Copperheads in the Middle West (review)

Book Reviews457 whereas Patrick's is confused and weak. To point out that Hersey is a novelist and Patrick a historian is to state a fact, but that fact does not excuse poor writing. Research and documentation need not throttle literary expression. Professor Patrick divides his story into three chapters, each dealing with the events of a single day—April 2, 3, and 4, 1865. Unfortunately he aUows his narrative to wander aimlessly; never does he bring the events of a day into sharp focus. One gets the impression that he is stringing his notes together rather than reconstructing the story of the faU of Richmond. Emphasis and projiortion are lacking. Trivial incidents are stressed and major events are slighted. A single paragraph deals with the extinguishing of the fire by the Union army, and General Edward H. Ripley, who had charge of the work, is not even mentioned in tiiis connection, though he is elsewhere reported to have an office in the city hall for no apparent reason. The author seems to be unfamiliar with Richmond and to have only a nodding acquaintance with its citizens. On page 60 we are introduced to a nephew of the Reverend Moses Hodge [sic, Hoge], pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church and invited to watch from the housetop whüe the United Presbyterian Church three blocks to the north [sic, east] goes up in flames. In spite of such slips, Professor Patrick's book gives evidence of extensive research (though it has no footnotes and only a truncated bibliography). With the possible exception of regimental histories, the author has blazed about every tree in the forest of sources, including the pictorial. Material is abundant, but it has not been transformed into history. A paU of smoke still hangs over fallen Richmond. WnxiAM M. E. Rachal Virginia Historical Society Copperheads in the Middle West. Frank L. Klement. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, Pp. xiü, 341. $7.50.) this book is a partial misfire. Although its author presumably hoped to deepen our understanding of the Copperhead movement, much of what he says is not news. In the concluding chapter of his 1942 volume, The Copperheads, Wood Gray already indicated that his subjects were not the "traitors" of wartime Republican propaganda. Klement does no more than Gray in showing that they were, rather, hardshelled enemies of the triumphant nationalism and industrialism which were remolding the nation to martial music. The Copperheads, and Adullamite coalition, were united mainly in their hates—of New England, banks, "big business," railroads, and the Negro. Their weakness lay in their violent extremism, rubbed raw by the frustrations of minority-hood. They made little distinction between tight wartime controls and "despotism," they overestimated Union sentiment in the South, they sniffed a coming "race war" in emancipation, and their zealous Constitution-worship would have made that living document an 458CIVIL WAR HISTORY unchanging, "touch-not" fetish. In this one-sided outlook, granted, they were but counterparts of the Radical Republicans, but the Republicans had history, economic logic, nationalism, and humanitarianism—all the big guns of nineteenth-century ideological warfare—on their side. What was more, they had national power, a fact for their political opponents to weigh judiciously. The Copperheads did not do so. As a result, despite Midwestern election victories in 1862, they were outgeneraled in the Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois state legislatures. By 1864 they were sinking rapidly, with colors naüed to the mast, but not a life raft in sightl Klement does indeed make a contribution in showing that the secret societies of Copperheadism were only a last resort for a desperate handful. The Knights of the Golden Circle and Sons of Liberty were mostly led by inept charlatans, and only Republican oratory puffed them into major subversive threats to the North. Thus a mythology perpetuated in George F. Müton's Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column is dismembered and scattered to the winds. Klement is also on the right track in showing the Copperheads as forebears of Greenbackers and even Populists. His failure here is in not going far enough. The Copperheads, with their "rampant partyism," their ignorant suspicions of the modem world, their hatred...