To Stop these Wolves’ Forays: Provost Marshals, Desertion, the Draft, and Political Violence on the Central Illinois Home Front

Abstract

In May 1863 R.W. Mallory of Macon County wrote Illinois Republican Governor Richard Yates detailing the troubling state of his community. Local copperheads had recently held secretive armed meetings at a nearby schoolhouse and organized an antiwar guerilla company in nearby Christian County. Tensions between pro-war and antiwar men were rising as vocal antiwar men brazenly proclaimed their sentiments and intentions on the street. These went well beyond criticisms of the Lincoln administration common during the first two years of the war, openly targeting pro-war men for their political allegiances. Mallory overheard a prominent local copperhead named Jessy Lockhart proclaim in less than 2 months they will murder all of the G - d - republicans that dares to tak sides with the Administration. Lockhart publically dared pro-war townsmen to go ahead and report him and other copperheads to government officials as the copperheads were prepared to make this State the batel ground from this time until they Murder or drive all of the Men out of this part of the country. In closing Mallory warned Governor Yates that It appears as if there is a cloud agethere around us which will have to burst Sooner or later.1 By the late spring of 1863, Mallory's final observation resonated with many pro-war central Illinoisans. Until the third year of the war, reports of neighborhood tensions rarely reached government or military officials. There were reports of antiwar organizations holding secret meetings and reports of antiwar sentiments being expressed in communities, but none seriously heralded a bloody home front until after the Enrollment Act of March 1863. Historians of the northern home front have recognized this fundamental change. While scholars like Frank Klement have maintained the copperhead movement was a loyal opposition unfairly demonized by falsified reports of violence and militarization to gain political support for Republicans, others, most prominently Jennifer Weber, convincingly maintained that violent activities and militaristic preparations were real and provide evidence for the emergence of a neighbors' war over federal policy beginning in early 1863.2 While Klement's warnings against assigning treason to these activities are hard to ignore and while Weber's neighbors' war is persuasive in its depiction of the growth of animosities between antiwar and pro-war civilians, neither school of thought has explored the tense atmosphere on the home front at the community level. Instead both subsume such reports within a national political narrative primarily concerned with the political threat posed by the copperhead movement to Abraham Lincoln's reelection. To illuminate what has been lost in this oversight, scholars must find a region ripe with local political tensions and animosities. Central Illinois was such a region. The majority of its residents lived in small, agrarian communities that, with the exception of major cities such as Springfield, rarely numbered over 1,500 inhabitants.3 By 1860 much of central Illinois had weathered a decade of intense political elections regularly decided by less than five percent of the vote.4 Neighbors in these small communities were split over the most divisive political issues of the times and elections regularly proved a hotbed for local political suspicions and violence between local party members. Yet, despite all these preexisting political tensions, disagreements over national policy seldom spilled into open violence during the first two years of the war. For the home front to be rocked by an upsurge in violence following the Enrollment Act, something dramatic must have changed the political dynamics within central Illinois communities, something that exacerbated those longstanding political tensions. That something was a historically underappreciated section of the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863. In that act, Congress mandated the Provost Marshal Office to prepare to enforce the draft, a logistical nightmare the office was in no condition to pursue. …