Lincoln's Fifth Column
BARNES, FRED
Lincoln's Fifth Column Northern Democrats versus the Great Emancipator. by Fred Barnes As if Abraham Lincoln didn't have enough distractions while pursuing a war to restore the Union, he also had...
...They interpreted the Constitution in a way that would have crippled a wartime president...
...Racist Northern Democrats— there were many—who had backed the war to maintain the Union joined the opposition when the war became an effort to free the slaves...
...And Lincoln, already bolstered by overwhelming support from Union soldiers outraged by the Copperheads, was suddenly assured of reelection...
...On that last point—the South's rejoining the Union—talks with the South would have been worthless since Southern leaders were insistent on secession...
...Does that qualify them as conservative...
...Then came Atlanta," Weber writes...
...They were not patriotic...
...If he found such a person, Lincoln said he would guarantee him safe passage to Washington...
...He wrote Lincoln, urging him to open peace negotiations with the South...
...They undermined the war wherever they could, particularly in the areas north of the Ohio River to which Southerners had migrated—Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio...
...They opposed the Civil War, sympathized with the Southern secessionists, were mostly racists themselves, loathed Lincoln, blamed him and not the Southerners for starting the bloody fight, and impeded the war effort in whatever way they could, some of them treasonous or close to it...
...The most famous was the demagogic congressman from Ohio, Clement Vallandigham, who was convicted by a military court for his attacks on Lincoln and the war, and then banished from the country by Lincoln...
...The name stuck...
...They were soft on slavery...
...But they mattered, and mattered enormously, and one of the great merits of Jennifer L. Weber's brief history of the Copperheads is that it takes them seriously...
...I think not...
...They weren't all rubes from what was then the West...
...They were dubbed Copperheads in a letter to the editor in the Cincinnati Commercial in 1861 that suggested the term on the basis of Genesis 3:14: "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life...
...The Copperheads' "resistance to conscription and their encouragement of less ideologically minded Americans to dodge the draft or desert the army forced the military to divide its attention and at times send troops home to keep order there," according to Weber...
...The oversight was to give Copperheads short shrift by minimizing their role in the Civil War and the trouble they caused Lincoln...
...The antiwar furor prompted editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to make a fool of himself...
...The analogy with today is between the Copperheads and Democrats who oppose President Bush on Iraq and are critical of the war on terror...
...More broadly, the antiwar faction's vituperative opposition hurt the ability of the Union army to carry out the war effectively...
...Weber's highly readable account of the short life span of the Copperheads is especially valuable because it redresses a historical oversight, and also points intriguingly to a current political struggle...
...They never offered a coherent alternative to Lincoln's plan—war—nor did they ever acknowledge the Confederates' own resolve to gain independence," writes Weber...
...But like the Copperheads, antiwar Democrats have grown in numbers as victory in the war—in Iraq now—has faded from sight...
...So, too, I suspect, would be one-on-one talks (favored by Democrats) with America's enemies now, such as North Korea and Iran...
...The Copperheads grew as a political force in three phases...
...The second phase," Weber writes, "began with the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, and extended into the following spring, when the Union adopted a draft...
...The third phase came with the horrendous losses suffered by the Union army in 1864...
...It was a Copperhead convention...
...The Copperheads didn't choose their name...
...When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus as a wartime measure, they became fervent opponents...
...Despair gave way to cheerful—almost giddy—confidence...
...Morse, inventor of the telegraph, was a Copperhead...
...by Fred Barnes As if Abraham Lincoln didn't have enough distractions while pursuing a war to restore the Union, he also had to worry about what he called "the fire in the rear...
...Something similar was true with the Copperheads...
...Support for McClellan collapsed...
...Vallandigham went to Canada...
...Samuel F.B...
...Historians haven't paid the Copperheads much attention, and the few who took up the subject have treated them largely as a footnote to the Civil War Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, is the author of Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W Bush...
...She labels the Copperheads "conservatives...
...Governor Horatio Seymour of New York and Mayor Fernando Wood of New York City were Copperheads...
...Initially a splinter group, the Copperheads grew into a powerful political force that dominated the Democratic convention of 1864, wrote the party platform, handpicked one of their own as presidential nominee George McClellan's running mate, and came perilously close to defeating Lincoln's bid for reelection...
...A rival editor called him a "nincompoop without genius...
...New York City was an antiwar hotbed...
...She sticks to history...
...They fomented violent protests...
...The political impact was immediate and sweeping...
...The fire was actually a group of Northern Democrats known as Copperheads...
...They hated the war more than they loved the Union...
...The first came with secession...
...They tended to believe the South could legally withdraw from the Union because the Constitution didn't expressly forbid it...
...That's how serious the Copperhead problem was...
...As the Democrats were meeting, Sherman was driving the Confederates out of Atlanta and taking the city...
...In fact, Union troops, hundreds of thousands strong, became lifelong Republicans...
...When the news arrived, the mood in the North made a 180-degree turn...
...In response, Lincoln told Greeley to seek out "any person anywhere professing Copperheads The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North byJennifer L. Weber Oxford, 286 pp., $28 to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery...
...As a threat to the survival of America as a united country, Lincoln feared them almost as much as he did battlefield defeats at the hands of the Confederates...
...And Democrats today have offered no real alternative, merely a seemingly irresistible impulse to retreat from Iraq...
...One of the most hardline Copperheads, George Pendleton, was the party's unanimous choice for vice president...
...They thought of themselves as Peace Democrats or true conservatives committed to preserving the Constitution and preventing Lincoln from grabbing too much presidential power...
...And the McClellan-Pendleton ticket emerged as the favorite to defeat Lincoln and the Republicans...
...era...
...So does James M. McPherson, the renowned Civil War scholar at Princeton: "The danger to the Northern war effort posed by Copperhead political activities was far more than a figment of Republican imagination," he writes in his foreword...
...Antiwar sentiment reached its height and "thousands of Northerners were clamoring for peace...
...When the Confederate marauder John Hunt Morgan rampaged through Indiana and Ohio in 1863, his actions "were so specifically targeted that locals could only surmise that their Copperhead neighbors had briefed his men," Weber writes...
...What exactly did the Copperheads do...
...Not only had Grant's army stalled, it lost 60,000 troops in a single six-week period...
...Greeley met with Southerners in Canada, but they turned out to be spies with no authority to join peace talks...
...The press joined in the giddiness...
...But were they...
...They've weakened the president's tools in combating terrorists and made that effort more difficult...
...Former Connecticut governor Thomas Seymour was a leading Copperhead...
...But I think the analogy is inescapable—not that Democrats are unpatriotic or treasonous...
...Copperheadism reached high tide at the Democratic convention in late August 1864...
...Weber draws no analogy with Democrats today...
...Democratic leaders let Val-landigham write the platform, which said the war was "a failure" and called for a peace treaty with the South...
...The Copperheads, with their antiwar stance and harsh criticisms of the president, offered an appealing alternative to Lincoln's stubborn determination to stay the course...
...Greeley became a national laughingstock...
...He was speaking metaphorically...
...I have one quibble with Weber's otherwise wonderful book...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 13
