Northern Men of Southern Principles

Research and Writing Needed for Southern History, Part 1

The standard interpretation of the War between the States is that the North was righteously united in Lincoln’s war on the South except for a few sneaky “Copperheads,” a tiny minority of disreputable conspirators. Like most prevalent Union assumptions about the war, this is false, a belief made   acceptable only in the aftermath of Union victory. Lincoln was always in fear of Northern opposition, which explains many of his actions.

There is still an important book to be written surveying Lincoln’s Northern opposition, which was larger, more respectable, and more sincerely principled than has been admitted. This would be a serious exercise of necessary revisionism to put America’s most revolutionary event and the South’s position in true focus.

We might see some indication that Lincoln’s destruction of the Union and creation of an empire was never approved by a majority of the people and was not a natural development of American history.  It was a revolution by a minority.

In the first three-quarters of the 20^th century a great many decently honest historians piled up a large scholarship. Despite differing viewpoints, they knew that perfect objectivity is impossible for a historian. A good historian must find and explore the sources and interpret them as fairly as he or she can.

In more recent decades Politically Correct history has flourished, often heavily subsidised, and claiming to represent unjustly forgotten minorities–history often distorted, tendentious, trivial, and even imaginary.

Quite a lot of research work has been done on “Copperheads.”  Frank L. Klement, professor of History at Marquette University, turned out several good books on the subject: Limits of Dissent (1970), Dark Lanterns (1984), The Copperheads of the Middle West (1990), Lincoln’s Critics (1998).

Klement identified antiwar leaders, their activities (sometimes necessarily secretive), and their truly vicious persecution by Republican officials and mobs. Quite a lot of published material has followed, treating particular figures, organisations, and locales.

What is needed is a good overall understanding of the reasons Northerners opposed Lincoln’s war. Not just to describe who they were and what they did, but to listen to them. A good start has been made in D. Jonathan White, ed., Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s War (2014).

Jennifer Weber’s Copperheads (2006) argues argues that race was the driving force behind opposition to the War in the North. Her book was the first monograph on the Copperheads produced after Klement’s pioneering research, but it falls flat in its overall conclusions. Hardly anyone, North or South, favored racial equality–even Lincoln himself. Weber presents a false dichotomy of a racially integrated North opposed to a racially oppressive and segregated South. Racial arguments were used on both sides to justify their preferred political outcomes, including by Republicans who viewed the South as the land of miscegenation and racial diversity and openly criticized it as such.

Lincoln’s opponents understood the economic agenda of the Republican War.  Not emancipation or saving the Union as it had been. The prewar Republican policy of preventing the “expansion” of slavery to the Territories was to bar any new Southern States that would thwart tariffs, interest-paying public debt, currency manipulation, land giveaways, business subsidies— the militant Republican agenda of state capitalism—not free enterprise but private profit by government sponsorship—which became and still is the basic U.S. regime.

As soon as Southerners left Congress, the Republicans voted the highest tariff ever and pushed for a National Bank, by which selected interests could control the currency. Lincoln’s Northern opponents understood this agenda (which had nothing whatever to do with the welfare of black people) and said so frequently.  Simple Jeffersonianism, resistance to centralised power, remained a real allegiance for many Northerners.  Vallandigham was eloquent in this position and was gaining sympathetic listeners.  Too prominent to be simply jailed, he had to be illegally banished.

Most war opponents had been sympathetic to the Southern position before the war on the same grounds. A good treatment of this before the war is H.A. Scott Trask, The Constitutional Republicans of Philadelphia, PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1998. Northern men of Southern principles before The War is another subject that needs a broad treatment, which will put the Southern position in a more positive light.

A standard view is that white supremacy and segregation was imposed by racist Southerners after the war. But in fact, anti-black sentiment was as pervasive in the North and the Union cause as in the Confederacy before and during The War, if not more so. Northern States forbade blacks to settle, limited the rights of their tiny fraction in the population. The most abolitionist and Radical Republican governors refused to allow even a few displaced black refugees into their States.  In his last weeks of life Lincoln was still talking about deportation of the black population.

Northern critics of Lincoln’s war cannot be explained by “racism.” John Chodes in  Segregation (2017) showed how segregation was invented and imposed by Northern power.

To sanitise the Northern position, it is often assumed that opposition to the expansion of the South was due to labour’s fear of competition with slavery. But that is seldom mentioned at the time. The sources show that the basis of Northern opinion was simple racism—repugnance at having black people in their midst.

Northern opponents of Lincoln’s war had many other reasons besides the economic ones. They understood that the Southern States were simply fighting for the sacred American principle of self-government.  Having Southern friends and relatives, they knew that Southerners were not the monsters portrayed in Republican propaganda.  They revolted against waging brutal looting war against other Americans, including women and children, who had been good and loyal people until unforgivably provoked. They believed that New England and not the South was unAmerican.

They understood that the war would pile up public debt to the cost of the people and the profit of capitalists. They resisted the illegal suppression of mere opinion by Lincoln and his supporters as a threat to sacred American freedom. As the war went on they could not miss the corruption over contracts and the illegal cotton trade by connected Republicans.

Worth looking into is evidence of the Republican animosity toward Catholics and Jews. There was a strong if not predominate component of New England Anglo-Saxon purity and superiority among the most fervent Union supporters.  Impossible as it is for folks to believe now, the South was more accepting of such people than the North and most in the South were loyal Confederates.

Such a new work as I am suggesting would thoroughly examine the Congressmen who consistently voted against war measures.  Who were they?  What did they have to say?  Who were their constituents?  A similar investigation might be made of leading war opponents in the state legislatures and among clergy and newspaper editors.  This repudiates the charge that such people were all about defending slavery.

Another important part of the case is Northerners’ reluctance to fight.  A recent worthwhile book is ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North (2024) by Paul Taylor. The author discusses the large number of Northerners who felt war against the South had nothing to do with them and were indifferent to the whole business.

It is a fact that any affluent Northerner who did not want to serve did not have to and a great many stayed at home and made money. Others served in short-term or non-fighting units.  Lincoln bought a deferment for his son, who spent most of the war at Harvard. Such a thing was unthinkable for Southern leaders, whose kinfolk were voluntarily under fire.

Some well-to-do Northerners served because they thought it was the right thing to do¸ because they were interested in the military or did not want to miss out on the biggest event of their time.  That did not necessarily mean that they supported the Lincoln program.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. resigned in disgust after considerable active service. Many willing Union soldiers had their morale undermined by Lincoln’s bad political generals and the corruption which often caused unnecessary suffering.

It is a plain fact the keeping up the forces was a constant challenge to Lincoln. Hundreds of thousands of men were draft dodgers or deserters, and enrollment quotas were never filled.  After no-shows and exemptions of various sorts, only 6% of the 776,000 men called up in the 1863 enrollment were actually enlisted. Ludwell Johnson, Division and Reunion, (1978), pp. 91-93, estimated that about one-third of Union soldiers were willing volunteers. This problem was solved by using immigrants who made up a fourth of the armies, drafting black men (many of whom were coerced and not volunteers) and vast expenditures on enlistment bounties, which made up one-fourth of all Union war expenditures.

The Union army by the later days of the war had become largely a mercenary army.  Local, state, and federal bounties, amounting to much more than a working man’s annual income, were paid on enlistment.  Those who had better things to do stayed home and paid their less consequential citizens to join up.  This is why Grant coldly sacrificed working men and immigrants in offensives that had little purpose except to wear out an outnumbered Confederate army.

Another study that needs research and exposition on a wide scale is the Border States during the war.  It is yet another false interpretation that the Border mostly happily supported the Union side. Massive evidence yet to be organised and presented indicates that coercion was the primary factor in keeping the Border States in the “Union.”

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books.

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