Oliver P. Morton, Political Ideology, and Treason in Civil War Indiana

FALL 2013 27 Oliver P. Morton, Political Ideology, and Treason in Civil War Indiana A. James Fuller O n May 4, 1876, Oliver P . Morton rose in the United States Senate and delivered a speech detailing his actions as Civil War governor of Indiana. In the centennial year, Morton served the Hoosier State as a senator and was a leading candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His prominence sparked criticism and the New York World had published a story implying that Morton had misused federal government appropriations to Indiana during the war. A frequently vindictive man who ruthlessly smashed his political enemies and rivals when possible, Morton defended his record and rallied the support of fellow senators who quickly testified to his personal honesty. In the course of his defense in the Senate, Morton explained why he had made some of his most controversial decisions as governor, including helping uncover Copperhead conspiracies in the Midwest. He remembered that “the State was honeycombed with secret societies,” as groups of southern sympathizers undertook treasonous plans to take Indiana out of the Union and into the Confederacy. Morton worked with Union Army officials to infiltrate the secret societies, especially the infamous Knights of the Golden Circle, a group that later called itself the Sons of Liberty. In the late summer of 1864, the governor and his allies in the military moved against the Copperheads, seizing papers and weapons and arresting the leaders of the conspiracy, in time for the news to help the Republican Party in the election that fall.1 The Indianapolis treason trials became a stark symbol of resistance and treason , and of Governor Morton’s controversial actions on the divided Civil War home front of Indiana. For those who feared the rapid expansion of government in the name of the war, arresting half a dozen Copperheads proved nothing less than evidence of tyranny. For such individuals, authorities like Morton smashed those who dared to resist the government’s policies. They viewed the arrests and Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton (1823-1877). From William Dudley Foulke, Life of Oliver P .Morton, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1899). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER OLIVER P. MORTON, POLITICAL IDEOLOGY, AND TREASON IN CIVIL WAR INDIANA 28 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY trials as unjust, the work of oppressors out to destroy liberty. For those who feared the disloyalty of Hoosiers opposed to the war, the trials reassured them that officials like Morton were diligently rooting out the treacherous traitors who hated the Union and hoped to destroy it and attach Indiana to the Confederacy. Such individuals viewed the government’s actions as right and good, the work of loyal and competent men out to save the Union from great peril. The conspiracy and the government investigation that led to the arrests and military trials of leading Indiana Copperheads revealed Morton’s significant role in combating opposition on the home front. While he certainly used the events of 1864 to his political advantage, Morton also pursued the Copperheads out of ideological principle. Adhering to the ideology of freedom, Union, and power that animated the Republican Party during the Civil War, Morton acted in ways consistent with those ideas. He denounced the accused men as traitors who threatened to destroy the Union and the liberty it provided the American people. Rather than sit by and let secret societies overthrow the government, Morton used the expanded power of government to crush them in order to secure freedom and Union.2 Instead of interpreting the governor’s actions as the product of a coherent ideology, historians have made much of Morton’s political opportunism in the 1864 trials. Following the lead of his Democratic opponents who labeled the governor unscrupulous and accused him of using the harebrained ideas of a few misguided men to political advantage, some scholars have argued that Morton and the Republicans all but created the specter of conspiracy to win votes. Most notably, Frank L. Klement, whose interpretation of the Copperheads influenced half a century of scholarship, characterized the events surrounding the treason trials as nothing less than a political scheme concocted by Morton and the region’s head of military intelligence, General Henry B...