The Decisive Year: Loyal Americans, Print Culture, and the Election of 1864
ECW welcomes back guest author Heath Anderson.
[Editor’s note: This post contains a racial epithet quoted from an 1864 source]
In the fall of 1864, Abraham Lincoln faced perhaps his most formidable challenge of the Civil War to date: a presidential election. With the war locked in a bloody stalemate, a vocal minority of “Peace” or “Copperhead” Democrats argued that subduing the Confederacy was no longer worth the cost in blood and treasure and, more tellingly, that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had transformed the war’s purpose from the preservation of the Union into a crusade for racial equality, something few White Northerners supported. While Lincoln’s challenger, his idiosyncratic former general, George McClellan, vowed to continue the war, many Democrats demanded immediate and—in some cases—unconditional negotiations with the Confederacy should McClellan win.
Of course, Abraham Lincoln ultimately won a second term, Union armies defeated the rebellion, and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but these developments hung in the balance in 1864. In this fraught political moment, Lincoln and the Republicans had two crucial allies in keeping public opinion behind the war effort: the Loyal Publication Societies of New York and Boston. Launched in February and March of 1863 and led by such luminaries as intellectual Charles Eliot Norton and legal theorist Francis Lieber, the New England (Boston) and New York Loyal Publication Societies circulated hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, broadsides, and articles in support of Lincoln’s re-election. In a nationalist message, their literature framed the election as an existential struggle between slavery and freedom or “aristocracy and popular government” as the basis for American civilization. As Boston’s Norton explained, the war was between “two adverse conditions of society” and fought by the “champions of government and law” on one side and the “supporters of privilege” on the other.[1]
Ultimately, loyal citizens responded to the societies’ message. By re-electing Lincoln and securing a Union free from slavery, loyal Americans rejected the Copperheads’ defeatism and race-baiting despite their deep misgivings about emancipation. However, this result does not mean that shaping public opinion was easy.
In 1864, Copperhead Democrats gained ground in key Republican states, like Indiana and Illinois, by appealing to the war weariness of loyal Americans and their latent racism. Republicans in these states were the party’s original antislavery core, but most opposed slavery because it threatened their status as equal White citizens in the republic, not out of sympathy for Black Americans. For these men, the Copperheads’ equation of emancipation with racial equality held particular sway. As Indiana’s Governor Oliver P. Morton wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the people were “bountifully supplied with the most treasonable and poisonous literature.” In response, the New England Society distributed the majority of their pamphlets in 1864 to 412 publications in these Midwestern states, compared to only 148 in New England.[2]
Mixing incisive pieces on the election’s moral stakes with shrewd partisanship, the societies combated Copperhead Democrats’ charges that the war was unwinnable and emancipation a crime by portraying Copperheads as useful idiots for Confederate traitors. The New York Society’s “Union Broadside No. 2: What the Copperheads and their Southern Friends Say” epitomizes this strategy. One excerpt in this piece was from the Louisville Courier, a Kentucky paper referred to as a “Copperhead organ of the Rebels.” The Courier lauded White Southerners as a distinct race who held a “sacred” and “hereditary hostility” for the “Saxon Yankee.” Beneath this excerpt, the Broadside featured a piece from the Confederate Richmond Enquirer that excoriated Yankees as “those creatures” and pointed to the “ineffaceable differences which make us now and hereafter two distinct races of men.” In this context, the Broadside framed Copperheads’ peace plans as treasonous delusions because, as the Enquirer’s Editor concluded, “in peace or in war, we shall indeed be aliens for all time; for our ways are not their ways, their people are not our people, neither is their God our God.”[3]
While their distribution was expansive, responses to a questionnaire conducted by the New England Society from 1864 to 1865 provide the best evidence that many White Northerners accepted their main argument: that defeating the rebellion and preserving a Union without slavery was a moral end unto itself, and that loyal Americans must vote for Lincoln despite their prejudice toward African Americans.
In response to a question about Black citizenship in their communities, the society included replies from 76 newspapers in their annual report. Of these, 41 were decidedly against it, 27 at least slightly in favor, and eight mixed or indifferent. Results from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois—all states that went for Lincoln in 1864—were especially telling. “The general sentiment here is, ‘D—n the nigger,’ responded the editor of Pennsylvania’s Williamsport Bulletin. “I regret to say that this feeling is not all confined to Democratic Copperheads,” he continued, but was held by many Republicans lacking a “sense of justice.” Other respondents agreed and stated that their support for Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment was entirely consistent with their desire to associate with Black people as little as possible. As one Illinois editor put it, “The majority want them free because they think slavery the cause of the war, but the general sentiment is ‘free the slaves, and send them off.’ ‘We want no niggers among us.’ This is almost general.”[4]
With Lincoln’s re-election and Union victory, the New England and New York societies gradually ceased operations. Reflecting on their accomplishments in the New York chapter’s final meeting in 1866, Francis Lieber stated that their publications “contributed no inconsiderable share in bringing about one of the greatest national acts in all history—the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.”[5] With this statement, Lieber reiterated that the triumph of the Union was still very much in doubt in the decisive year of 1864. While McClellan likely would have continued the war, his victory would have done little to dampen Copperheads’ demands for peace or to advance the abolition of slavery via constitutional amendment.
Heath Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate at Mississippi State University. His dissertation focuses on how nineteenth-century Americans’ conceptions of “civilization” impacted the course of Reconstruction.
Endnotes:
[1] My interpretation of the pamphlet literature is informed by historian Mark E. Neely Jr.’s, Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Quotes in George Winston Smith, “Broadsides for Freedom: Civil War Propaganda in New England.” The New England Quarterly 21 (September 1948), 292, 297-299; For an article on the New York Chapter see Frank Freidel, “The Loyal Publication Society: A Pro-Union Propaganda Agency,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 26 (Dec 1939).
[2] Smith, “Broadsides for Freedom,” 295-296.
[3] [ID# 1904] “Union Broadside No. 2.: What the Copperheads and their Southern Friends Say” (New York: The Loyal Publication Society, John F. Trow, Printer, 1864), Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana, Mississippi State University Libraries. Italics from source.
[4] Quotes from the papers are in John Murray Forbes, Report of the Executive Committee of the New England Loyal Publication Society. May 1, 1875 (Boston: Fred Rogers Printers, 1865), 22-23. Williams Collection, MSU.
[5] Freidel, “The Loyal Publication Society,” 376.
Excellent article – much appreciated.