The Genesis of a Copperhead by CARL M

Home , Copperhead (politics)

Oil painting by Henry Mosler I nSociety collection ONE OF THE SOCIETY'S ART TREASURES Scene in Canal Market — 1860 BULLETIN of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio CINCINNATI

October, 1961 CINCINNATI Vol. 19 No. 4

The Genesis of a Copperhead by CARL M. BECKER

As the Civil War took its painful course, it generated in the Old Northwest a threat to the integrity of American nationality. There, elements of the Democratic party, calling themselves Peace Democrats but bearing the popular epithet "Copper- head," insisted that the use of coercion to preserve the Union was not only unconstitutional but futile, arguing that only a "union of hearts and hands" could endure. In their passion for peace — their idee fixe — they opposed Lincoln's war policies, encouraged young men to desert and evade draft calls, and urged the public not to subscribe to government bond issues; some even proposed, as a means to end the war, the formation of a North- western Confederacy which might ally with the South and leave New England adrift. The Copperheads presented a conservative face in their social and economic complex, too. They were often Irish-Americans and German-Americans who crowded the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder. Largely dependent laborers in industry, they feared the possible competition of free Negro labor. Transplanted Southerners, subsisting on small farms in lower Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, were often Copperheads 236 The Bulletin who blanched at the thought of emancipation. These hyphenate and native Americans — the former trapped by an iron law of wages and the latter weltering in debt on marginal farms — could both inveigh against an emerging corporate capitalism dominated by Republicans whose New England heritage was all too evident to inferiors. As must be the fate of political and social phenomena that come under the Argus eye of the scholarly community, the Copperhead persuasion has been studied mainly in the context of its great adherents — Clement L. Vallandigham, Daniel Voorhees and Samuel Medary, among others — and the ethnic and social groups that embraced it.L Since these adherents, who were usually older generation Americans, gave Copperheadism its inner support and direction, younger, lesser-known Copperhead personalities have received little attention from scholars. And though general classifications of Copperheads by their ethnic and social status are significant in revealing the anatomy of a political and social organism, they permit but limited insight into the individual personality as it moved to the Copperhead rationale. An inquiry into the formation of a psyche in its progression to Copperheadism may, on the other hand, reveal some of the personal attributes and peculiarities which impelled men to the faith and which endowed that faith with its distinctive charac- teristics. One lad who brought the energy and passion of youth to the Copperhead cause was Thomas Owen Lowe. Molded by unusual forces in his formative years, young Lowe was possessed of a compulsive contentiousness that determined his political course; an amalgam of family pride and circumstance, college days, a strange sojourn in Southern climes, and the fortunes of war swept him inexorably into Copperhead ranks. As his life moved to this political deviation, it touched on the lives of the great and near-great in the Republic in unusual and indeed bizarre ways. Born in the village of Batavia, Clermont County, Ohio, in 1838, Tom Lowe was nurtured in an atmosphere of legalism and litigation and was early impelled to a vaulting ambition. His father, John William Lowe, issue of Scotch-Huguenot stock in 1809 at New Brunswick, New Jersey, came to Ohio in 1833 after ^ee, for example, Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War (New York, 1942) and Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960). The Genesis of a Copperhead 237 having helped support for a number of years two sisters and a brother left indigent by their father's death in 1820.2 Settling in Batavia, he studied law with Thomas Hamer, the eminent attorney and Congressman who secured Sam Grant's appointment to West Point. In 1837, Lowe married Manorah Fishback, a daughter of Owen T. Fishback, one of the outstanding lawyers and politicians of Clermont County in the 1820's, 1830's and 1840's.3 Despite this affinity and occupational tie, it appears that Lowe practiced his profession alone — and unprofitably — in Batavia and Bethel in the 1840's. His son's life was pleasant enough, though, in households abounding with lawyers whose idiom was of court and legislative hall. Constantly in front of the boy were the words of men of law; from such a surrounding could emerge a man consumed with a legalistic respect for the law and established institutions. During his youth in the East, John Lowe had served with a New York City cadet company, and when the Mexican War began his martial memories were revived. Shortly after the beginning of that war, he received a letter from an old friend, U. S. Grant, then a lieutenant at Matamoras, saying that he would like to have Lowe in Mexico as a commander of a volunteer company.4 Grant followed with letters vividly describing the Mexican country and battles there.5 His martial spirit stirred by this siren call, Lowe, though opposed to the Polk administration, joined the Second Ohio Infantry Regiment with a captain's commission and in September of 1847 left for Mexico. Had he expected a tour of exhilarating duty, great must have been Captain Lowe's dis- appointment. He found that the Mexican War, like most wars, took from its soldiery many more hours of routine duty than it gave them in moments of exulting combat. On the long river and gulf voyage to Mexico, he spent much of his time attending enlisted men ill with dysentery and malarial attacks, though sick himself. As he put it, "the blue above and the blue below, and 2Biographical notes on John W. Lowe by Thomas Lowe, Lowe Manuscripts Collection, in Dayton, Ohio, Public Library; all Lowe documents cited herein are in this collection. Xenia Torchlight, September 18, 1861. 3J. L. Rockey, History of Clermont County, Ohio (Philadelphia, 1880), 137. 4Grant to John Lowe, June 26, 1846. The original letter is not in the Lowe MSS. But the copy in that collection, according to the pencilled notes of Thomas Lowe, was made from the original in the possession of his son, William. The copy is identical with the copy published by Hamlin Garland in "Grant in the Mexican War," McClure's Magazine, No. 4, 8 (February, 1897), 366-380. 5Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (Boston, 1950), 129, 134-135. 238 The Bulletin the sicker I get the further we go."6 In Mexico, despite miles of marching, seldom did Captain Lowe face the enemy, and then only from afar. Often on court-martial duty, he faced instead cowed American officers and men charged with rather trivial offenses. Not surprisingly, he bitterly regretted his decision to leave the banks of the Ohio for the sunny shores of Mexico. Confiding to his diary homesickness for his wife and children, he lamented that "their father has acted unwisely and now must suffer the consequences. Accursed be the hour he left home." His return to the family bosom within a year perhaps softened the pain of frustrated valor. On his return to Batavia, Lowe again opened his law office. He also dabbled in politics, becoming mayor of the village in 1853, but still his practice did not flourish. In the meantime, his son's curiosity about the issues that moved men to anger and violence must have been quickening. Tom had seen his father leave home to fight for a cause that men in Batavia could at best call "manifest destiny." The very nature of his father's and grandfather's profession brought home the debate over the extension of slavery into newly-acquired territories. And an alert boy in Clermont County might hear of, or even see, runaway slaves on their way to freedom in Canada via the underground railroad. In a natural deference to his father's view, one which opposed slavery on the ground that it was both a social and political evil threatening the political integrity of the nation, the boy was forming an antipathy toward slavery, too. But the paternal influence did not carry the spirit of a Garrison, and how long a boy could cling to his father's belief in the face of other forces had yet to be determined. A formalized shaping of the young mind began in 1851 when the elder Lowe, looking to the intellectual development of his son, enrolled him in Farmers' College near Cincinnati. Tom's uncles, George and William Fishback, sons of Owen Fishback, were then in attendance at Farmers'; and their accounts of activities there and the avuncular protection they could afford Tom in the halls of the college probably inclined Lowe to his academic selection for the boy. Farmers' College was an outgrowth of Pleasant Hill Academy, an academy founded in 1833 by Freeman Cary two years after his "Diary of John Lowe, October 4, 1847. The Genesis of a Copperhead 239 annua l repor t o f college , 184 7 Fro m COLLEGE , COLLEG E HIL L (no w Cincinnati ) FARMERS ' 240 The Bulletin graduation from Miami University and popularly known as Cary's Academy.7 Chartered in 1846, the college in the early 1850's, with Cary as president, was enjoying its fairest days. It was maintaining a degree of financial stability. The faculty was of undoubted ability, its patriarch and guiding spirit being Dr. Robert H. Bishop, first president of Miami University. Cary was embarking on a new farm program that promised to realize the pretensions of the agrarian appellation, which previously had signified things hoped for rather than attained.8 Enrollment was on the rise, with over three hundred boys in attendance in 1852 and 1854. And most important of all, the college was attracting some outstanding students to its halls. In attendance from 1848 to 1851 were Murat Halstead and Benjamin Harrison, Halstead graduating in 1851 and Harrison removing himself to Miami in the same year to complete his college work — and to woo the daughter of Professor John Scott, former faculty member at Farmers'. William Fishback, a partner-in-law with Harrison during the Civil War, adorned the class of 1853. His brother, George, was also in attendance then; his glory came as editor of the St. Louis Democrat. Jonathan and Valentine Winters, merchant-princes in Dayton in the 1860's and 1870's, were at the college in 1850. The young scholar began his studies in the fall of 1851. In the next three years, his life was one of lucubrations over Livy, Euclidian planes and Founding Fathers; juror scribendi for "old Dr." Bishop; shrill forensics over moral and political issues; and, of course, schoolboy pranks. His academic record was evidently quite good; at least in June of 1853, President Cary praised him as a scholar who had achieved the "maximum standing" in his classes.9 Not one to hide his light, Tom had anticipated Cary, having assured his father a month earlier that he was second to

7Freeman Cary, Early Annals — Autobiography, [1885?], MS. in Library of Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio; Alexander B. Huston, Historical Sketch of Farmers' College (Cincinnati, 1902), 19. 8In 1854, the college announced the opening of the Department for In- struction in Scientific and Practical Agriculture — "THE FIRST COMPLETE INSTITUTION OF THE KIND ORGANIZED ON THE CONTINENT OF AMERICA," Annual and Triennial Catalogue of Farmers' College, 185^-1855 (Cincinnati, 1854), 22. Despite sanguine hopes of establishing an institution of agricultural education, the college evidently failed to develop an adequate curriculum to achieve its goal, for by 1858, as one observer put it, the college had "subsided into a respectable Academy for instruction in the common branches of learning." Ohio Cultivator, No. 2, 14 (January 15, 1858), 25. 9Freeman Cary to John Lowe, June 23, 1853. The Genesis of a Copperhead 241 none in all of his classes.10 In this youthful personality, a streak of confidence, self-assurance, egoism — call it what one will — appears in juxtaposition with a Calvinistic sense of unworthiness. Despite his impressive academic success, Tom left the college in 1854 without a diploma. His decision was prompted by his father's financial stringencies. As a shaping force, Farmers' College had an indirect impress on young Lowe, but one which facilitated his entry into the political arena and one which characterized his adult political behavior. Like many college students of the period, the students at Farmers' energetically supported their literary societies in giving innumerable hours to society elections, debates and speeches. To his father, Tom sent a steady stream of reports on the activities agitating him and his fellow scholars in the Burritt Hall Literary Society. His father read letters about a hotly- contested election in which the son took a leading part.11 The patriarch commiserated with his son on a pressing dilemma: should the boy speak on "Great Men" or "The Millennium, Is It Near?" during the Exhibition at Christmas?12 "Great Men" was finally chosen. He read, perhaps with some consternation, that his son was discussing with his comrades the merits of Universalism and Swedenborgianism.13 The lawyer in Batavia read missives of his son's assumption of the negative in a debate on whether more territory should be acquired by the nation and the justice of the Mexican War, a debate followed by Tom's threatened use of force to gain an apology from a heckler.14 Lending social approval to and ingeminating the household legalism of Batavia, these voluble exercises further developed in Tom an argumentative and clamorous approach to all human problems; and these attributes were the stuff on which a party of political and economic doctrinairism could feed. Though an age of causes was sending gusts of reform swirling around American colleges, Farmers' College did not imbue its students with any reforming zeal. Given his paternal injunctions on slavery, Tom Lowe could have passionately embraced aboli- 10Thomas Lowe to John Lowe, May 29, 1853; hereafter all letters from the son to his father will be cited as "T. L. to J. L." nT. L. to J. L., October 2, 1853. 12T. L. to J. L., October 9, 1853. 13T. L. to J. L., October 16, 1853. 14T. L. to J. L., October 30, 1853; November 20, 1853. 242 The Bulletin tionism had two men he admired, Dr. Bishop, a man of known anti-slavery views, and Professor George Ormsby, an intense abolitionist, inculcated the student body with their personal beliefs on the "peculiar institution."15 But if they sought to inculcate, they failed. After leaving Farmers', Tom was employed briefly as a clerk with the banking house of Ellis & Sturges in Cincinnati. From there he went to Dayton to join his father, who had shaken the dust of Batavia off his feet in a determination to offer his talents to a wider world. His shingle hung but momentarily in Dayton; in 1855 he moved his practice again, this time to Xenia in Greene County, where he remained until the Civil War began. Even before his father moved to Xenia, Tom had abruptly departed for Nashville, Tennessee, in mid-1855 to take a position as a clerk with the W. B. Shepherd banking firm. Why he sought Southern climes is not known. Certainly his decision to leave Dayton and his departure were hasty; at the news of his journey, his mother expressed surprise and complained that his father had not even known of his decision.16 Tom himself admitted to his father that he had indeed left his friends and home unceremoniously.17 Whatever the reasons for a Tennessee excursion, it could not help but leave an impress on a callow, impulsive youth removed from the family cocoon. Nashville, the largest city south of the Ohio River with the exception of New Orleans, was passing through a decade of bustling economic and social growth as it engaged in the turbulent debate over popular sovereignty, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the many other wedges of separation. "It was," as a contemporary English novelist was then writing of the French Revolution, "the best of times, it was the worst of times." New political and new social stimuli pervaded the city, and they were certain to evoke new responses in the boy; they might not bring forth a better boy or man — but they had per- force to produce a changed being. Tom's world quickly began to enlarge after his departure from Ohio. On his trip down the Ohio on the packet, Baltimore, he encountered an "old boy" from North Carolina who owned about 15Bishop's opinions on slavery led to his ousting as president of Miami as a sacrifice to pro-slavery elements there. Alfred Thomas, ed., Correspondence of Thomas E. Thomas (Dayton [?], 1909), 45-46. In one instance, young Lowe described Ormsby as a "red-hot" abolitionist. T. L. to J. L., October 9, 1853. 16Norah Lowe to Thomas Lowe, July 17, 1855. 17T. L. to J. L., July 16, 1855. The Genesis of a Copperhead 243 one hundred and sixty slaves, fifteen of whom were with him. Tom observed that they were happy, hearty and contented, and found that his discussion with their owner had expanded his ideas on slavery.18 This event marked the beginning of a struggle between old beliefs on slavery and new attitudes engendered by daily contact with the Negro and his master. The transition to new concepts was facilitated for Tom by the initial deference with which he was received in Nashville and at Shepherd's. He speedily found the slavery arguments of his new friends to be of some worth. To his father he was soon revealing his abhorrence of abolitionist fanaticism and acceptance of the Southern aphorism, "he who would steal a nigger will as readily steal a horse."19 His race, boasted Tom, was superior in every respect to the African, and woe now to the black boy who did not move from his path on the pavement. Incensed by Tom's pronouncements, the father rebuked the son for his apparent defection from paternal ideals. And Tom recanted, assuring his father of allegiance to old patterns: "You know that all my life, I have been taught to regard Slavery as an unmitigated curse, and slaveholders as but little better than criminals of the deepest die."20 His father's severity in describing him as a Southerner was also unjustified: "I am not yet," Tom wrote, "and I hope I never shall be an apologist for slavery." Convinced of his son's sincerity but alarmed that his views, if given public currency, would give rise to reprisals in Nashville against the boy, the senior Lowe urged him to repress his anti- slavery sentiments. Now Tom thrust at his father. His principles were so immutable on the subject of slavery, so he reminded the father, that he found it difficult to remain quiet when among fire-eating young Southerners who slurred Northern principles and Northerners who refused to uphold those principles. Against such whelps his position was clear: "I am exceedingly fearless upon this point, & reckless of consequences. You certainly did not mean for me to repudiate my principles.... I will not disavow them because they are not indigenous in this latitude. It would be glorious to fall a myrter \sic] in the cause of Truth."21 Brave indeed were these words from a seventeen-year-old boy torn by 18T. L. to J. L., July 16, 1855. 19T. L. to J. L., September 23, 1855. 20T. L. to J. L., October 7, 1855. 21T. L. to J. L., January 27, 1856. 244 The Bulletin conflict between loyalty to his father's ideals and adjustment to new standards. Assurances of loyalty, notwithstanding, Tom was subject to an environment that had to alter his gaze on the sable arm. Another conflict between old and new came in Tom's admira- tion of the patrician class he discerned in Tennessee and his distaste for the indolence and dissipation that he saw as a hall- mark of that order; for an acceptance of the Tennessee aristocracy and its value structure signified an abandonment of an ingrained puritanic heritage of work and frugality. Tom increasingly sensed this conflict — this juxtaposition of old with new — when, because of growing friction with his employer, he left Nashville to take up the duties of a bank clerk with the Bank of Middle Tennessee in Lebanon. The lessons of Nashville had inculcation in this community. The home of Cumberland University and its law school, Lebanon was a small town with a population of about 2500, of whom about 1000 were slaves.22 There Tom observed closely the values of a stratified class society and met young law students from the lower South who vigorously defended those values. Young and interested in the law as he was, Tom naturally gravitated to the law students and came to accept much of their social philosophy. During part of his year's residence in Lebanon, he roomed with a senior law student, Will McQuiston, son of a wealthy Mississippi planter. McQuiston and his fellow students invited Tom to their parties and academic ceremonies, their cordiality convincing him that these "chivalrous gentlemen" had accepted him in complete brotherhood.23 He did feel disdain for the gentlemen during the heat of summer; their only activities then, so he lamented, consisted of playing backgammon and cards all day, attending the ladies all night, and drinking whiskey all the time. Probably the most stimulating aspect of Tom's Tennessee residence was his observation of the 1856 political campaign in middle Tennessee. This experience whetted his political appetite and accentuated his contentious spirit. When Tom moved to the Bank of Middle Tennessee, he came under the political tutelage of one of Tennessee's leading public figures, William B. 22T7ie Statistics of the Population of the United States, Ninth Census (Wash- ington, 1872). In 1860 the population of Lebanon was 1523 whites and 1075 Negroes. 23T. L. to J. L., June 22, 1856. The Genesis of a Copperhead 245 Campbell, one of the proprietors of the bank. Former attorney- general and Whig governor of Tennessee, representative to Congress, and Mexican War veteran, Campbell deigned to give his young clerk the benefit of his political experience.24 A supporter of compromise between North and South but wedded to the maintenance of slavery, he urged on Tom the validity of the principles of the American party, in an effort, as Tom believed, to secure his vote for the vice-presidential nomination on the American ticket. Tom evidently so ingratiated himself with Campbell that the latter assumed a paternal air over him, and Tom happily acquiesed in his protection. On one occasion, Campbell covertly revealed to his young confidant the contents of a letter from John Bell, the long-time Whig who would become the presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union party in 1860, in which Bell implied that if the Republicans nominated John McLean of Ohio for the presidency in 1856, he would swing his support to McLean. According to Tom, Bell wrote, "I fear they [the Republicans] will not be wise & patriotic enough to nominate him but if they do, I regard his election as certain."25 Such attention on Tom was not wasted. He believed Campbell to be devoted to union-saving principles and compromise that could prevent a recourse to arms or secession without sacrificing essential interests of either North or South. With this kind of influence on him, it is not surprising that Tom gave his support to the American party in the campaign of 1856. He attended numerous party functions and heard such orators as Colonel J. G. Pickett and General William F. Haskells, for whom he shouted until hoarse, though he knew they were both reputed to be drunkards.26 The din of politics, he reported to his father, was fascinating. Campbell's largess had social benefits, too; on May-day 1856 Tom was invited to the Hermitage by Miss Rachel Donelson, daughter of Andrew Jackson Donelson, the American party nominee for vice president.27 His social and political comity with a Southern elite and the class structure he found in Lebanon soon generated in Tom an attitude of contempt for those men he regarded as his social inferiors; and his words clearly disclosed the contrasts between ^Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1929), III, 466. 25T. L. to J. L., June 8, 1856. 26T. L. to J. L., August 10, 1856; October 5, 1856; October 12, 1856. 27T. L. to J. L., May 1, 1856. 246 The Bulletin old and new worlds, between bustle and inertia. The Northerner, he wrote to his father, was energetic, intelligent and law-abiding, but the Yankee head was cultivated at the expense of the heart.28 The Northerner was luke-warm in his friendships and enmities; the Southerner, though gentle, courteous and kind, could love and hate with a passion. The North had its aristocratic shoe- makers and soap-boilers; the South was graced with unassuming tradesmen who did not seek to thrust themselves up the social scale. The veneer of the upstart Northern cooper was far inferior to the Southern lawyer's polish of inherited wealth, and life was more pleasant where the bootmaker and tailor did not elbow their way into the race for social honors. Thank God there was no necessity for Chartist meetings nor room for Alton Lockes in the South! "I grow prouder, haughtier, everday," Tom proclaimed, "& it grinds me to think that if I ever wish to obtain political eminence I must seek the votes of these confounded plebians." His political phrases ought not be ad captandum vulgusl It was not from his new social connections that these aristocratic feelings flowed, Tom believed; rather, he attributed them somehow to the influence of his father, whose natural aristocratic mien would have well-fitted him for the practice of law in the South, where the lawyer could stave off the familiar advances of the low sort without damaging his practice.29 The boy did lament that the sordid and indolent side of patrician life lessened his inclination to live permanently in the South; he failed to recognize that perhaps these unbecoming attributes of the Southern gentility that he admired were inherent where social and economic affluence rested upon the labor of inferiors. For nearly two years, this impressionable youth beheld Southern ideals, and this new vision wrought fundamental changes in him as it replaced old concepts with new ones. For Tom, despite his protestations of adherence to the paternal view on slavery, the Negro was chattel property, whose continued en- slavement was necessary to the political and social stability of the South. For him, the stratified class structure of the South — dominated by the patrician order — was an ideal compared with which the egalitarian spirit of Yankeeland was repugnant. For him, the political campaign of 1856 stimulated contentiousness 28T. L. to J. L., August 24, 1856. 29T. L. to J. L., September 7, 1856. The Genesis of a Copperhead 247 and induced a love of politics that had eventually to seek their level in an expression of new attitudes. Legalistic respect for property rights and visions of a social and economic order fixed in determent in its structure were proper credentials for admission to the Copperhead order, and Tom's dossier, as a result of the Tennessee experience, enabled the lad to subscribe in good con- science to the articles of faith. The Southern sojourn ended in July of 1857 when Tom returned to Dayton, again taking up employment with a bank, this time as a cashier with the banking firm of Harshman and Winters'. One of the proprietors of the bank was Jonathan Harshman, father of Martha Harshman, whose sweet call evidently hastened Tom's return to the north; he married her in November of 1857. Domesticity and an alien environment may

From Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio DAYTON, OHIO, 1846 Montgomery County Court House on left have bridled his urge to broach his new beliefs publicly, for now — and for the next three years — he failed to "communicate" with local newspapers on social and political problems, as had been his wont, even as a sixteen-year-old boy. But the atmosphere of political contention that pervaded the nation and Dayton in 1860 had to summon the spirit of debate in the young man, even if it could manifest itself only in intro- spection. Not an active participant in the presidential campaign 248 The Bulletin of 1860, Tom did commit to his journal, in an act of self-edifica- tion, an essay entitled, "A Political Speech for John Bell and Edward Everett."30 In the essay, which evidently was never delivered as a speech, Tom recounted his hostility for the commercial spirit of the North, justified slavery by appeals to the Bible, rejected the egalitarian doctrines of the Republicans, subscribed to popular sovereignty, fulminated against politicians who would sacrifice chattel property of others for demagogic purposes, and generally inveighed against sin and temporization wherever they could be found. Tom argued that the only way to curb dangerous sectional parties and protect the South, which was now surrounded by a cordon of hostile states, was to elect Bell, who would command the respect of all sections and partisans in Congress. Then would wrangling cease and secession and fanaticism melt away. The outbreak of the Civil War saw no fervor of activity in Tom, but the struggle soon presented a catalytic agent that wakened him from his political hibernation and called forth the heritage of home, college and Southern residency. A few days after Fort Sumter received shot and shell, Tom's father began enrolling volunteers at Xenia. Quickly, John Lowe enlisted two hundred enthusiastic recruits who were ready to move to Dixie. First, however, they went to Columbus as Company A and there were mustered into service as Company D of the 12th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Militia, with Lowe elected as colonel of the regiment itself. The regiment then went to Camp Dennison for training and there was mustered into federal service for three years. Not content with a colonelcy, Lowe tried to secure brigadier rank, but the bid failed because, so Tom believed, it was hardly likely that Lincoln would appoint generals from adjoin- ing counties, Robert C. Schenck of Montgomery County and a strong supporter of Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860 having recently received a brigadier's commission.31 By July of 1861, the 12th was in western Virginia near Scarey Creek with Brigadier-General Jacob D. Cox's Kanawha Brigade of the Department of the Ohio, then under the command of Major-General George B. McClellan. With great military events

30Journal of Thomas Lowe. 31Thomas Lowe to William Lowe, June 5, 1861; June 14, 1861. Thomas Lowe to Norah Lowe, May 29, 1861. The Genesis of a Copperhead 249 impending two hundred miles to the east at a stream known as Bull Run, what happened at the muddy rivulet of Scarey would be unknown or seem unimportant to most of the nation. But to the men there, Scarey assumed a transcendent importance. To Colonel John Lowe, a clash with Confederate forces would offer him a chance to achieve some measure of martial renown and preferment. Yet, ironically, only a few days after a skirmish at Scarey with Confederate elements on July 1%, John Lowe faced public imputations against his personal and professional capa- bility. Unknown accusers, finding compliant news organs throughout Ohio — the Cincinnati Commercial, the Perrysburg Journal and Cleveland newspapers among others — willing to air the charges, alleged that Lowe had committed execrable acts of cowardice at Scarey. According to the Commercial, which asserted that its account came from the lips of soldiers recently returned from Scarey, Colonel Lowe had concealed himself behind a house during the heat of battle and despite the expostulations of other officers had refused to withdraw from this shelter.32 Using the testimony of allegedly reputed but unidentified eyewitnesses, the Perrysburg Journal, a partisan of the locally-recruited 21st Ohio Volunteer Regiment, and its commander, Colonel Jesse Norton, charged that although Colonel Lowe had received a request from Colonel Norton to come to the aid of his embattled regiment he had refused to move himself and his troops into supporting action.33 Within a few days after Scarey, the impugnment of Colonel Lowe's honor had spread the breadth of Ohio's teeming cities and hamlets, from Cleveland to Cincinnati, from Perrysburg to Batavia. Against the power of the press, the anguished father, still near Scarey, entreated his son for help.34 Tom had anticipated his father's plea, having already called on M. D. Potter, publisher of the Commercial, to publish a retraction of the charges against the Colonel. Potter declined, maintaining that Colonel Norton had recently substantiated the charges while in Cin- cinnati.35 Armed with more than a mere demand, Tom then submitted to the Commercial copies of the statements of the

32Cincinnati Commercial, July 30, 1861. 33Perrysburg Journal, July 22, 1861. 34John Lowe to Thomas Lowe, August 1, 1861; August 11, 1861. 36M. D. Potter to Thomas Lowe, August 1, 1861. 250 The Bulletin eminent geologist, Colonel Charles Whittlesey of the Engineer's Corps, and Captain Ira Gibbs from General Cox's staff, both of whom had witnessed the action at Scarey. Lowe acted honorably there, declared Whittlesey; Gibbs concurred and added that wherever he saw Lowe longest, there was the point of hottest fire.36 Still no retractions came from the Commercial. By this time, a rival of the Commercial, the Cincinnati Ga?ette, had taken up Colonel Lowe's cause and was also demanding retractions, but to no avail. To suppress talk in Dayton, Tom arranged for Dayton newspapers to publish exonerative accounts by officers and soldiers who had fought at Scarey. The Dayton Daily Journal carried in one issue four such statements defending Colonel Lowe; Tom appended a comment pointing out that they proved the Commercial to be an organ of libel. Lowe's superiors saw no substance in the allegations of cowardice. General Cox believed the declarations of Whittlesey and Gibbs to be sufficient defense for Lowe and urged no further publicity on his behalf because it would "imply consciousness of the truth of the charge."37 Though criticizing general officers and two colonels, who had amused themselves by undertaking a reconnaissance beyond enemy positions, McClellan did not con- demn Lowe in any way in his report on Scarey.38 Yet a fellow- Xenian, Whitelaw Reid, later asserted that the Colonel had failed to give support to Norton as requested.39 The father's need for defense, whether for honor or future preferment, suddenly ended on September 10, 1861, at Carnifax Ferry, Virginia. There, leading an attack, Colonel John Lowe fell with a ball in his forehead, the first field officer of Ohio killed in the Civil War. Now a melancholy poem he had written some months earlier bore a tragic meaning for his family:

36Statements of Colonel Charles Whittlesey, August 4, 1861, and Captain Ira Gibbs, August 4, 1861, in Lowe Manuscripts Collection. "General Jacob D. Cox to Colonel John Lowe, August 15, 1861. 38Report of Major-General George B. McClellan, July 19, 1861, The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, II, 288. McClellan was so incensed by the performance of his generals at Scarey that he sent a beseeching invocation to Colonel E. B. Town- send: "In Heaven's name give me some general officers who understand their profession. I give orders and find some who cannot execute them unless I stand by them." Brigadier-General Henry Wise, commanding Confederate troops, reported that three-fourths of the Union troops panicked under fire at Scarey. 39Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War, 2 vols. (Cin., 1868), II, 149. The Genesis of a Copperhead 251 My day of life is over, And here I lay me down In the hot, red field of battle In the arms of high renown. By the shaft of death I'm stricken In my upward flight to fame, And I give my life to nothingness To win a warrior's name.

For the rest of his life, Tom Lowe believed that his father had boldly and unnecessarily exposed himself to danger in order to refute the allegations of cowardice. The official report of the action lends some credence to the son's belief; according to his commander, Brigadier-General Henry Benham, Colonel Lowe made his death attack in an exposed situation without orders.40 The sacrifice of John Lowe served no great military purpose and did not even quiet talk about his alleged conduct at Scarey. But it did provide Tom with the immediate justification for publicly venting his beliefs in words and deeds that must have sent the paternal cadaver whirring. Prior to the Carnifax Ferry tragedy, for Tom to oppose the war or the Lincoln administration was to oppose his father. Once relieved of his father's restraining hand, he openly clasped the dogmas of Copperheadism and worshipped at the altar of its high priest, Clement Laird Vallandig- ham, whose liturgy spoke volumes for compromise and peace with the South. Tom's life as a Copperhead is beyond the scope of this essay, but in brief, as his formative years presaged, it was one of bizarre events, acrimonious controversy and bitter frustration. In his militant exertions on behalf of the Copperhead movement, no man in Dayton — Vallandigham included — equalled him. * * * * Of what substance was Tom Lowe? At least in what respects was his personality a typical manifestation of the Copperhead complex? In its political, social and economic conservatism, his personality bore similarities to the dominant complex of the Copperhead body; for that persuasion was legalistic and conservative in its political, social and economic outlook. Dedicated 40Report of Brigadier-General Henry W. Benham, commanding First Brigade, September 12, 1861, The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, V, 134. 252 The Bulletin to a strict construction of the Constitution that would limit the national government in social and economic matters, almost atavistic in their devotion to states' rights, opposed to emancipation of the Negro slave, and hostile to the emerging finance and industrial capitalism of the times, the Copperheads offered an emotional and intellectual sanctuary to Tom Lowe. As a result of his formative experiences, he had come, on the eve of the Civil War, to regard the maintenance of slavery as essential to the social structure of the South, where the democratic leaven of the industrial North did not yet infect men — white or black — with a frenzy for equality. With his ingrained legalism, Lowe would find it simple, during the war, to subscribe to the Copperhead contention that the Constitution denied to the national legis- lature the right to confiscate or emancipate the Negro slave. When he embraced the Copperhead movement, Tom's complex of conservatism — a fait accompli — was typical of that of his political accessories; but the experiences and accidental forces that shaped the Lowe psyche were atypical. Other Copperheads could be as legalistic and conservative as Tom Lowe, but few were cast from a similar mold; in its genesis, the Lowe emotional and intellectual context was unique. His very environment had, in fact, fashioned an emotional make-up lacking empathy for, and even hostile to, those Copperhead allies who arose from Irish- American and German-American enclaves. For, according to the Lowe understanding, these hyphenate groups — hard working, frugal and "on the make" — carried no self-sacrificing, ennobling passion to remain unassuming ciphers who knew their place, as Tom's Southern tradesmen did, and as their superiors would have them know it. Grimy, sweaty laboring men might dwell in the same political realm with Tom Lowe, but their path to Copper- headism was the customary one; Tom Lowe's was a solitary path unknown to the common sort but one which, nonetheless, led him to a political kinship with those from whom he shrank in distaste. However unusual and inexorable the forces giving rise to the social and political attitudes of a man, they do not in themselves exempt him from accountability for the correctness of his views. Tom himself, sensing that he was a creature of circumstance, explained away his accountability by an appeal to the deter- ministic rationale — or rationalization — held by his preceptor, The Genesis of a Copperhead 253 Vallandigham. "Val," according to Tom, averred to him that a man could not help his convictions and thus deserved no more praise or blame for his political beliefs than he did for living.41 Such a tenet could reassure its holder of the wisdom of his convictions and even justify all kinds of political aberration; such a tenet could convince him that he was of the political elect; and such a doctrinaire tenet could move a man faced with problems requiring the application of systematic and deliberate thought to reason reflexively from a limited matrix and to identify personal predilection as absolute truth. Doctrinaire and litigious in its demands, this belief system might, under the onrush of civil war, inflict pain and frustration on Tom Lowe; but he had chosen to be an easily molded vessel and, like Erisichthon, listened not to wise counsels. The "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," if they came to Tom Lowe, would be of his own making.

41Thomas Lowe to John Wallace, August 24, 1861.

NEWSBOY SAGACITY

A newsboy, anxious to dispose of his stock in hand yesterday, cried lustily, at the corner of Fourth and Vine Streets: " 'Ere's yer mornin' papers — all about Jeff Davis bein' hung — only three cents." An individual, who was passing at the time, was startled at the announcement made by the ragged youth, and without taking time to consider the amount of unpoetic license usually taken by the class of merchants he was about to patronize, he invested three cents and got a copy of the Gazette. But failing to discover the news of Jeff's execution, he tried to bring the newsboy to an account for his misrepresentation, when he was repulsed by the following remark: "If Jeff Davis 'd bin hung I'd a sold all my papers afore six o'clock this mornin', and yer wouldn't a got it for three cents nither." The man passed on. (Cincinnati Daily Gazette Wednesday, May 22, 1861)