From the Archives: Copperheads
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from September and October five or six years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
First up, this piece from October, 2015:
When we write the history of national conflicts, we tend to assume that “our” side stood united in monolithic opposition to “them”. It’s a simple and enjoyable version of history, but it simply isn’t true. Sympathizers with the “other side”* are a fact of war. Sometimes they engage in fifth column activities.** Sometimes they simply gather with like-minded folk and grumble into their martini glasses. Sometimes, if they live in a place with freedom of speech, they are vocal in their objections and express them through established public channels. There were Nazi sympathizers in Britain and the United States in World War II. There were British loyalists in the American Revolution. And in the American Civil War, Southern sympathizers in the North were known as Copperheads.***
Copperheads opposed the war and advocated the restoration of the Union through a negotiated peace settlement with the South. Many Copperheads were from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where many families had southern roots and agrarian interests resented the growing power of the industrialized northern cities. The movement was also prominent in New York City, where many merchants and workers were dependent on the cotton trade. (Demonstrating that there is more than one path to any given political position.) Others were opposed to the draft, abolition, Lincoln’s abrogation of civil liberties, the Republican party, or all of the above. Some just wanted the bloodshed of the war to end.
The New York Tribune first used the term in July 20, 1861,**** comparing southern sympathizers to the poisonous snake that strikes without giving its victims the courtesy of a warning rattle. The implication was that southern sympathizers would, by definition, engage in treason given half a chance. In practice, they were more inclined to fight the war at the level of local elections and on the floor of state legislatures.
Peace Democrats embraced the name: “copperhead” was also the slang term for a penny, which at the time had an image of Lady Liberty on one side. They saw themselves as defending the Constitution and civil liberties against presidential incursions. I leave you to draw parallels to current political positions and note the resultant ironies for yourselves.
*NOT the same thing as pacifists.
**When such people fight the “other side” for “us”, they are called the resistance. You can see how quickly this gets complicated.
***And before anyone raises their hand to protest: I am not saying that British Tories were the moral equivalent of Nazis. Southern sympathizers are a gray area. Quite frankly, many Northerners who supported the war effort were not pro-abolition and even abolitionists were often racist in ways that shock a modern reader.
****For those of you who have not spent recent months living and breathing the Civil War, that was the day before the the first major battle of the war occurred: the First Battle of Bull Run aka the Battle of Manassas aka the Great Skedaddle (depending on where you hang your hat).
Across the Minefields is out!
[Warning: Blatant self promotion ahead]
Last July I had a writing predicament. I had signed a contract to write my book about Sigrid Schultz, but the archives I needed to access were closed thanks to the pandemic and no one knew when they would re-open.*
In order to fill the gap, I agreed to write a book for HarperKids’ Great Escapes series. Around here, we called it the “little book,” as opposed to the “big book” on Sigrid Schultz. The timing turned out to be perfect. The first archive opened in mid-August, just as I turned in the first draft on the little book.
The “little book”, Across the Minefields, came out earlier this week. It’s the real life story of a woman army driver in Africa in World War II, who later became the first–and as of the last time I looked, the only— woman in the French Foreign Legion. (Could a story be any more in my wheelhouse?) Here’s the official description:
June, 1942–Libya. Free French Officer Susan Travers was one of the few women on the frontlines in Africa during World War Two. After the Germans surrounded the military camp of Bir Hakeim, a shocking order was issued. The French troops were going to break out in the middle of the night–crossing through dangerous minefields and enemy territory–to reach their British allies. And Officer Travers would be leading the charge.
With the lives of thousands of military men at risk, stakes were high. But Officer Travers didn’t face rejection and break gender barriers to back down now. Her country needed her to fight. And win.
If you’re eight-to-twelve years old and like true adventure, or know someone who is, Across the Minefields is available wherever you buy your books.
As for the big book, the second archive will be open next week. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
*In all honesty, I wasn’t completely dead in the water. I had plenty of background reading to do, and I had large stash of relevant books. Thanks to a heads-up from the privileges manager at the University of Chicago’s main library I made a raid just before they closed. Library people rock!
In which I abandon my main story and fall down a rabbit hole
I have spent far too much time over the last week working on a blog post about the Siberian Intervention: a minor American military expedition at the end of the First World War that has been crossing my path for more than a year. It just isn’t working. Even though I regularly reduce complicated stories to their essentials for this blog, I don’t seem to be able to do it this time.*
But even though I couldn’t move the big story along, I found myself fascinated by one minor question: Why were the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War called White Russians?
It turned out to be a delightful little research rabbit hole for a late summer afternoon.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of my regular stops for such things, the color white has long been associated particularly with royalist and legitimist causes, beginning during the French Revolution, when the white flag of the Bourbon family became the symbol of the royalist cause. Having been the symbol of royalists, white became the symbol for many counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, reactionary, or conservative parties. (For example, the Finnish White Guard.) The White Russians were all of the above.
White Russian propaganda poster, depicting the Bolshevik army as a fallen red (!) dragon and the White Russians as a dragon-slaying white knight. Nothing subtle about the imagery there.
Interestingly, the use of red as the color of revolutionary groups, including the Bolsheviks, also has its roots in the French Revolution, in the form of the bonnet rouge or Liberty cap—a complex bit of symbolism that might be worth a blog post of its own.
*Often when I bang my head against the wall of a story, it means that I don’t have a solid grasp of the material. When that happens, I have two choices. Buckle down and do more background work, or walk away from the story. In the case of chapter three on my current book, I have chosen door number one and am now reading my way through a stack of books on the revolutions at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, happy as a clam.** In the case of the Siberian intervention, it makes more sense to walk away.
***Though I am uncertain as to just how happy a clam might be, now that I think about it. More accurately, I am as happy as a historian who has settled into the groove of the work and has several uninterrupted hours to devote to it. Which is pretty dang happy.
For those of you who are interested in learning about the Siberian intervention, I recommend the following:
The episode dealing with it in Elizabeth Lunday’s excellent podcast, The Year That Was: Eggshells Loaded with Dynamite: Allied Intervention in the Russian Revolution
Anthony Brandt. First Shots of the Cold War.