The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North's Union Leagues in the American Civil War

"The Most Complete

Political Machine

Ever Known"

·   CIVIL WAR IN THE NORTH   ·

Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union · John M. Belohlavek

Banners South: A Northern Community at War · Edmund J. Raus

"Circumstances are destiny": An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to DeWne Sphere · Tina Stewart Brakebill

More Than a Contest between Armies: Essays on the Civil War · Edited by James Marten and A. Kristen Foster

August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman · Edited by David W. Lowe

Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861–1888 · Edited by Glen N. Wiche

The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians · Mark A. Lause

Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer · Paul Taylor

Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front · J. Matthew Gallman

A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

"They Have Left Us Here to Die": The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry · Edited by Glenn Robins

The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union, from August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865 · Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Peter C. Luebke

The Election of 1860 Reconsidered · Edited by A. James Fuller

"A Punishment on the Nation": An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War · Edited by Brian Craig Miller

Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family · Edited by Patricia A. Donohoe

Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry · Edited by Eric R. Faust

Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers · Roger Pickenpaugh

Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War—for Better and for Worse · Candice Shy Hooper

For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops · Kelly D. Mezurek

Pure Heart: The Faith of a Father and Son in the War for a More Perfect Union · William F. Quigley Jr.

"The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known": The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War · Paul Taylor

"The Most Complete

Political Machine

Ever Known"

The North’s Union Leagues in

the American Civil War

Paul Taylor

Kent, Ohio

© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-353-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

22  21  20  19  18        5  4  3  2  1

There are wars of opinion not fought out with the musket.

—William T. Sherman

In such wars those who win are loyal, the defeated ones the traitors.

—Caldéron

"Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?

Why if it prospers none dare call it treason."

—John Harrington,

sixteenth or early seventeenth century

Contents

Foreword

by Jonathan W. White

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Questions of Patriotic Loyalty versus Treason

Chapter 1

Quiet Men Are Dangerous: Civilian Antecedents

of the Union Leagues

Chapter 2

"There Can Be No Neutrals in This War; Only Patriots

or Traitors": The Demand for Public Loyalty

Chapter 3

A Fire of Liberty Burning Upon the Altar: The Union

Leagues Arise amidst Despair and Disillusionment

Chapter 4

A Refuge Rather Than a Resort for Loyalty:

Philadelphia, New York, and Boston Lead the Way

Chapter 5

"We Are Learning to Draw the Line Between Treason and

Loyalty": Union League Ostracism and Democratic Resentment

Chapter 6

This Is the Time for Pamphleteers and Essayists:

The Pen Begins to Fight Alongside the Sword against

Copperhead Dissent and Violence

Chapter 7

The ‘Loyal Leagues’ Are Really Effecting Public Opinion:

The Broad-Based Loyal Leagues and No Party Now

Chapter 8

"Neutrality Is Allied to Treason; Indifference Becomes a

Crime; and Whoever Is Not with Us Is Against Us":

A Union League of America Council in Every Town

Chapter 9

"We Are Not a Partisan, Yet We Are a Political Organization":

Women Enter the Fray as Midwest Dissent Boils Over

Chapter 10

"We Are Organizing Our Leagues and Getting Ready for the

Great Fight of 1864": An Open Arm of the Republican Party

Chapter 11

"Once More Rally Around the Flag, and Your Work

Will Be Complete": A Bitter and Partisan Election

Chapter 12

"It Is a Fatal Mistake to Hold That This War Is Over Because

the Fighting Has Ceased": The Union League in Reconstruction

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

Union Leagues

Jonathan W. White

When Abraham Lincoln was a mere twenty-nine years old in January 1838, he exulted in the fact that Americans inhabited a peaceful and prosperous land, and that they lived under a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. The Founding Fathers had fought for this land and established this government; Lincoln’s generation had received them as a gift. But now it was their responsibility to transmit these … to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. Preserving America’s political institutions, Lincoln said, was a task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.¹

Clearly, from a young age, Lincoln believed the Union was worth preserving. And these ideas continued to motivate him into his adult life. In his 1852 eulogy for Kentuckian Henry Clay, Lincoln maintained that the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States. Why? Because the United States offered more liberty and equality than any other nation in the world. Ten years later, in 1862, Lincoln told Congress what he believed the Civil War was really about. In fighting for the Union and giving freedom to the slave, he said, We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.²

Union soldiers echoed the sentiments of their commander in chief as they marched off to war. In what is now one of the most famous letters of the Civil War, Maj. Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island Infantry spoke of how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. Through his own military service, Ballou hoped to set an example for his two young sons so that they might grow up to honorable manhood. Other soldiers felt alike. Our fathers made this country, we their children are to save it, wrote one Ohio volunteer, while a Connecticut infantryman was proud to fight for those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution … in order that they may be perpetuated to those who may come after.³

For as important as the Union was to many Americans of the Civil War generation, the concept of the Union has not received its due in the historical literature. In some ways it makes sense that scholars would be more interested in questions of nationalism in the Confederacy. After all, the Southern states were attempting to create and define a nation during the Civil War. The Union, by contrast, was merely fighting to preserve a preexisting nation. And yet we cannot begin to understand what motivated Northerners to enlist and fight in the Civil War—and what prompted Northern civilians to support the soldiers in the field—unless we probe what Union and nation meant to them.⁴ After all, as Gary W. Gallagher reminds us in The Union War, belief in Union, more than any other factor by far, motivated northerners to fight and die for their country. For them, the American Union was a democratic beacon shining in a world dominated by aristocrats and monarchs—a unique and exceptional nation that provided economic opportunity, political liberty, and the possibility of upward social mobility.⁵ If the Union fell, no other nation would be left on earth to carry the torch of liberty.

In this wonderful new study of the Union Leagues during the Civil War Era, Paul Taylor brings to light new evidence about the ordinary men—and, in some cases, women—who supported the Union from behind the lines through the establishment of Union Leagues in cities, towns, and villages throughout the North (and during Reconstruction, in the South). When many of us think of the Union League, we perhaps envision the spectacular 1865 building on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, or the elegant postwar clubhouse in New York City. And yet, as Taylor reveals, these groups emerged not as the elite social clubs they are today, but as patriotic (and sometimes secret) community-based societies dedicated to preserving a nation that was smoldering amid the chaos of civil war.

Taylor deftly provides the context for the emergence of these grassroots patriotic organizations, reminding us that Unionists did not simply encounter an enemy on the battlefield—they also faced strong, and sometimes violent, political opposition in the rear. Lincoln’s critics—the Copperheads, or antiwar Democrats—have received a significant amount of attention from historians. Tellingly, much of this scholarship has appeared during periods in which America has been involved in wars, most notably during World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the post–9/11 era.⁶ Scholars working in this field have probed the nature of loyalty and dissent in wartime. But the private citizens who organized to counteract the Copperheads have received far less attention. And yet they deserve it. In response to both real and perceived Copperhead threats, Union League clubs formed in communities from Maine to California, ready to do partisan battle (and sometimes actual violence) against their political enemies in the North. As Taylor explains, They attacked their ‘treasonous’ Democrat and Copperhead foes relentlessly in an effort to shape public opinion and achieve their war aims.

Pro-Union organizations took vital action to support the Union war effort by raising regiments and supplies and publishing patriotic pamphlets and broadsides. Much of this work focused on shaping Northern understandings of patriotism and loyalty. As Taylor explains, members of the Union Leagues became "the powerful propaganda machine for the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party" during the Civil War. They played a fundamental role in keeping the North united behind the war effort—and the Republican agenda—even when prospects looked dark. Indeed, when things were going badly for the Union and war weariness was sweeping through the land, it was they who reminded Northern soldiers and civilians why the Union was worth preserving.

Acknowledgments

The author of any nonfiction book often benefits from the support and largesse of others who assist with the author’s research requests, advice, and even reviewing early manuscript drafts. This work is certainly no different and accordingly, I would like to acknowledge those individuals who graciously gave of their time and talents over this book’s five-year gestation period.

Most of the major characters in this work were private civilians, or state or national politicians during the Civil War, rather than military personnel. Much of their pertinent commentary and thoughts pertaining to the Union Leagues are to be found within their private correspondence and diaries as opposed to official government documents. Therefore, much of the research for this book was conducted within the Library of Congress, which is one of the nation’s premier archives for such collections. I want to thank Michelle Krowl of that institution’s Manuscripts Division for pointing out numerous underutilized or overlooked collections that proved beneficial to my research. I am also indebted to Patrick Kerwin of the Manuscripts Division who graciously helped me with some long-distance research. Gary Johnson at the Library of Congress’s Newspaper and Periodicals Reading Room was likewise helpful in recommending little-known period newspapers that proved to be of solid value.

Specific individuals at archives from around the country also provided immense aid. In particular, I would like to thank Theresa Altieri, archivist at the Heritage Center of the Union League of Philadelphia; Kimberly Reynolds, manuscripts curator at the Boston Public Library; and Tammy Kiter of the New-York Historical Society’s Manuscript Department for their research assistance and then kindly providing me with copies of important documents from their collections. I am grateful to Rodney Foytik at the United States Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, along with the staffs at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the York County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society, Philadelphia’s Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan’s Bentley and Clements Libraries for making my visits to their research facilities both productive and pleasant. I also cannot forget Katharina Fuller of Boyne City, Michigan, who studiously translated and transcribed several nineteenth-century, old-script, German-language newspaper articles.

I would be extremely remiss if I did not recognize Dwight Woodward and Avery Hicks of the Williamsburg (Virginia) Regional Library. Over the three-year period when I lived in that old colonial town, they cheerfully acquired dozens upon dozens of uncommon books, Civil War–era pamphlets, obscure dissertations, and rare microfilm rolls for me through their interlibrary loan program. I felt that many of these acquisitions were long shots at best when I first placed my request, yet time and again they delivered. My research would have been far more arduous and time-consuming without their superb assistance.

I also want to thank Jonathan W. White for his generosity in contributing an insightful foreword to this book. Equally helpful were J. Matthew Gallman, Robert Sandow, and a third anonymous historian who all carefully read my manuscript’s early drafts as part of the publisher’s initial review process. As is always the case, the thoughtful critiques and suggestions provided by these scholars made for a much better book than the one I originally submitted.

Lastly and far from least, I wish to express my gratitude to Will Underwood and all of the staff at the Kent State University Press. Their expertise and attention to detail has helped make this labor of love a hardcover reality.

Introduction

Questions of Patriotic Loyalty

versus Treason

In the early 1930s, psychology professor Dr. Donald P. Wilson began a three-year research study at Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary in northeast Kansas. The professor later recalled in his memoir what transpired when he told the story of President Abraham Lincoln to a European-born, convicted murderer. The prisoner’s emotions ranged from sadness to anger as he concluded how Lincoln was, in his vernacular, a right guy, a good man who saved his country while freeing the slaves held in bondage. The tough inmate was near tears as he decided that Lincoln and the Union were worthy of veneration, but angered that the noble president simply ended up gettin’ it in the back upon the Civil War’s conclusion. To the misty-eyed convict, the president’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was simply a ham, an SOB who got what he deserved in that Port Royal, Virginia, barn on April 26, 1865. For the rest of the day, the psychologist watched the convict and his fellow prisoners quietly sing the just-learned Battle Hymn of the Republic as they went about their tasks. This callous killer’s patriotic emotions still resonated years later with the professor.¹

Psychological studies such as Dr. Wilson’s have shown that convicted felons are generally quite patriotic; however, America to them is not the government nor its citizens. America is an idea best represented by iconic symbols such as the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and, of course, Old Glory itself. Throughout our nation’s history, patriotism has taken on different perspectives, based in large measure on what lens the citizen is looking through. What exactly is patriotism? What constitutes a loyal patriot? To whom or what is loyalty due—and under what conditions? These were all hotly contested questions for Northern citizens during the American Civil War, just as they are in our present day. The contrasting question, then as now, is: What exactly makes one a traitor and what should be considered treasonous activities? After all, if a convicted murderer can be an America-loving patriot, can a so-called traitor also be an upstanding, honorable man? The answers to those questions, how they were determined and by whom, together with the consequences of not being properly patriotic in the Civil War North are interconnected subjects that lie at the heart of this book.²

Defining loyal versus treasonous speech or acts are conundrums that have faced every government in times of political or military turmoil, whether the conflict was an internal rebellion or external war. It can be argued that civil wars elicit even stronger black and white definitions of loyalty and treason considering the intensity of brother fighting brother and family against family. The Civil War was certainly no different, especially in the tumultuous middle years. In fact, these questions manifested themselves more forcefully than perhaps any other time in American history. The American Civil War was the first significant occasion in the young nation’s history where questions of loyalty and treason stretched from one end of the land to the other.³

Speaking out against potential hostility was certainly acceptable in the North during the months prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, for few in the North sought war. Legislators and citizens across the Northern political spectrum were open to any solution that would prevent such a calamity, as long as the results did not mean disunion or dishonor. But with the attack upon that Charleston harbor fort, many Northern citizens changed their perception permanently: Secession speech had been replaced by treasonous violence directed against the republic. The Stars and Stripes had been desecrated, nation and honor were at stake, and it became imperative to many in the North that the Rebels must be taught a lesson. Three days after Fort Sumter surrendered, Lincoln called for 75,000 ninety-day state militia to march into the South and force the seceded states to recant. For the Republican Lincoln administration, preserving the Union was sacrosanct.⁴

Meanwhile, Democrats also proclaimed their virtue, which is patriotism’s core element. Wrapping themselves in the flag, they laid claim to the moral high ground by their unwavering loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. For most Democrats, including the so-called War Democrats, suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union through military force was acceptable; however, the explosive slavery issue was not a legitimate rationale for war because of the simple fact that slavery was legal in much of the United States. Furthermore, slavery was a hands-off issue driven by the fact that almost all Northern whites were unrepentant racists by twenty-first century standards, viewing the African as the social, moral, and physiological inferior to the white man. Though most whites abhorred slavery and considered it morally wrong, those sentiments were trumped by its legality. Each state or territory had the right to decide for itself whether slavery would exist within its borders. Using military force to eliminate the South’s peculiar institution was deemed a constitutional violation and an unlawful usurpation of power by the Federal government. This bloc of the Northern population viewed themselves as true patriots. Often referred to as the Civil War’s political conservatives, their convictions held to a narrow, literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the nation’s laws, and the civil rights guaranteed to each white person within them. As the war ground on, they considered Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Enrollment Act mandating conscription to be unconstitutional. Vitriolic Democratic editors denounced the war, encouraged young men to avoid enlisting, and condemned the black Republican politicians who were risking white lives in order to free black slaves. After Lincoln’s Proclamation and the Enrollment Act went into effect on January 1 and March 3, 1863, respectively, this anti-Lincoln and antiblack portion of the Northern populace was routinely referred to as Secesh, Butternuts, and worse by their Republican enemies. One of the harshest epithets used to describe an anti-Lincoln, antiwar Democrat was Copperhead, first used in 1861 as a comparison to the poisonous snake slithering along the ground. When Peace Democrats attempted to turn the tables on that epithet by wearing the Lady Liberty copper penny as their symbol of pride, Iowa’s Gov. Samuel Kirkwood referred to the newly styled breastpins as the emblems of moral treason. Regardless of the term, every American of that era knew those words were derogatory and by utilizing those nicknames, Republicans engaged in a type of verbal shorthand that questioned the loyalty and integrity of Democratic partisans. Their reputation, deserved or not, became one of peace at any price, subversion, and even outright treason.⁵

Numerically speaking, many but certainly not all of the Northern antiwar, anti-Lincoln dissidents came from the poor, unskilled working class who had emigrated to the North from the Ohio Valley as well as poor European immigrants who had settled in Eastern city slums. This latter scenario was often true for the poverty-stricken Irish, who had fled the late 1840s potato famine in their homeland seeking a better life in the United States. Unlike other European immigrants, however, the Irish had been engaged at home in a protracted war against what they construed as a foreign English government; therefore, many did not feel loyalty toward the state that other immigrants felt, though certainly an antiwar ideology also played a role. Furthermore, conscription into the British Army provided an additional impetus for the Irish to leave their old country. For that reason, a possible military draft in the new world was likewise viewed doubtfully. Working-class German American Catholics were another ethnoreligious group often found in Democratic circles. Like their Irish immigrant brethren, German American Catholics disdained what they saw as the three "-isms" permeating the Republican Party: prohibitionism against alcohol, antislavery abolitionism, and Know-Nothingism, the early to mid-1850s nativist political movement that was resolutely anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Within political circles, many legislators held to a literal interpretation of the Constitution, which maintained each state had the right to determine for itself whether it would preserve slavery. Furthermore, these men viewed the Union as a mere association of the individual states, with any state free to leave the Union if it so desired. Though devoted to their country, they believed the national government did not have the legal right to force the seceded states back into the federal Union.⁶

Concurrently, Lincoln administration supporters viewed any public dissension from government policy as treasonous sympathy for the enemy. If treason was deemed the greatest crime under the law, it was because the government’s highest duty was self-preservation. Americans have seen similar positioning even in modern times with the overseas affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defining treason in theory versus current reality may often be politically ambiguous.⁷

Lincoln was careful not to describe the seceding states in any manner that might be construed as a de facto acknowledgment of their actions and legitimacy, opting instead to use the term so-called Confederate States. If the Southern states had the right to secede and form a new government, then Lincoln did not have the right to raise an army, send it into those states, and force them back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. With such recognition, Confederate soldiers would have the international status of belligerents and all recognized rights under the international rules of warfare. Such theoretical talk ended on April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. Dissenting speech had been replaced by subversive action—the secessionists’ attempt to kill Union soldiers and destroy federal property. Thus, from the war’s outset, the Lincoln administration, its political allies, and the pro-Lincoln press portrayed the Confederacy and its purported Northern sympathizers as black-hearted insurgents guilty of treason.⁸

The reader should note that treason is the only crime defined in the United States Constitution. Article 3, Section 3 of that document states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort [italics added]. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The intentional use of the phrase overt act" meant Union-leaning politicians and judges would not be able to cite mere speech or a suspected conspiracy as an act of treason, thereby eliminating the ability to use a treason allegation for partisan purposes.⁹

The legal challenge of alleging treason was first illustrated in the Civil War era by the October 16–18, 1859, raid by John Brown and eighteen followers against the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In what many consider the rebellion’s opening salvo, Brown attempted to obtain arms in order to inspire a slave uprising throughout the South. Several town residents were killed in the brief skirmish, but the locals held their own, forcing Brown and his men to take refuge in the arsenal’s firehouse. United States troops, led by then-Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee and Lt. J. E. B. Stuart soon arrived and attacked the building, killing at least six of Brown’s men while capturing him.¹⁰

The state of Virginia was stunned and outraged by Brown’s actions and intentions, for an armed slave revolt was what white Southern society feared most. Brown and his men were certainly guilty of something, but exactly what? Was Brown’s crime an act of war or the simple murder of local townsfolk? Seeking to give a political face to its indignation (and fear), Virginia charged Brown with treason against the state, as opposed to the felony charge of murder or military belligerence. This charge illustrated the emotional appeal of alleging treason against an accused, as opposed to his actions being viewed as mere dissent or even simple criminality. As George Fletcher pointed out, with such a charge Virginia converted Brown’s acts of violence into a calculated act of betrayal. By making such a claim, Virginia alleged Brown owed loyalty and fealty to that state, even though Brown was not a Virginia resident or a Virginian by birth. Furthermore, by charging Brown with treason, Virginia maintained it was a sovereign entity and enjoyed a relationship with its citizens that demanded loyalty, despite the aforementioned fact that Brown was not a Virginia citizen or resident. Brown was found guilty and hanged by Virginia on December 2, 1859, only three months after his trial ended. He walked up the gallows’ steps unrepentant, a man who considered himself to be of a different nation and values than Virginia alleged, and quickly became the North’s first martyr.¹¹

In the John Brown case and throughout the Civil War, the angry cry of Treason! was often the pro-Union accuser’s outraged sense of the South and its Northern sympathizers’ betrayal. Moreover, making lofty accusations was one thing, gaining a conviction in a court of law was quite another. When Tennessee’s fifty-seven-year-old Parson William G. Brownlow thundered that Democratic antiwar dissidents had but two rights, the right to be hanged and the right to be damned, he gave voice to this dilemma. If they were not to be hanged because a legal conviction for treason was too problematic, they were certainly going to be openly damned within the court of public opinion. For many Northern Democrats on the receiving end of the treason accusation, they believed it was easier for their opponents to lump the Lincoln administration’s political opposition in with traitors rather than trying to do the right thing the right way. From conservative Democrats’ vantage, the ends could never justify the means. The Constitution was not constructed upon a sliding scale, advised an Illinois senator to his colleagues. When a Union League formed in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1863, the local Democratic paper complained only seven of the league’s 130 members volunteered to help defend the state during the Rebel invasion that culminated at Gettysburg. It is easier to abuse Copperheads than fight rebels, concluded the editor. As this work will show, what was often left out of Democrats’ arguments was that their adherents had indeed often engaged in overt, subversive violence against pro-Union civilians or federal authority in an attempt to undermine the war effort. In many (if not most) instances where a civilian was arrested for subversive violence or conspiracy to carry out the same, the arresting authorities had solid cases.¹²

Despite the precedent of the John Brown case, the Lincoln administration’s ability to secure treason convictions was going to be difficult at best, due in large measure to the legal writ of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase that means you shall have the body and by the start of the Civil War, the writ of habeas corpus had been a cornerstone of anglophone jurisprudence for over two and a half centuries. In essence, it required the arresting authorities to literally bring the accused before the court, where formal charges would have to be put forth or the accused set free. Lincoln’s suspension of the writ was designed to allow the Union military to arrest suspected secessionists and hold them indefinitely, rather than see the accused tried in a civil court, where embarrassing acquittals were a distinct possibility. The modern debate over detaining suspected Islamic terrorists at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay military detention facility and whether or not these men should be tried in a civil or military court raises some, but not all, of the same concerns. In the president’s opinion, suspending the writ was comparable to cutting off a limb in order to save a life, but you would never sacrifice a life in order to save a limb. Lincoln and his Cabinet knew that actually trying these men for treason would prove to be far more difficult than the arrest. This would be especially challenging in the still-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, or Missouri if the presiding judge held some personal sympathy with the Southern cause.¹³

Adding to Lincoln’s legal dilemma was the fact that death was the only permissible penalty for treason when the Civil War started. Since no statutory sedition laws were in effect, those who spoke out against the war could receive only the death penalty if charged and convicted of treason. Everyone knew the federal government could not hang every antiwar Northerner or Confederate soldier.¹⁴

This is one reason why Lincoln and his allies viewed Copperhead pronouncements against the war and their sometimes violent antiwar protests as a significant threat to the home front. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, asked Lincoln rhetorically, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert? Within this growing culture war, Republicans became convinced that antiwar or antidraft speeches and violent protest were treasonous activities because they offered aid and comfort to the enemy. For those Northern individuals who admitted assisting Southern family or friends, but claimed opposition to secession and, therefore, were not guilty of treason, the Lincoln administration occasionally had such persons banished under guard into the Confederacy, well beyond Union lines. Such deportations allowed administration authorities to ignore civil trials while smugly stating they were allowing the individuals to give a sincere expression of their feelings in a more appropriate theater. After all, It is but just to our government and laws, claimed one Union military tribunal, that the shield of its power should not be thrown over those who are inimical to it, and are giving active aid and sympathy to its enemies. Rejecting the very idea of a loyal opposition in the midst of a civil war, the tribunal concluded, The claim to protection by the government implies the reciprocity of fealty. How to manage the free speech issue proved to be a vexing dilemma for the Lincoln administration, since managing the war efficiently mandated some regulation of public communications, which stood in stark contrast to the war’s objectives.¹⁵

In addition, the very nature of revolution or the right of rebellion against what one considered a tyrannical government was dismissed by steadfast Union loyalists. Arguing that while man’s right to revolution existed in the abstract, it ended when a society had established a free popular government with all its appropriate institutions and a constitution duly regulating the administration of that government, and itself amendable by the people. If such a society existed, as staunch Unionists believed it did within the United States, then an armed uprising against a free constitutional government without justifying conditions was never a right, but merely a crime. If Lincoln the lawyer and his political allies were well aware of how challenging and imprudent going after treason convictions would be in a civil court, they were also well aware that the court of public opinion would be a far easier setting in which to solidify their definitions of what constituted patriotic loyalty versus treason.¹⁶

The entire debate over loyalty and treason reached the boiling point as summer 1862 progressed into fall. Repeated military defeats, economic worries, and staggering casualties all combined to prompt many Northern civilians to question the war’s viability and cost. The public’s frustration exploded into anger when Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September. While many Northerners were willing to risk their lives to restore the Union, relatively few saw the benefit in jeopardizing white lives or livelihoods to free black slaves.

These disgruntled voices only grew louder. Prowar advocates labeled them as peace at any price traitors who blamed blacks for everything while always arguing that Lincoln’s decisions were wrongheaded at best and unconstitutional at worst. Antiblack and antidraft street riots broke out in several Midwestern towns. Pro-Lincoln men were physically attacked and saw their farms vandalized by Copperheads. This growing civilian disenchantment led to significant Republican defeats in the November elections. As 1862 ended, Union confidence was at rock bottom.

Across the North, ardent pro-Union men realized their country needed a patriotic stimulus, as well as an organized means of countering their Copperhead adversaries’ treasonous statements and physical violence against loyal, pro-Union men. For as William Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries later wrote of those days, There is no Confederate army in the field that is so dangerous as the political army now assailing the administration. A new sense of nationalistic patriotism needed to be introduced into the populace, one that would supplant the dominant regional or sectional loyalties that had worked against a national consciousness since the country’s founding. Loyalty toward the national state had to replace the dominant moral sympathy for others as the proper mechanism for generating proper American allegiance. As Elizabeth Duquette noted, Consistently opposed to sympathy’s poor politics and local allegiances, loyalty encouraged a movement of both moral norms and political practices away from feeling by suggesting that rational reflection provided a more stable basis for national affiliation. ¹⁷

Furthermore, those loyal, pro-Union men argued how it was essential that the right type of patriotic fervor and loyalty manifest itself. For loyalty to be considered proper, it had to be unconditional and directed not merely toward constitutional precepts, but toward the Lincoln administration and all of its war policies. Since the Confederacy had ready access to Northern newspapers, any anti-Lincoln, antiwar, or Southern-sympathizing editorials surely gave aid and comfort to the Rebel enemy and were therefore equated with treason.

These generally middle-aged, civilian men created what became known as Union Leagues: quasi-secretive clubs whose potential members had to possess unqualified loyalty to the Government of the United States, and unwavering support of its efforts for the suppression of the Rebellion. Their mysterious member initiation rites featured prayers, oaths, songs, and patriotic symbols that were likened to a religious ceremony. Members vocalized the League’s nationalistic viewpoint in speeches and served as campaign workers. They served as an armed home guard to protect their families, neighborhoods, and federal authority against Copperhead violence. They helped recruit white and colored military regiments, and when deemed necessary, employed social and commercial ostracism as a means of enforcing loyalty and stifling dissent that shocked polite society. On a murkier level, some members displayed no hesitation in smashing Democratic presses and serving as a form of civilian secret police for the Union military. The Union League crusade and its various offshoots spread like wildfire across the North. By the end of 1863, it seemed as if every hamlet from Maine to California had formed its own council.

In a singular sense, the Civil War–era Union League was what is now known as a pressure group, defined as an organized assembly of individuals who share a common opinion, values, or point of view and who try to influence the policies of government or business to their end. While many groups may operate independently of the government, others can also work hand in glove with the government. This was the case with the Union Leagues, for though they initially raised a nonpartisan banner, by the war’s last year they were in open collaboration with the Lincoln administration, its Republican allies, as well as the Union military.

Obviously, such groups have to strive for attention in order to be heard and achieve success. As modern studies of public opinion and propaganda have shown,¹⁸ it is often far easier to rally the masses against a particular idea or person rather than for a specific cause. The Union Leagues and their loosely affiliated publishing societies explicitly illustrated this precept. For in their goal to shape public opinion and achieve their war aims, they attacked their treasonous Democrat and Copperhead foes relentlessly, as do many modern pressure groups.

Famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted knew this well when he first conceived the idea for what became the Union League Club of New York by writing to a colleague, It is easier to profess true hate than true love. The Union Leagues, their kindred publication societies, Republican political allies, and sympathetic newspaper editors worked this concept ceaselessly in convincing the Northern populace of their shared conviction that pro-Southern secret cabals were lurking throughout the North. It became the duty of every loyal and true patriot to counteract their treasonous activity by joining his local Union League council and voting the Republican ticket.¹⁹

My personal aha! moment arrived when I discovered this last point. I realized that the often angry, partisan media considered so prevalent in today’s culture is not a new phenomenon, but rather has its roots in antebellum and Civil War–era journalism. As I delved further into the Union Leagues, I realized their story intersected with two of my keenest interests: Civil War history and contemporary politics. It became apparent to me how some of the most important political issues in our current news cycle are strikingly similar to the serious political debates faced by the Union Leagues during the Civil War. For instance, as I type these words in the summer of 2016, our nation is watching a relatively small but elite faction of a major political party attempting to replace that party’s very popular and apparent presidential nominee with someone more to their liking. The parallels to 1864 will become obvious.

Placing Lincoln’s controversial Emancipation Proclamation alongside the modern Iraq War’s divisive switch from the publicly approved search for weapons of mass destruction to contentious nation-building allows us to compare each era’s response to a president who added a second, highly provocative reason for continuing a bloody war—when that war was originally commenced based on only one widely agreed-upon reason. An examination of those two historic events also allows us to compare and then ask how a president’s supporters should respond to antiwar protesters whose actions were viewed by administration loyalists as more sympathetic to the enemy than toward the nation’s own men and women in uniform. Do these protesters not enjoy the same public, free speech rights as those who agree with the administration?

The Union League movement faced all of these questions during the Civil War and answered them by declaring that anything less than unconditional support for the government was treasonous. The Leagues acknowledged that freedom of speech was always a cherished ideal in the abstract; however, in wartime,