In July 1861 the New York Times pronounced that “[p]arty organization is dead,” having committed suicide by failing to prevent secession and war. The alternative now was to stand together to save the Union.1 But Northerners did not euthanize their old party system just yet; rather, they subsumed their political differences into an emotional, shared patriotism that carried them into and through the early months of the war without forgetting who they were. It was one thing for most Democrats to stand with the Republicans, their bitter political adversaries, in the name of the Union, but quite a different thing to give up all political ambitions for their old party. As one Democrat explained, “It is not the administration as an administration, but as the embodiment of our institutions which is entitled to obedience.”2
Unlike their cooperationist comrades, antiwar or Peace Democrats challenged Republicans from the war’s beginning. Holding to their old values of individual freedom and states’ rights, Peace Democrats preferred to allow the Confederacy to go its own way, fearing the ambitious desire of some radical Republicans to turn the conflict into an abolitionist war.3 Even when allied with Lincoln’s administration, the prowar Democrats shared the suspicion of their more discontented political brethren when it came to a Republican desire to expand war aims. What was critical for so many Democrats who would willingly set aside partisan bickering was that this war be one of limited ends. As former Indiana governor Joseph Wright and Fort Wayne banker Allen Hamilton advised, “We must restore this Government upon the Constitution alone, without dotting an i or crossing a t.”4
Most Democrats thus strove to be a loyal opposition. They would find their work difficult. As the war dragged on, once supportive Democrats questioned the Republican agenda and learned that Republicans had come to assume that any challenges to administration policies revealed traitorous hearts. Throughout 1862 and into 1864, Northern military victory remained elusive, the financial and human costs climbed, and the Lincoln administration’s policies, notably concerning conscription, civil liberties, and emancipation, reminded many Democrats that they could offer political alternatives to such a radical expansion of the power of the national government.
During the fall of 1861, fissures appeared in the effort to do away with party politics in Ohio, where Democrats abandoned any commitment to a Union party.5 Hardly a year into the war, Indiana Democrat James Athon believed such unity tickets, those optimistic efforts to bury party differences, to be on the wane in his own state.6 Illinois Democrats rejected invitations to join Union parties and sent a majority of delegates to the state constitutional convention.7 Early military defeats aggravated opposition throughout the Midwest.8
In 1862, war weariness and a general sense that the Republicans were mismanaging the war reached into the communities on the East Coast and discouraged citizens further. In January 1862, Massachusetts mother Maria Berry believed “that neither General Burnside nor government know how to act or what to do.” She believed she could do better, given her experience as a mother; after all, she wrote to her soldier son, “this Rebellion ought to have been put down long before this time.”9 Later, in November, a Connecticut woman wrote to her husband in the army, “the more I see and hear the less confidence I have in our ever haveing [sic] peace restored to us again.”10 Indeed, at the same time, Irish-American New Yorker Rowland Redmond judged the Lincoln administration lacked the intelligence to guide the country, which now “may drift into no one knows what.”11
The Union army’s loss at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, did not improve these opinions. Christmas in the wake of that disaster was not a joyful day for Henrietta Parker, a mother from Vergennes, Vermont. She urged her son, Charles, a captain in the Seventh Vermont Infantry, to resign his commission, expressing her disgust with how the politicians were conducting the war. “Managed as things now are, the enemy have and will have the advantage,” she complained. “I am sick sick Heart sick, of this War, and I want my Son out of it.” She told Charles, “I cannot sacrifice you to this Unholy War, They accomplish nothing but the slaughtering of thousands, and to all appearances it is all they will accomplish.”12
By the end of 1862, Democrats who had refused to give up their party identity had found renewed energy in their challenges to Republicans who still claimed proprietary rights to national patriotism. Democrats won gubernatorial, legislative, and congressional victories in a number of states.13 Generally, these victories did not spread beyond old Democratic strongholds nor did they produce extraordinary congressional gains.14 Nevertheless, the elections gave notice to Republicans that political partisanship endured and throughout the North antiwar Democrats demanded peace.15 Far from having died with the shots fired on Fort Sumter, the political party system found new life in debates over the conduct of the war and what Democrats considered the Lincoln government’s constitutional overreach in suspending habeas corpus, suppressing dissent, and moving against slavery.
There remained efforts to cultivate a united political front, especially during the presidential election campaign of 1864, but unity generally meant accepting Republican policies. The German-born intellectual Francis Lieber and like-minded individuals believed that loyal Democrats should have no objections to reelecting Lincoln. Using rhetoric similar to that found in the orations of 1861, Lieber, a former slaveholder, argued that “in our present troubles” there were no political parties, but only patriots and “traitors to their country in the hour of need.”16 At the October 1864 meeting of African American men in Syracuse, New York, John S. Rock, a black Massachusetts resident, presented the political contest in a way Lieber would have accepted. “There are but two parties in the country today,” he reported, “The one headed by Lincoln is for Freedom and the Republic; the other, by McClellan, is for Despotism and slavery. There can be no middle ground in war.”17
Nominating Lincoln for reelection was not a problem at the National Union Party Convention, as the president’s organization now referred to itself. The name change was opportunistic, but at the same time an honest effort to encourage patriots who might still find the Republican name to represent something radical to support their candidates.18 The party’s naming efforts were designed to prove a unity that, if not entirely fictional, was somewhat exaggerated, with the Republicans experiencing some internal dissent.19 However, in June at their Baltimore convention they emphasized the appeal for a united front, when they replaced the radical vice-president Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee War Democrat.20
Of course, there still remained a Democratic presidential candidate in the field with noticeable support. Democrats continued to pound Lincoln and his supporters with accusations of radicalism and tyranny.21 Ohio’s Tiffin Advertiser made the partisan case for George B. McClellan, the Democratic presidential nominee, by arguing that the Republican Party had given the country “good times” in the form of excessive taxation, government expansion, a “ragged currency . . . instead of good, old fashioned, Democratic Gold and Silver,” conscription’s “Wheel of Death,” and an antislavery war.22 Democrats insisted that emancipation would unleash a torrent of racial violence, race mixing, and threats to the social order and made the Republicans’ proposed constitutional amendment to abolish slavery throughout the land a centerpiece of their campaign.23
Democrats approached the campaigning season with some optimism. Unfortunately for their prospects, the Union army’s performance improved in time for the 1864 election. Also state elections held in October in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania suggested a vigorous Republican Party and presented an opportunity to call straying Democrats into the fold of a unity party.24 Thereafter, the national prospects of Lincoln and his party appeared good. Northerners gave Lincoln an Electoral College vote of 212 to 21 and the assurance that his party would return to Congress in complete control.25 “The crisis has passed,” concluded New York lawyer George Templeton Strong; “My contempt for democracy and extended suffrage is mitigated. The American people can be trusted to take care of the national honor.”26 A resigned Maria Lydig Daly, a Democratic diarist, also acknowledged Lincoln’s victory, commenting, “Vox Populi, vox Dei. So it must be for the best.” Importantly, she added, “All now left us is to put the shoulder to the wheel and do our best to draw the government machine out of the slough.”27 Despite suspicions of rabble-rousing voters and despite the electoral disappointment of Democrats, the 1864 contest demonstrated the nation’s commitment to holding elections and to accepting their outcomes.
The results of 1864 and of the earlier state and local elections suggested that political parties continued to do the work they had done since the early republic and in an almost universal fashion helped to cultivate an informed if partisan citizenry. “Every man belongs to a party,” Dietrich Gerstein wrote in 1860 from his farm in backwoods Michigan as he explained American politics to his brother back home in Germany; furthermore, everyone “has a well-founded opinion about our political situation and can explain his views as clearly as the top Senatas in Washington.” His Catholic and Old Lutheran neighbors were exceptions, the liberal German Protestant immigrant believed. Exhibiting a prejudice that would especially dog Catholics throughout the war, he concluded, “Those people don’t read any papers, they let their preachers do their thinking for them.”28
Parties held their occasional national conventions, which allowed participants to revive their spirits, roar for a presidential candidate, rant against the opposition’s policies, and expand their circles of like-minded acquaintances. The real work of politics, however, was in the states and the communities. Closer to home partisans mobilized support for candidates and sustained party loyalty by making the serious game of choosing a government amusing to their supporters.29 In 1864 in New Jersey party loyalists formed clubs, assembled crowds in urban areas, canvassed the countryside, and even invested money in buying votes in unpredictable constituencies. 30 Importantly, the parties relied on their newspapers “written free of restraint” to keep readers, “even out on the edge of settlement,” “informed about what has happened and what is to be hoped and feared in the near future.”31
Campaigning was important work, as the activities of the New Jersey Republicans suggested, but also a form of outdoor entertainment matched in oratory and staging only by religious revivals. During the fall of 1863, an English reporter, a somewhat amused and bemused outsider, observed a rally at Carthage, Ohio, that was typical of the times. “[I]t reminded me of a Derby day at Epsom,” he wrote home, “only if a somewhat shabbier character with a dash of an Italian masquerade and carnival frolic.” The chaotic affair, perhaps a bit vulgar, featured a noisy parade, with people wandering about, eating, and enjoying themselves. Politics demanded orators and the “listless loafers” who listened to them, “cheering occasionally, jeering more frequently; all this in a din of discordant music, the racking fire of great and small guns, and the shrill cries of apple women and vendors of firewater.” “For the rest,” he continued, “there were children squalling, young people flirting, angry men swearing, drunken men reeling—all the varieties of a swarming, bustling crowd.” Republicans hanged a “colossal man of straw with a mask” giving it the likeness of Ohio Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham; the “zealous” among them then had a grand time “hacking away” at it “with their sabres [sic] and poking with their bayonets.”32
With liquor on hand, such political gatherings along with tavern debates and election day socializing were always one drink removed from violence. During the 1864 election, a soldier on his way home to his wife and sickly child stopped to vote at a barroom serving as a polling station in Nininger, Minnesota. He bought drinks for the crowd of men loitering around the place “and soon all hands began to feel pretty full of talk.” A political argument led the well-oiled Democratic disputants to demand the soldier not vote for Lincoln. He ignored the warning. The drunks “caught up fence rails pieces of boards & all sorts of weapons of war that was near & killed him on the spot.” The authorities arrested three men and jailed them for trial in St. Paul.33
Party supporters when not bloodying one another carried flags, banners, and placards at rallies and in marches. Women and men wore hats, handkerchiefs, scarves, paper collars, and mittens with patriotic symbols and words and political party labels that advertised their loyalty to a candidate, party, or principle. Partisans had access to all sorts of things stamped with political and patriotic symbols, cartoons, and slogans that further brought the war into the home.34 Even children became politicized, enthusiastically participating in these grownup activities while also loyally wearing their party symbols to school and with the Republicans among them donning the uniform of cloak and cap of the Wide Awake political club.35 Their fathers passed on political views in the same way that they made Methodists or Baptists of their offspring and with the same understanding of the meaning and consequences of political apostasy. The war might change the control fathers had over their sons who went off to fight, but that did not mean they gave up their paternal obligation. Wisconsin Democrat William Reid engaged his prowar soldier-son Harvey in political discussions, trying to reenforce the family principles from a distance with argument and newspaper clippings as Harvey drifted into Republicanism.36
People on the home front could hardly avoid their cause even in executing their daily routines. They sent letters, notices, and other written fare in envelopes embossed with flags, eagles, and other patriotic symbols. As the war progressed, printers added portraits, caricatures, allegories, vignettes of military heroes, images of slavery, and representations of war that expressed more complex political ideas and interests.37 At the same time, patriotic symbols, especially the old national flag, were stamped on newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and broadsides as a matter of course.38 All of these efforts had the serious and successful purpose of stimulating supporters to vote for their candidates, producing high rates of voter participation.39
In states with flagging Republican support, men established extra-party fraternities to encourage loyalty to their cause and provide vocal public testimony. During 1863, in New Jersey, the Republican Loyal National League with its fraternal rituals and oaths spread across the state. The organization held statewide meetings in Trenton, which provided the opportunity for Frederick Frelinghuysen to proclaim the loyalty of the state’s citizens and the valor of its troops to the approval of the assembled crowd.40 Farther west in Cincinnati, Lincoln’s supporters founded the National Union Association, which sponsored speakers such as the Reverend Charles G. Ames, who in March 1863 exhorted his raucous listeners to give Lincoln their unqualified support, regardless of the direction of his policies.41 In New York State, Loyal Leagues attracted Union veterans, who made it clear that Democrats were not much better for the country than their old rebel enemies, or as one veteran, a convert to Republicanism, promised, he “would see all democrats in hell before he would vote for one of them.”42
Earlier during the war, with Republican fortunes flagging because of battlefield reverses, pro-Union businessmen in Philadelphia in 1862 established the first Union League to support Republican candidates and the war effort. As Sidney George Fisher explained in early January 1863, “The conditions of membership are unwavering loyalty and support of the government in all its efforts to suppress the rebellion.” By March 11, Fisher considered the venture a success. Other cities would follow Philadelphia’s example. But at about the same time, in spite of the show of unity in Philadelphia, Fisher acknowledged the existence of a Democratic club in the city, a reminder that party loyalty survived.43 The Central Democratic Club, founded in January 1863, provided a philosophical home for antiadministration Philadelphians, who could rely on their new journal, the Age, to promulgate their party’s views on the war.44
Big-city Union Leagues, such as Philadelphia’s, were elitist because their agenda required money as well as experienced operators who had the necessary community connections to raise it.45 The 27 members of Philadelphia’s Board of Publications each contributed $250 to subsidize its efforts.46 Union Leagues in other cities raised regiments and performed other patriotic tasks, but most significantly they did what the Philadelphia Board did so well, publishing reams of pamphlets, tracts, handouts, posters, lithographs, and other literature to defend and explain Republican policies and to promote Republican candidates, which required money. In late March 1863, for example, the Union League of Philadelphia had a reserve of $40,000 and another $22,000 set aside for its publication program.47 Its Board of Publications alone printed tens of thousands of items, which it distributed to military camps, hospitals, political clubs and reform societies, and other Union Leagues.48
If one needed a reminder that politics and parties were alive and well, the Illinois Union League used the antebellum network of Wide Awake clubs, those groups of young men who in 1860 had rallied support to Lincoln, to establish itself across the state. Chicago Tribune owner Joseph Medill described his efforts to the president, noting his organization’s “somewhat secret . . . but . . . strictly patriotic” actions, with rituals and signs and at least 75,000 members in the state. Democrats also formed secret clubs in Illinois and elsewhere, evincing the continued partisan nature of Northern politics.49 Open partisanship shaped by club activity also remained common. In 1864, in New Jersey, Young Men’s Lincoln Clubs along with Union Leagues contested the election with McClellan Clubs and Democratic Associations.50
Secret clubs had not been unusual in American politics before the war. Republicans, however, became concerned when they learned of underground Democratic organizations. Republican suspicions were not misplaced when war opponents found outlets for their views in clandestine groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, and the Sons of Liberty, secret societies standing in opposition to the war. In the wake of the first defeat of Union forces at Bull Run in Virginia, antiwar Midwesterners began to organize in secret societies and even go out of their way to intimidate Union supporters.51 Republicans saw treasonous conspiracies in all such gatherings of Copperheads, antiwar men supposedly as treacherous, sneaky, and vile as the deadly snake, although Democrats claimed they were important bulwarks of the people’s liberty against the Republican government’s growing power. In fact, Republicans had some reason to worry as some of these antiwar groups skirted legitimate opposition, with the more serious offenses involving Democrats in discouraging enlistments, helping men dodge conscription, hiding deserters, speaking out against Lincoln’s policies, and singing “their cursed Secesh Songs.”52
Fear of traitors and conspiracies could, however, be effective political tools regardless of how extensive they might have been. In Indiana, Governor Oliver P. Morton and other Republicans collected information on secret Democratic organizations, fearing they were plotting conspiracies. The army arrested alleged subversives, and their trials proved to be an excellent campaign maneuver for Indiana Republicans, who were successful in the 1864 elections.53
The lack of tolerance for a conservative opposition to a war probably fostered underground opposition, but it also encouraged political violence, another expression, even if an unsavory one, of the time’s popular political activities. Even at a time when Democrats controlled the Indiana General Assembly, the Republican governor Oliver P. Morton and his allies worked to suppress their power. As one Democrat editorialized, the Republicans of the state “have contented themselves with demanding that the Democratic party should quietly give up all their principles, and aid them in carrying out their doctrines.” He posed a rhetorical question, well knowing his readership’s answer: “Is this right—is this the way to harmonize the people?”54
Progovernment editors, vigilance committees, and citizens, taking their cues from Republican politicians who brooked no divergence from the party line, refused to acknowledge the difference between legitimate dissent and treason. Consequently, mobs attacked Democratic editors, destroyed printing presses, and disrupted legitimate Democratic political rallies. In doing so, they contributed to muffling opposition voices without the need for laws, military orders, and other governmental intrusions into their local affairs. In Indianapolis, the editor of the Republican paper, the Journal, pointed an accusatory finger at his rival, Democratic editor J. J. Bingham of the Indianapolis Sentinel, charging him with having treasonous Confederate sympathies. In August 1861, incited by such rhetoric, Republicans dragged Bingham to the city mayor’s office to prove his loyalty by taking a public oath.55 Ohio Republicans and their supporters boycotted, intimidated, and destroyed Democratic presses in concerted efforts to silence the political opposition.56 In New England editors and public figures expressing pro-Southern sympathies or too forcefully challenging the Lincoln administration’s prosecution of the war were branded as disloyal and treated accordingly, with one Haverhill, Massachusetts, Democratic editor being stripped, tarred, feathered, and marched around straddling a pole. The effect was to stifle criticism and make Democrats cautious in their opposition to Republican policies.57
Such intolerance of dissent limited political speech and open debate, illustrating that extralegal action could be effective in limiting the political power of Democrats without official intrusion. An Indiana Democrat admitted to being afraid to express his views because “Some crazy Republicans here in this county don’t tolerate free speech.” “I hope that Democrats in all parts of the State will be temperate and discreet in criticizing the acts of the administration,” he wrote, “Yet we should not consent that good Loyal union men should be mobbed for a free expression of their abhorrence and disaprobation [sic] of the acts of [Indiana] Gov. [Oliver] Morton or Pres. Lincoln.” Republicans in Indiana continued to use “disloyalty” as an argument against Democratic opponents.58
The wartime partisanship spilled over to upset family tranquility and disrupt friendly discourse while breeding distrust and discontent among neighbors. Albert Hancock plagued with antiwar Democrats in his wife’s family must have felt the domestic tension when he declared, “it would do him more good to kill one of his brother in laws, than to shoot Jeff Davis himself.”59 Hancock’s unhappy sentiments were not actions, but an already unhappy Illinois woman betrayed her abusive husband by spying and informing on him and his circle of Confederate sympathizers.60 Ohioan Jane Evans, a staunch Democrat opposed to conscription and emancipation, exchanged a pleasant correspondence with her soldier cousin Sam Evans for a time. Their views, however, radically diverged. Sam, once a Democrat, had become an officer in a black regiment and firm in his support for Lincoln, conscription, and emancipation. Their friendship ended, with Sam chastising her for her rebel views while reporting to his father, another convert to Republicanism, that his cousin had insulted him and all Union soldiers.61
As with other types of political activities, children carried their affiliations and loyalties with them into their community schools, where arguments over students wearing symbols perceived by Unionist youths to be expressions of disloyalty devolved into fisticuffs in Dayton, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois.62 The scholars were enthusiastic partisans, but not much better able to control their elevated feelings than were their parents. Neighbors also turned on one another. In 1862 in Indiana, Unionists denounced vocal Democrats, who ended up being arrested and jailed.63 In Illinois, they spied on neighbors who were pro-Confederate malcontents, secretly denounced alleged traitors to the state government, and armed themselves in defense against their Democratic neighbors in Clay County; in Indiana after the Union defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, secessionists in the Indianapolis hinterland threatened local Unionists and vandalized their national flags.64
Mattie Blanchard of Foster, Connecticut, had to deal with the gloating antiwar men in the community who gathered at the local store and “have a glorious time over the news if it is in favor of the south.” These neighbors of hers, she suggested, “ought to be shot” when a time comes for them “to be punished for treason.”65 Even passive disloyalty could earn the wrath of previously cordial neighbors. Emeline Ritner of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, considered neighbors to be traitors if they failed to support the troops. “When I know a person is a ‘copperhead’ I can’t feel that they are my friends,” she explained to her soldier husband. Rumor had it that one of her neighbors believed that the nation’s soldiers would be unwelcome in heaven. “If she was not my nearest neighbor and I knew it was so,” Ritner concluded, “I would never have anything to do with her again.”66
Such heated political feelings could lead to tense and sometimes violent situations for neighbors and communities. Late in the first summer of the war Union loyalists and Confederate sympathizers clashed in three Fairfield County, Connecticut, communities.67 In August 1863, in the Northfield, Indiana area, a storeowner found his building razed and his stock burned up with it, allegedly because “he voted the Democratic ticket.”68 “Society is fast degenerating into perfect lawlessness,” an Indiana Democrat wrote that month, “and from the President down to the humblest citizen the doctrine of force, reprisals and barbarism is fast obtaining.”69
If families and neighborhoods could not escape the weight of wartime politics, neither could the churches that served them and their communities. Politics readily entered churches, and even divided them as they had in the public square. Ministers and congregations took up war issues and confused their political beliefs with God’s wishes, much as Republicans assumed that they were the keepers of the nation’s true values.70 In the aftermath of the attack on Fort Sumter, pro-Union congregants of a New Jersey Reformed Church raised a flag at their church. Their antiwar fellow church members insisted they remove the flag. The prowar congregants refused to comply, and the pastor stood by the Union men. Men brought out their weapons, but in the end the church board approved the flying of the old national banner. Ill will remained and almost two years later, the pastor noted “political dissensions of the country have not failed to leave their mark upon the Church.” The same issues of dissent and freedom of expression that upset civil discourse also disturbed this New Jersey congregation’s Christian peace and that of others across the North.71
Catholics tended to be immigrants and Democrats, thus avoiding much of the internal dissension experienced in some Protestant churches, although there were individuals who diverged on issues such as the legitimacy of secession and sacredness of slavery. Some Catholics in Dubuque complained about a political priest, but when confronted with emancipation and conscription, Catholic positions would lead them foremost into strife with loyal Northerners and especially Protestants.72 Antiwar Catholics dealt with Protestants who had not trusted them before the war. That distrust continued. Pope Pius IX’s call for peace did not help matters and neither did the increasingly vocal antiwar stance of the Catholic press. Some Catholic Republicans broke with their fellow communicants over the issue, but if the Catholic press was any indication, by 1864 internal strife was minimal with most editorialists exhibiting discontent with Republican policies.73
There were certainly dissident Protestants who, in the manner of the Methodist Edson Olds, argued that Christ blessed the peacemakers.74 And there were antiwar and Democratic communities that would allow Olds to say what he thought. Indeed, in Iowa, Democrats loathed the preachers who espoused political ideas, which they feared would run to discordant orations on abolitionism and Republicanism.75 For many Protestants, however, Olds was a sinner and Lincoln’s policies were righteous, especially with the addition of emancipation as a war aim. There was little room for dissent when the Northerners were concurrently serving the Lord and the Republicans. “Christian people throughout the North have been praying for this time,” Oberlin College student W. W. Parmenter explained to his mother after he enlisted in April 1861; “The conflict is now between Liberty and Slavery, Christianity and Barbarism, God and the Prince of Darkness.”76
African American churches could not separate their political activities, which favored the Union cause, from their religious functions.77 They had been involved in the antislavery movement long before the war had begun. When New Haven, Connecticut, African Americans learned of the Emancipation Proclamation, they gathered at their Temple Street Church to celebrate and it was in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York, where African Americans met to form the National Equal Rights League in October 1864.78 By that time, however, white denominations were taking official political stands, which meant that they were also tempting dissent with their rigid commitments. On September 7, 1862, evangelical Protestants of various denominations gathered in Chicago and affirmed the war to be “a divine retribution upon the land for its manifold sins” and only emancipation would allow for absolution.79 In 1863, the Philadelphia Baptist Association agreed that the end of slavery would confirm the United States’ place as the divinely sanctioned “model of the world’s civilization.”80 And in 1864, the New Jersey Reformed Dutch Church, which by this time had become an abolitionist church, resolved to support Lincoln.81 The cause for Union was obvious and good, but once Lincoln stood for emancipation, there would be no separating Republican war aims from God’s wishes for these Christians.
Methodists, then the largest denomination in the Union, were especially vigorous in support of the war and the Lincoln administration. They demanded unity on the political issues of the day. In 1863, New York’s Methodist Episcopal Conference, after expressing its loyalty to the Lincoln government, resolved that “those who oppose every warlike measure under the pretext of discriminating between the administration and the government, are guilty of covert treason.”82 Earlier in August 1862 the influential Methodist Western Christian Advocate made the case clearly in addressing Christian obligations. The choices were as plain to the editorialist as they would have been to any Republican politician: “Shall it be Union, Peace, Brotherhood, Liberty, freedom, and equalizing Christianity . . . [or] disunion, war, selfishness, slavery and a besotted, barbarous, brutalizing, bastard corruption, and the perversion of holy religion?”83 Condemnations of antiwar positions echoed in other Protestant publications and assemblies. In 1863, the New School Presbyterians, for example, likened the Democrats’ criticism of the Lincoln administration’s policies on emancipation, suspension of habeas corpus, and limits on the free press to treason.84
Preaching in such a heated atmosphere could hardly avoid the political. Protestant preachers wove prowar views into sermons, using biblical texts to support the Union cause.85 Even Sunday school could be political, as was the case in a Washington, Iowa, Methodist congregation where the minister taught the children that “a Copperhead” was “the meanest thing in the world.”86 Indeed, churchgoers expected their ministers to deliver patriotic sermons, unless they were Democrats. Northern Unionists relied on their preachers to rally their patriotic spirits during low times. Along the way, ministers reminded their congregants to persevere in what was God’s work and to be grateful for, as the Reverend Samuel J. Niccolls reminded his Chambersburg congregation in the aftermath of Gettysburg, having a “good and stable government . . . securing prosperity and protection to all alike. This is God’s ordaining among us.”87
Those ministers who were not sufficiently patriotic for their congregations could find themselves with no church. Northern Unionists required their preachers to be part of the war effort, expected them to support the president, and worried about the negative effects that allegedly treasonous ministers could have on the morale and support for the war.88 Protestant Episcopal, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and other church bodies regularly disciplined ministers who preached against the Republicans or encouraged resistance to the war. In the Midwest, where antiwar feelings were common, Unionist-controlled churches punished allegedly disloyal clergy—some of whom had protested their colleagues’ overtly pro-Republican preaching—and pressured their Democratic communicants to support the war effort. Over the course of the war years, annual denominational conference meetings in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois brought 121 ministers to face discipline for disloyalty.89
In 1863, the Illinois Methodist Annual Conference meeting in Springfield set a standard when it forced the retirement of Reverend William Blundell. His political sins were many. He had not joined organizations that supported the Lincoln administration. He neglected praying for Lincoln and the Union armies. And he acted immorally when he refused to honor the president’s proclamation for a national day of thanksgiving. Furthermore, people had seen him with other disloyal individuals. So eager were the committee members sitting in judgment to reach a decision that they saw no need to trouble Blundell’s accusers with requests for evidence, nor did they find it necessary to have the alleged perpetrator of these acts present to face them. The church accepted the committee’s recommendation to deny him the right to preach.90
Across the North, other ministers came under fire for various types of allegedly disloyal activities, which generally involved supporting Democrats and their values while opposing the Republican Party. Unionists assumed that such views were indicators of the lack of religious virtue. A “Copperhead cannot be a Christian,” a minister noted of the beliefs of Unionists; “and he who is not a Christian is not a proper person to preach the Gospel.”91 Congregants, local officials, and eventually the president would not tolerate outright antiwar talk from clergymen. As with unfortunate newspaper editors, disloyal preachers in some states ended up detained, which served to remind other dissidents that silence was a virtue.92
Democratic communicants clearly could not have felt welcome in a worship environment where they faced weekly sermons designed to further the Republican agenda and condemn their own political allegiances. In 1864, in New Jersey, pro-Republican preachers frustrated Democratic worshippers and one disgruntled conservative Sussex County man was dismayed to hear ministers “howling for the blood of every Southern man.”93 A Chicago minister concluded one of his services praying for the Lord to save him and his worshippers “from the blackhearted democrats and rebel sympathizers.” Others preachers used biblical passages with ministerial authority to interpret scripture in ways to condemn those listeners who failed to agree with the Union cause.94 Such outspoken partisan ministers could very well make lasting enemies among Democratic congregants.95 But the congregants were just as likely to direct their wrath at each other, as did those good Christians in one church who held a truce while praying and then “abuse[d] each other out of church.”96 More likely, Democratic congregants might be expelled from patriotic churches, as some Iowa worshippers were.97 Other frustrated worshippers simply walked away from church discord if they could. In Iowa, there were individuals who left their old churches to avoid its politics or who came together with like-minded individuals to establish churches free of secular debate, usually without having to abandon long-held theological beliefs given the theological similarities of the evangelical denominations.98
The preaching expectations loyal Unionists had of their ministers combined with all of their displays of civic patriotism—flag raisings, rallies, recruiting events, odes to the Constitution, days of mortification, and days of thanksgiving—to nurture a civic religion, a syncretism of political and religious beliefs that they could not easily unravel. Patriotic clergy encouraged this development, preaching that God had ordained the Union and those individuals who attacked it challenged God’s will. Once the nation passed through this test, even if it required stifling opposition voices, it would be better for the sacrifices endured, confirming the United States, as Hartford, Connecticut, Congregationalist preacher Horace Bushnell wrote, as “God’s own nation, providentially planted, established on moral foundations.”99 It also would mean a dominant Republican Party well into the future.