They denounced and opposed every measure
of the government, harangued vehemently against the war and against all
that was done to prosecute it, reviled with scurrilous and passionate
abuse every prominent Republican, filled the air with disheartening
forecasts of defeat, ruin, and woe, and triumphed whenever the miserable
prophecies seemed in the way of fulfillment. General Grant truly
described them as auxiliaries to the Confederate army, and said that the
North would have been much better off with a hundred thousand of these
men in the Southern ranks, and the rest of their kind at home thoroughly
subdued, as the Unionists were at the South, than was the case as the
struggle was actually conducted. In time the administration found itself
forced, though reluctantly, to arrest and imprison many of the
ringleaders in this Northern disaffection. Yet all the while the
Copperheads resolutely maintained their affiliations with the Democratic
party, and though they brought upon it much discredit which it did not
deserve, yet they could not easily be ejected from it. Differences of
opinion shaded into each other so gradually that to establish a line of
division was difficult.
Impinging upon Copperheadism stood the much more numerous body of those
who persistently asserted their patriotism, but with equal persistence
criticised severely all the measures of the government.
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