Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North

Journal of Southern History, May, 2008 by Michael D. Pierson

Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North. By Jennifer L. Weber. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. [xviii], 286. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-19-530668-2.)

Jennifer L. Weber is convinced that the Copperheads, "the conservative, antiwar wing of the Democratic Party," played an influential role during the Civil War (p. 1). Her book is a chronological narrative, including summaries of the war's progress, that argues that "Copperheadism" rose or fell depending on the fortunes of the U.S. military. This is a familiar plot, so Weber relies on four analytical points to give her narrative relevance and depth. First, she states that Copperheadism was a grassroots movement that often set northern neighbors against one another. Second, she argues that the Copperheads damaged the Union war effort by opposing the draft, encouraging desertion, and forming conspiracies. Third, Weber insists that the Copperheads' goal of negotiating a peace by restoring the Union with slavery was naive and impractical. Lastly, Weber asserts that Union soldiers, even former Democrats, rejected Copperheadism and voted to reelect Abraham Lincoln.

Weber's most intriguing point is that Copperheadism thrived at the local level. Her success in locating many mob actions against draft enrollment officers suggests the existence of a large grassroots movement. Violence throughout the North left many U.S. officials and draft resisters dead or wounded. Though Weber gives the 1863 urban draft riots their due, readers will never again think of draft resistance as an exclusively urban phenomenon. This antidraft violence is vital to Weber's book, which argues explicitly against historian Frank L. Klement's claims that the Copperheads and their conspiracies were largely invented by Republicans in order to mobilize their voters and discredit the Democratic Party.

But Weber also blends all kinds of draft resistance into the Copperhead movement, and her categories get blurred. In arguing against Klement, the book is hampered by the fact that no Copperhead plot was ever launched. Faced with this lack of organized action beyond the level of local draft resistance, Weber instead includes evidence that men sought medical deferments from the draft or deserted from the army. Draft dodgers fleeing to Canada are covered as if they were Copperheads, as is, most strangely, the Confederates' 1864 attempt to seize Great Lakes shipping. Were all these men Copperheads'? Were they thinking politically? In her attempt to argue for the widespread nature of Copperhead dissent, Weber casts a very broad net and perhaps brings in people who sought self-preservation--not a political goal.

The book is further marred by the author's contempt for the Copperheads. They lived in "the realm of fantasy." Their constitutional interpretations had a "bizarre, even reckless quality." They were "blind to or ignorant of the consequences of their actions" (p. 6). Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham is described as "the ideologically driven outlaw" after he was convicted by a military tribunal rather than by a jury of his peers (p. 170). The Union soldiers' "bitterness" that led to extralegal threats and violence against Copperhead civilians "was understandable" (p. 147). Indeed, this book shares the view of the Copperheads that Lincoln enjoyed from the White House. But it seems to this reviewer that when Americans try to use the democratic system to protect civil liberties during war, they deserve a fairer hearing. Indeed, when some Americans seek to end peacefully an extremely bloody war, we might study their motivations and experiences more seriously. We might still argue that the Civil War served the greater good by ending the even longer war called slavery; however, let us analyze individual desertions and draft evasions instead of saying that Copperhead ideas were "utopian fantasies" while blithely writing that Grant "racked up more than sixty-four thousand casualties" getting from the Wilderness to Petersburg (pp. 14, 139).

MICHAEL D. PIERSON

University of Massachusetts Lowell