The war in 1863
The first half of 1863 was grim for the Union cause. In the East, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia experienced its greatest successes. Meanwhile, Union armies in the West were stifled, especially in their efforts to take Vicksburg, Mississippi. Catastrophic Confederate losses in early July, however, left Lee unable to ever take the offensive again, gave the Union control of the Mississippi River from top to bottom, and divided the Confederacy in half. Nevertheless, problems plagued both sides as the war’s toll weighed increasingly on the people at home.
The Copperheads
In January 1863 Lincoln was despondent about the political situation in the North. Antiwar Democrats had been in evidence since the beginning of the conflict, but the North’s defeats in the summer and fall of 1862, along with the deeply divisive Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, had given the so-called Peace Democrats credibility and an audience. Republicans had not fared well in the midterm elections, and a movement in the Midwestern states to break off and either join the Confederacy or start a third country seemed to be gaining ground. “The fire in the rear,” Lincoln told a senator, posed a greater threat to the nation than the Confederates did to its front.
The Peace Democrats, dubbed “Copperheads” by Republicans after a poisonous snake, braided together three coalitions: immigrants, especially Irish and German Catholics, who had been the target of ugly discrimination by nativists and Protestant reformers and who had gravitated into the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s; people in the Lower Midwest with family ties to the South; and conservative Democrats who had a strict constructionist reading of the Constitution. Poorly led and having only loose formal connections beyond county lines, Peace Democrats universally characterized themselves as conservatives worried that Lincoln and the Republicans were reaching far past constitutional bounds. They also shared a deep antipathy toward African Americans. By the summer of 1862 the rallying cry of these conservatives was “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is.”
The movement was galvanized by the suspension of habeas corpus, first on the East Coast and then throughout the Union; the Emancipation Proclamation, which confirmed the worst suspicions of the Copperheads, who believed this had always been a war about abolition rather than reunion; and conscription, which Congress approved in March 1863. Other changes that were widely accepted by most Northerners and would have major implications for the American economy for generations to come were also reviled by the Copperheads. Specifically, they believed that the income tax that was levied for the first time in the country’s history and the issuance of paper currency—so-called greenbacks—were further gross violations of the Constitution that represented yet another dangerous extension of executive power. These were indeed more examples of the executive’s broader power, although the income tax, like many other war measures, disappeared after the war. A nationally recognized paper currency, however, was with the country to stay.
Ultimately the Copperheads really had very little control over their own fate. Instead, the extent of their influence rested with the armies. Although they never seemed to realize it, the power of the Peace Democrats waxed and waned through the war in direct opposition to how well the Union armies performed in the field.