The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known

The North's Union Leagues in the American Civil War

Paul Taylor

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013355
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

The martial enthusiasm that engulfed the North when the American Civil War commenced in April 1861 vanished by the following summer. Repeated military defeats, economic worries, and staggering casualties prompted many civilians to question the war's viability. Frustration exploded into anger when Republican president Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September.

The disgruntled voices grew louder. These anti-Lincoln Democrats, nicknamed "Copperheads, " viewed blacks with disdain and considered many of Lincoln's legal decisions to be unconstitutional. Civilian disenchantment led to significant Republican defeats in the November Congressional elections. As 1862 ended, Northern morale was at rock bot- tom. Across the North, ardent pro-Lincoln men realized their country needed a patriotic stimulus, as well as an organized means of countering what they viewed as their Copperhead adversaries' treasonous pronouncements and subversion. These men formed what became known as Union Leagues: semisecretive societies whose members had to possess unconditional loyalty to the Lincoln administration and unwavering support for all of its efforts to suppress the rebellion. Their mysterious member initiation rites were likened to a solemn religious ceremony.

In "The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known, " Paul Taylor examines the Union League movement. Often portrayed as a mere footnote to the Civil War, the Union League's influence on the Northern home front was far more important and consequential than previously considered. The Union League and its various offshoots spread rapidly across the North, and in this first comprehensive examination of the leagues, Taylor discusses what made them so effective, including their recruitment strategies, their use of ostracism as a way of stifling dissent, and their distribution of political propaganda in quantities unlike anything previously imagined. By the end of 1863, readers learn, it seemed as if every hamlet from Maine to California had formed its own league chapter, collectively overwhelming their Democratic foe in the 1864 presidential election.

Chapter 1

“Quiet Men Are Dangerous”

Civilian Antecedents of the Union Leagues

Man is a social creature, with character traits that result from the herd instinct. Throughout all of recorded history, he has sought companionship and refuge with others of like mind. In times of strife, men of similar convictions gathered for emotional protection and security, as well as for physical defense. In times of peace and tranquility, men joined together based upon the social metaphor of brotherhood and fellowship to pursue similarly held religious convictions, to advance a fraternal cause that will improve the quality of human life, or to gather to enjoy each other’s company in an entertaining environment. Many of these latter gatherings resulted in the formation of “open” organizations, such as the modern-day Rotary or Lions Clubs, where any may join to share in the group’s mission. Other such gatherings gave rise to “closed” associations, where men of comparable wealth or social stature associated only among themselves. In such private groups, admittance is gained only through invitation, for the herd wants agreement, not independent thought or criticism.¹

It is this latter want that gave rise to the gentleman’s club in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. These clubs based their structure and design on similar grand clubs that had permeated London since the late eighteenth century. At its highest level, “society” was defined by white men who belonged to these clubs. Among the earliest and most important was the Union Club of New York City, formed in 1836 as a refuge for “gentlemen of social distinction.” In particular, it brought together the monied elite in a purely social setting, where men of power and wealth could dine with their peers and share their various business affairs, tastes, and intellectual thoughts in a uniquely male domain that existed somewhere between the gentleman’s public and private life. When the Union Club moved into a new building in 1855, it marked the first time that a building was utilized solely for club purposes, which stood as a testament to the increasing social importance of class-based segregated spaces. By the late 1850s, three smaller though no less important social clubs had formed in the city. Two were formed for aficionados of yachting and the literary arts respectively; however, in both cases meeting the era’s definition of what constituted a gentleman was paramount for admission. In the twenty-five years prior to the start of the Civil War, similar exclusive clubs were formed throughout the Eastern seaboard’s major cities illustrating that the patrician Union League clubs that formed in early 1863 in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were not an entirely new concept.²

A semipolitical group with the Union League name existed in New York City as early as 1860, though it was completely unrelated to the better-known Union League Club of New York formed in 1863 and which still exists. This earlier League was politically conservative in tone, meaning that its core principles held to a strict interpretation of the Constitution and a fealty to the nation’s laws, which included the right of any citizen to move his property into any territory without distinction. That meant a conviction that slavery was legal and, therefore, should not be tampered with by any governmental body other than the respective states. The League’s doctrine further stated they could not support any candidate whose beliefs were not in harmony with theirs. To that end, numerous papers across the country were reporting in the early months of 1860 how the League’s National Executive Committee had issued a proclamation for a convention to meet in July, when it would determine if the League should offer its support to any specific presidential candidate. Though its stated principles stressed that the League’s motives were “of the purest patriotism,” their doctrines would have pleased any steadfast Southerner. This early New York Union League opposed Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election and soon found itself on the outside looking in, vanishing from the political landscape soon thereafter.³

Such closed associations also existed in the South in the years before the Civil War. Most notable were the Knights of the Golden Circle, a militant, secret, oath-bound society created by George W. L. Bickley at Cincinnati in 1854 as a means of furthering American expansion southward. This was the era of “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined in 1845 by Democratic Review editor John O’ Sullivan in the belief that American expansionism was providential and preordained. For the Knights, their targeted “golden circle” encompassed the area of Central America, the Caribbean, and especially Mexico. Any man could join, Southern or Northern, as long as he prescribed to the Southern interpretation of Constitutional principles, which included slavery’s preservation. Through the late 1850s and into 1860, Bickley was a frequent public speaker on the Knights’ behalf while their Southern expansion goals and activities often appeared in Southern newspapers. When they realized that civil war could become a real possibility, Bickley and the Knights abandoned the notion of foreign expansion and aligned the group with Southern secession and antiabolitionism. Bickley described the Knights as “a nucleus around which Southern men could rally.” The KGC, as the group became known, soon grew into the northern Union Leagues’ archenemy, as well as the North’s villain for all manner of anti-Lincoln plots and treasonable actions. Union-leaning men feared for their physical safety to such an extent that Kentucky’s centralized Union Club published its own revelations of the KGC monster.⁴

Such semisecretive voluntary organizations whose goals were primarily political, reform, religious, or simply fraternal had existed throughout history. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, established a club in Philadelphia in 1727 dedicated to the cause of moral improvement. Known as The Junto, Franklin explained in his autobiography that members were to discuss any question pertaining to morals, politics, or natural philosophy. By the mid-nineteenth century, such private groups were extremely popular in the United States. For example, the Sons of Temperance was created in 1842 with the goal of reforming alcoholics and established simple initiation rites. The Know-Nothings, a short-lived and secretive political party from the early to mid-1850s, had taken their moniker from one of their initiation rituals, even though their candidates were officially designated under the American Party. Created from the Whig Party’s disintegration coupled with schisms in the Democratic Party over slavery, their firm nativist beliefs and clandestine rituals attracted thousands of men to their organization.⁵

Perhaps the most famous of such organizations was the Masons or “Freemasons.” The Masons were initially a Catholic-oriented order whose existence could be traced back to the skilled stoneworkers of medieval times. Cloaked in rites and ritual, Masonic meetings were closed to the public with members swearing an oath of secrecy as to what transpired in their meetings. When Arthur Newell revealed to his brother in October 1864 that he had “rode the goat” during his local Loyal League initiation, he was referring to a purported Masonic phrase that described the secret nature of its own initiation rite. Outside of their lodges, Masons utilized secret handshakes and other undisclosed signs of recognition. These clandestine acts were all later adapted by the Union Leagues, especially in the Midwest, where secrecy was often deemed necessary due to violence against pro-Lincoln men. By the start of the Civil War, the Masons had existed in the United States for almost 130 years and were well known at the time as a fraternal and charitable society with spiritual overtones. Its members included such luminaries as Union generals George McClellan and Lew Wallace, Adm. David Farragut, and Democratic Ohio Rep. Clement Vallandigham. On the Southern side, Gen. Lewis Armistead was a notable Confederate Mason.⁶

Beyond such self-evident wartime security, why was such an emphasis on secret ritual with religious and mystical overtones so important to the mid-nineteenth-century young male initiate? Mark Carnes contended that such devices provided passage, i.e., support and emotional guidance as he made his way into full manhood. The secretive fraternal order offered refuge from an increasingly secular domain laden with worldly and monetary burdens via a belief system that granted order and fellowship. Secrecy not only added an element of mystique to the organization while excluding so-called “outsiders,” but also furnished an important emotional element of possession to members. The prospect of advancing within a hierarchical organization by degrees or ranks, such as in the case of the Masons and the post–Civil War Grand Army of the Republic respectively, likewise appealed to many men and were quite common within the country’s fraternal organizations during the second half of the nineteenth century, or what W. S. Harwood labeled the “Golden Age of fraternity.” Within both groups, a member’s advancement was accompanied by a distinctive ceremony, which included secret grips and passwords, as well as an allegorical performance that showcased the group’s underlying reason for being. These ranks offered social distinction while their quasi-military overtones offered a measure of camaraderie that young, middle-class men found appealing.⁷

Yet in many instances, it appeared that these fraternal groups’ entire emphasis was on ritual with any additional core activities undertaken almost by chance. These orders were almost entirely middle class and masculine in nature with their stylized rituals closely linked to issues of gender and paternalism. Though the later Union Leagues would also have female chapters, membership was always strictly divided along gender lines.⁸

Similar organizations and clubs consisting of loyal Union men were formed in Kentucky and Missouri as much as a year and a half prior to the war’s commencement in April 1861. The agitation and potential for bloodshed was particularly acute in both border states, for they were founded by pro-slavery men and were both culturally and geographically tied to the South. Not only were these men adept at getting sympathetic politicos into office, but into vote-counting positions as well. Just for good measure, the old time-honored tradition of importing voters from neighboring states was utilized as well as outright physical intimidation. Defiant Unionists were to be simply driven away. As the storm clouds of war began to darken the horizon, those who considered themselves loyal Union men began to gather together for both influence and protection.⁹

Since each state’s loyalty to the North or South was still up in the air, avid supporters of both sides began to gather to help sway public opinion. January 2, 1860, saw a “Union” meeting in Maysville, Kentucky, and then a huge public gathering on February 22 in Frankfort, where resolutions were passed declaring the people were for both the Union and the Constitution, and that both must be preserved. In addition to the public gatherings designed for any who wanted to attend, private antisecession Union clubs were being formed in early 1860 once many sensed that civil war was a possibility. The Democratic-leaning Covington Journal reported in early July that such an organization had recently formed and was making a special appeal to the young men of that city. “They have no interest in the bitter personal quarrels of selfish old politicians … they detest sectionalism.… The Union Party is now the only national party in the country,” it asserted. In Louisville, the sixth ward formed a Union Club on July 19 while the city’s seventh and eighth wards did likewise one week later. Following Lincoln’s election in early November 1860, Union meetings were a regular event throughout the state. Though these clubs were antisecession and dedicated to the Union’s preservation, they avoided any endorsement of what many called the “Black Republican” party.¹⁰

The Union clubs that formed in Kentucky and Missouri through 1860 and 1861 were secretive in nature and designed so that their members might become known to each other in case any type of violence broke out against them—characteristics later adopted by the Midwestern Union Leagues in 1862–64. Meetings were usually held at night behind guarded doors. Members laid out plans as to how they were to communicate with each other via secret passwords, phrases, and handshakes. Most club founders were older family men who knew they were not fit for the regular army but stood ready to serve within a local home guard unit. All agreed that none but well-known and trustworthy Union men would be admitted. Unlike New England or the Deep South, where sentiments generally went only one way, “here on the border it was quite different,” wrote Missourian Robert Matthews. “You did not know who was friend or who was foe.” Like the Midwestern Union Leagues that followed them, these men were often not politicians, the wealthy, or professionals who always had a finger raised in the political wind, but men who made up the skilled trades, shopkeepers, small manufacturers, bookkeepers, and the like. Within weeks, the number of such men in the Louisville, Kentucky, area numbered close to six thousand.¹¹

Following the lead of Kentucky, Union clubs sprang up throughout the land in 1860 and 1861. Some of these were aligned with the Democratic Party and certainly did not align themselves with so-called “Black Republicans” who held an abolitionist agenda. Yet they decried any secession talk. “It is difficult to tell whether there is greater danger to the Union in this crisis in the South or in the North,” lamented an Ohio paper in August 1860. The sheet saw disunionists in the South and ardent abolitionists in the North, the latter who were “fully organized with secret clubs.” It urged Union clubs to form throughout that state to help ensure that Democrats would carry the upcoming presidential election, which was the only way to save the Union. Such clubs’ firm loyalty was to the Union, such as the Central Union Club of Dayton (Ohio), which was formed in September 1860 and was dedicated to the “defence [sic] and propagation of the principles of the Constitutional Union Party, as proclaimed in its national and patriotic platform, ‘the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of its Laws.’” That simply meant that slavery was legal and should not be eliminated by force of arms. By January 1862, over sixty Union clubs had formed in Ohio to combat the growing peace-at-any-cost movement and were organized to the extent that they were able to conduct a statewide meeting in Cincinnati. All but six of these clubs were in Ohio’s lower half, where Southern sympathies remained the strongest. The conference also noted in its proceedings that their expansion efforts had also resulted in clubs being formed in Wisconsin, Indiana, and one in loyal western Virginia.¹²

Just to the west of Kentucky lay the slave state of Missouri. It had entered the union in 1821 as the nation’s twenty-fourth state due to what was known as the Missouri Compromise. That congressional act was the agreement between antislavery and pro-slavery factions as to how that institution would be regulated in the western territories and any future states that might arise. In return for admitting Missouri as a slave state, the act specified that slavery would be outlawed in any area north of the parallel 36 degrees 30 minutes north except within the boundaries of the then proposed state of Missouri. The Missouri Compromise kept the peace for over thirty years until 1854, when it was essentially nullified by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. That act allowed white male settlers in those territories, as well as any future territories, to vote under the concept of “popular sovereignty” as to whether slavery would be allowed in Nebraska or Kansas. The result was that pro- and anti-slavery men began pouring into those two territories in the mid-1850s in order to influence the future vote. Many Northern antislavery advocates and other Free-Soilers were aghast at the new act, which led in part to the birth of the Republican Party in 1854.¹³

It had become apparent that by the time of Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, Missouri’s current governor, Claiborne Jackson, as well as most of the state’s leading politicians, were openly sympathetic to the Southern cause. As in Kentucky, political clubs had formed in Missouri that were dedicated to the Union, such as the St. Louis Union Guard Club. In its resolutions, members declared their fealty to the Union. As a conservative group, however, they lamented Lincoln’s election. Though the club stated their discouragement due to what they defined as the triumph of sectionalism, Lincoln’s forthcoming presidency was not adequate reason to dissolve the Union as it existed.¹⁴

It was possible that union or dis...