THE MOBBING OF THE CRISIS
by EUGENE H. ROSEBOOM
Professor of History, Ohio
State University
On the night of March 5, 1863, in the midst of the Civil
War, the capital city of Ohio was the scene of a species of violence
that had more than local significance. The office of Samuel
Medary's Crisis, a weekly newspaper that had won both national
acclaim and condemnation for its opposition to the war, was
wrecked by a crowd of armed men. Some writers have
attributed the act to soldiers, others to soldiers and civilians; nearly
all explain it as the work of a mob. A bit of contemporary evidence
has come to light which reveals clearly who the participants were
and which raises doubts as to the accuracy of the use of the word
"mob" in describing the attack.
[...]
Military arrests of allegedly disloyal editors and the more
illegal destruction of their presses in the years 1862-64 were
practices that became far too common in a nation that had prided
itself on the complete freedom of its press.2 The stresses of a
great civil war loosed passions Americans had never felt before,
and the term "Copperhead" became synonymous with
"Confederate" to those who believed that the Union could be saved
only by victory on the field of battle. The soldiers in particular
were incensed at the peace advocates. They blamed Copperheadism
for prolonging the war by encouraging the belief in the South
that the North was divided and that an armed uprising might
occur which would bring about the overthrow of the Lincoln
administration and make possible a Confederate victory.
In the house I grew up in the term Copperhead was uttered with contempt by my southern mother and my staunchly Yankee father. Copperhead was synonymous with traitor.
In 1861,
Mayor Fernando Wood denounced the Lincoln administration and
contemplated New York secession, proposing a separate republic on Manhattan
island. Two years later, amid the horrific racial violence of the draft
riots, Governor Horatio Seymour openly sympathized with white rioters,
voicing an unrepentant Copperhead vision of the war.
As the Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Gotham described, “in the fall 1862
elections, after the Preliminary Proclamation, Peace Democrats bid for power.
In the city, ex-mayor Wood and his supporters denounced the administration
as ‘fanatical, imbecile, and corrupt’ and openly urged resistance to
emancipation. At the state level, Peace Democrat Horatio Seymour (allied to
New York Central Railroad interests) adopted a similar stance, favoring
restoration of the Union by granting all possible concessions to the South.
Both resorted to a shrill racism, protesting that emancipation substituted
‘niggerism for nationality.’ In the context of growing unhappiness with the
costs of war, Democrats carried every ward in the city, Wood won a
congressional seat, and Seymour captured the governorship.
NYC politics haven't changed much.
Pamphleteers attacked the rising war debt, the government’s military
strategy, and the Republican Party’s centralizing project and agitated for a
negotiated peace and a revocation of emancipation. Belmont also promoted
these ideas in the New York World, a newspaper edited by
twenty-seven-year-old Manton Marble, which he, Tilden, and other rich
Democrats underwrote.
In addition, in his capacity as Democratic Party national chairman, Belmont
began grooming the cashiered General George McClellan to challenge Lincoln in
1864. After being fired, McClellan moved to New York City and began working
with Chairman Belmont on building a presidential candidacy. He took with him
as his aide Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer, who now received his first
introduction to the financial, political, and journalistic elite of the
metropolis.
Nor has the politics of disgruntled Generals as dupes.
While the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge took the
(relatively) high road, the popular press launched a gloves-off campaign that
mixed racism, solidarity with labor, attacks on war profiteers, and,
increasingly, calls for peace. At various points the Lincoln administration
banned “Copperhead” papers from the mails. Republican infringements of civil
liberties generated more support for Peace Democrats. The Lincoln
administration suspended habeas corpus and arrested or detained hundreds. In
New York City political prisoners were housed in Fort Lafayette, just off the
Brooklyn shore from Fort Hamilton. When Ohio Democrat Clement L. Valandigham
was indicted for seditious oratory, Fernando Wood chaired a meeting at Cooper
Institute in his support.
June 1863 was the high point of antiwar activism in the city. Wood held a
massive Peace Convention at Cooper Union on June 3-of which James
Gordon Bennett’s Herald approved, auguring a new respectability-and orators
pounded home the ideas that the war was a rich man’s fight, that it was
undermining the Constitution, and that it would flood the North with southern
blacks.”
Little has changed. Rich men extolling to the mob just how disgusted they are that this is a rich man's war, the administration is corrupt and coddles its war profiteering friends as the copperheads profit from their opposition in hopes of further wealth, and, as always, any President that doesn't see the world through the true prism of their truth is an "imbecile".
What true men fight for is freedom. Copperheads then and today are not true men.
