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Indiana in the Civil War an Introduction Jennifer L Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2013 A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents 3 Indiana in the Civil War An Introduction Jennifer L. Weber 7 Detectives and Spies U.S. Army Espionage in the Old Northwest during the Civil War Stephen E. Towne 27 Oliver P. Morton, Political Ideology, and Treason in Civil War Indiana A. James Fuller 46 Repudiating the Administration The Copperheads in Putnam County, Indiana Nicole Etcheson 65 Collection Essay Peter G. Thomson and theBibliography of the State of Ohio at the CMC Barbara J. Dawson 70 Collection Essay Documenting Women’s Civil War Experiences in the Ohio Valley at The Filson Eric Willey 77 Review Essay Cause and Consequence The Meaning of the Civil War Today Aaron Sheehan-Dean 84 Book Reviews 98 Announcements on the cover: From top: William A. Bowles, Andrew Humphreys, Stephen Horsey, Horace Heffren, and Lambdin P. Milligan, the five men charged in the 1864 Indianapolis “Treason Trials.” From Benn Pitman, The Trials for Treason at Indianapolis: Disclosing the Plans for Establishing a North-Western Confederacy…(Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, & Baldwin, 1865). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Contributors Jennifer L. Weber is associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (2006), and the children’s book, Summer’s Bloodiest Days: The Battle of Gettysburg as Told from All Sides (2010), and co-editor of The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction (2011). Stephen E. Towne is associate university archivist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He has written or edited books and articles on Civil War topics, including Civil War Secrets and Spies: Army Intelligence and Pro-Confederate Conspiracies in the Heart of the Midwest, forthcoming from Ohio University Press, on which this essay is based. A. James Fuller is professor of history at the University of Indianapolis. A past president of the Indiana Association of Historians, he has published six books, including the edited collection, The Election of 1860 Reconsidered. He is under contract with Kent State University Press for a biography of Oliver Morton enti- tled, The Great War Governor: Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of Power in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Nicole Etcheson is Alexander M. Bracken professor of history at Ball State University. She is the author most recently of A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community which won the 2012 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. Her other publications include The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787-1861 (1996), and Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (2004). Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey professor of history at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (2007), and Struggle for a Vast Future: The American Civil War (2006), and editor of The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers(2006). 2 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Indiana in the Civil War An Introduction Jennifer L. Weber ivil War Indiana was a state set on simmer, a state that throughout the war seemed just on the edge of boiling over. With a heavy southern influence within its population, particularly in the downstate regions, CIndiana was riven by political differences during the war. Generally speaking, Republicans and Democrats divided the state, but the more serious break lay between Republicans and antiwar Democrats, who called themselves “peace men” but whom their foes called “Copperheads” after the treacherous snake. Considering themselves the ideological heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the Copperheads sheathed themselves in the Constitution. They took refuge in the most conservative interpretation of the document possible. Many of them questioned even the legality of the war, noting that the Constitution said nothing against secession. As the war rolled along, they took umbrage at many of the decisions that Congress and Abraham Lincoln’s administration made in the name of winning the war: calling out troops and announcing a blockade in the days after Fort Sumter but weeks before Congress met, paper currency, income taxes, suspending habeas corpus, and arresting newspaper editors. The draft stoked their worst fears of big government because the responsibility for raising troops had always lain with the states. Now, enrollers came knocking at the door, asking personal questions so they could find drafted individuals who did not show up for military service. Now, an entire federal bureaucracy existed to raise troops, a task formerly handled by leading citizens of the county. But nothing—nothing—enraged conservatives like the Emancipation Procla- mation. From the beginning of the war, conservatives labeled it a battle to extinguish slavery, not to reunite the country. See, they crowed, after Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation in September 1862, they had been right. The man from Illinois had duped the country. The proclamation cemented the peace men’s belief that abolitionists controlled the government, and nothing could shake them from that position. Not far beneath these accusations lay an extremely racist worldview, one that approached fanatical even by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century. Their rhetoric, ugly in their time, provokes revul- sion in our own. The most moderate of the conservatives believed slavery the best and most appropriate institution for African Americans. In places such as New York and Cincinnati, immigrant laborers, an important constituency within the Copperhead movement, had a history of clashing with free blacks, whom they FALL 2013 3 INDIANA IN THE CIVIL WAR: AN INTRODUCTION feared would undercut their wages. While many Copperheads expressed their opinions about race openly, others, men and women from various backgrounds, voiced their objections in constitutional terms. They included southerners living in the North, northerners whose parents had migrated from the South, Catholics, immigrants, and rock-ribbed conservatives. Whatever their background, they tended to frame their complaints in constitutional terms. While white suprem- acist beliefs clearly lay at the bottom of complaints about the Emancipation Proclamation, they grounded their best arguments in the Constitution. And so, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, they objected (beyond their racist complaints) that the president had far exceeded the powers granted him by the Constitution and in the process had shredded southerners’ property rights while excusing his actions as a war measure. What made the Copperheads different in Indiana were their numbers, their concentration, and the threat they posed—characteristics underscored by the articles in this issue. While the number of antiwar Democrats who lived in Indiana and their percentage of the population remain unclear, only Ohio and Illinois had concentrations as large and in such proximity. Antiwar Hoosiers also resisted wartime measures to a degree rarely seen elsewhere. Hardly anywhere else, for instance, had a plot against the government advanced as far as Indianapolis printer H. H. Dodd’s when federal agents arrested him with a significant cache of guns and ammunition in his warehouse. The arrest of Dodd and others became national news, and their prosecution became known as the Indiana Treason Trials. Even now those trials resonate, largely through the Supreme Court deci- sion they spawned, Ex parte Milligan. Plots, rumored and substantiated, swirled through the state, especially in the lower half, heavily populated by people with connections to the South. Republican Governor Oliver P. Morton, deeply worried about subversive activity, persuaded the federal government to give him money and manpower to investigate poten- tial conspiracies, especially those sponsored by secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Sons of Liberty. As Stephen E. Towne writes, these agents became part of a vast domestic intelligence network—one that extended through much of the North—composed of spies who worked for the army and the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau, the agency charged with administering and enforcing the draft. The information that these men collected went to gover- nors and military officials in Washington. That the federal government engaged in domestic intelligence during the Civil War remains an aspect of the conflict, to paraphrase Lincoln, neither little noted nor long remembered. That is a shame, because the breadth and depth of information gathering that Towne outlines is breathtaking. One cannot help but think of the efforts of Woodrow Wilson’s administration in World War I and wonder what a comparative study of the two systems would yield. 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY JENNIFER L. WEBER Morton confronted a more challenging political situation than nearly any other governor in the North. Only Governor Richard Yates of Illinois faced any- thing that even approached the interparty difficulties that Morton faced. His central problem was that Democrats controlled the Indiana General Assembly, and—so Morton believed—threatened to undermine the state’s contribution to the war effort and perhaps
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