The role Ohio played in the Civil War can seem, at first glance, to be simple: the state was part of the Union fighting to abolish slavery.
But the situation on the ground was a little more complicated.
“There were large numbers of Northerners who were extremely unhappy with the call to end slavery and the war that followed. And some of them plotted a massive insurrection with allies in the Confederacy,” explained Dan Gediman in his new podcast, “The Copperhead Conspiracy.”
The podcast doesn't just tell an often forgotten part of history, it draws throughlines to the state of American democracy today.
Gediman joined the Ohio Newsroom to talk about the story. The full series is available on podcast platforms.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
On the Copperheads
“[The Copperheads] were a loose-knit coalition of Northerners who were against the Civil War. They felt that the South should have been allowed to secede from the Union, or at very least that the North should not have gone to war to keep them from doing so.
“They came at it from three different perspectives: Some of them were constitutional absolutists. Some of them were people who originally were born or had family in the South. And some of them were recent immigrants, in particular from Ireland, who didn't feel like they had a dog in the fight and they didn't want to be dying for a cause that they didn't believe in.”
On a rebellion in Holmes County
“In Holmes County — and I should add in several other locations in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York and throughout the North — there were armed insurgents who were members of this Copperhead movement who were violently opposed, in particular, to the draft. In 1863, there was universal conscription for men to join the Union Army. And so they beat up a Union agent who came to the community to sign up men for the war. Then, the governor of Ohio ordered troops to go into Holmes County and put down this rebellion. There was a shooting battle between northern troops and these Holmes County insurgents and many of them were arrested and a couple of them served prison time.”
On the Copperheads’ demise
“The reason why you and I are not currently living in a different part of the country with a different name is because of a group of Union spies who were able to infiltrate the anti-war, anti-Lincoln, Copperhead organizations that were planning on a violent coup in many of the states of the present-day Midwest. [There were] also some Confederate officers who were turncoats and basically, to save their own skin, decided to help the Union Army to put down this planned rebellion. But had it worked, there would have been assassinations of governors and Republican leaders throughout the Midwest, in particular in Ohio, and we might now be living in a very different United States.”
On the story’s connections to today
“Throughout American history, there have been movements going all the way back to the founding of the Republic and to the very present day, where people who feel strongly that the government is doing something wrong feel compelled to take up arms against their own government. Sometimes it's people on the right, sometimes it is people on the left. But what they have in common is rage against the government and what the government is doing. And so it was true back in the 1860s. It’s true today.”
