Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History Read Online Free PDF Page A

raider’s instincts and flair for leadership, qualities that chaffed under Bragg’s limp hand.
    Morgan had left a trail of burned railroad bridges and factories, looted homes and stores, plundered payrolls, and roused state governments in Indiana and Ohio. Morgan’s leadership talents had not extended to the discipline of his men, who went on an uncontrollable rampage as they rode through southeastern Indiana. Capt. Henry Thomas Hines, one of his most intrepid company commanders, was beside himself in anger at this thoughtless display. Lithe and dark-haired, barely 130 pounds, the daring young Hines had more than once been likened to the rising star of the famous Booth family of actors, John Wilkes Booth. Looks aside, Hines had far better control of his emotions than the tempestuous actor. He had to swallow his dismay that Morgan was casting away the very allies he had sought to find among the disloyal elements in these states. He had returned from a June foray in the region and sought out the leaders of this movement and been promised their willing support.
    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 theirrage 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