"Screw the Troops" and Other Copperhead Methodology

Read this and imagine how our nation and our world would look today if the Reids, Pelosis and the New York Times of Lincoln's time succeeded. They were scum then and they are scum now. I say this as the great grandson of an officer with the Virginia 8th.

This is eerily like today.

Newspaper OpinionsThe Press and Army Morale
"'Spend Much Time in Reading the Daily Papers': The Press and Army Morale in the Civil War."

by James McPherson

...

News from the homefront as well as from other theaters of war affected army
morale. A soldier's conviction that he was risking his life for a worthwhile
purpose, a Cause with a capital C, was rooted in the support of his family and
community for that Cause. Some of that support, or the lack of it, was conveyed
to soldiers by the letters they received from home. But much of it came via the
press and the political process, which were intertwined institutions during the
Civil War. In both North and South, antiwar movements arose and flourished at
times when the war seemed to be going badly for one's own side. These movements
advocated an armistice and a negotiated peace. The governments in both
Washington and Richmond viewed such proposals as defeatist at best, treasonable
at worst. So did most soldiers. They labeled the peace proponents in the
Confederacy as "Tories" and in the North as "Copperheads." On both sides,
opponents of the war -- or more accurately, perhaps, opponents of their
governments' war policies -- made their case through the press as well as
through the political process.

After the triple disasters to Confederate arms
in the summer of 1863 -- Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and the Army of Tennessee's
retreat from its namesake state some Southern civilians began urging a
compromise peace. A nineteen-year-oid private in the 7th Alabama Cavalry
denounced what he called this "miserable class of men that now infest the
country," while another Alabamian, an infantry captain, deplored the lack of
"patriotism of a great many of the people at home. The army cannot be sustained
without the cooperation of the people." Even in South Carolina, a few Tories
seemed to surface after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, causing a nineteen-year-old
veteran from that state to cry out: "Shame for South Carolina! Go back into the
union, degraded despised dishonorable.... This is the way we are rewarded -- our
own people forsake us in the trying hour -- and after our all -- honour-and
everything else is at stake.... Degrading, wretched, unpatriotic, infamous
thought!"24

In 1863, peace sentiment manifested itself most powerfully in North Carolina. The
state's largest newspaper, the North Carolina Standard, edited in Raleigh by
William W. Holden, became an outspoken advocate of peace negotiations. So
incensed toward Holden were Confederate soldiers that on the night of September
9-10, 1863, several men of General Henry L. Bennings's brigade of Georgia
troops, passing through Raleigh on their way from Virginia to Georgia where they
would suffer heavy losses at Chickamauga ten days later, broke into the
Standard's office and wrecked it.25

Union soldiers did the same to so-called "Copperhead" papers in the North. And judging from the volume and bitterness of soldiers' denunciations of homefront
"traitors," the Copperhead press in the North was far more extensive and
outspoken than the Tory press in the South. Especially during the early months
of 1863 and again in the summer of 1864, the drumbeat of defeatism and anti-war
editorials in Copperhead newspapers caused morale problems in Union armies. A
captain in the 8th Connecticut complained in January 1863 that "the papers (many
of them) published at the North & letters rec[eive]d by the soldiers are
doing the Army an immense amount of evil." From Grant's army in the Western
theater came similar testimony from a captain in the 103d Illinois: "You can't
imagine how much harm these traitors are doing, not only with their papers, but
they are writing letters to the boys which would discourage the most loyal of
men. . . . I put in a great deal more of my time than I would wish to, in
talking patriotism at the boys ... to counteract the effect of these letters
[and papers] ... and doing good solid cursing at the home cowardly vipers." An
enlisted man from Iowa believed that the Copperhead press not only discouraged
the boys in blue but also encouraged the enemy. "The Rebels in the South well
know how we are divided in the North," he wrote in March 1863. "It encourages
them to hold out, with the hopes that we will get to fighting in the North, well
knowing that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand."26

At the same time, however, a backlash against the Copperheads' anti-war rhetoric
forged a bond of unity among Union soldiers that actually improved their morale.
"Copperheadism has brought the soldiers here together more than anything else,"
wrote a corporal in the 101st Ohio in April 1863. "Some of the men that yoused
to be almost willing to have the war settled in any way are now among the
strongest Union soldiers we have got." Many Northern soldiers lumped the Rebels
and Copperheads together as twin enemies who deserved the same treatment. "My
first object is to crush this infernal Rebellion," wrote a Pennsylvania infantry
captain in March 1863, "the next to come North and bayonet such fool miscreants
as [Clement] Vallandigham" the foremost Copperhead political leader. A private
in the 49th Ohio told his sister in June 1863 that "it would give me the
greatest pleasure in the world to be one of a regiment that would march through
Ohio and Indiana and hang every Copperhead in the two States."27

When Northern homefront morale plunged to perhaps its lowest point in the summer of 1864 because of horrendous casualties in the Army of the Potomac without much apparent progress toward victory, Union soldier morale remained higher than it had been in the spring of 1863 because of this bond of unity against the Copperheads. As a New York captain wrote to his wife, "it is the soldiers who
have educated the people at home to a true knowledge ... and to a just
perception of our great duties in this contest."28

That is one reason why many Union regiments established their own camp
newspapers at various times and places during the war -- at least one hundred
such newspapers, most of them short-lived. (There seem to have been few if any
counterparts in Confederate camps.) They bore such names as Stars and Stripes,
Whole Union, Banner of Freedom, New South, Free South, American Patriot, and
other such patriotic titles. Many Union soldiers (and some Confederates as well)
also served as army correspondents for their hometown newspapers. Perhaps the
most famous of these was Wilbur Fisk of the 2d Vermont, whose dispatches have
been published in book form in two modern editions. Fisk signed his letters with
the pen name "Anti-Rebel," which pretty much sums up their dominant theme.29

That is why almost 80 percent of the Union soldiers who voted in 1864 cast their
ballots for Abraham Lincoln on a platform of conquering a peace by military
victory, compared with 53 percent of the civilian vote for Lincoln. As one Union
officer put it in August 1864, at the low point of civilian morale, "We must
succeed. If not this year, why then the next, or the next. And if it takes ten
years, then ten years it must be, for we can never give up, and have a Country
and Government left."30

...

The Copperhead's grand children and great grand children are alive and well today. They're just as scummy.