Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Civil War and Reconstruction by James Fuller (review)

Jim Fuller of the University of Indianapolis has done historians and the reading public a great service by publishing the first biography since 1899 of the Civil War governor of Indiana, and one of the closest governors to Abraham Lincoln. Other historians had backed away from doing a biography because Morton burned all his papers. The study not only gives a detailed account of Morton’s political policies during the war but also covers Morton’s policies under Reconstruction when he was Senator from 1867 until his death in 1877. It would not be stretching the truth to claim that Morton was the most important Union governor and the most important Radical Republican senator over an era that spanned sixteen years.

Morton was born in 1823 near Centerville, Indiana, in Wayne County on the Ohio border. His father was a Scot who was born in New Jersey and his mother, Sarah Miller, was a native of southern Ohio. Oliver graduated from Wayne County Academy, was an apprentice briefly to his father and brother who were hatters, and attended Miami College in Oxford, Ohio, before moving back to Centerville to apprentice for the law. In 1845 he married Lucinda Burbank, the daughter of a local merchant, and had three sons who survived childhood. He practiced law in local courts until he was elected a circuit judge in 1852 by his Democratic Party.

A great change came for Morton in 1854 when his party passed the Kansas– Nebraska Act that allowed the possibility of the extension of slavery into northern territories formerly closed to it. He switched to the new Union or Republican Party and was its candidate for governor in 1856 but lost to conservative Ashbel Williard. However, in 1860 in a Republican Party deal he ran for lieutenant governor with the understanding that if he and Henry Lane, the candidate for governor, and the Republicans won, including the state legislature, Lane would be named senator and Morton would be elevated to governor. The Republicans swept into office and Morton became the Civil War governor.

During his first two years as Governor Morton had to fight the Republican-dominated statehouse to get sufficient money to clothe and arm the soldiers after Fort Sumter. He did so and quickly became known as the “soldier’s friend.” However, his situation worsened after the 1862 elections because the legislature flipped to the Democrats, in part due to the lack of success of the Union army in fighting the war. The legislature was stingy in its financial support for the Indiana troops, so Morton resolved to run the state as a “dictator” by securing extralegal funds so he could ignore his political opponents. He was able to send more troops to the front than any other war governor and support them with a state sanitary commission and a state arsenal. In addition, he created a network of spies under Henry Carrington so as to gain information on dissenters and deserters who were encouraged by Peace Democrats. Through his friendship with Secretary of War Edward Stanton, Morton even had Union generals who he perceived as weak or incompetent transferred to other arenas, including Don Carlos Buell, Ambrose Burnside, and Milo Hascall. Morton was particularly paranoid about invasion of his state from Kentucky. Fortunately, a small raid by Confederate John Hunt Morgan was repelled easily in 1863.

Earlier scholarship about Morton was quite critical because the threat of “Copperheads” or southern sympathizers to revolt and create chaos in the Midwest was considered a hoax perpetrated by Morton for political gain. However, in the past twenty-five years new studies of the Copperheads by Jennifer Weber (Copperheads), David Long (The Jewel of Liberty) and Stephen Towne (Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War) have concluded that Morton was correct in believing that the Copperheads were a credible threat to the Union cause. Therefore, Morton’s arrest and trial of six...