[LS]

A Copperhead in New York had far more rights---indeed, far more chance of LIVING---than did a Union sympathizer in, say, Charleston. Even before the war, Unionists (especially if they mentioned slavery) were beaten, tarred and feathered, and jailed. Pro-confed. material could circulate freely in the North, but pro-Union material was banned by southern mails. While criticism of southern generals was tolerated in southern papers, there was NO criticism of the "cause" allowed, at all.

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

Your sense of history differs than that of mine. Lincoln filled the prisons with people he deemed to be a threat, some of those he deemed less threatening, he had escorted south between the lines of the federal troops.

And BTW, don't tell me how enlightened the union was to descent, I come from a part of Missouri where the unionist were no less than murdering thugs. The federals confiscated all southern sympathizer's property and burned them out, cleaned out all the specie from banks in certain towns and declared a 20 mile deep free fire zone along the Kansas Missouri border from Kansas City south.

Much of history (written by Yankees) taught since, teaches how brutal the Missouri Partisan Rangers were, they had to be to survive the onslaught carried out against them. The raid on Lawrence KS (payback is a bitch) was an attempt to capture the bloody minded Senator Lane, (he escaped by crawling into a corn field in his night clothes) who as a union general had by that time murdered thousands of pro southern Missourians.