These were the Copperheads, men who called themselves the Sons of Liberty or Knights of the Golden Circle. They wore the Indian head on their lapels. Others were less charitable in their political sentiments, and for them the word “Copperhead” meant the serpent that hid in the grass and struck without warning. The North in this ever-bleeding war was rife with such men for whom nothing was worth all the bloodshed, and yet they were willing to shed more blood to stop it.
Mostly they were Democrats who could not abide the war for the Union and emancipation, close cousins to the Southern branch of their party, and so disaffected that they made common cause with those same rebels. They obstructed the war effort and made a special attempt to stop the Army’s recruiting. Their political agitation was intense as their rage against “King Lincoln” swelled with bile. President Abraham Lincoln could be sure of a kinder reception in Richmond than in some parts of the Midwest. He had had the temerity to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and round up a few hundred such agitators. But he had only skimmed the indiscreet surface of where the Copperheads seethed and plotted. Whatever they called themselves, they were united in their determination to seize power and overthrow the Lincoln administration.
Their leader was the fiery Ohio orator and politician, Klement Vallandingham, who Lincoln had convicted of treason and exiled to the Confederacy in May in an act of executive common sense that had the civil libertarians up in arms. That hardly bothered Lincoln, who saw a danger that these critics did not when he explained that he was willing to bend the Constitution here and there to save the entire document. On his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1862 he had asked “whether all the laws but one were to go unexecuted… and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” There in a nutshell was the common sense of the matter.3
Once cast into the Confederacy, Vallandingham had gone straight to Bragg’s headquarters and then to Richmond. He argued with great effect to Confederate president Jefferson Davis that the Copperheads of the Northwest would rise in revolt when the famous Gen. John Hunt Morgan led his men into their states. Captain Hines had been sent ahead in his June raid to test Vallandingham’s assurances. Specifically, he was to search out Dr. William Bowles, an acknowledged Copperhead leader in southern Indiana who had not hesitated to defy both state and federal authority. Hines found him at French Lick in command of a gang known as “Bowles’s Army”-deserters and escaped Confederate prisoners of war-armed with fine Henry rifles and Colt revolvers. Bowles was described by a historian of the movement as “about fifty-five,… a slight man with a prominent nose, glaring eyes and tufts of white hair which gave him the appearance of an outraged old eagle. Bowles had served as colonel in the Second Indiana Volunteers during the Mexican War. To him was attributed the disgraceful retreat at Buena Vista.” He promised Hines he “could command ten thousand men in twenty-four hours.”4
Captain Hines’s report had been the trigger that set General Morgan in motion. So secret was the mission that Jefferson Davis gave the orders directly to Morgan, pointedly bypassing Bragg. As brilliant a raider as Morgan was, he could not plan beyond the raid. Accounts of the depredations of his brigade flew ahead on the telegraph wires to every town in three states during his three-week raid on Indiana and Ohio. The many homes that displayed the single star flag of the Knights of the Golden Circle were looted just as thoroughly as those of their pro-Union neighbors. Adding insult to outrage, Morgan’s men seemed to key on such homes, laughing that the occupants should “give for the cause you love so well!”5
The Copperheads stayed home, while the loyal men of Indiana and Ohio rushed to join their militia and home guard units reinforced by Union Army cavalry and infantry. Now Morgan was the hunted. They harried him from place to place, closing in tighter and tighter until they trapped him on the banks of the Ohio. On July 26, he was captured along with seven hundred of his men.
Fragments of his command eluded the disaster. The captain of an Ohio River tugboat, tied up at small wharf, was startled out of his sleep by the click of a Colt Dragoon pistol being cocked by his head. Captain Hines apologized for his lack of manners but would appreciate if the good captain could get his boat away to the Kentucky shore. An hour later Hines and twenty-three men stepped back onto a friendlier territory.
KRONSTADT NAVAL BASE, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, 9:20 AM, JULY 15, 1863
Midshipman Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was excited about the possibilities of this new cruise aboard the frigate Aleksandr Nevsky, as the flagship of both the Baltic Squadron and the Russian Imperial Navy swung out of the naval base harbor. The excitement even took his mind away from the symphony he was composing in his head. This nineteen-year-old from Novgorod had just graduated from the Naval Academy eager to serve Czar and empire. The ships of the squadron were slipping out under the cover of an elaborate deception of an extended cruise in the Mediterranean. Maximum stores were taken aboard, and the captains were issued funds and warrants to obtain fresh provisions, coal, and repairs in neutral ports. Six ships would leave Kronstadt in staggered succession. A similar expedition was leaving from the Pacific Fleet’s base at Vladivostock. These were new ships, all steam and propeller driven, the products of the post-Crimean War shipbuilding program, all launched between 1859 and 1861.6
The midshipman’s berth had learned the real destination easily enough; rumor floated through the ship-New York! America! The reason was not hard to guess for any reasonably astute person. War with Britain and France over control of Poland was expected any day now. The two powers had been the guarantors of the kingdom of Poland in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. The Russian Czar had just abolished the kingdom as a response to the Polish rising and incorporated it as a mere province into the empire. Now the powers Britain and France threatened war to rescue Poland. Nikolai stood on deck, wondering why anyone would fight over a pledge to Poland.
If war came, the Russian Navy was determined not be caught in its bases again by the Royal Navy. That had happened in the Crimean War and resulted in the fleet’s shameful impotence in that war. It would not happen again. The Czar wanted the fleet to be at sea when the war came, able to savage British and French commerce around the world. But unless it was going to be a one-way suicide mission, the Russian ships would need a secure and friendly base. There were few ports that British threats would not make untenable.
The choice of a neutral country willing to offer a base and willing to thumb its nose at Britain in the process was obvious-the United States. Russian and American strategic priorities were rapidly converging. The two countries had been on the friendliest terms since Catherine the Great formed her League of Armed Neutrality during the American Revolution to protect neutral trade with the new country from British interdiction. Since then, they had found natural attraction in the similar problems and opportunities of developing vast continents. They also shared a healthy fear of British world hegemony. For the Russians, it had been the sting of their defeat in the Crimean War that had reinforced the danger facing them. For the Americans, it had been the undisguised British desire for a Southern victory and its huge and blatant support of the rebel war effort.