e at a low ebb, especially in the Northern cities.
It was to counteract these depressing influences that the Union League
movement was begun among those who were associated in the work of the
United States Sanitary Commission. Observing the threatening state of
public opinion, members of this organization proposed that "loyalty be
organized, consolidated and made effective."

* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W.
Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America"), pp. 156-7,
234-5

The first organization was made by eleven men in Cleveland, Ohio, in
November 1862. The Philadelphia Union League was organized a month
later, and in January 1863, the New York Union League followed. The
members were pledged to uncompromising and unconditional loyalty to the
Union, to complete subordination of political views to this loyalty, and
to the repudiation of any belief in state rights. The other large cities
followed the example of Philadelphia and New York, and soon Leagues,
connected in a loose federation, were formed all through the North. They
were social as well as political in their character and assumed as their
task the stimulation and direction of loyal Union opinion.

As the Union armies proceeded to occupy the South, the Union League sent
its agents among the disaffected Southern people. Its agents cared for
Negro refugees in the contraband camps and in the North. In such work
the League cooperated with the various Freedmen's Aid Societies, the
Department of Negro Affairs, and later with the Freedmen's Bureau. Part
of the work of the League was to distribute campaign literature, and
many of the radical pamphlets on reconstruction and the Negro problem
bore the Union League imprint. The New York League sent out about
seventy thousand copies of various publications, while the Philadelphia
League far surpassed this record, circulating within eight years four
million five hundred thousand copies of 144 different pamphlets. The
literature consisted largely of accounts of "Southern outrages" taken
from the reports of Bureau agents and similar sources.

With the close of the Civil War the League did not cease its active
interest in things political. It was one of the first organizations to
declare for Negro suffrage and the disfranchisement of Confederates; it
held steadily to this declaration during the four years following the
war; and it continued as a sort of bureau in the radical Republican
pa