Historiography
Two central questions have run through the historiography of the Copperheads: How serious a threat did they pose to the Union war effort and hence to the nation's survival? And to what extent and with what justification did the Lincoln administration and other Republican officials violate civil liberties to contain the perceived menace?
The first book-length scholarly treatment of the Copperheads appeared in 1942. In The Hidden Civil War, Wood Gray decried the "defeatism" of the Copperheads. He argued they deliberately served the Confederacy's war aims. Also in 1942, George Fort Milton published Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, which likewise condemned the traitorous Copperheads and praised Lincoln as a model defender of democracy.
Gilbert R. Tredway, a retired historian at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky, in his 1973 study Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana found most Indiana Democrats were loyal to the Union and desired national reunification. He documented Democratic counties in Indiana having outperformed Republican counties in the recruitment of soldiers. Tredway found that Copperhead sentiment was uncommon among the rank-and-file Democrats in Indiana.
The chief revisionist historians, who generally favor the Copperheads, are Richard O. Curry and Frank L. Klement, who devoted most of his career to debunking the idea that the Copperheads represented danger to the Union. Klement and Curry have downplayed the treasonable activities of the Copperheads, arguing they were traditionalists who fiercely resisted modernization and wanted to return to the old ways. Klement argued in the 1950s that the Copperheads' activities, especially their supposed participation in treasonous anti-Union secret societies, were mostly false inventions by Republican propaganda machines designed to discredit the Democrats at election time. Curry sees Copperheads as poor traditionalists battling against the railroads, banks, and modernization. In his standard history Battle Cry of Freedom, (1988), James M. McPherson asserted Klement had taken "revision a bit too far. There was some real fire under that smokescreen of Republican propaganda."
Jennifer Weber's Copperheads (2006) agrees more with Wood and Milton than with Klement. She argues that first, Northern antiwar sentiment was strong, so strong that Peace Democrats came close to seizing control of their party in mid-1864. Second, she shows the peace sentiment led to deep divisions and occasional violence across the North. Third, Weber concluded the peace movement deliberately weakened the Union military effort by undermining both enlistment and the operation of the draft. Indeed, in 1863, Lincoln had to divert combat troops to retake control of New York City from the peace rioters. Fourth, Weber shows how the attitudes of Union soldiers affected partisan battles back home. The soldiers' rejection of Copperheadism and their overwhelming support for Lincoln's reelection in 1864 was decisive in securing the Northern victory and the preservation of the Union. The Copperheads' appeal, she argues, waxed and waned with Union failures and successes in the field.
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