dinary "Copperhead" position was so plainly in
contradiction of known facts that it must be pronounced either imbecile
or dishonest. If these men had urged the acceptance of disunion as an
accomplished fact, a case might be made out for them. But they generally
professed the strongest desire to restore the Union, accompanied by
vehement professions of the belief that this could in some fashion be
achieved by "negotiation." The folly of such a supposition was patent.
The Confederacy was in arms for the one specific purpose of separating
itself from the Union, and so far its appeal to arms had been on the
whole successful. That it would give up the single object for which it
was fighting for any other reason than military defeat was, on the face
of it, quite insanely unlikely; and, as might have been expected, the
explicit declarations of Davis and all the other Confederate leaders
were at this time uniformly to the effect that peace could be had by the
recognition of Southern independence and in no other fashion. The
"Copperheads," however, seem to have suffered from that amazing illusion
which we have learnt in recent times to associate with the Russian
Bolsheviks and their admirers in other countries--the illusion that if
one side leaves off fighting the other side will immediately do the
same, though all the objects for which it ever wanted to fight are
unachieved. They persisted in maintaining that in some mysterious
fashion the President's "ambition" was standing between the country and
a peace based on reunion. The same folly was put forward by Greeley,
perhaps the most consistently wrong-headed of American public men: in
him it was the more absurd since on the one issue, other than that of
union or separation, which offered any possible material for a
compromise, that of Slavery, he was professedly against all compromise,
and blamed the President for attempting any.

Little as can be said for the "Copperhead" temper, its spread in the
Northern States during the second year of the war was a serious menace
to the Union cause. It showed itself in the Congressional elections,
when the Government's majority was saved only by the loyalty of the
Border Slave States, whose support Lincoln had been at pains to
conciliate in the face of so much difficulty and misunderstanding. It
showed itself in the increased activity of pacifist agitators, of whom
the notorious Vallandingham may be taken as a type.

Lincoln met the dange