e they may even masquerade as patriots of the kind so well
described by Lincoln when he said how often he had noticed that
the men who were loudest in proclaiming their readiness to shed
their last drop of blood were generally the most careful not to
shed the first.

Many of these fustian heroes formed the mushroom secret societies
that played their vile extravaganza right under the shadow of the
real tragedy of war. Worse still, not content with the abracadabra
of their silly oaths, the busybody members made all the mischief
they could during Lincoln's last election. Worst of all, they not
only tried their hands at political assassination in the North but
they lured many a gallant Confederate to his death by promising to
rise in their might for a "Free Northwest" the moment the Southern
troopers should appear. Needless to say, not a single one of the whole
bombastic band of cowards stirred a finger to help the Confederate
troopers who rode to their doom on Morgan's Raid through Indiana and
Ohio. The peace party wore a copper as a badge, and so came to be known
as "Copperheads," much to the disgust of its more inflated members,
who called themselves the Sons of Liberty. The war party, with a
better appreciation of how names and things should be connected,
used their own descriptive "Copperhead" in its appropriate meaning
of a poisonous snake in the grass behind.

The Indians would have preferred neutrality between the two kinds
of inevitably dispossessing whites. But neutrality was impossible
in what was then the Far West. Not ten thousand Indians fought
for both sides put together. On the whole they fought well as
skirmishers, though they rarely withstood shell fire, even when
their cover was good and their casualties small.

The ten times more numerous negroes were naturally a much more
serious factor. The North encouraged the employment of colored labor
corps and even colored soldiers, especially after Emancipation.
But the vast majority of negroes, whether slave or free, either
preferred or put up with their Southern masters, whom they generally
served faithfully enough either in military labor corps or on the
old plantations. As the colored population of the South was three
and a half millions this general fidelity was of great importance
to the forces in the field.

The total population of the United States in 1861 was about thirty-one
and a half millions. Of this total twenty-two and a half belonged to
the