Posted on 07/13/2013 5:43:00 AM PDT by Sherman Logan
Good flick though. Cameron Diaz.....yumm
2.2M men served in the Union armies. Most of them volunteers. Out of a population of 25M.
Never heard of the butternuts. Where did this come from?
Many soldiers of the Confederacy wore uniforms colored a yellowish-brown by dye made of copperas and walnut hulls. The term later became a synonym for the soldier, but also for Democrats in the North who supported them or peace at any price.
The Butternut Region referred to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where sentiment for the war was tepid, because many of the people who lived there had southern sympathies.
This outlasted the war. Southern Indiana was where the second KKK arose in the 1920s. Though oriented more to oppose immigrants and Catholics, it showed that their southern sentiments remained strong. Even linguistically they shared many “southernisms” in speech.
Clement Vallandigham, the effective leader of the Copperheads, was from Ohio. Ironically, while he and Lincoln were bitter enemies, a close personal friend of Vallandigham was none other than Edwin M. Stanton, later Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who before the war had loaned him the astronomical sum of $500 to set up his law practice.
Both Democrats, they were still on opposite sides of the slavery issue.
God bless the copperheads.
You can admire the Confederacy, while still cursing the Copperheads as traitors. Right or wrong, both the Confederacy and the Union had honorable men supporting them. But just because scoundrels side with you does not mean they are, or should be, your friends.
Benedict Arnold was accepted by the British, and they even rewarded him, modestly, for his treason. But they never embraced him, nor saw him as an honorable man thereafter.
Clement Vallandigham then was as Harry Reid is today. Both villains destined for oblivion.
Thanks for more information on that. I knew butternuts were like walnuts (both grow in NY, though butternuts are a bit more rare), but I didn’t know they were used for the dyes for Confederate uniforms or that it was a term for supporters of peace with the Confederacy. There’s a lot we didn’t learn in school. Look up Fernando Wood, for instance.
There was some irony in calling Confederates butternuts, as the Butternut tree generally does not grow in the South.
Copperas is ferrous sulfate, which would bind the dark yellow to light brown color of the walnut shells to the fabric. Both of which were inexpensive, commonly available, and gave fabric a uniform color. A color distinct from the Union Army blue coats.
Supporting Lincoln’s war against the South and the war against the Constitution are what some consider the higher crime than that of being a Copperhead.
Abe Lincoln the Ho Chi Minh of NA!
Yea, I can imagine that traitors would be inclined to support traitors.
The Confederacy didn’t seem to think so. After Vallandigham’s trial and conviction, Lincoln ordered his deportation to the Confederacy under a flag of truce. He was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina by President Davis and put under guard as an “alien enemy.”
This did not stop Vallandigham, however. He began to advise the Confederacy to not conduct any military campaign North into Pennsylvania, as it would interfere with the political campaign of Lincoln’s rival, Democrat George B. McClellan, even though McClellan had repudiated the Democrat party’s anti-war platform, and insisting on peace only if the Confederacy vied for peace *and* returned to the Union.
It indicated to the Confederacy that Vallandigham was less interested in peace than Democrat political power in the North. And he later proved this by traveling by blockade runner to Bermuda, then Canada, from where he ran for governor of Ohio. He lost in a landslide, but created much acrimony in the state.
He talked to a Confederate representative in Canada about plans for forming a Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, by overthrowing their governments.
He requested money for weapons from the Confederates. Vallandigham refused to handle the money himself and it was given to his associate James A. Barrett. Part of the Confederate plan was to liberate Confederate prisoners of war. The intended revolt never materialized.
So, top to bottom, the Confederacy was right to look at him through a jaundiced eye. As with the modern Operation ANSWER, anti-war movement, run by Maoist Marxists, peace was never seen as an end, but a means to something entirely different.
I noticed that as well.
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