]
Newspapers
The Copperheads had numerous important newspapers, but the editors never allied. In Chicago, Wilbur F. Storey made the Chicago Times into Lincoln's most vituperative enemy.[13] The New York Journal of Commerce, originally abolitionist, was sold to owners who became Copperheads, giving them an important voice in the largest city. A typical editor was Edward G. Roddy, owner of the Uniontown, PennsylvaniaGenius of Liberty. He was an intensely partisan Democrat who saw African Americans as an inferior race and Lincoln as a despot and dunce. Although he supported the war effort in 1861, he blamed abolitionists for prolonging the war and denounced the government as increasingly despotic. By 1864, he was calling for peace at any price.[citation needed]
John Mullaly's Metropolitan Record was the official Catholic newspaper in New York City. Reflecting Irish American opinion, it supported the war until 1863 before becoming a Copperhead organ. In the spring and summer of 1863, the paper urged its Irish working-class readers to pursue armed resistance to the draft passed by Congress earlier in the year. When the draft began in the city, working-class European Americans, largely Irish, responded with violent riots from July 13 to 16, lynching, beating and hacking to death more than 100 black New Yorkers and burning down black-owned businesses and institutions, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, an orphanage for 233 black children. On August 19, 1864, John Mullaly was arrested for inciting resistance to the draft.
Even in an era of extremely partisan journalism, Copperhead newspapers were remarkable for their angry rhetoric. Wisconsin newspaper editor Marcus M. Pomeroy of the La Crosse Democrat referred to Lincoln as "Fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism" and a "worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero ... The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer ... And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good".[14]
Copperhead resistance
Clement Vallandigham, leader of the Copperheads, coined the slogan: "To maintain the Constitution as it is, and to restore the Union as it was."
The Copperheads sometimes talked of violent resistance and, in some cases, started to organize. However, they never actually made an organized attack. As war opponents, Copperheads were suspected of disloyalty, and their leaders were sometimes arrested and held for months in military prisons without trial. One famous example was General Ambrose Burnside's 1863 General Order Number 38, issued in Ohio, which made it an offense (to be tried in military court) to criticize the war in any way.[15] The order was used to arrest Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham when he criticized the order itself.[16] However, Lincoln commuted his sentence while requiring his exile to the Confederacy.
Probably the largest Copperhead group was the Knights of the Golden Circle. Formed in Ohio in the 1850s, it became politicized in 1861. It reorganized as the Order of American Knights in 1863 and again in early 1864 as the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with Vallandigham as its commander. One leader, Harrison H. Dodd, advocated the violent overthrow of the governments of Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri in 1864. Democratic Party leaders and a Federal investigation thwarted his "Northwest Conspiracy". Despite this Copperhead setback, tensions remained high. The Charleston Riot took place in Illinois in March 1864. Indiana Republicans then used the sensational revelation of an antiwar Copperhead conspiracy by elements of the Sons of Liberty to discredit Democrats in the 1864 House elections. The military trial of Lambdin P. Milligan and other Sons of Liberty revealed plans to set free the Confederate prisoners held in the state. The culprits were sentenced to hang, but the Supreme Court intervened in Ex parte Milligan, saying they should have received civilian trials.[17]
Most Copperheads actively participated in politics. On May 1, 1863, former Congressman Vallandigham declared the war was being fought not to save the Union but to free the blacks and enslave Southern whites. The U.S. Army then arrested him for declaring sympathy for the enemy. He was court-martialed by the Army and sentenced to imprisonment, but Lincoln commuted the sentence to banishment behind Confederate lines.[18] The Democrats nevertheless nominated him for governor of Ohio in 1863. He left the Confederacy and went to Canada, where he campaigned for governor but lost after an intense battle. He operated behind the scenes at the 1864 Democratic convention in Chicago. This convention adopted a largely Copperhead platform and selected Ohio Representative George Pendleton (a known Peace Democrat) as the vice-presidential candidate. However, it chose a pro-war presidential candidate, General George B. McClellan. The contradiction severely weakened the party's chances to defeat Lincoln.[citation needed]
Characteristics
The values of the Copperheads reflected the Jacksonian democracy of an earlier agrarian society. The Copperhead movement attracted Southerners who had settled north of the Ohio River, and the poor and merchants who had lost profitable Southern trade.[19][20] They were most numerous in border areas, including southern parts of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana (in Missouri, comparable groups were avowed Confederates).[21]
The movement had scattered bases of support outside the lower Midwest. A Copperhead element in Connecticut dominated the Democratic Party there.[22] The Copperhead coalition included many Irish American Catholics in eastern cities, mill towns and mining camps (especially in the Pennsylvania coal fields). They were also numerous in German Catholic areas of the Midwest, especially Wisconsin.[23]
There was an earthy quality in Voorhees, "the tall sycamore of the Wabash." On the stump his hot temper, passionate partisanship, and stirring eloquence made an irresistible appeal to the western Democracy [i.e. the Democratic Party]. His bitter cries against protective tariffs and national banks, his intense race prejudice, his suspicion of the eastern Yankee, his devotion to personal liberty, his defense of the Constitution and State's rights faithfully reflected the views of his constituents. Like other Jacksonianagrarians, he resented the political and economic revolution then in progress. Voorhees idealized a way of life that he thought was being destroyed by the current rulers of his country. His bold protests against these dangerous trends made him the idol of the Democracy of the Wabash Valley.[24]
Historiography
Two central questions have run through the historiography of the Copperheads, i.e., "How serious a threat did they pose to the Union war effort and hence to the nation's survival?" and "to what extent and with what justification did the Lincoln administration and other Republican officials violate civil liberties to contain the perceived menace?".[25]
The first book-length scholarly treatment of the Copperheads was The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (1942) by Wood Gray: in it, Gray decried the "defeatism" of the Copperheads and argued that they deliberately served the Confederacy's war aims.[26] Also in 1942, George Fort Milton published Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, which likewise condemned the traitorous Copperheads and praised Lincoln as a model defender of democracy.[27][25]
Gilbert R. Tredway, a professor of history, in his 1973 study Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana found most Indiana Democrats were loyal to the Union and desired national reunification. He documented Democratic counties in Indiana having outperformed Republican counties in recruiting soldiers. Tredway found that Copperhead sentiment was uncommon among the rank-and-file Democrats in Indiana.[28]
The chief historians who favored the Copperheads are Richard O. Curry and Frank L. Klement. Klement devoted most of his career to debunking the idea that the Copperheads represented a danger to the Union. Klement and Curry have downplayed the treasonable activities of the Copperheads, arguing the Copperheads were traditionalists who fiercely resisted modernization and wanted to return to the old ways. Klement argued in the 1950s that the Copperheads' activities, especially their supposed participation in treasonous anti-Union secret societies, were mostly false inventions by Republican propaganda machines designed to discredit the Democrats at election time.[25] Curry sees Copperheads as poor traditionalists battling against the railroads, banks, and modernization.[29] In his standard history Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), James M. McPherson asserted Klement had taken "revision a bit too far. There was some real fire under that smokescreen of Republican propaganda".[25][30]
Jennifer Weber's Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North (2006) agrees more with Gray and Milton than with Klement. She argues that first, Northern antiwar sentiment was strong, so strong that Peace Democrats came close to seizing control of their party in mid-1864. Second, she shows the peace sentiment led to deep divisions and occasional violence across the North. Third, Weber concluded that the peace movement deliberately weakened the Union military effort by undermining both enlistment and the operation of the draft. Indeed, Lincoln had to divert combat troops to retake control of New York City from the anti-draft rioters in 1863. Fourth, Weber shows how the attitudes of Union soldiers affected partisan battles back home. The soldiers' rejection of Copperheadism and overwhelming support for Lincoln's reelection in 1864 was decisive in securing the Northern victory and the preservation of the Union. The Copperheads' appeal, she argues, waxed and waned with Union failures and successes in the field.[6][pageneeded]
↑ Michael Kent Curtis, "Lincoln, Vallandigham, and Anti-War Speech in the Civil War." William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 7 (1998) pp. 105+.
↑ Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West.
↑ Frank L. Klement, "Clement L. Vallandigham's Exile in the Confederacy, May 25 – June 17, 1863." Journal of Southern History (1965): 149–163. in JSTOR.
↑ Mary Beth Norton, et al. A People and a Nation, A History of the United States" Vol I, (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001) pp. 393–395.
↑ Eugene H. Roseboom, "Southern Ohio and the Union in 1863." Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1952): 29–44. in JSTOR.
↑ Robert H. Abzug, "The Copperheads: Historical Approaches to Civil War Dissent in the Midwest." Indiana Magazine of History (1970): 40–55. online.
↑ Joanna D. Cowden, "The Politics of Dissent: Civil War Democrats in Connecticut." New England Quarterly (1983): 538–554. in JSTOR.
Calhoun, Charles W. "The Fire in the Rear", Reviews in American History (2007) 35#4 pp.530–537 10.1353/rah.2007.0078 online; review of Weber, Jennifer L. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North.
Cowden, Joanna D. "The Politics of Dissent: Civil War Democrats in Connecticut", The New England Quarterly, 56#4 (December 1983), pp.538–554 in JSTOR.
Cowden, Joanna D., "Heaven Will Frown on Such a Cause as This": Six Democrats Who Opposed Lincoln's War. (UP of America, 2001). xviii, 259pp.
Curry, Richard O. "Copperheadism and Continuity: the Anatomy of a Stereotype", Journal of Negro History (1972) 57(1): 29–36. in JSTOR.
Curry, Richard O. "The Union as it Was: a Critique of Recent Interpretations of the 'Copperheads'". Civil War History 1967 13(1): 25–39.
George, Joseph Jr. "'Abraham Africanus I': President Lincoln Through the Eyes of a Copperhead Editor". Civil War History 1968 14(3): 226–239.
George, Joseph Jr. "'A Catholic Family Newspaper' Views the Lincoln Administration: John Mullaly's Copperhead Weekly". Civil War History 1978 24(2): 112–132.
Gray, Wood. The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (1942), emphasizes treasonous activity.
Hershock, Martin J. "Copperheads and Radicals: Michigan Partisan Politics during the Civil War Era, 1860–1865", Michigan Historical Review (1992) 18#1 pp.28–69.
Kleen, Michael, "The Copperhead Threat in Illinois: Peace Democrats, Loyalty Leagues, and the Charleston Riot of 1864", Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (2012), 105#1 pp.69–92.
Klement, Frank L. The Copperheads in the Middle West (1960).
Klement, Frank L. The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1998).
Klement, Frank L. Lincoln's Critics: The Copperheads of the North (1999).
Klement, Frank L. Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (1984).
Landis, Michael Todd. Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Lendt, David L. Demise of the Democracy: The Copperhead Press in Iowa. (1973).
Lendt, David L. "Iowa and the Copperhead Movement". Annals of Iowa 1970 40(6): 412–426.
Manber, Jeffrey, Dahlstrom, Neil. Lincoln's Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President's Mission to Destroy the Press (2005).
Nevins, Allan. The War for the Union (4 vols. 1959–1971), the standard scholarly history of wartime politics and society.
Rodgers, Thomas E. "Copperheads or a Respectable Minority: Current Approaches to the Study of Civil War-Era Democrats". Indiana Magazine of History 109#2 (2013): 114–146. in JSTOR; historiography focused on Klement, Weber and Silbey.
Tidwell, William A. April '65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War. (1995).
Walsh, Justin E. "To Print the News and Raise Hell: Wilbur F. Storey's Chicago 'Times'". Journalism Quarterly (1963) 40#4 pp.497–510. doi: 10.1177/107769906304000402.
Weber, Jennifer L. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North (2006).
Wertheim, Lewis J. "The Indianapolis Treason Trials, the Elections of 1864 and the Power of the Partisan Press". Indiana Magazine of History 1989 85(3): 236–250.
Wubben, Hubert H. Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement (1980).
The 1864 United States presidential election was the 20th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1864. Near the end of the American Civil War, incumbent President Abraham Lincoln of the National Union Party easily defeated the Democratic nominee, former General George B. McClellan, by a wide margin of 212–21 in the electoral college, with 55% of the popular vote. For the election, the Republican Party and some Democrats created the National Union Party, especially to attract War Democrats.
Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that the use of military tribunals to try civilians when civil courts are operating is unconstitutional. In this particular case, the Court was unwilling to give former President Abraham Lincoln's administration the power of military commission jurisdiction, part of the administration's controversial plan to deal with Union dissenters during the American Civil War. Justice David Davis, who delivered the majority opinion, stated that "martial rule can never exist when the courts are open" and confined martial law to areas of "military operations, where war really prevails", and when it was a necessity to provide a substitute for a civil authority that had been overthrown. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and three associate justices filed a separate opinion concurring with the majority in the judgment, but asserting that Congress had the power to authorize a military commission, although it had not done so in Milligan's case.
Clement Laird Vallandigham was an American lawyer and politician who served as the leader of the Copperhead faction of anti-war Democrats during the American Civil War.
During the American Civil War, the United States was referred to as simply the Union, also known colloquially as the North, after eleven Southern slave states seceded to form the Confederate States of America (CSA), which was called the Confederacy, also known as the South. The name the "Union" arose from the declared goal of the United States, led by President Abraham Lincoln, of preserving the United States as a constitutional federal union.
The 1864 Democratic National Convention was held at The Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
During the American Civil War, the State of Ohio played a key role in providing troops, military officers, and supplies to the Union army. Due to its central location in the Northern United States and burgeoning population, Ohio was both politically and logistically important to the war effort. Despite the state's boasting a number of very powerful Republican politicians, it was divided politically. Portions of Southern Ohio followed the Peace Democrats and openly opposed President Abraham Lincoln's policies. Ohio played an important part in the Underground Railroad prior to the war, and remained a haven for escaped and runaway slaves during the war years.
Popular opposition to the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, was widespread. Although there had been many attempts at compromise prior to the outbreak of war, there were those who felt it could still be ended peacefully or did not believe it should have occurred in the first place. Opposition took the form of both those in the North who believed the South had the right to be independent and those in the South who wanted neither war nor a Union advance into the newly declared Confederate States of America.
Lambdin Purdy Milligan was an American lawyer and farmer who was the subject of Ex parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866), a landmark case by the Supreme Court of the United States. He was known for his extreme opinions on states' rights and his opposition to the Lincoln administration's conduct of the American Civil War.
Alexander Long was a Democratic United States Congressman who served in Congress from March 4, 1863, to March 3, 1865.
Andrew Humphreys was a U.S. Representative from Bloomfield, Greene County, Indiana, who served in the Forty-fourth Congress. Prior to the American Civil War, Humphreys was as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives, and an Indian agent for Utah. In 1864 Humphreys was a defendant in a controversial trial by a military commission that convened on October 21 at Indianapolis, where he and three others were convicted of treason. Humphreys was sentenced to hard labor for the remainder of the war, but the sentence was modified three weeks later to allow for his release. At the end of the war, Humphreys resumed a career in politics, which included terms in Forty-fourth Congress and the Indiana Senate.
Indiana, a state in the Midwest, played an important role in supporting the Union during the American Civil War. Despite anti-war activity within the state, and southern Indiana's ancestral ties to the South, Indiana was a strong supporter of the Union. Indiana contributed approximately 210,000 Union soldiers, sailors, and marines. Indiana's soldiers served in 308 military engagements during the war; the majority of them in the western theater, between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains. Indiana's war-related deaths reached 25,028. Its state government provided funds to purchase equipment, food, and supplies for troops in the field. Indiana, an agriculturally rich state containing the fifth-highest population in the Union, was critical to the North's success due to its geographical location, large population, and agricultural production. Indiana residents, also known as Hoosiers, supplied the Union with manpower for the war effort, a railroad network and access to the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, and agricultural products such as grain and livestock. The state experienced two minor raids by Confederate forces, and one major raid in 1863, which caused a brief panic in southern portions of the state and its capital city, Indianapolis.
The Crisis was a newspaper published during the first half of the American Civil War by Samuel Medary that was critical of the American government's decision to limit slavery, and following the beginning of the war against the Confederate States of America, to wage war against the South. It was presented as the newspaper for favor with "Peace Democrats" - those northerners who sided with the Confederate cause during the war.
William Augustus Bowles was a physician, landowner, and politician from French Lick, Orange County, Indiana. He is best remembered for establishing the first French Lick Springs Hotel, a mineral springs resort hotel in the 1840s, and platting the town of French Lick, Indiana, in 1857. Bowles, a Democrat, served two terms in the Indiana state legislature. During the Mexican–American War he became a colonel in the 2nd Indiana Volunteer Regiment and joined in the Battle of Buena Vista (1847). An outspoken advocate of slavery as an institution, Bowles was sympathetic to the South during the American Civil War. In 1863 Harrison H. Dodd, leader of the Order of Sons of Liberty (OSL) in Indiana, named Bowles a major general for one of four military districts in the state's secret society that opposed the war. Bowles also played a role in the Indianapolis treason trials in 1864, when he and three others were convicted of plotting to overthrow the federal government. Following his release from prison in 1866, Bowles returned to Orange County, Indiana, where his failing health continued to decline in the years prior to his death.
Ex parte Vallandigham, 68 U.S. 243 (1864), is a United States Supreme Court case, involving a former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who had violated an Army order against the public expression of sympathy for the Confederate States and their cause. Vallandigham was tried before a military tribunal by Major General Ambrose E. Burnside for treason after he delivered an incendiary speech at Mount Vernon; he then appealed the tribunal's verdict to the Supreme Court, arguing that he as a civilian could not be tried before a military tribunal.
The New Departure refers to the political strategy used by the US Democratic Party after 1865 to distance itself from its pro-slavery and Copperhead history in an effort to broaden its political base and to focus on issues on which it had more of an advantage, especially economic ones. The New Departure theory also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment had already given women suffrage, but that argument was rejected in state and federal courts.
War Democrats in American politics of the 1860s were members of the Democratic Party who supported the Union and rejected the policies of the Copperheads. The War Democrats demanded a more aggressive policy toward the Confederacy and supported the policies of Republican President Abraham Lincoln when the American Civil War broke out a few months after his victory in the 1860 presidential election.
During the American Civil War, the state of Illinois was a major source of troops for the Union Army, and of military supplies, food, and clothing. Situated near major rivers and railroads, Illinois became a major jumping off place early in the war for Ulysses S. Grant's efforts to seize control of the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. Statewide, public support for the Union was high despite Copperhead sentiment.
The Northern Democratic Party was a leg of the Democratic Party during the 1860 presidential election, when the party split in two factions because of disagreements over slavery. They held two conventions before the election, in Charleston and Baltimore, where they established their platform. Democratic Candidate Stephen A. Douglas was the nominee and lost to Republican Candidate Abraham Lincoln, whose victory prompted the secession of 11 Southern states and the formation of the Confederate States of America.
The American Civil War bibliography comprises books that deal in large part with the American Civil War. There are over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month. There is no complete bibliography to the war; the largest guide to books is over 40 years old and lists over 6,000 titles selected by leading scholars. Many specialized topics such as Abraham Lincoln, women, and medicine have their own lengthy bibliographies. The books on major campaigns typically contain their own specialized guides to the sources and literature. The most comprehensive guide to the historiography annotates over a thousand titles.
In the 1864 U.S. presidential election, the Democrats nominated Union Army General George McClellan for U.S. President and Ohio U.S. Representative George Pendleton for U.S. Vice President. During the campaign, McClellan vowed to do a better job of prosecuting the Union Army effort in the American Civil War than incumbent U.S. President Abraham Lincoln did. Ultimately, the McClellan-Pendleton ticket lost to the National Union ticket of Abraham Lincoln and former U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
