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Copperheads or Peace Democrats

The Copperheads or Peace Democrats supported reconciliation with the Confederacy. Even while patriotism and harmony prevailed, differences over the meaning of the war emerged. The majority believed the conflict was about preserving the Union, but two distinct minorities thought differently about the war. A small minority, mostly Democrats, opposed the war and saw it as an aggressive campaign to increase national power and further the Republican economic agenda. These conservatives usually held to an agrarian ideal and hoped for a restoration of the Union along the traditional lines of Jacksonian America. They feared that the war would bring an end to their agricultural way of life and American liberty. Another minority, this one mostly within the Republican Party itself, hoped that the war would bring an end to slavery. These radical abolitionists worried that Republicans like Lincoln and Morton were not fully committed to emancipation and believed that no real peace could be achieved without ending slavery. These two minorities opposed one another, as well as the majority, and both feared the other.

Conservative Democrats adopted the symbol of the “Copperhead” as a sign of their defiance of the Republicans, and the nickname became the term used to label those who actively opposed the war. The Copperheads played upon the Democratic victories in 1862 and 1863, and there was widespread talk of secession and the creation of a Northwest Confederacy.

Democratic Party dissenters against federal policies, be it the draft, the war, or emancipation, were more than mere conscientious objectors, or loyal citizens exercising their Constitutional rights, but were actual traitors and conspirators. They worked covertly with Confederate civilian and military agents hoping to foment a rebellion with the goal of establishing a Northern Confederacy in the Old Northwest states of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as in neighboring Missouri and Kentucky. Copperheads led by Ohio’s ex-Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham and his allies such as Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana, are the most cited examples.

These pro-rebel Northerners favored a victory of the Southern slave-owning aristocracy, joined secret political societies such as the Order of the Secret Knights, Knights of the Golden Circle, and the Butternut Society, eventually numbering 125,000 members, and in one state, Indiana, counting chapters in 85 of 92 counties. These groups colluded to stockpile arms; plotted with notorious rebel agents, such as Thomas Henry Hines and cavalry commander John Hunt Morgan, to attack communities; and developed schemes to hijack warships on the Great Lakes, destroy military depots, sabotage rail lines and bridges, and attack prisoner of war camps.

By the summer of 1864, concerns increased that the Democratic opposition in the person of the popular former commander of the Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan, running as the Democratic presidential candidate on a “peace ticket,” could end the war short of victory through negotiation, leaving the Confederacy and slavery intact.

Histories depicting Civil War Democrats and Copperheads as traitors and subversives predominated for nearly a century until Frank L. Klement’s The Copperheads of the Middle West (University of Chicago Press, 1960) appeared. Jennifer L. Weber, in Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (Oxford University Press, 2006), presents a view of Democratic dissent in the North representative of the current historiography.