January 21, 2025

After a year and a half of fighting some Northerners began to express increasing concern about the direction the Civil War was taking. In the lower Midwest, Democrats lamented the growing human cost of the war, the expansive powers wielded by the federal government, and President Lincoln’s decision to free the enslaved people of the rebel states. Vilified by soldiers and Republicans as “Copperhead” snakes, many at the time saw the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party as a serious threat to the Union war effort, while the Copperheads themselves declared they sought only to return the Union to its pre-war status quo. In a moment of candid desperation Lincoln referred to them as the “fire in the rear.” Dr. Lund will discuss the role of the Copperheads in the Civil War political landscape; why they inspired such anger in Union soldiers, why their rivals regarded them as such a danger, and how they and the rest of the Democrats nearly defeated Lincoln’s re-election campaign. Though small in number, the Copperheads’ shadow looms large over the political world of the Lincoln administration.

Stefan Lund, PhD is a teacher and editor from Minneapolis. His essay “Inexcusable by Us as Soldiers: Wartime Dissent and the 1863 Keokuk Soldier Mob,” appeared in the Annals of Iowa (2021), and he has edited multiple educational texts with Oxford University Press. Dr. Lund holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia where he studied press censorship during the American Civil War.