Indiana's War

The Civil War in Documents

Richard F. Nation, Stephen E. Towne, Richard F. Nation, Stephen E. Towne

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780821443378
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Indiana's War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana's citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana's participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front. Starting in the 1850s, the documents show the sharp political divisions over issues such as slavery, race, and secession in Indiana, divisions that boiled over into extraordinary strife and violence in the state during the rebellion. This conflict touched all levels and members of society, including men, women, and children, whites and African Americans, native-born citizens and immigrants, farmers and city and town dwellers.

Collecting the writings of Indiana's peoples on a wide range of issues, chapters focus on the politics of race prior to the war, the secession crisis, war fever in 1861, the experiences of soldiers at the front, homefront hardships, political conflict between partisan foes and civil and military authorities, reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation, and antiwar dissent, violence, and conspiracy.

Indiana's War is an excellent accompanying primary source text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the American Civil War. It documents the experiences of Indiana's citizens, from the African American soldier to the antiwar dissenter, from the prewar politician to the postwar veteran, from the battle-scarred soldier to the impoverished soldier's wife, all showing the harsh realities of the war.

NINE

Dissent, Violence, and Conspiracy

THE CIVIL WAR was fought all over Indiana—in courthouses, city and town streets, saloons, churches, schoolhouses and playgrounds; in fields, forests, and swamps—wherever people met, congregated, argued, and disputed. Beyond being merely a military struggle fought in the South between warring armies, the Civil War was first and foremost a political struggle between two competing ideologies, one espousing slavery as a part of the political, social, and economic fabric of the nation, and the other rejecting it. Just as the people of the South rebelled against the Union to protect slavery, so too did people in Indiana fight about slavery and its role in society.

After warfare began between the United States and the Confederate States, several measures undertaken by the federal government under President Abraham Lincoln and a Republican-controlled Congress to aid the war effort exacerbated internal political and ideological tensions. Such measures as an income tax, the Confiscation Acts to seize rebel-owned property in the North, the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the states in rebellion, the Enrollment Act of 1863 establishing a federal draft, and military arrests of civilians enraged conservative Democrats, who saw the measures as so many blows struck against the United States Constitution, specifically, the right of assembly and the freedoms of speech and the press. Further, they saw the use of military tribunals to try civilians from Indiana and other Northern states as a violation of constitutional rights.

As political conflict at the national level boiled over into warfare, politics in Indiana likewise produced violence and bloodshed. Numerous politically motivated shootings, knifings, and fistfights occurred throughout the state, involving men, women, and children. Political passions could not be restrained, and many politically related murders resulted. Fights were frequent at political rallies and meetings; members of the opposing party would linger on the fringes of open-air rallies, heckling and abusing speakers, and the resulting fights would escalate into riots. Alcohol frequently contributed to such brawls, as event organizers supplied drinks to participants as inducements for attendance, and their opponents often partook as well. In other cases, armed men interrupted political meetings to threaten and intimidate speakers and audiences into quiescence. Speakers traveled with armed bodyguards to ward off violence; however, the presence of such armed men often precipitated violent reactions.

The presence of armed troops in Indiana played a significant role in much of the violence committed. To paraphrase the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, war is political action using other means. Soldiers, especially volunteers, accepted violence as a political tool. In Indiana, federal troops and state militia—the Indiana Legion—clashed with Democrats who opposed the war against the rebellious South. They employed the means at their disposal—armed force and intimidation—to attack and punish those whom they viewed as sympathetic to the rebellion. Military authorities used their power to arrest Democratic political speakers and newspaper editors who criticized the Lincoln administration and its handling of the war effort. Violence against newspapers in Indiana was widespread and frequent. Troops ransacked newspaper offices and destroyed presses, often without any official or legal repercussions. Troops also were often present at polling places, usually as voters themselves, but in some cases positioned to intimidate Democratic voters and dissuade them from voting.

Conservative Democrats resisted government measures such as the federal draft in 1863 and 1864. Even Governor Morton feared that measures like the substitute clause of the Enrollment Act—whereby drafted men could pay to avoid military service—would drive dissent and should be ignored: “I can assure you that this feature in the Bill is creating much excitement and ill feeling towards the Government among the poorer classes generally, without regard to party and may if it is not subdued lead, to a popular storm under cover of which the execution of the Conscription Act may be greatly hindered or even defeated in some portions of our Country.”¹ Draft violence was rampant throughout Indiana. In the summer of 1863, several draft enrollment officials were shot dead and others assaulted. In addition, shootings and death resulted when draft dodgers and deserters, often aided by family and friends, resisted arrest by troops and government officials.

Conservative Democrats adopted certain symbols to identify themselves and their opposition to government tyranny. Republicans often called backwoods country dwellers “butternuts,” a disparaging reflection on their poor, subsistence-level agricultural ways, such as wearing homespun clothing dyed with the nuts of the butternut hickory, a common tree in Indiana. By 1863 Democrats embraced the image by wearing butternut pins on their dresses, bonnets, watch chains, and lapels. Similarly, Democrats employed the “copperhead” epithet, wearing a penny in a show of defiance. Enraged Republicans often insisted on removing these symbols of resistance, and Democrats often dared them to try: “We learn that a religious meeting at Henkin’s school house was broken up on last Sunday night by four individuals, who entered the house while divine services were being held, with arms in their hands, and their guns cocked, demanding in Hascallian manner that all those having butternuts upon their persons should immediately take them off.”² Thus, wherever the two partisan groups met—in churches, schoolhouses, markets, and saloons—many fights resulted.

Early in the armed struggle, amid partisan conflict and violence, prowar political leaders and federal officials in Indiana began to believe that antiwar opponents of the Lincoln administration were secretly organizing and acting to subvert the war effort. The idea that groups would meet in secret to discuss politics and political action was far from foreign to mid-nineteenth-century American society: numerous fraternal organizations existed to cater to the social, spiritual, and intellectual needs of Victorian male society, and political clubs formed an important part of political life. Clubs, party activities, family, and other social forces played a large role in forming party allegiances, transmitting political ideology, and mobilizing party workers for political action.³ Both the Democratic and Republican parties supported and were supported by adjunct political and social organizations, which were part of a broader culture of organizations that included groups like the Masons, Knights Templar, Oddfellows, and many others—some of which maintained secrecy and secret rituals. These networks enabled men to join with others to socialize, develop friendships, and advance their economic well-being as well as social or political causes with other like-minded men. This “joiner” culture played an important role in masculine culture of the period.⁴

When Republicans in Indiana began to suspect that groups met secretly to discuss politics and ways to oppose the war policies of the Lincoln administration, they relied on informants to provide them with details about the groups and their aims that distinguished them from the conventional organizations and showed them to be of a different character. Based on the information supplied to them, Republican leaders in Indiana believed in the existence of secret conspiracies to subvert the Northern war effort. This conviction grew in intensity during the course of the war, as the evidence mounted regarding the aims and activities of the secret organizers. Governor Oliver P. Morton was the key figure in collecting information and mobilizing state and federal government efforts to combat what he saw as a significant threat. In 1862 Morton worked to collect information on secret groups throughout Indiana. In the early summer party leaders publicized their suspicions, as well as communicating their fears to the Lincoln administration in Washington. Concerted efforts to expose the secret groups by employing state and federal grand juries in Indiana failed. Democrats denied the existence of secret organizations and accused Republicans of organizing their own. (Indeed, Republicans organized several secret organizations, such as the Union Leagues and others, and sought arms for them in order to combat the Democrats.)

The U.S. Army emerged as the chief means by which to collect information and combat the effects of the secret groups. Widespread desertion in the army prompted this action. Colonel (later Brigadier General) Henry B. Carrington worked closely with Governor Morton and other officials to collect information on the groups, collectively identified during much of the war as the Knights of the Golden Circle (an organization that existed prior to the Civil War to support the spread of slavery throughout the Caribbean and Gulf region). Subsequent names for the groups were the Order of American Knights and the Sons of Liberty. As the war progressed, army intelligence in Indiana and neighboring states pointed to the arming of these groups for self-defense, for resistance to the draft, or for what were seen as even more sinister purposes. At the end of 1862 and into 1863, after Democrats had won significant electoral victories in the Indiana and Illinois legislatures, federal and state officials in Indiana and neighboring states became aware of talk among Democratic politicians of a plan to separate the Old Northwest from New England and other eastern states. The purpose of this plan was to become independent of the financial and manufacturing interests of the East that had the effect, in some Democrats’ vie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One The Politics of Slavery
• Two The Election of 1860 and Secession
• Three Choosing Sides, Making an Army
• Four The Front Lines
• Five The Home Front
• Six Race, Slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation
• Seven The Battle to Control State Government
• Eight The Morgan Raid
• Nine Dissent, Violence, and Conspiracy
• Ten War’s End
• Timeline
• Discussion Questions
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index