Ohio in the Civil War

Ohio’s geographic location in relation to free and slave states made it an important player in the American Civil War. While the state supported the Federal war effort by providing large numbers of troops, of military officers, and supplies to the Federal Army, and it’s location as one of the closest free states made it a haven for runaway slaves and freedmen both before and throughout the war, Ohio was by no means allied in its belief that war was constitutional or even the moral answer to the conflict between Northern and Southern states.

At the outset of the Civil War, Ohio was home to both politicians of the burgeoning Republican party of the industrial North who saw slavery as an ill that had to be disposed of and Democrats who, like most of the Democrats of the time, represented the agricultural interests who had come to accept slavery as an institution. These Democrats, who came to be known as Peace Democrats, opposed both Lincoln and the war. However, Ohioans put their political differences aside to support the Union, at least in the war’s beginning, and followed only New York and Pennsylvania in the number of soldiers sent to the Federal Army, raising close to 320,000 men to support the Union. Among the men from Ohio were some of the most important figures in the Union military, including generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan.

Despite Ohio’s proximity to war-ravaged Southern states, no major battles occurred on the state’s soil, although Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s raids in the state during 1863 terrorized civilians throughout the southern part of the state. However, Ohio was home to Johnson’s Island, a war prison near Lake Erie where over 15,000 Confederate officers and soldiers were held during the war.

Despite the state’s ostensible support for the Civil War, Ohio was also home to many Copperheads, or Democrats who favored a peace settlement with the South, during the war. Lincoln’s administration did not tolerate Copperheads well, often arresting and holding these opponents of the war for months in military prisons, denying them habeas corpus.

The most famous Ohio Copperhead was undoubtedly state congressman Clement Vallandigham, who defied General Ambrose Burnside’s order 38, which restricted public discussion of anti-war sentiment. Vallandigham was jailed, then “deported” to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a Confederate territory, where he then embarked upon a long and winding journey through the Bahamas and Canada before sneaking back into Ohio.

Ohio was also known as the home of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society comprised of Northerners, mainly Copperheads, sympathetic to the Southern cause, who also proposed the annexation of a “circle” of territories in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, which would be admitted to U.S. as slave states. Vallandigham, incidentally, was the group’s commander for a time.