others. The main strength of the organization was naturally wherever the Peace Democrats abounded. The chief "temples" were at Cincinnati, Dayton and Hamilton in Ohio, Indianapolis and Vincennes in Indiana, at Chicago, Springfield, and Quincy in Illinois, at St. Louis in Missouri, Louisville in Kentucky, and Detroit in Michigan. In some counties in Indiana practically all Democrats were enrolled. 40 Contemporary estimates of the membership, whether by the Government agents or by the officials of the order, are undoubtedly exaggerated. The motives of the individual made him see numbers in large. Some placed the number near a million. Vallandigham claimed an active membership in 1864 of half a million. Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate General of the United States, accepted Vallandigham's claim as near the truth, and added the opinion that 340,000 of them were ready for military service. On the other hand, Thompson, the Confederate Commissioner in Canada placed the number at 170,000 for Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The total in the Northwest would in that case not exceed 225,000. As a matter of fact the local organization was so loose and the membership so shifting and inconstant that contemporary estimates were little more than guesses. A half a million there certainly was not. The total vote for McClellan in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky was just over 500,000 in 1864; that vote was the combined strength of the greater part of the War Democrats and all the Peace Democrats. It is inconceivable that anything like the whole of the Peace Democrats were enrolled in the secret political societies; much less a number equal to the combination of the two factions of the Democratic Party. The Adjutant General of Ohio reported from the information which the state authorities gathered with some care that

39 Report of Advocate General, Joseph Holt, p. 5.

40 The Report of the Adjutant General of Indiana, Vol. I, p. 303, says this was true of Brown, Huntington, Jackson, Marshall, Orange, Putnam, and Washington counties.

there were from 80,000 to 108,000 in Ohio. 1 The lower number (80,000) represents a little over 40 per cent of Vallandigham's vote for Governor in 1863, or less than one fifth of the voters in the state. The estimate is not unreasonable, but the evidence in its support is not convincing. If one accepts the figure for Ohio, and adds to it similar conservative estimates for the other states where the secret organization existed the result would give a membership of 325,000 in 1864 when the movement was at its height. It is doubtful whether one will ever be able to make a statement more precise than this that there were two or three hundred thousand men in the Northwest banded together in a secret political and military organization hostile to the Federal Government. How far the body was armed and drilled is a matter about which the evidence is even less trustworthy than the estimates of numbers. 42

The oaths, rituals, and declarations of principles of the secret societies laid stress on unswerving obedience of the members to the leaders and on the political doctrines of the Peace Democrats. And then they pushed the teachings of the more radical elements of Peace Democracy into fields that party resolutions, platforms, and speeches, being public, dared not touch. The right and duty of resort to force against the Government was freely taught. The old Democracy of Jefferson and Calhoun had set up the States as the final authority in the place the Supreme Court came to occupy when the powers of the Federal Government were in question. Vallandigham's movement in effect set up the assemblies of the Sons of Liberty as the court of final appeal. The ritual of the order spread the doctrine that "whenever the officials, to whom the people

41 Report of the Adjutant General of Ohio, 1864, p. 37.

42 Holt, Advocate General, p. 5: Official Records, (Series II), Vol. VII, pp.228, 630, 801; (Series III), Vol. 4, p. 579; Thompson in Southern Bivouac, Vol. II, p. 509, Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. V, p. 318, seems to place the number near 200,000; Fessler, Indiana Magazine of History, 1918, p. 230 reaches the conclusion that the number was much less than these figures; he seems to doubt that it ever exceeded 100,000.

have intrusted the powers of the government, shall refuse to administer it in strict accordance with its constitution, and shall assume and exercise power and authority not delegated, it is the inherent right and imperative duty of the people, to resist such officials, and, if need be, expel them by force of arms. Such resistance is not revolution, but is solely the assertion of right”. Those who "exercise power not delegated. should be regarded and dealt with as usurpers". 43 And the Peace Democrats planned to appeal to force to overthrow the Administration when the ballot appeal ran against them.

Both the Peace Democrats and the Secret Orders had a perfectly definite program. It could not have been otherwise. Their leadership was generally identical. They were bent on the overthrow of Abraham Lincoln as a menace to the theory of government which they had set up. To do this it was necessary to defeat the Union armies in the field. The defeat of Union candidates at the polls would follow. The defeat of the armies was essayed by a propaganda to undermine the morale of the soldiers, to discourage enlistment, to encourage desertion and protect the deserters. This was the program from the first days of the Civil War. Each successive War measure of Congress lashed the Copperheads to a greater fury. The Confiscation Act of August, 1861, the abolition of slavery in the territories, 1862, and the draft act and Habeas Corpus act of March 3, 1863, were especially condemned as acts of tyranny. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, accepted the issue with the Peace Democrats which they had expected from the beginning, and changed the meaning of the War. The step rallied the anti-slavery forces

43 Indiana Treason Trials, p. 297. Report of the Union Congressional Committee under the title "Copperhead Conspiracy in the Northwest", p. 3. Report of the Special Committee of the House of Representatives of Kentucky on the Case of Joshua F. Bullitt, Feb. 27, 1865, p. 18ff. Report of Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate General, p. 8 ff. Official Records, (series II), Vol.VII, p. 289. Ibid, (Series III), Vol. VIII, pp. 68-9. Southern Bivouac, (New Series), Vol. II, p. 504.

in the nation around a moral issue. It did more. It won the sympathy of foreign people, particularly the British, and silenced all serious thought of foreign intervention. These were distinct assets for the Administration. But there were liabilities as well. The Emancipation Proclamation gave the Peace Democrats an opportunity to stand forth as true prophets. The War was after all what they had said it was an Abolition War.

"What has caused all our discontent,
Our Union asunder rent,

And is on our destruction bent?
Abolition."

"Honest old Abe, when the war first began,
Denied abolition was part of his plan;
Honest old Abe has since made a decree,
The war must go on till the slaves are all free.
As both can't be honest, will some one tell how,
If honest Abe then, he is honest Abe now.'

In equally cheap doggerel they appealed to the latent race prejudices of the North. To the air of "John Anderson, My Jo John" their followers were urged to sing:

"Old Abraham, my jolly Abe,
When we were first acquaint,
I thought you were an honest man,
But nothing of a saint;

But since you wore the Spanish cloak,
You love the negro so,

And hate the white man, so you do,
My jolly Abe, my Jo." 44

The army was the most vulnerable point in the Administrative agencies in the conduct of the war.

44 A Choice Collection of Democratic Poems and Songs, pp. 46, 47, 59.

The adjutant general of Indiana reported in January, 1863, that the number of arrests for desertion in the Indianapolis district alone in the month of December had exceeded 2500; that officers sent to arrest men accused of desertion were set on by the local population. After the inauguration of the draft system in the spring of 1863, the Peace Democrats and secret orders centered their activities on its defeat. Local resorts to force became quite common in 1863. A small uprising in Holmes County, Ohio, was quickly put down. The officers who dispersed the would be insurgents saw about fifty, "an ignorant and misguided class who hardly knew what they wanted or why they felt themselves aggrieved." 45 The draft records in Blackford County, Indiana, were destroyed by a mob. Several draft officers in Indiana and Illinois were set on by mobs; in a few cases the officers were murdered. It became necessary in the Copperhead strongholds to accompany United States officials with armed guards. The authorities that attempted to arrest deserters were attacked by mobs. Disloyal judges supplemented the work of the mobs by discharging the deserters and those who encouraged desertion when brought before them.

It is difficult to take the measure of the acts of violence at this stage. Jefferson Davis thought the Ohio Valley in 1863 the weak place in the enemy's territory. It was his mature judgment that the death of General A. S. Johnston in 1862 was a fatal event for the Confederacy. That with a skillful commander like him "Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri would have been recovered, the Northwest disaffected, and our armies filled with the men of the Southwest, and perhaps of the Northwest also."46 The Copperheads boasted that the Northwest was in a state of insurrection. Such a statement was a gross exaggeration, if applied to the whole, not so for certain narrow districts.

45 Official Records, (Series I), Vol. 23, Part I p. 396.

46 Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. II, p. 61.