The Copperheads of the Civil War

American politics during the war form a wildly confused story, so intricate that it cannot be made clear in a brief statement.

But 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 more plausible explanation associates the peace advocates with the deadly 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 programme in 1863 called for a cessation of hostilities and a general convention of all theStates, and who promised as the speedy result of a debauch of talk a carnival of bright eyes glistening with the tears of revived affection.

With these strange people in 1863 there combined a number of different types: the still stranger, still less creditable visionary, of whom much hereafter; the avowed friends of the principle of state rights; all those who distrusted the Government because of its anti-slavery sympathies; Quakers and others with moral scruples against war; and finally,sincere legalists to whom the Conscription Act appeared unconstitutional.

In the spring of 1863 the issue of conscription drew the line fairly sharply between the two political coalitions, though each continued to fluctuate, more or less, tothe end of the war.

From:Abraham Lincoln and the Union, A Chronicle of the Embattled North BY NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON, 1918

Posted by Vanderleun at December 4, 2003 8:44 PM