Copperheads: then and now

The Cheif has referred to certain Donk factions as “Copperheads” in the same vien as the Civil War Copperheads who opposed Lincoln’s determination to win the war between the states. Taken from a couple of on-line sites we find some interesting parallels.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/copperheads.htm
http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/HomeFront/copperheads.html

Although the Democratic party had broken apart in 1860, during the secession crisis Democrats in the North were generally more conciliatory toward the South than were Republicans. They called themselves Peace Democrats; their opponents called them Copperheads because some wore copper pennies as identifying badges.

In 1861, Republicans started calling antiwar Democrats “copperheads”, likening them to the poisonous snake. By 1863, the Peace Democrats had accepted the label, but for them the copper “head” was the likeness of Liberty on the copper penny, and they proudly wore pennies as badges.

The Peace Democrats were opposed to the war and would have accepted a negotiated peace resulting in an independent Confederacy….many of them bitterly opposed the Union’s war against what one of them called “the injured, incensed, downtrodden people of the South.”

The most prominent Copperhead leader was Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, who headed the secret antiwar organization known as the Sons of Liberty. At the Democratic convention of 1864, where the influence of Peace Democrats reached its high point, Vallandigham persuaded the party to adopt a platform branding the war a failure, and some extreme Copperheads plotted armed uprisings. The Copperheads mounted a forceful and sustained protest against the Lincoln administration’s policies and conduct. The most popular of the Copperheads was Democratic Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, who in 1862 introduced a bill in Congress to imprison the President. Instead, Vallandigham and a host of other Democrats, including judges, newspaper editors, politicians, and antiwar activists, were arrested and imprisoned without trial on the orders of Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton, who had decided to take off their gloves in dealing with persons “guilty of any disloyal practice”.

The Democratic presidential candidate, George B. McClellan, repudiated the Vallandigham platform, and victories by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Phillip H. Sheridan assured Lincoln’s reelection, and the plots came to nothing.

With the conclusion of the war in 1865 the Peace Democrats were thoroughly discredited. Most Northerners believed, not without reason, that Peace Democrats had prolonged war by encouraging the South to continue fighting in the hope that the North would abandon the struggle.

It’s striking that the language of the Copperhead Donks of Lincoln’s time is the same as that of the latter-day Copperheads of our day.

“Those who fail to learn the lessons of history, are condemned to relive them. – Santayana

Let he who has eyes, see; and he who has ears, hear.