Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement (review)

book reviews185 Abzug also offers an insightful and rewarding discussion of the social basis of Weld's disenchantment, which demonstrates that although Weld rejected abolition he did not altogether spurn reform. Weld lamented the splintering of the antislavery movement into factions and he feared that abolitionists no longer embodied Christian principles. Scandals in the reform community appalled him, and he withdrew into a search for personal piety. Two years after his tribulation at Troy, Weld married Angelina Grimke and settled down. Weld believed that the institution of marriage was as much in need of reform as other aspects of society, and he refocused his attention there. The Welds started a family and became more preoccupied with Sylvester Graham's advice on diet and William Andrus Alcott's system for efficient housekeeping than the roles each had formerly played. Between 1844 and the Civil War, Weld turned to education and created a curriculum that united his reformist beliefs with a concern for the family and nurture of the child. The drama of Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation led him, at age sixty, to return briefly to the lecture circuit. Passionate Liberator is a well-crafted work that is based upon extensive research in manuscript sources. The gracefully written narrative interrelates abolitionism, revivalism, the manual labor school movement , phrenology, and Millerism both to Weld and antebellum society in general. Abzug carefully probes his subject's "invisible history" (George Eliot's DanielDeronala provides the epigraph) without relying upon a strictly psychoanalytic account of Weld's actions. The result is not only a sensitive study of one man's changing assumptions and strategies but a penetrating discussion of piety and reform in antebellum America. Louis Paul Masur Princeton University Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement. By Hubert H. Wubben. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1980. Pp. xi, 280.) Hubert H. Wubben's Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement offers an excellent analysis of wartime politics in Iowa with a focus on Copperheads. Although he occasionally broadens the context of his study to include economic, social and cultural considerations, Wubben is at his best when dealing with the intraparty strife of wartime Democrats and their general opposition to Republican policies. Some Democrats deserved the label "Copperhead," because they had "reached the stage at which they more rather than less consistently opposed a war to force reunion, especially a war conducted by a Republican administration " (p. 222). Were such persons disloyal? In recent years, historians such as Frank Klement and Richard Curry have skirted the question of Copperhead disloyalty by presenting Copperheads as Democratic con- 186civil war history servative critics of the Lincoln administration. In this study of Iowa Copperheads, Wubben reintroduces the question of loyalty during wartime. Professor Wubben suggests that a few Iowa Democrats, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation, doubtlessly preferred a Southern victory, while still others hoped for a military stalemate followed by reunion on Confederate terms. Such persons were disloyal in the sense that they did not support a Northern victory on Republican terms. He distinguishes, however, the attitudes and actions of these Copperhead disloyalists from those of traitors who might have been engaged in conspiratorial activities to assist theSouth. If there wereany such traitorous conspiracies in Iowa, says Wubben, they were not widespread and were probably designed to resist the draft. The author might have presented a clearer picture of this latter category of Copperheads had he examined more closely draft resistance in Iowa. Record Group 110 in the National Archives is a rich source of information on the Civil War draft. The correspondence and reports of Iowa provost marshals would have shed considerable light on the nature and extent of draft resistance in Iowa. For persons interested in Iowa history, the early chapters contain a mine of information on the notable political figures of both parties. The sources are primarily Iowa newspapers, voting records, and the papers of numerous public officials and private citizens. Some of the material in these early chapters seems loosely connected to the general theme of wartime loyalty, but the concluding chapter brings the overall picture back into sharper focus. Throughout the book Wubben hedges on the question of the depth of disloyalty...