The Making of a Riot: Political Violence in Civil War Illinois

ECW welcomes back guest author M.A. Kleen.

In late April 1864, members of the 54th Illinois Infantry Regiment gathered around a small-town courthouse, waiting to board a train back to their unit, when an argument with resentful civilians erupted into gunfire. The clash, which left nine dead and twelve wounded, occurred not in the South, but in Charleston, Illinois.

Known as the Charleston Riot, it was the deadliest episode of Northern home-front violence outside the New York City Draft Riots and drew national attention when President Abraham Lincoln personally intervened. Pitting antiwar Democrats against hometown soldiers on furlough, the incident raised a pressing question: how could such bloodshed happen so far from the frontlines?

By 1864, mounting casualties fueled Northern opposition to the Civil War, and Democrats sought to harness this discontent without stoking Republican suspicions of disloyalty. This balancing act split the party into War Democrats and Peace Democrats, the latter derisively nicknamed “Copperheads,” a label some embraced by wearing copper Liberty Head coins.

Historians have long debated the roots of Copperheadism’s appeal.^[1] My own research suggests that, at least in Illinois, Copperheadism had more to do with longstanding political rivalries than with economic and cultural ties to the South. Southern Illinois shifted heavily toward unionism as the war progressed, despite the region’s overwhelming Democratic vote in the 1860 election. Central Illinois, where the margin between Republicans and Democrats was razor-thin, became the hotbed of Copperhead activity.^[2]

Several academic articles examining events surrounding the Charleston Riot have been published in Illinois state historical journals, but despite its importance to Copperheadism’s broader story, the riot has never received the national attention it deserves.

The story of the riot is the story of escalating political tensions in east-central Illinois during 1863 and early 1864. Although Abraham Lincoln won Illinois in the 1860 presidential election, opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation and the suspension of habeas corpus handed Democrats a majority in the state legislature during the November 1862 midterm elections. Passage of the nation’s first conscription law in 1863 further inflamed tensions, and Illinois Democrats attempted to pass resolutions and legislation calling for an armistice, restricting use of the state militia, and obstructing the draft.^[3]

Republicans responded by accusing the Democratic Party of disloyalty, even treason. In February 1863, State Senator Isaac Funk delivered a widely published speech, saying, “…the country would be the better of swinging them up… What man, with the heart of a patriot, could stand this treason any longer?”^[4] In June 1863, Illinois’s Republican Governor Richard Yates exploited a loophole in state law that allowed him to decide how long the legislature would remain in recess if the House and Senate did not agree on a recess date. He prorogued them for two years and ran the state as its de facto dictator.^[5]

The political situation deteriorated further with the military arrest of Charles H. Constable, judge of the Illinois 4th Circuit Court. In March 1863, Judge Constable ordered the release of Union Army deserters who had been arrested by Union soldiers in east-central Illinois. The Clark County sheriff then arrested the two sergeants leading the posse on kidnapping charges. In response, Col. Henry B. Carrington led a force of over 200 Union soldiers to Marshall, Illinois, to arrest Constable at the county courthouse as he presided over the sergeants’ trial. They ultimately turned him over to federal court, where the charges were dismissed.^[6]

Constable became a cause célèbre among Peace Democrats and a target of derision among Unionists. On January 29, 1864, soldiers on leave in Mattoon, Charleston’s sister city in Coles County, forced Constable to kneel in the mud and swear a loyalty oath. The next day, Charles Shoalmax of the 17th Illinois Cavalry shot and killed a man named Edwards Stevens who tried to escape the same fate.^[7]

In February, trouble between Union soldiers on furlough and local Copperheads again boiled over, this time in Edgar County, east of Coles County. There, in the town of Paris, Amos Green, a member of the Order of the American Knights, operated a Democratic newspaper. At a Democratic meeting in Mattoon in August 1863, he reportedly told the crowd, “They would appeal to the ballot-box for their rights, and if they could not get them in that way, they would appeal to the cartridge box.” Members of the 12th and 66th Illinois infantry regiments forced Green to swear an oath and pledge a sum of money to prove his loyalty to the Union.^[8]

In a confrontation in the streets of Paris, a soldier named John Milton York shot and seriously wounded an outspoken Copperhead named Cooper. Edgar County Sheriff William S. O’Hair attempted to arrest the soldier, but one of York’s compatriots prevented him from doing so at gunpoint. York was eventually arrested, but the court released him on a technicality and he rejoined his regiment.^[9]

On hearing rumors that the soldiers planned to burn the newspaper office before returning to the front, Sheriff O’Hair, accompanied by over a dozen men, rode into town on the day the furloughed soldiers were to leave. Someone informed the soldiers of the posse’s whereabouts, and they immediately went to investigate. As they approached an alley, a group of men fired on them before fleeing toward a horse stable on the edge of town, where Sheriff O’Hair and his posse were presumably waiting. These men then promptly escaped.

As the soldiers approached the stable, Alfred Kennedy, a young man hiding inside, shot one of them in the wrist. Private Mark Boatman of the 12th Illinois peered into the building as he heard Kennedy call out that he surrendered. As Boatman lowered his weapon, Kennedy shot him in the shoulder. More Union soldiers arrived and poured a volley into the stable, riddling the planks with bullets. When they looked inside, they found Kennedy badly wounded. Kennedy told the soldiers that his fellow Copperheads had planned to ambush them at the train station.^[10]

Some participants in the Charleston Riot had familial ties to the participants in the February Edgar County affair. John Henry O’Hair, sheriff of Coles County, was William S. O’Hair’s cousin. Both were known for their Copperhead leanings. Major Shubal York, surgeon of the 54th Illinois, was from Paris and was the father of John Milton York. These family connections meant that the violence in Edgar County had personal implications for key figures at the Coles County Courthouse that fateful Monday, March 28, 1864.

The Charleston Riot emerged not from spontaneous wartime tensions, but from a sequence of political provocations, personal vendettas, and escalating confrontations across east-central Illinois. What began as ideological disagreements over emancipation and federal authority had devolved into a bitter cycle of retribution. By March 1864, conditions were ripe for violence. The deadly riot that followed was the culmination of months of political warfare that had transformed ordinary citizens into enemies and reduced democratic debate to the language of bullets.

M.A. Kleen is a program analyst and editor of spirit61.info, a digital encyclopedia of early Civil War Virginia. His article “‘A Kind of Dreamland’: Upshur County, WV at the Dawn of Civil War” was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Ohio Valley History.

Endnotes:

^[1] See: Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Frank L. Klement, “Midwestern Opposition to Lincoln’s Emancipation Policy,” The Journal of Negro History 49 (July 1964).

^[2] Michael Kleen, “The Copperhead Threat in Illinois: Peace Democrats, Loyalty Leagues, and the Charleston Riot of 1864,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 105 (Spring 2012): 69-92.

^[3] Willard L. King, “Lincoln and the Illinois Copperheads,” Lincoln Herald 80 (Fall 1978): 134-135; James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, “Was Illinois Governor Richard Yates Intimidated by the Copperheads During the Civil War?,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 107 (Fall/Winter 2014): 338-339.

^[4] Loyal Publication Society, The Three Voices: Soldier, Farmer, and Poet. To the Copper Heads (New York: Rebellion Record), 1-2.

^[5] John H. Krenkel, ed., Richard Yates: Civil War Governor by Richard Yates and Catharine Yates Pickering (Danville: The Interstate Printers & Publishers, 1966), 182-184.

^[6] Stephen E. Towne, “‘Such conduct must be put down’: The Military Arrest of Judge Charles H. Constable during the Civil War,” Journal of Illinois History 9 (Spring 2006): 43-62.

^[7] Sampson, 111; Charles H. Coleman and Paul H. Spence, “The Charleston Riot, March 28, 1864,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 33 (March 1940), 16.

^[8] Peter J. Barry, “Amos Green, Paris, Illinois: Civil War Lawyer, Editorialist, and Copperhead,” Journal of Illinois History 11 (Spring 2008): 48-49.

^[9] Independent Gazette (Mattoon), 7 February 1864; Richard K. Tibbals, “‘There has been a serious disturbance at Charleston…’: The 54th Illinois vs. the Copperheads,” Military Images 21 (July-August 1999), 11.

^[10] Crawford County Argus (Robinson), 10 March 1864; John Scott Parkinson, “Bloody Spring: The Charleston, Illinois Riot and Copperhead Violence During the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 1998), 168-71.