A Lesson for All Rebels at Home: The Holmes County, Ohio, Rebellion of 1863 Revisited

On June 17, 1863, over four hundred Union Army troops sent by state and military authorities to crush resistors to the draft enrollment encountered a force of armed men in the hills of Holmes County, in east-central Ohio just south of the Western Reserve, in what can be described fairly as a small battle. The self-described "secessionists" fired on the advancing troops, and the troops responded with a volley and a bayonet charge. Though of short duration and nearly bloodless, the encounter proved decisive in the federal government's effort to suppress widespread enrollment resistance in northern Ohio. In the coming months, government officials deployed coercive power to quell violent resistance throughout the region. Military action was the first step in asserting the authority of state and federal governments over a restive and organized resistance.

Today the Holmes County episode is well known but poorly understood. Both scholars and local antiquarians alike dismiss the fight—commonly called "Fort Fizzle"—as a comic-opera act of resistance to the draft enrollment. Starting from a minor rock-throwing incident, they assert, things grew out of hand. The resistors never intended to stage a major act of defiance and were sorry they had.¹ Echoing local folklore, historian Kenneth H. Wheeler argues that the armed men were just a small group of backwoods immigrants. "Rarely considering the world beyond" their isolated corner of Ohio, these non-English-speaking farmers wanted merely to be left alone and in control of their simple lives. Their display of "localistic patriotism" never intended to provoke government retaliation.² Wheeler's interpretation minimizing the scope of the uprising and its organization has become the frequently cited standard view of the incident. Following Wheeler, the authors of a recent Ohio-history textbook portray the episode as a "flamboyant" but halfhearted resistance in defense of "individualism and local autonomy."³

This standard view of the Holmes County incident as the disorganized effort of foreign-born backwoodsmen both informs and conforms to different interpretations of Civil War draft resistance in the North put forward by historians. According to one school of thought, draft resistance was spontaneous, "organic and unpredictable"; it arose in the heat of the moment and lacked ideological motive.⁴ According to one scholar, local extralegal violence against the draft was "grassroots and uncoordinated rather than the imagined large-scale national conspiracies forming a staple of Republican discourse." Citing Wheeler's analysis of the Holmes County events, that scholar concludes that resistors simply wanted to be left alone.⁵ Other historians argue men were up in arms over perceived class and ethnic injustice implicit in the commutation clause of the recently enacted federal conscription law, allowing a drafted man to pay the significant sum of $300 or to hire a substitute to avoid service ("a rich man's war, the poor man's fight").⁶ Still others say opposition emerged out of distrust of growing centralization of power in the federal government.⁷ Some historians see resistance arising from disgust over Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the abolitionist turn it represented.⁸

Common to all these analyses is that draft resistance was disorganized, leaderless, isolated, unplanned, and unconnected to other acts of draft resistance and defiance of government authority, either in Ohio or neighboring states. Scholars suggest that violence occurred primarily among foreign-born ethnic groups, exemplified by the Irish Catholic immigrants who rioted in New York City and Boston. It posed no threat to government authority or to the ability of the Republican administration of President Abraham Lincoln to prosecute the Union war effort.

This common view of draft resistance as spontaneous and disorganized relies heavily on historian Frank L. Klement's thesis regarding antiwar or Peace Democrats—the Copperheads—during the Civil War. Klement posited that these conservative Jeffersonian-Jacksonian opponents of Lincoln's Republican Party were a loyal opposition. Wartime and postwar accusations of Democratic disloyalty and treason resulting in organized resistance and conspiracy were, he repeatedly asserted, lies spread by Republican politicians and military officers...