American politics during the war form a wildly confused story, so intricate that it cannot be made clear in a brief statement.From: Abraham Lincoln and the Union, A Chronicle of the Embattled North BY NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON, 1918 Posted by Vanderleun at January 10, 2004 4:17 PM | TrackBackBut this central fact may be insisted upon: in the North, there were two political groups that were the poles around which various other groups revolved and combined, only to fly asunder and recombine, with all the maddening inconstancy of a kaleidoscope.
The two irreconcilable elements were the "war party" made up ofdetermined men resolved to see things through, and the "copperheads"* who for one reason or another united in a faithfulstruggle for peace at any price. (* The term arose, it has been said, from the use of the coppercent with its head of Liberty as a peace button. But a moreplausible explanation associates the peace advocates with thedeadly copperhead snake.)
Around the copperheads gathered the various and singular groups who helped to make up the ever fluctuating "peace party."
It is an error to assume that this peace party was animated throughout by fondness for the Confederacy. Though many of its members were so actuated, the core of the party seems to have been that strange type of man who sustained political evasion in the old days, who thought that sweet words can stop bullets, whose program in 1863 called for a cessation of hostilities and a general convention of all the States, and who promised as the speedy result of a debauch of talk a carnival of bright eyes glistening with the tears of revived affection.