of personal gain by systematized corruption, cruelty and crime. In all this wicked, cruel war, there has been but these unchangeable objects in view: to glut the avarice of the rich, to satiate the vengeance of the spiteful, minister to the most groveling appetites of the vicious; to make the people the slaves of money, and their armies the tools of tyrants. The people are not bound in justice to pay this debt. Every consistent friend of peace must oppose the payment of this debt.”
In their efforts to discourage volunteering in the Union Army the “Copperheads” resorted to misrepresentation and slander. The following is the language used by Henry Clay Dean:
“The popular mind was wrought up to an artificial frenzy. At a given signal the mercenary ecclesiastical politicians broke loose in their Sabbath day harangues to inflame the passions and prepare the public mind for war. They made their absurd charges against the Southern people. They appealed to the people to fly to arms in defense of their homes—to fight for liberty. The manufacturers closed up their mills and sold their operatives to the recruiting sergeant; merchants refused credit to the poor to drive them into the army; every manner of argument was used, and every kind of bait held out as an inducement to the poor to rush to the army to fight the battles of plunder for the rich.”
“Early in the second year of the war,” says Dean, “it assumed a purely mercenary character, stimulated by the hope of plunder. The public was undermined; licentiousness reigned to an extent without parallel or precedent among us. Thousands of enlisted soldiers, having first entered the army without bounty, became excited over the bounty mania, and engaged in bounty-jumping. They would leave the ranks at every available opportunity, re-enlist several times, take bounties and share the spoils liberally with their delinquent commanders. This mercenary spirit spread throughout every part of the army like a contagion. The soldiers caught the infection until the army became a reckless, mercenary mob of unfortunate conscripts driven to the slaughter. The degradation of society was consummate. Parent might be seen selling their children in the conscript market and walking complacently away with the price of their own blood in their pocket.”
The above are but examples of the falsehoods industriously circulated, both in public speeches and in the newspapers under control of the “Copperheads.” A secret
