A new podcast looks at how thousands of Northerners during the Civil War conspired with the Confederacy and tried — sometimes through violence — to end the Civil War.
The podcast's creator Dan Gediman is an Antioch College graduate and WYSO alum with a long career in public radio.
On Jan. 13, Gediman’s new podcast, The Copperhead Conspiracy, will make its debut.
WYSO's Jerry Kenney spoke with Gediman about the conspiracy and the part Ohio played in it.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Dan Gediman: It's a pretty amazing story that I stumbled on about seven years ago while I was researching another public radio and podcast series that I produced called The Reckoning, which was about the history of slavery in Kentucky.
And as I was research one prominent slave holder here in Louisville, Kentucky, where I'm based, I found out that he was arrested for treason and was given a death sentence for being involved in some sort of conspiracy with the Confederacy, and that piqued my interest.
"These were very well-funded, well-drilled paramilitary organizations, and the guy at the head of it was a U.S. congressman from Ohio."
And I pulled on that thread and learned a whole lot about this conspiracy, which in essence, there were a group of northerners, in particular in the Midwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, who were deeply angry at Abraham Lincoln and his administration and the fact that they were even in a civil war against the South. And they felt strongly that it shouldn't exist, the Civil War, that we didn't have a beef with the South, we shouldn't have gotten involved with their desire to secede, we shouldn't have gotten involved with trying to do anything about slavery and we basically should've butted out of the whole thing. They just felt that the North should mind their own business.
And this began as a political disagreement, and as the Civil War progressed, and as more and more soldiers were dying, as more northern young men were being drafted into the army, they started to become radicalized. And that radicalization eventually turned into violence. And so there started to be acts of violence committed against northern soldiers. This is in the North, so this would be in Ohio in particular, where there were armed insurrections, armed attacks on Northern soldiers, on government workers who were involved with signing men up for the draft. This was a big flash point.
An example of one of these happened in 1863 in Holmes County, Ohio, where a group of armed men physically attacked the guy who was signing people up for the draft and beat him badly. And as a result of this, they called in the army to suppress this rebellion, and there were shots fired and people were wounded.
I never knew this stuff happened.
And by the way, this happened all over the United States, not just in Ohio. It happened in Indiana. It happend in Kentucky. It happened in Pennsylvania. It happened in New York City.
There were these rebellions, these uprisings, armed uprising, all throughout the Civil War. You know, very similar in some respects to what happened in the 1960s against the Vietnam War.
So you had massive draft resistance that turned into violence and eventually, this desire to fight back against the Union Army and the government of the United States escalated to the point where there were tens of thousands of armed men in the North, in states like Ohio, who were actively planning on overthrowing the governments of the states, of the Midwest, assassinating the governors, assassinating leaders of the legislature, and installing new governments to take over those states, which were going to secede from the United States into a separate new country to be called the Northwest Confederacy, which was then going to align itself with the Southern Confederacy and end the Civil War, essentially by having more citizens and more soldiers at their disposal than the North.
Jerry Kenney: So you pulled on this thread, and it sounds like a lot unraveled. There were, in this group of people, if I understand there was an Ohio congressman involved in all this?
Gediman: Yes, so there were quite a few elected leaders in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, in particular, also Missouri, who were actively involved in this conspiracy. There were sitting U.S. senators, there were sitting U.S. congressmen, there were miscellaneous state officials, the chief justice of the appellate court of Kentucky ran the conspiracy in Kentucky, for instance.
And, by the way, one of the conspirators eventually became the vice president of the United States, later in the 19th century, and yes, the sitting congressman from the district that represents the Hamilton, Ohio area, a guy named Clement Vallandigham was the ringleader nationally of this conspiracy. He ran a secret organization called the Sons of Liberty, of which he was the supreme commander. Think of this as kind of a paramilitary organization along the lines of the Ku Klux Klan, but at a much, much larger level.
So tens of thousands of members who were armed, had explosives, rifles, sidearms, were actively drilling fields in the country to prepare for this insurrection. Or another way to think about it would be any number of groups in the Middle East, like ISIS or the Taliban, who were these paramilitary organizations fighting against the governments of their respective countries. These were very well-funded, well-drilled paramilitary organizations, and the guy at the head of it was a U.S. congressman from Ohio. And that guy ends up getting arrested for treason, kicked out of the country, ends up in Canada as an exile, and while there, runs for governor of Ohio and is in fact selected as the democratic nominee in 1863 to be the governor of Ohio while he is exiled.
Kenney: Let's go back to the ties between these events and what's happening today. Certainly there's no shortage of political violence on either side, the right and the left, but how should we look at events, particularly within the construct of American ideology from its founding on?
Gediman: Ken Burns just ran his American Revolution series starting with the founding of this country. So we started in a revolution against a perceived tyrant, King George, and baked into the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence explicitly is this notion that if you strongly disagree with what is happening in your government, you have the right to rebel against it, okay? It's baked into both our founding documents, but also into the ethos of this country, right? So the people both in the South and in the North that were talking about the Copperheads firmly believed they were part of the same historical trend that the, quote, patriots in the American Revolution lived by in terms of taking up arms against tyranny. And by the way, the main organization that undertook this Copperhead conspiracy styled themselves as the Sons of Liberty, explicitly taking the same name that the early patriots used in violent rebellion against the British crown.
So that notion that we always reserve the right to use violence when we believe government officials or government entities are misbehaving has never gone away in this country. It just pops up like a bad penny every few decades. And so it's been a cyclical thing that's happened throughout the United States history. It certainly happened throughout the early 19th century leading up to the Civil War, but it has happened throughout 20th century. There have been armed rebellions in the United States around the time of the First World War and in the aftermath of the First World War in the early 1920s, happened again in the run up to World War II, definitely happened in the 1960s and 1970s.
We've seen it with the militia movement, we've seen with all sorts of paramilitary white supremacist groups, neo-Nazis, etc., that have been organizing, again, armed paramilitary groups ready to take action. We've seen it in the recent past with the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This is a thread in American history that I don't think will ever go away. It just can be sort of temporarily suppressed and then it pops back up. And I don't know that it is unique to America's history, But I think it is very specific to American history in terms of this feeling, this sincere intellectual justification for taking up arms against the government when you strongly disagree with its policies.
