Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North

Political dissent and protest in wartime is a controversial topic and how we interpret those historical movements reveals much about ourselves and our own times. Jennifer L. Weber has written the latest word on the perennially contentious Democratic peace movement during the Civil War. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North outlines several worthwhile findings beginning with the notion that dissent in the Civil War North was not a peripheral issue but central and pervasive. Moreover, she articulates how it divided communities both rural and urban into a "neighbor's war" noted at times for the outbreak of violence. Weber shares company with other scholars pointing to the fractured and contradictory Northern experience. Much of this work lies in essays, such as collections edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (2002) and Joan E. Cashin The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (2002). Such fruitful inquiry owes a great deal to the larger body of literature on the Southern home front that highlights parallel experiences there.

Copperheads illuminates key themes including the politicization of Union soldiers whose hatred of villainous Copperheads, she argues, pushed them to embrace emancipation and cement their enduring Republican Party identities. This portrait of the seething backlash against dissent at home was deftly adapted from Joseph Allan Frank's With Ballot and Bayonet: The Politicization of American Civil War Soldiers (1998). Weber's central thesis, however, is that Peace Democrats were not merely a bothersome nuisance to the Lincoln administration but misguided ignorants who "damaged the army's ability to prosecute the conflict efficiently" (2). The author argues that this political movement materially undermined the war effort in numerous ways including the encouragement of draft resistance and desertion and diverting soldiers from the front to maintain federal authority at home.

Weber's book makes many positive contributions to the growing field of Northern studies. It peers into the fissures of Northern society revealing the contested nature of the conflict. It limns a useful periodization for the "rise and fall" of the peace movement marked by key political and military events. The work also reinforces the significance of bi-directional linkages between the front and home that shaped the war. Furthermore, she posits insightfully that the peace movement ultimately failed from lack of national organization and the inability to present a cohesive policy alternative that would yield peace. This pithy work bears other hallmarks of quality including engaging prose, stories well-told, a clear thesis and organization, and a broad base of sources.

Disappointingly, Copperheads can be compared to old wine in a beguiling new bottle. The fortunes of the northern peace movement have ebbed and flowed. Weber echoes the Republican paradigm of Copperheadism established during the war, that Democrats were a disloyal "fire in the rear" sabotaging the Union war effort. Fantastic tales of Democratic secret-societies were a staple of the partisan press and Republican conspiracy theories drummed up continual voter fear through depictions of Jacobin plots. Postwar "bloody shirt" politics stoked wartime fires well into the 1880s when the study of wartime Democrats fell into quiescence broken only by World War I. Disillusioned "revisionists" reevaluated the Civil War as the needless result of extremist agitation. The Copperhead stock rose, depicted as a voice of sanity and restraint. Such historians denounced emotional nationalistic appeals to patriotism in support of wartime agendas. During the Second World War, however, the Copperheads were damned again as partisan traitors and labeled a "Fifth Column." The newly ascendant Republican paradigm soon came under assault, however, beginning in 1960 with the publication of Frank L. Klement's The Copperheads in the Middle West. Klement was a prodigious defender of Peace Democrats whose many works undermined Republican charges of disloyalty and subversion. Klement contextualized these men as civil libertarians and agrarian conservatives while simultaneously debunking the mythologies of secret-societies and Confederate sympathies.

Weber's work rejects Klement as an apologist. Acknowledging some Republican exaggeration for political purposes, she asserts that the dangers were real. Klement discounted many reports of Copperhead perfidy as "overheated imaginations and Republican propaganda." Weber counters that the ubiquity and diversity of sources reveal that "many people in the North believed the Copperheads posed a threat in their neighborhoods" (25–26). Certainly, many Republicans felt threatened and could point to local foundations for conflict. War-opponents were neither saints nor sinners. The onus is upon Weber, however, to prove her case and Copperheads does not displace Klement's many volumes. The thesis that dissent undermined the war effort, for instance, deserves further scrutiny. Opposition did divert soldiers to enforce draft laws but relatively few and largely those deemed unfit for front-line service. Additionally, disagreement and protest in wartime has been a staple of our national history. Weber's work could address evidence at the local level where the clashes occurred. My own work on opposition examined the Pennsylvania Appalachians, a region Weber labeled "the most serious resistance in the country" (195). Her interpretation holds true only if you read the feverish initial reports but not the results of the military expedition to the region.

In fairness, Copperheads makes subtle distinctions. Peace Democrats were not "traitors" but "obstructionists" who "never recognized the magnitude of the emergency confronting the nation." Only some held Southern sympathies and "most were genuinely committed to the well-being of the nation" (6). Her narrative, however, drips with scorn for her subject whom she characterizes as ignorant, backward-looking, and out of step with the reality of progress (217). The Copperheads are the great evil in a drama of national redemption. This view harmonizes with Weber's mentor James M. McPherson, critiqued by some scholars for a didactic or "triumphalist" interpretation of the Civil War. In an essay "Worrying about the Civil War," Edward L. Ayers summed McPherson's central theme, a "story of freedom emerging through the trial of war, of a great nation becoming greater through suffering." Such stories need heroes like Lincoln and Emancipation and villains that include the Copperheads.