| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jennifer L. Weber. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North.New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. $28.00.

General Robert E. Lee had no doubt that the object of Confederate military strategy was to undermine the northern public's willingness to keep on fighting. Jennifer L. Weber quotes him urging Jefferson Davis to "give all the encouragement we can ... to the rising peace party of the North" (p. 99). It is somewhat surprising, then, that in the voluminous and ever-growing literature on the Civil War the nature and extent of antiwar feeling in the North remains relatively understudied and only dimly understood. Weber's splendid, vigorously written book is the first monograph on this subject since it was explored a generation or more ago by Frank L. Klement in several important works, all of which concluded that fears of Copperheads undermining the war effort were much exaggerated by scare-mongering Republicans. Following Klement, most historians have tended to draw a sharp distinction between the tiny numbers of Confederate sympathizers in the North and the vast majority of opposition politicians who remained loyal to the Union even while reviling the Lincoln administration. Joel H. Silbey's A Respectable Minority: The Democractic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (1977) pursues this approach. Weber does not argue that Klement was wrong to downplay the significance of pro-Confederate conspiracies, but she does think that he focused on too narrow an issue. There may not have been a huge fifth column of pro-Confederates, but she argues convincingly that Lincoln was right to fear what he called the "fire in the rear" from antiwar and anti-administration activists.

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