ONE OF THE SOCIETY'S ART TREASURES
Scene in Canal Market — 1860
Oil painting by Henry Mosler
In Society collection
BULLETIN
of the
Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio
CINCINNATI
October, 1961
CINCINNATI
Vol. 19 No. 4
The Genesis of a Copperhead
by CARL M. BECKER
As the Civil War took its painful course, it generated in the
Old Northwest a threat to the integrity of American nationality.
There, elements of the Democratic party, calling themselves
Peace Democrats but bearing the popular epithet "Copperhead," insisted that the use of coercion to preserve the Union
was not only unconstitutional but futile, arguing that only a
"union of hearts and hands" could endure. In their passion for
peace — their idee fixe — they opposed Lincoln's war policies,
encouraged young men to desert and evade draft calls, and urged
the public not to subscribe to government bond issues; some even
proposed, as a means to end the war, the formation of a Northwestern Confederacy which might ally with the South and leave
New England adrift. The Copperheads presented a conservative
face in their social and economic complex, too. They were often
Irish-Americans and German-Americans who crowded the lower
rungs of the social and economic ladder. Largely dependent
laborers in industry, they feared the possible competition of free
Negro labor. Transplanted Southerners, subsisting on small
farms in lower Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, were often Copperheads
236
The Bulletin
who blanched at the thought of emancipation. These hyphenate
and native Americans — the former trapped by an iron law of
wages and the latter weltering in debt on marginal farms —
could both inveigh against an emerging corporate capitalism
dominated by Republicans whose New England heritage was all
too evident to inferiors.
As must be the fate of political and social phenomena that
come under the Argus eye of the scholarly community, the
Copperhead persuasion has been studied mainly in the context
of its great adherents — Clement L. Vallandigham, Daniel
Voorhees and Samuel Medary, among others — and the ethnic
and social groups that embraced it.L Since these adherents, who
were usually older generation Americans, gave Copperheadism
its inner support and direction, younger, lesser-known Copperhead
personalities have received little attention from scholars. And
though general classifications of Copperheads by their ethnic
and social status are significant in revealing the anatomy of a
political and social organism, they permit but limited insight into
the individual personality as it moved to the Copperhead rationale. An inquiry into the formation of a psyche in its progression
to Copperheadism may, on the other hand, reveal some of the
personal attributes and peculiarities which impelled men to the
faith and which endowed that faith with its distinctive characteristics.
One lad who brought the energy and passion of youth to the
Copperhead cause was Thomas Owen Lowe. Molded by unusual
forces in his formative years, young Lowe was possessed of a
compulsive contentiousness that determined his political course;
an amalgam of family pride and circumstance, college days, a
strange sojourn in Southern climes, and the fortunes of war
swept him inexorably into Copperhead ranks. As his life moved
to this political deviation, it touched on the lives of the great and
near-great in the Republic in unusual and indeed bizarre ways.
Born in the village of Batavia, Clermont County, Ohio, in
1838, Tom Lowe was nurtured in an atmosphere of legalism and
litigation and was early impelled to a vaulting ambition. His
father, John William Lowe, issue of Scotch-Huguenot stock in
1809 at New Brunswick, New Jersey, came to Ohio in 1833 after
^ee, for example, Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War (New York, 1942)
and Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960).
The Genesis of a Copperhead
237
having helped support for a number of years two sisters and a
brother left indigent by their father's death in 1820.2 Settling
in Batavia, he studied law with Thomas Hamer, the eminent
attorney and Congressman who secured Sam Grant's appointment to West Point. In 1837, Lowe married Manorah Fishback,
a daughter of Owen T. Fishback, one of the outstanding lawyers
and politicians of Clermont County in the 1820's, 1830's and
1840's.3 Despite this affinity and occupational tie, it appears that
Lowe practiced his profession alone — and unprofitably — in
Batavia and Bethel in the 1840's. His son's life was pleasant
enough, though, in households abounding with lawyers whose
idiom was of court and legislative hall. Constantly in front of the
boy were the words of men of law; from such a surrounding could
emerge a man consumed with a legalistic respect for the law and
established institutions.
During his youth in the East, John Lowe had served with a
New York City cadet company, and when the Mexican War began
his martial memories were revived. Shortly after the beginning of
that war, he received a letter from an old friend, U. S. Grant,
then a lieutenant at Matamoras, saying that he would like to have
Lowe in Mexico as a commander of a volunteer company.4 Grant
followed with letters vividly describing the Mexican country and
battles there.5 His martial spirit stirred by this siren call, Lowe,
though opposed to the Polk administration, joined the Second
Ohio Infantry Regiment with a captain's commission and in
September of 1847 left for Mexico. Had he expected a tour of
exhilarating duty, great must have been Captain Lowe's disappointment. He found that the Mexican War, like most wars,
took from its soldiery many more hours of routine duty than it
gave them in moments of exulting combat. On the long river and
gulf voyage to Mexico, he spent much of his time attending
enlisted men ill with dysentery and malarial attacks, though sick
himself. As he put it, "the blue above and the blue below, and
2
Biographical notes on John W. Lowe by Thomas Lowe, Lowe Manuscripts
Collection, in Dayton, Ohio, Public Library; all Lowe documents cited herein
are in
this collection. Xenia Torchlight, September 18, 1861.
3
J. L. Rockey, History of Clermont County, Ohio (Philadelphia, 1880), 137.
4
Grant to John Lowe, June 26, 1846. The original letter is not in the Lowe
MSS. But the copy in that collection, according to the pencilled notes of Thomas
Lowe, was made from the original in the possession of his son, William. The
copy is identical with the copy published by Hamlin Garland in "Grant in the
Mexican
War," McClure's Magazine, No. 4, 8 (February, 1897), 366-380.
5
Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (Boston, 1950), 129, 134-135.
238
The Bulletin
the sicker I get the further we go."6 In Mexico, despite miles of
marching, seldom did Captain Lowe face the enemy, and then
only from afar. Often on court-martial duty, he faced instead
cowed American officers and men charged with rather trivial
offenses. Not surprisingly, he bitterly regretted his decision to
leave the banks of the Ohio for the sunny shores of Mexico.
Confiding to his diary homesickness for his wife and children, he
lamented that "their father has acted unwisely and now must
suffer the consequences. Accursed be the hour he left home."
His return to the family bosom within a year perhaps softened
the pain of frustrated valor.
On his return to Batavia, Lowe again opened his law office.
He also dabbled in politics, becoming mayor of the village in 1853,
but still his practice did not flourish. In the meantime, his son's
curiosity about the issues that moved men to anger and violence
must have been quickening. Tom had seen his father leave home
to fight for a cause that men in Batavia could at best call "manifest destiny." The very nature of his father's and grandfather's
profession brought home the debate over the extension of slavery
into newly-acquired territories. And an alert boy in Clermont
County might hear of, or even see, runaway slaves on their way
to freedom in Canada via the underground railroad. In a natural
deference to his father's view, one which opposed slavery on the
ground that it was both a social and political evil threatening
the political integrity of the nation, the boy was forming an
antipathy toward slavery, too. But the paternal influence did
not carry the spirit of a Garrison, and how long a boy could cling
to his father's belief in the face of other forces had yet to be
determined.
A formalized shaping of the young mind began in 1851 when
the elder Lowe, looking to the intellectual development of his son,
enrolled him in Farmers' College near Cincinnati. Tom's uncles,
George and William Fishback, sons of Owen Fishback, were then
in attendance at Farmers'; and their accounts of activities there
and the avuncular protection they could afford Tom in the halls
of the college probably inclined Lowe to his academic selection
for the boy.
Farmers' College was an outgrowth of Pleasant Hill Academy,
an academy founded in 1833 by Freeman Cary two years after his
"Diary of John Lowe, October 4, 1847.
FARMERS' COLLEGE, COLLEGE HILL (now Cincinnati)
From annual report of college, 1847
The Genesis of a Copperhead
239
240
The Bulletin
graduation from Miami University and popularly known as
Cary's Academy.7 Chartered in 1846, the college in the early
1850's, with Cary as president, was enjoying its fairest days.
It was maintaining a degree of financial stability. The faculty
was of undoubted ability, its patriarch and guiding spirit being
Dr. Robert H. Bishop, first president of Miami University. Cary
was embarking on a new farm program that promised to realize
the pretensions of the agrarian appellation, which previously had
signified things hoped for rather than attained.8 Enrollment was
on the rise, with over three hundred boys in attendance in 1852
and 1854. And most important of all, the college was attracting
some outstanding students to its halls. In attendance from 1848
to 1851 were Murat Halstead and Benjamin Harrison, Halstead
graduating in 1851 and Harrison removing himself to Miami in
the same year to complete his college work — and to woo the
daughter of Professor John Scott, former faculty member at
Farmers'. William Fishback, a partner-in-law with Harrison
during the Civil War, adorned the class of 1853. His brother,
George, was also in attendance then; his glory came as editor of
the St. Louis Democrat. Jonathan and Valentine Winters,
merchant-princes in Dayton in the 1860's and 1870's, were at
the college in 1850.
The young scholar began his studies in the fall of 1851. In the
next three years, his life was one of lucubrations over Livy,
Euclidian planes and Founding Fathers; juror scribendi for "old
Dr." Bishop; shrill forensics over moral and political issues; and,
of course, schoolboy pranks. His academic record was evidently
quite good; at least in June of 1853, President Cary praised him
as a scholar who had achieved the "maximum standing" in his
classes.9 Not one to hide his light, Tom had anticipated Cary,
having assured his father a month earlier that he was second to
7
Freeman Cary, Early Annals — Autobiography, [1885?], MS. in Library
of Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio; Alexander B. Huston, Historical
Sketch
of Farmers' College (Cincinnati, 1902), 19.
8
In 1854, the college announced the opening of the Department for Instruction in Scientific and Practical Agriculture — "THE FIRST COMPLETE
INSTITUTION OF THE KIND ORGANIZED ON THE CONTINENT
OF AMERICA," Annual and Triennial Catalogue of Farmers' College, 185^-1855
(Cincinnati, 1854), 22. Despite sanguine hopes of establishing an institution
of agricultural education, the college evidently failed to develop an adequate
curriculum to achieve its goal, for by 1858, as one observer put it, the college
had "subsided into a respectable Academy for instruction in the common
branches
of learning." Ohio Cultivator, No. 2, 14 (January 15, 1858), 25.
9
Freeman Cary to John Lowe, June 23, 1853.
The Genesis of a Copperhead
241
none in all of his classes.10 In this youthful personality, a streak
of confidence, self-assurance, egoism — call it what one will —
appears in juxtaposition with a Calvinistic sense of unworthiness.
Despite his impressive academic success, Tom left the college in
1854 without a diploma. His decision was prompted by his
father's financial stringencies.
As a shaping force, Farmers' College had an indirect impress
on young Lowe, but one which facilitated his entry into the
political arena and one which characterized his adult political
behavior. Like many college students of the period, the students
at Farmers' energetically supported their literary societies in
giving innumerable hours to society elections, debates and
speeches. To his father, Tom sent a steady stream of reports on
the activities agitating him and his fellow scholars in the Burritt
Hall Literary Society. His father read letters about a hotlycontested election in which the son took a leading part.11 The
patriarch commiserated with his son on a pressing dilemma:
should the boy speak on "Great Men" or "The Millennium,
Is It Near?" during the Exhibition at Christmas?12 "Great Men"
was finally chosen. He read, perhaps with some consternation,
that his son was discussing with his comrades the merits of
Universalism and Swedenborgianism.13 The lawyer in Batavia
read missives of his son's assumption of the negative in a debate
on whether more territory should be acquired by the nation and
the justice of the Mexican War, a debate followed by Tom's
threatened use of force to gain an apology from a heckler.14
Lending social approval to and ingeminating the household
legalism of Batavia, these voluble exercises further developed in
Tom an argumentative and clamorous approach to all human
problems; and these attributes were the stuff on which a party of
political and economic doctrinairism could feed.
Though an age of causes was sending gusts of reform swirling
around American colleges, Farmers' College did not imbue its
students with any reforming zeal. Given his paternal injunctions
on slavery, Tom Lowe could have passionately embraced aboli10
Thomas Lowe to John Lowe, May 29, 1853; hereafter all letters from the
son to his father will be cited as "T. L. to J. L."
n
T. L. to J. L., October 2, 1853.
12
T. L. to J. L., October 9, 1853.
13
T. L. to J. L., October 16, 1853.
14
T. L. to J. L., October 30, 1853; November 20, 1853.
242
The Bulletin
tionism had two men he admired, Dr. Bishop, a man of known
anti-slavery views, and Professor George Ormsby, an intense
abolitionist, inculcated the student body with their personal
beliefs on the "peculiar institution."15 But if they sought to
inculcate, they failed.
After leaving Farmers', Tom was employed briefly as a clerk
with the banking house of Ellis & Sturges in Cincinnati. From
there he went to Dayton to join his father, who had shaken the
dust of Batavia off his feet in a determination to offer his talents
to a wider world. His shingle hung but momentarily in Dayton;
in 1855 he moved his practice again, this time to Xenia in Greene
County, where he remained until the Civil War began. Even
before his father moved to Xenia, Tom had abruptly departed for
Nashville, Tennessee, in mid-1855 to take a position as a clerk
with the W. B. Shepherd banking firm. Why he sought Southern
climes is not known. Certainly his decision to leave Dayton and
his departure were hasty; at the news of his journey, his mother
expressed surprise and complained that his father had not even
known of his decision.16 Tom himself admitted to his father that
he had indeed left his friends and home unceremoniously.17
Whatever the reasons for a Tennessee excursion, it could not
help but leave an impress on a callow, impulsive youth removed
from the family cocoon. Nashville, the largest city south of the
Ohio River with the exception of New Orleans, was passing
through a decade of bustling economic and social growth as it
engaged in the turbulent debate over popular sovereignty, the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the many other wedges of separation.
"It was," as a contemporary English novelist was then writing
of the French Revolution, "the best of times, it was the worst
of times." New political and new social stimuli pervaded the city,
and they were certain to evoke new responses in the boy; they
might not bring forth a better boy or man — but they had perforce to produce a changed being.
Tom's world quickly began to enlarge after his departure from
Ohio. On his trip down the Ohio on the packet, Baltimore, he
encountered an "old boy" from North Carolina who owned about
15
Bishop's opinions on slavery led to his ousting as president of Miami as
a sacrifice to pro-slavery elements there. Alfred Thomas, ed., Correspondence
of Thomas E. Thomas (Dayton [?], 1909), 45-46. In one instance, young Lowe
described
Ormsby as a "red-hot" abolitionist. T. L. to J. L., October 9, 1853.
16
Norah Lowe to Thomas Lowe, July 17, 1855.
17
T. L. to J. L., July 16, 1855.
The Genesis of a Copperhead
243
one hundred and sixty slaves, fifteen of whom were with him.
Tom observed that they were happy, hearty and contented, and
found that his discussion with their owner had expanded his
ideas on slavery.18 This event marked the beginning of a struggle
between old beliefs on slavery and new attitudes engendered by
daily contact with the Negro and his master. The transition to
new concepts was facilitated for Tom by the initial deference with
which he was received in Nashville and at Shepherd's. He speedily
found the slavery arguments of his new friends to be of some
worth. To his father he was soon revealing his abhorrence of
abolitionist fanaticism and acceptance of the Southern aphorism,
"he who would steal a nigger will as readily steal a horse."19
His race, boasted Tom, was superior in every respect to the
African, and woe now to the black boy who did not move from his
path on the pavement.
Incensed by Tom's pronouncements, the father rebuked the
son for his apparent defection from paternal ideals. And Tom
recanted, assuring his father of allegiance to old patterns: "You
know that all my life, I have been taught to regard Slavery as an
unmitigated curse, and slaveholders as but little better than
criminals of the deepest die."20 His father's severity in describing
him as a Southerner was also unjustified: "I am not yet," Tom
wrote, "and I hope I never shall be an apologist for slavery."
Convinced of his son's sincerity but alarmed that his views, if
given public currency, would give rise to reprisals in Nashville
against the boy, the senior Lowe urged him to repress his antislavery sentiments. Now Tom thrust at his father. His principles
were so immutable on the subject of slavery, so he reminded the
father, that he found it difficult to remain quiet when among
fire-eating young Southerners who slurred Northern principles
and Northerners who refused to uphold those principles. Against
such whelps his position was clear: "I am exceedingly fearless
upon this point, & reckless of consequences. You certainly did
not mean for me to repudiate my principles.... I will not disavow
them because they are not indigenous in this latitude. It would
be glorious to fall a myrter \sic] in the cause of Truth."21 Brave
indeed were these words from a seventeen-year-old boy torn by
18
T.
19
T.
20
T.
21
L. to
L. to
L. to
T. L. to
J.
J.
J.
J.
L., July 16, 1855.
L., September 23, 1855.
L., October 7, 1855.
L., January 27, 1856.
244
The Bulletin
conflict between loyalty to his father's ideals and adjustment to
new standards. Assurances of loyalty, notwithstanding, Tom was
subject to an environment that had to alter his gaze on the
sable arm.
Another conflict between old and new came in Tom's admiration of the patrician class he discerned in Tennessee and his
distaste for the indolence and dissipation that he saw as a hallmark of that order; for an acceptance of the Tennessee aristocracy
and its value structure signified an abandonment of an ingrained
puritanic heritage of work and frugality. Tom increasingly sensed
this conflict — this juxtaposition of old with new — when,
because of growing friction with his employer, he left Nashville
to take up the duties of a bank clerk with the Bank of Middle
Tennessee in Lebanon. The lessons of Nashville had inculcation
in this community. The home of Cumberland University and its
law school, Lebanon was a small town with a population of about
2500, of whom about 1000 were slaves.22 There Tom observed
closely the values of a stratified class society and met young law
students from the lower South who vigorously defended those
values. Young and interested in the law as he was, Tom naturally
gravitated to the law students and came to accept much of their
social philosophy. During part of his year's residence in Lebanon,
he roomed with a senior law student, Will McQuiston, son of a
wealthy Mississippi planter. McQuiston and his fellow students
invited Tom to their parties and academic ceremonies, their
cordiality convincing him that these "chivalrous gentlemen" had
accepted him in complete brotherhood.23 He did feel disdain for
the gentlemen during the heat of summer; their only activities
then, so he lamented, consisted of playing backgammon and
cards all day, attending the ladies all night, and drinking whiskey
all the time.
Probably the most stimulating aspect of Tom's Tennessee
residence was his observation of the 1856 political campaign in
middle Tennessee. This experience whetted his political appetite
and accentuated his contentious spirit. When Tom moved to
the Bank of Middle Tennessee, he came under the political
tutelage of one of Tennessee's leading public figures, William B.
22
T7ie Statistics of the Population of the United States, Ninth Census (Washington, 1872). In 1860 the population of Lebanon was 1523 whites and 1075
Negroes.
23
T. L. to J. L., June 22, 1856.
The Genesis of a Copperhead
245
Campbell, one of the proprietors of the bank. Former attorneygeneral and Whig governor of Tennessee, representative to
Congress, and Mexican War veteran, Campbell deigned to give
his young clerk the benefit of his political experience.24 A supporter
of compromise between North and South but wedded to the
maintenance of slavery, he urged on Tom the validity of the
principles of the American party, in an effort, as Tom believed,
to secure his vote for the vice-presidential nomination on the
American ticket.
Tom evidently so ingratiated himself with Campbell that the
latter assumed a paternal air over him, and Tom happily acquiesed
in his protection. On one occasion, Campbell covertly revealed
to his young confidant the contents of a letter from John Bell,
the long-time Whig who would become the presidential nominee
of the Constitutional Union party in 1860, in which Bell implied
that if the Republicans nominated John McLean of Ohio for the
presidency in 1856, he would swing his support to McLean.
According to Tom, Bell wrote, "I fear they [the Republicans] will
not be wise & patriotic enough to nominate him but if they do,
I regard his election as certain."25 Such attention on Tom was
not wasted. He believed Campbell to be devoted to union-saving
principles and compromise that could prevent a recourse to arms
or secession without sacrificing essential interests of either North
or South. With this kind of influence on him, it is not surprising
that Tom gave his support to the American party in the campaign
of 1856. He attended numerous party functions and heard such
orators as Colonel J. G. Pickett and General William F. Haskells,
for whom he shouted until hoarse, though he knew they were both
reputed to be drunkards.26 The din of politics, he reported to his
father, was fascinating. Campbell's largess had social benefits,
too; on May-day 1856 Tom was invited to the Hermitage by
Miss Rachel Donelson, daughter of Andrew Jackson Donelson,
the American party nominee for vice president.27
His social and political comity with a Southern elite and the
class structure he found in Lebanon soon generated in Tom an
attitude of contempt for those men he regarded as his social
inferiors; and his words clearly disclosed the contrasts between
^Dictionary
of American Biography (New York, 1929), III, 466.
25
T. L. to J. L., June 8, 1856.
26
T. L. to J. L., August 10, 1856; October 5, 1856; October 12, 1856.
27
T. L. to J. L., May 1, 1856.
246
The Bulletin
old and new worlds, between bustle and inertia. The Northerner,
he wrote to his father, was energetic, intelligent and law-abiding,
but the Yankee head was cultivated at the expense of the heart.28
The Northerner was luke-warm in his friendships and enmities;
the Southerner, though gentle, courteous and kind, could love
and hate with a passion. The North had its aristocratic shoemakers and soap-boilers; the South was graced with unassuming
tradesmen who did not seek to thrust themselves up the social
scale. The veneer of the upstart Northern cooper was far inferior
to the Southern lawyer's polish of inherited wealth, and life was
more pleasant where the bootmaker and tailor did not elbow their
way into the race for social honors. Thank God there was no
necessity for Chartist meetings nor room for Alton Lockes in the
South! "I grow prouder, haughtier, everday," Tom proclaimed,
"& it grinds me to think that if I ever wish to obtain political
eminence I must seek the votes of these confounded plebians."
His political phrases ought not be ad captandum vulgusl It was
not from his new social connections that these aristocratic feelings
flowed, Tom believed; rather, he attributed them somehow to the
influence of his father, whose natural aristocratic mien would
have well-fitted him for the practice of law in the South, where
the lawyer could stave off the familiar advances of the low sort
without damaging his practice.29 The boy did lament that the
sordid and indolent side of patrician life lessened his inclination
to live permanently in the South; he failed to recognize that
perhaps these unbecoming attributes of the Southern gentility
that he admired were inherent where social and economic affluence
rested upon the labor of inferiors.
For nearly two years, this impressionable youth beheld
Southern ideals, and this new vision wrought fundamental changes
in him as it replaced old concepts with new ones. For Tom,
despite his protestations of adherence to the paternal view on
slavery, the Negro was chattel property, whose continued enslavement was necessary to the political and social stability of
the South. For him, the stratified class structure of the South —
dominated by the patrician order — was an ideal compared with
which the egalitarian spirit of Yankeeland was repugnant. For
him, the political campaign of 1856 stimulated contentiousness
28
T.
29
L. to J. L., August 24, 1856.
T. L. to J. L., September 7, 1856.
247
The Genesis of a Copperhead
and induced a love of politics that had eventually to seek their
level in an expression of new attitudes. Legalistic respect for
property rights and visions of a social and economic order fixed
in determent in its structure were proper credentials for admission
to the Copperhead order, and Tom's dossier, as a result of the
Tennessee experience, enabled the lad to subscribe in good conscience to the articles of faith.
The Southern sojourn ended in July of 1857 when Tom
returned to Dayton, again taking up employment with a bank,
this time as a cashier with the banking firm of Harshman and
Winters'. One of the proprietors of the bank was Jonathan
Harshman, father of Martha Harshman, whose sweet call evidently hastened Tom's return to the north; he married her in
November of 1857. Domesticity and an alien environment may
From Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio
DAYTON, OHIO, 1846
Montgomery County Court House on left
have bridled his urge to broach his new beliefs publicly, for now —
and for the next three years — he failed to "communicate" with
local newspapers on social and political problems, as had been
his wont, even as a sixteen-year-old boy.
But the atmosphere of political contention that pervaded
the nation and Dayton in 1860 had to summon the spirit of debate
in the young man, even if it could manifest itself only in introspection. Not an active participant in the presidential campaign
248
The Bulletin
of 1860, Tom did commit to his journal, in an act of self-edification, an essay entitled, "A Political Speech for John Bell and
Edward Everett."30 In the essay, which evidently was never
delivered as a speech, Tom recounted his hostility for the commercial spirit of the North, justified slavery by appeals to the
Bible, rejected the egalitarian doctrines of the Republicans,
subscribed to popular sovereignty, fulminated against politicians
who would sacrifice chattel property of others for demagogic
purposes, and generally inveighed against sin and temporization
wherever they could be found. Tom argued that the only way to
curb dangerous sectional parties and protect the South, which
was now surrounded by a cordon of hostile states, was to elect
Bell, who would command the respect of all sections and partisans
in Congress. Then would wrangling cease and secession and
fanaticism melt away.
The outbreak of the Civil War saw no fervor of activity in
Tom, but the struggle soon presented a catalytic agent that
wakened him from his political hibernation and called forth the
heritage of home, college and Southern residency. A few days
after Fort Sumter received shot and shell, Tom's father began
enrolling volunteers at Xenia. Quickly, John Lowe enlisted two
hundred enthusiastic recruits who were ready to move to Dixie.
First, however, they went to Columbus as Company A and there
were mustered into service as Company D of the 12th Regiment,
Ohio Volunteer Militia, with Lowe elected as colonel of the
regiment itself. The regiment then went to Camp Dennison for
training and there was mustered into federal service for three
years. Not content with a colonelcy, Lowe tried to secure brigadier rank, but the bid failed because, so Tom believed, it was
hardly likely that Lincoln would appoint generals from adjoining counties, Robert C. Schenck of Montgomery County and a
strong supporter of Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860
having recently received a brigadier's commission.31
By July of 1861, the 12th was in western Virginia near Scarey
Creek with Brigadier-General Jacob D. Cox's Kanawha Brigade
of the Department of the Ohio, then under the command of
Major-General George B. McClellan. With great military events
30
Journal of Thomas Lowe.
Thomas Lowe to William Lowe, June 5, 1861; June 14, 1861.
Lowe to Norah Lowe, May 29, 1861.
31
Thomas
The Genesis of a Copperhead
249
impending two hundred miles to the east at a stream known as
Bull Run, what happened at the muddy rivulet of Scarey would
be unknown or seem unimportant to most of the nation. But to
the men there, Scarey assumed a transcendent importance. To
Colonel John Lowe, a clash with Confederate forces would offer
him a chance to achieve some measure of martial renown and
preferment. Yet, ironically, only a few days after a skirmish at
Scarey with Confederate elements on July 1%, John Lowe faced
public imputations against his personal and professional capability.
Unknown accusers, finding compliant news organs throughout
Ohio — the Cincinnati Commercial, the Perrysburg Journal and
Cleveland newspapers among others — willing to air the charges,
alleged that Lowe had committed execrable acts of cowardice at
Scarey. According to the Commercial, which asserted that its
account came from the lips of soldiers recently returned from
Scarey, Colonel Lowe had concealed himself behind a house during
the heat of battle and despite the expostulations of other officers
had refused to withdraw from this shelter.32 Using the testimony
of allegedly reputed but unidentified eyewitnesses, the Perrysburg
Journal, a partisan of the locally-recruited 21st Ohio Volunteer
Regiment, and its commander, Colonel Jesse Norton, charged
that although Colonel Lowe had received a request from Colonel
Norton to come to the aid of his embattled regiment he had
refused to move himself and his troops into supporting action.33
Within a few days after Scarey, the impugnment of Colonel
Lowe's honor had spread the breadth of Ohio's teeming cities and
hamlets, from Cleveland to Cincinnati, from Perrysburg to
Batavia. Against the power of the press, the anguished father,
still near Scarey, entreated his son for help.34 Tom had anticipated his father's plea, having already called on M. D. Potter,
publisher of the Commercial, to publish a retraction of the charges
against the Colonel. Potter declined, maintaining that Colonel
Norton had recently substantiated the charges while in Cincinnati.35 Armed with more than a mere demand, Tom then
submitted to the Commercial copies of the statements of the
32
Cincinnati Commercial, July 30, 1861.
33
Perrysburg Journal, July 22, 1861.
34
John Lowe to Thomas Lowe, August 1,
36
1861; August 11, 1861.
M. D. Potter to Thomas Lowe, August 1, 1861.
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eminent geologist, Colonel Charles Whittlesey of the Engineer's
Corps, and Captain Ira Gibbs from General Cox's staff, both of
whom had witnessed the action at Scarey. Lowe acted honorably
there, declared Whittlesey; Gibbs concurred and added that
wherever he saw Lowe longest, there was the point of hottest
fire.36 Still no retractions came from the Commercial. By this
time, a rival of the Commercial, the Cincinnati Ga?ette, had taken
up Colonel Lowe's cause and was also demanding retractions, but
to no avail. To suppress talk in Dayton, Tom arranged for
Dayton newspapers to publish exonerative accounts by officers
and soldiers who had fought at Scarey. The Dayton Daily Journal
carried in one issue four such statements defending Colonel Lowe;
Tom appended a comment pointing out that they proved the
Commercial to be an organ of libel.
Lowe's superiors saw no substance in the allegations of cowardice. General Cox believed the declarations of Whittlesey and
Gibbs to be sufficient defense for Lowe and urged no further
publicity on his behalf because it would "imply consciousness of
the truth of the charge."37 Though criticizing general officers and
two colonels, who had amused themselves by undertaking a
reconnaissance beyond enemy positions, McClellan did not condemn Lowe in any way in his report on Scarey.38 Yet a fellowXenian, Whitelaw Reid, later asserted that the Colonel had
failed to give support to Norton as requested.39
The father's need for defense, whether for honor or future
preferment, suddenly ended on September 10, 1861, at Carnifax
Ferry, Virginia. There, leading an attack, Colonel John Lowe
fell with a ball in his forehead, the first field officer of Ohio killed
in the Civil War. Now a melancholy poem he had written some
months earlier bore a tragic meaning for his family:
36
Statements of Colonel Charles Whittlesey, August 4, 1861, and Captain
Ira Gibbs, August 4, 1861, in Lowe Manuscripts Collection.
"General
Jacob D. Cox to Colonel John Lowe, August 15, 1861.
38
Report of Major-General George B. McClellan, July 19, 1861, The War
of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, Series I, II, 288. McClellan was so incensed by the performance of his
generals at Scarey that he sent a beseeching invocation to Colonel E. B. Townsend: "In Heaven's name give me some general officers who understand their
profession. I give orders and find some who cannot execute them unless I stand
by them." Brigadier-General Henry Wise, commanding Confederate troops,
reported that three-fourths of the Union troops panicked under fire at Scarey.
39
Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War, 2 vols. (Cin., 1868), II, 149.
The Genesis of a Copperhead
251
My day of life is over,
And here I lay me down
In the hot, red field of battle
In the arms of high renown.
By the shaft of death I'm stricken
In my upward flight to fame,
And I give my life to nothingness
To win a warrior's name.
For the rest of his life, Tom Lowe believed that his father had
boldly and unnecessarily exposed himself to danger in order to
refute the allegations of cowardice. The official report of the
action lends some credence to the son's belief; according to his
commander, Brigadier-General Henry Benham, Colonel Lowe
made his death attack in an exposed situation without orders.40
The sacrifice of John Lowe served no great military purpose
and did not even quiet talk about his alleged conduct at Scarey.
But it did provide Tom with the immediate justification for
publicly venting his beliefs in words and deeds that must have
sent the paternal cadaver whirring. Prior to the Carnifax Ferry
tragedy, for Tom to oppose the war or the Lincoln administration
was to oppose his father. Once relieved of his father's restraining
hand, he openly clasped the dogmas of Copperheadism and
worshipped at the altar of its high priest, Clement Laird Vallandigham, whose liturgy spoke volumes for compromise and peace with
the South. Tom's life as a Copperhead is beyond the scope of
this essay, but in brief, as his formative years presaged, it was one
of bizarre events, acrimonious controversy and bitter frustration.
In his militant exertions on behalf of the Copperhead movement,
no man in Dayton — Vallandigham included — equalled him.
* * * *
Of what substance was Tom Lowe? At least in what respects
was his personality a typical manifestation of the Copperhead
complex? In its political, social and economic conservatism, his
personality bore similarities to the dominant complex of the
Copperhead body; for that persuasion was legalistic and conservative in its political, social and economic outlook. Dedicated
40
Report of Brigadier-General Henry W. Benham, commanding First
Brigade, September 12, 1861, The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, V, 134.
252
The Bulletin
to a strict construction of the Constitution that would limit the
national government in social and economic matters, almost
atavistic in their devotion to states' rights, opposed to emancipation of the Negro slave, and hostile to the emerging finance and
industrial capitalism of the times, the Copperheads offered an
emotional and intellectual sanctuary to Tom Lowe. As a result
of his formative experiences, he had come, on the eve of the Civil
War, to regard the maintenance of slavery as essential to the
social structure of the South, where the democratic leaven of the
industrial North did not yet infect men — white or black — with
a frenzy for equality. With his ingrained legalism, Lowe would
find it simple, during the war, to subscribe to the Copperhead
contention that the Constitution denied to the national legislature the right to confiscate or emancipate the Negro slave.
When he embraced the Copperhead movement, Tom's complex of conservatism — a fait accompli — was typical of that of
his political accessories; but the experiences and accidental forces
that shaped the Lowe psyche were atypical. Other Copperheads
could be as legalistic and conservative as Tom Lowe, but few were
cast from a similar mold; in its genesis, the Lowe emotional and
intellectual context was unique. His very environment had, in
fact, fashioned an emotional make-up lacking empathy for, and
even hostile to, those Copperhead allies who arose from IrishAmerican and German-American enclaves. For, according to the
Lowe understanding, these hyphenate groups — hard working,
frugal and "on the make" — carried no self-sacrificing, ennobling
passion to remain unassuming ciphers who knew their place, as
Tom's Southern tradesmen did, and as their superiors would
have them know it. Grimy, sweaty laboring men might dwell in
the same political realm with Tom Lowe, but their path to Copperheadism was the customary one; Tom Lowe's was a solitary path
unknown to the common sort but one which, nonetheless, led
him to a political kinship with those from whom he shrank in
distaste.
However unusual and inexorable the forces giving rise to the
social and political attitudes of a man, they do not in themselves
exempt him from accountability for the correctness of his views.
Tom himself, sensing that he was a creature of circumstance,
explained away his accountability by an appeal to the deterministic rationale — or rationalization — held by his preceptor,
The Genesis of a Copperhead
253
Vallandigham. "Val," according to Tom, averred to him that a
man could not help his convictions and thus deserved no more
praise or blame for his political beliefs than he did for living.41
Such a tenet could reassure its holder of the wisdom of his convictions and even justify all kinds of political aberration; such a
tenet could convince him that he was of the political elect; and
such a doctrinaire tenet could move a man faced with problems
requiring the application of systematic and deliberate thought
to reason reflexively from a limited matrix and to identify personal
predilection as absolute truth. Doctrinaire and litigious in its
demands, this belief system might, under the onrush of civil war,
inflict pain and frustration on Tom Lowe; but he had chosen to
be an easily molded vessel and, like Erisichthon, listened not to
wise counsels. The "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,"
if they came to Tom Lowe, would be of his own making.
41
Thomas Lowe to John Wallace, August 24, 1861.
NEWSBOY SAGACITY
A newsboy, anxious to dispose of his stock in hand yesterday,
cried lustily, at the corner of Fourth and Vine Streets: " 'Ere's
yer mornin' papers — all about Jeff Davis bein' hung — only
three cents." An individual, who was passing at the time, was
startled at the announcement made by the ragged youth, and
without taking time to consider the amount of unpoetic license
usually taken by the class of merchants he was about to patronize,
he invested three cents and got a copy of the Gazette. But failing
to discover the news of Jeff's execution, he tried to bring the
newsboy to an account for his misrepresentation, when he was
repulsed by the following remark: "If Jeff Davis 'd bin hung I'd
a sold all my papers afore six o'clock this mornin', and yer wouldn't
a got it for three cents nither." The man passed on.
(Cincinnati Daily Gazette
Wednesday, May 22, 1861)