American History - Part 102 - Lincoln - Lee invades Pennsylvania - Copperheads beheaded
Channel: ListenAndReadAlong
Date: 2013-06-17

Welcome to welcome to the making of a nation American history in VOA Special English.
In 1863, the Confederate states were becoming short of supplies. Food and guns were difficult to find to keep the Confederate armies in the field.
 Men were also needed. More and more men. There seemed to be no end to the demand for men to fill the places left empty by dead and wounded soldiers.
 Many in the South were heavy of heart. And the hope among them slowly started to sink. The war was tiring. Its suffering was more than they could bear. And the situation in the West made matters worse.
  Something was needed to raise up the spirits of the South to break the pressure of Union armies.
 General Robert E. Lee believed he had the   an invasion of the north. This, he felt, would throw fear into the people of the north and weaken the Union war effort.
 Lee had organized an army of seventy-five-thousand men at Fredericksburg, Virginia, halfway between Washington and Richmond.
 Lee began moving his men June third. They marched northwest into the Shenandoah Valley. The valley led north to the Potomac River. Across the river was the narrow neck of western Maryland, then Pennsylvania.
 Pennsylvania was the target. Its rich farmland produced plenty of food  enough to feed Lee's hungry army for the summer.
The huge Army of the Potomac was behind him, near Washington. The Union commander, General Hooker, had to keep his army between Lee and Washington to prevent the Confederates from seizing the national capital.
 There had been signs that people were growing tired of the war.
 Coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania had shown their feelings toward the war a few months earlier.
 They rose up against a new law drafting men into the Union army. The miners did not want to fight. They refused to join the army. They rioted and attacked officials who tried to take them. Soldiers were sent to the mining areas to put down the riots.
 Farmers in nearby Ohio also rebelled against the draft law. They refused to be drafted. Instead, they took guns and battled soldiers who came to arrest them.
 Feelings against the war were growing stronger, not only in Pennsylvania and Ohio, but also in several other farm states of the north. These areas saw a growing support for a peace party  a political party opposed to the war.
 Leaders of this movement were Democrats called "Copperheads." They got this name because they wore on their coats a copper penny with the head of an Indian.
 The chief Copperhead was a former Ohio congressman. His name was Clement Vallandigham.
  Vallandigham said he wanted peace, and he wanted it immediately. He offered a simple   stop the fighting. Make a ceasefire. And let some friendly foreign nation negotiate peace between North and South.
 After he lost his seat in Congress, Vallandigham opened a campaign to become governor of Ohio. He traveled all across the state speaking out against the war. He said Republicans did not want peace. He said they wanted to fight until every black man was free.
 The Union military commander for Ohio was General Ambrose Burnside, a former commander of the Army of the Potomac
 One of these orders limited the right of citizens to criticize government military policy. Another declared that statements of support for the enemy would be punished as treason.
 Vallandigham refused to recognize Burnside's right to give such orders to civilians. Vallandigham claimed that Lincoln was using the war to become a dictator. He said Lincoln did not want peace, that the president had rejected peace offers from the South. Once again, he said the war was not a struggle for the Union, but a fight to free the slaves of the south. And he said men of Ohio who let themselves be drafted into the Union army were no better than slaves themselves.
 Burnside had sent several army officers to listen to the speech. When they reported what Vallandigham said, Burnside ordered his arrest. Without question, the man had violated the General's orders.
 Late the next night, soldiers went to Vallandigham's home in Dayton. They knocked on the door and said they had come to arrest him.
 Vallandigham called for help and refused to let the soldiers enter. They broke down the door, seized him and took him to a military prison in Cincinnati.
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