“The Fire in the Rear” (Part 2 of 5)

“…money you have expended without limit and blood poured out like water.  Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers, these are your only trophies…”  As he stood before the House, he denounced President Lincoln, Republican members of the House, and everyone else who supported the war effort.  He had nothing good to say about the Union’s efforts to reunify the seceded states, and now that emancipation of the slaves had been declared, his invective would reach new heights because, “War for the Union was abandoned; war for the negro openly begun…” and he did not care a whit about the plight of the millions enslaved.

He was none other than Clement Vallandigham, Democratic Representative from Ohio, about to lose his seat in the House of Representatives in January 1863, because voters had not supported him in the fall elections, likely because some deliberate gerrymandering of his district’s borders resulted in a larger Republican base that would purposely oust the vociferous agitator.  He was a member of the “Peace Democrats”, the anti-war wing of the party, politicians who opposed the war, opposed the spending, opposed the death and destruction. 

The Peace Democrats claimed to want nothing more than to stop the bloodshed so that the seceded states would peacefully rejoin the Republic.  They were deeply racist, so they had no issue with preserving slavery and said they would work with the slave-holding states to alleviate the tension surrounding the issue.  They had opposed Lincoln’s decision to call out the militia when hostilities first erupted in 1861, asserting that only Congress had the right to do so.  They challenged his order for the naval blockade, proclaiming it to be an act of war and therefore illegal because war had never been declared. They disputed the ability of government to assess an income tax to pay for the war and opposed the suspension of habeas corpus claiming it to be an unconstitutional abrogation of civil liberties.  Under their First Amendment privilege, Vallandigham and others like him had the right to speak their mind and offer their opinion.  But Vallandigham had the propensity to take things a step too far; at least that is what some Republicans believed.

Clement Vallandigham was the acknowledged leader of a secret organization widely known as the Copperheads.  They had organized long before the war erupted, first as the Knights of the Golden Circle, later as the Order of American Knights or the Order of the Sons of Liberty.  Secret handshakes and passwords added an air of intrigue to their shadowy pursuits.  Republicans were the first to refer to them as Copperheads, comparing them to the venomous snake, for that is what they thought of the organization and its subversive activities.  Members of the fraternity embraced the term and attempted to alter perceptions by wearing a lapel pin configured from an old-fashioned copper penny depicting the head of Liberty.  They claimed the “copper head” was symbolic of freedom and their patriotism.

The Copperheads openly advocated negotiation with the South to bring the war to a conclusion.  Again, it was their right under the first amendment to do so, but there were also whispers of overthrowing the governments of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, separating the collection of states from the Union, forming a Northwestern Confederacy, and negotiating a separate peace with the Southern Confederacy to open the Mississippi River to the Northwestern states’ commercial traffic.  They were accused of all manner of suspicious and devious activities and of encouraging desertion and resistance to military enrollment.  Whispers and rumors were one thing, but they also directly influenced a number of newspapers which published their inflammatory invective and propaganda, infecting public perception.

All of this was terribly subversive, bordering on sedition.  That was how Republicans viewed their rhetoric.  They believed that the secret society’s apparent deference to the Rebel cause demonstrated their treasonous intent.  PresidentLincoln had written that Vallandigham and his cronies clearly subverted anyone who would listen, “…under cover of ‘liberty of speech’, ‘liberty of the press’, and ‘habeas corpus…’”^, and that the South, “…hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause…”  The Copperheads’ popularity waxed and waned inversely with military success, and because Northern military successes were so meager at the beginning of 1863, their popularity was on the upswing.  As if leading the country through a major conflict was not enough, President Lincoln had to contend with what the President described informally as “the fire in the rear”.  It seemed the whole country was a war zone.

As much as President Lincoln relished the thought of quieting Vallandigham and his Peace Democrats, he respected that their First Amendment rights allowed them to express whatever opinion they might harbor, even if he disagreed with those opinions in this time of national crisis.  He knew that the best way to drown their voices of opposition was through success on the field of battle, something that had thus far been somewhat elusive for Union armies.  But then opportunity presented itself from a most unexpected and unlikely source, a Union general who had recently been banished to a backwater, away from that very field of battle.

Clement Vallandigham