Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians

By Robert M. Sandow

A “balanced, compelling” study of one rural region in the North where war resistance flourished (Civil War Times).
 
During the Civil War, there were explosions of resistance to the war throughout the Union—from the deadly draft riots in New York City to other, less well-known outbreaks. In Deserter Country, Robert M. Sandow explores one of these least known “inner civil wars”: the widespread, sometimes violent opposition in the Appalachian lumber country of Pennsylvania.
 
Sparsely settled, these mountains were home to divided communities that provided a safe haven for opponents of the war. The dissent of mountain folk reflected their own marginality in the face of rapidly increasing exploitation of timber resources by big firms, as well as partisan debates over loyalty.
 
One of the few studies of the northern Appalachians, this book draws revealing parallels to the War in the southern mountains, exploring the roots of rural protest in frontier development, the market economy, military policy, partisan debate, and everyday resistance. Sandow also sheds new light on the party politics of rural resistance, rejecting easy depictions of war-opponents as traitors and malcontents for a more nuanced and complicated study of class, economic upheaval, and localism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823230532

Robert M. Sandow

Robert M. Sandow is an associate professor of history at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (Fordham) and has presented numerous articles and conference papers. His recent work addresses issues of political dissent and rural protest on the northern home front. Robert M. Sandow is an associate professor of history at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (Fordham University Press, 2009) and has presented numerous articles and conference papers. His recent work addresses issues of political dissent and rural protest on the northern home front.

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DESERTER COUNTRY

Deserter Country

Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians

Robert M. Sandow

Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandow, Robert M.

    Deserter country : Civil War opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians/

Robert M. Sandow.—1st ed.

        p. cm.—(The North’s Civil War)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8232-3051-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

   1. Pennsylvania—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Protest movements.

2. Pennsylvania—Politics and government—1861–1865. 3. Appalachians

(People)—Pennsylvania—History—19th century. 4. Appalachians

(People)—Pennsylvania—Politics and government—19th century. 5. United

States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Protest movements. 6. United

States—Politics and government—1861–1865. I. Title.

F153.S24 2009

973.7’12097487—dc22

                                                                    2008050384

   Printed in the United States of America

   11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

   First edition

For Miyuki and Mark

Contents

List of figures and tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 The Lumber Region as Pennsylvania’s Appalachia

2 Patterns of Protest: The Raftsmen’s Rebellion of 1857

3 The Limits of Patriotism: Early Mobilization in the Mountains

4 The Rhetoric of Loyalty: Partisan Perspectives on Treason

5 Everyday Resistance in Pennsylvania’s Deserter Country

6 Collisions with the People: Federal Intervention in Deserter Country

EpilogueContested Memories of the Civil War

AppendixSupplemental Figures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

A.1 Pennsylvania in 1860 147

A.2 Town Centers of the Lumber Region, 1860 148

A.3 Farm Values, Burnside Township, Clearfield County, 1860 149

A.4 Landform Regions of Pennsylvania 150

A.5 Counties of Lowest Population Density, 1860 150

A.6 Imbalances of White Men Ages 20–39, 1860 151

A.7 Lowest Percentage of Total Land in Farms, 1860 152

A.8 Predominance of Farms under 50 acres, 1860 153

A.9 Counties of Lowest Total Manufacture, 1860 154

A.10 Lumbering as a Primary Manufacture, 1860 155

A.11 Greatest Output of Sawn Lumber, 1860 156

A.12 Capital Invested in Sawmills, 1860 157

A.13 Rivers and Creeks of the Lumber Region 158

A.14 Masthead of the Raftsman’s Journal 159

A.15 Rafting Scene on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, 1866 160

A.16 Irvin’s Mill at Curwensville, 1878 161

A.17 The Shift of the American Logging Frontier, 1840–1923 162

A.18 Pennsylvania White Pine, 1880 163

A.19 Total Enlistments by County 164

A.20 Geographic Distribution of Three-month Volunteer Companies 165

A.21 Geographic Distribution of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps 166

A.22 Prominent Occupations of Pennsylvania Three-month Soldiers 167

A.23 The St. Mary’s Resolutions 167

A.24 Constitution of the Democratic Castle 169

A.25 The 18th and 19th Provost Marshal Districts in Pennsylvania 171

A.26 James V.Bomford 172

A.27 Richard I.Dodge 173

A.28 Frederick A.H.Gaebel 174

A.29 The Fishing Creek Expedition, Columbia County 175

A.30 The Clearfield Expedition 176

Tables

A.1 Most Valuable Manufactures in Pennsylvania, 1860 177

A.2 Occupations of Pennsylvania Three-month Soldiers 178

Acknowledgments

A project of this length is sustained by the guidance, friendship, and support of many people. While I am indebted to a multitude of friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutional staff, any faults of this work are my own.

I am sincerely thankful for the vital funding I received through the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and the Department of History at the Pennsylvania State University. In addition, I am grateful to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, for a fellowship to research at the Pennsylvania State Archives as a scholar-in-residence. I also wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance from many archivists and librarians who guided me through my labors, with special mention to those at the National Archives and Records Administration and the Clearfield County Historical Society. Richard T. Hughes of Clearfield was especially helpful in sharing his information on county history, introducing me to local people, and including me in remarkable events such as the commemorative re-enactment of Bloody Knox.

At Penn State, I was aided by many encouraging professors and graduate colleagues. Professors Sally McMurry, Gregory Smits, and Deryck Holdsworth served as members of my dissertation committee. Professor Mark E. Neely, Jr. read the Introduction and Chapter 4 critically, offering keen insight and suggestions. Dr. Neely is the consummate iconoclast, driven to challenge even the most entrenched paradigms against the weight of historical evidence. He is a model historian in many ways. I am also obliged to Professors Carol Reardon and Gary W. Gallagher for their rigorous models of teaching and scholarship. My greatest intellectual debt is to my advisor, Professor William A. Blair, whom I consider a mentor and friend. His careful reading, thoughtful analysis, and intellectual prodding have improved this project measurably. I cannot imagine having completed this work without his generous direction and encouragement.

I owe special thanks for the help of graduate friends at Penn State. Jonathan Berkey, Christina Ericson, Barbara Gannon, Tristan Jolivette, David Smith, and Mike Smith gave useful critiques on portions of the manuscript. Fellow Gettys-burgian Scott Webster unselfishly opened his apartment to me on an extended research trip to Washington, D.C. Chris Ericson was an endless source of cheer during my studies. Andrew Slap helped me to survive graduate school and always lends his kindness and intellect to assist a friend. He listened and read about what he derided as my cowardly lumbermen long after the resolve of others had failed.

I thank Paul A. Cimbala of Fordham University, editor of Fordham University Press’s series The North’s Civil War, for enthusiastically supporting this project through publication. I am also grateful to the careful editorial assistance of Eric Newman and Mildred Sanchez, the Press’s managing editor and the book’s copy editor, respectively. In addition, I acknowledge the efforts of Daniel W. Crofts, of the College of New Jersey, who generously read the manuscript and made numerous helpful suggestions for its improvement.

Family members have made this project possible. I thank Nobuyuki and Hideko Ogihara for their generosity and kindness, overcoming the barriers of distance and language. Chris Galloway went beyond the duties of a brother and kindly read a chapter from my dissertation. Laurie Galloway probably wondered if I would ever finish but loved and encouraged me as a mother all the same.

I give my greatest thanks to Miyuki for her unending patience and understanding in the completion of this work. This project has spanned key milestones in my life, as I became a teacher, a husband, and the father of Mark Takumi. For all the moments lost to them in this research and for the many other ways my life is made better because of them, I dedicate this book to Miyuki and Mark.

DESERTER COUNTRY

Introduction

This work is a study of war opposition, an inner civil war, in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. It pursues the basic question why some rural northerners opposed the Civil War even to the point of violence. In its conception, it combines a regional study of the northern mountains with an examination into the causes and meaning of wartime protest. It argues that specific social, political, and economic factors contributed to the prevalence of antiwar attitudes there.

Although the Appalachian Mountains extend into the North, scholars of the Civil War have focused predominantly on their southern reaches—a region noted for the development of thorny resistance to the rebel government. Scholars of the Confederate war have drawn increasing attention to the complex struggle between Unionists, the disaffected, and Confederate Loyalists, most notably in the mountainous border areas. The people of the southern Appalachians were divided in their loyalty to Confederate independence. On the periphery of state authority, these communities developed strong regional identities nurturing traditions of autonomy and local government. Kinship and community fashioned the hierarchy of their loyalty.

Wartime hardships intensified the internal divisions of the mountain South. Many southerners grew to resent the intrusion of the Confederate government with its increased demand for volunteers and seizure of military supplies. Yeomen farmers of the upland South lived more closely to the margins of subsistence, and the disruptions of labor and food threatened family survival. As border communities in the path of Union military advances, they faced additional pressures. When armies advanced and retreated, issues of loyalty had profound implications for the people who lived there. Soldiers on both sides justified the capture of food and sometimes the destruction of property belonging to the enemy. In the uncertainty of the Civil War, hardships and bitterness fractured neighborhoods into warring factions that continued their bloody feuds even after the armies departed.¹

In its social and economic patterns, the heavily forested Pennsylvania Appalachians shared traits common to the South. The similarities of mountain experiences suggest that scholars rethink the boundaries of conflict. Like the southern mountains, a sparse population lived scattered across vast daunting woodlands. Railroads had not yet connected its interior with regional rail networks, leaving rural folk imperfectly connected to the market economy. Ties of kinship and community provided crucial aids to survival on the region’s poor farms. Traditions of localism in civic affairs cultivated self-reliance and a distrust of outside authority. Many people in the lumber region resented the expansion of federal authority during the war and its demands on household labor and finances. For some, poverty and the needs for family survival were justifiable excuses for avoiding military service. Additionally, the rugged terrain of the Pennsylvania Appalachians provided a safe haven for a spectrum of dissenting individuals including yeoman farmers, mobile laborers without the attachment of community and family, and true desperadoes with criminal intentions.

Despite similarities, there were some very significant contrasts between the northern and southern Appalachians, with slavery being the most important. In the southern mountains, slaveholding was marginal and state politics was shaped largely by the contending interests of low-country planters and up-country yeomen. Southern mountaineers did not reject slavery, however, and agreed fundamentally with its underlying racial assumptions and benefits for white society. Another major difference stemmed from changing economic conditions in the northern mountains, especially Pennsylvania. In the 1850s, capitalist entrepreneurs increased their exploitation of natural resources including coal, timber, and oil. Economic development transformed the remote regions of the state into battlegrounds of competing interests between entrepreneurs, small farmers, and mobile wageworkers. Readily available work attracted European immigrants, a population largely absent in the southern mountains.

Differing circumstances affected the actions of ordinary people. Outside of the south-central portions of the state, Pennsylvanians did not suffer under armies of occupation. The lumber region did not become a war zone threatening the destruction of property and life. The central authority of the Confederacy also made far greater exactions upon its citizens than the Lincoln government, drafting a higher proportion of men and claiming the right to freely requisition military goods from civilians. Southerners, however, had the impetus to fight for their own soil and the protection of their families. The northern war was more distant, requiring greater ideological fortitude than that of the foe.

Influenced by these dissimilarities, violence between civilians was arguably less intense in Pennsylvania than in the contested border regions of the Confederacy. Though nearly impossible to measure, personal harm was less frequent and behavior typically more limited to threats and moderate physical confrontations. This research uncovered no proof of civilian murders motivated by war politics.² Most violent actions were directed against representatives of the federal government. Pennsylvania differed from the southern mountains where the abundance of partisan organizations blurred the lines between civilian and soldier. Southern violence also reflected the disintegration of law and order that remained intact in the mountains of the Keystone State.

Not only were the levels of hostility different, but so were the targets of aggression. In southern border communities, Unionists and Loyalists waged reciprocal campaigns of recrimination. Cycles of violence intensified the longstanding feuds between neighbors even after the war had ended. In the lumber region, violence typically went in one direction. It was the loyal citizens supporting the war who complained most bitterly of threats and intimidation. Except for the destruction of Democratic newspapers, the historical record reveals far fewer attacks by civilians upon Democrats.

This research also looks beyond the Appalachian circumstances of the region to encompass political issues of loyalty and patriotism. It explores the sensitive issue of wartime dissent that has divided Americans throughout our nation’s history. In many ways, the subject of war opposition is timely and current events affirm the relevance of a people that question the causes and conduct of war. Much like the peace wing of the Democratic Party during the Civil War, opponents of America’s military conflicts today face charges of disloyalty and cowardice.

Americans have never felt the same about expressions of antiwar sentiment and attitudes have shifted dramatically over time. The carnage and seeming fruitlessness of World War I disillusioned many in that generation into pacifism and isolation in world affairs. Much of that outlook was eradicated in the enthusiastic embrace of World War II, widely seen as a Good War against evil and totalitarianism.³ The Vietnam generation had inherited their parents’ patriotic ideals but struggled with the turmoil of a deeply divisive war that fostered pervasive antiwar protests. All these events and more have influenced historians of the Civil War to either examine or shun dissenters, to castigate or sympathize. There is no scholarly consensus, as the binary conceptions of disloyal traitor versus loyal opposition continue to shape writings on dissent, consciously or not. One of the enduring problems of interpreting political dissent during the war is the aggressive white racism of the Democratic Party that makes their antiwar sentiments so unappealing. A historian must not be their apologist but neither should their outspoken critique of the war be cast aside as the ranting of traitors and cowards.

Why did some northerners oppose the war and go against the grain of a public discourse that emphasized loyalty, sacrifice, patriotism, and commitment to the Union cause? Interpreting these actions is difficult given the paucity of primary sources written by dissenters that could shed light on their reasons. This scarcity is more acute when examining northerners on the economic margins of society, both rural and urban. To make up for this lack, historians must try to recover the social, political, and economic context of their lives looking for meaning in their actions.

Before peering into the history of Pennsylvania’s mountain communities, it is useful to outline how scholars have typically explained the motivations for protest. To explain dissent, historical interpretations generally draw on a number of categories of analysis stressing socioeconomic, political, racial, or what might be termed human factors. In truth, the motives for individual actions are complex; none of these factors can be mutually exclusive. Historians often emphasize elements selectively in ways that reflect their own viewpoints or the tenor of their intellectual times.

Republicans fashioned the earliest dominant interpretation of Democratic opposition during the war itself. They charged Peace Democrats with treason and disloyalty, labeled them Copperheads for their scheming venomous attacks, and considered them a fire in the rear materially undermining the war effort. They branded war opponents as southern sympathizers and claimed that Democrats formed widespread secret societies, determined to resist the federal government with force of arms if necessary. Fantastic tales of a bugaboo society dubbed the Knights of the Golden Circle were a staple of the Republican press, warping the true goals and character of Democratic opposition. Republican conspiracy theories pictured widespread plots to remove Midwestern states from the Union through the formation of a Northwest Confederacy. Anxieties over sinister secret societies were a potent and psychologically arresting tool to shape voter loyalty.⁴

The paradigm of disloyal Copperheads continues to influence the literature on Civil War politics, and dominates popular history of the war. Certainly some Democrats were cowards, as Republicans asserted, but so too were many Republicans. Lack of courage is but one of many possible human weaknesses that may have impelled some northerners to oppose the war. For the historian, such individual motives present an almost insurmountable problem given the overwhelming human tendency to hide or deny our own faults.

From the end of the Civil War to the period of World War I, few writers looked upon wartime opposition in a favorable light. A recent scholar of the Democratic Party referred to this silence on the subject as malign neglect.⁵After the Civil War, Republicans continued to hold firm to the depiction of disloyal Copperheads in support of their bloody shirt politics. Though this motif disappeared gradually from Republican speeches in the 1880s, its longevity suggests its lingering appeal among voters.⁶ Even as Civil War studies entered the dispassionate hands of professional scholars, there was no serious inquiry or reevaluation of the antiwar movement until the 1920s. By the 1890s, reconciliation and the patriotic boost of the Spanish-American War encouraged a nationalist interpretation of American history that continued to view Copperheads as partisan obstructionists.⁷

Democratic opposition received a significant reinterpretation with the rise of revisionist history in the 1920s. Led by historians Avery O. Craven and others, revisionists were among those disillusioned by America’s entry into World War I. In many ways, they re-evaluated the past through the lens of their newly formed antiwar sentiment. They deemed the Civil War a needless war and praised the efforts of compromisers. They denounced abolitionists as agitating extremists and redeemed the image of Democratic opposition as a voice of sanity and restraint. They were critical of emotional appeals to patriotism and manipulation of the machinery of state in support of a war agenda.⁸ It is ironic that revisionists essentially championed the view held by wartime Democrats that the conflict was both avoidable and the product of extremists. Despite this more favorable view of opposition, however, professional historians wrote little about the wartime years, leaving the unfashionable subject to armchair military authors.

America’s role in World War II influenced historians to reassert the paradigm of disloyal Copperheads. The public at large perceived the struggle as a Good War against evil and totalitarianism. While revisionism remained a viable force among academics, a number of studies reflected the shift in attitudes toward war and dissent. Two notable works on Peace Democrats emerged, both reinforcing the view of Copperheads as partisan traitors. The year 1942 saw the publication of Wood Gray’s The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads and George Fort Milton’s Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column.⁹ As the only trained historian of the two, Gray’s work deserves the most scrutiny. After considerable research, he was essentially converted to the Republican view, accepting the secret societies and charges of subversion as fact. Gray excused the majority of rank-and-file Copperheads as poor, ignorant, and foolish but heaped calumny upon party leaders. He condemned them as willful manipulators who misled voters and endangered the nation.¹⁰

As the works of Gray and Milton won modest praise, Frank L. Klement was honing the most vigorous assault on the Republican depiction of Copperheadism. Klement was a prodigious writer whose dominant theme emerged with the 1960 publication of his book The Copperheads in the Middle West. Drawing considerable criticism from historians, Klement’s vast body of work undermined Republican charges of disloyalty and subversion. He characterized Midwestern peace advocates as agrarian conservatives in the Jeffersonian tradition motivated by a web of socioeconomic, religious, and regional conditions. He systematically surveyed and debunked the Republican Copperhead myth of secret societies and Confederate sympathies and crossed swords with scholars who challenged his assertions. Klement could not deny the darker side of Democratic dissent, and admitted that Negrophobia and the spirit of partyism could animate their actions. He tended to see these elements as more limited and episodic, stressing instead the party’s defense of civil liberties against dramatic changes in American government and society. Even those who disagreed with his fundamental assertions grudgingly acknowledged his depth of research and commitment to evidence. No serious scholar since can deny Republican exaggerations concerning their political foes.¹¹

The idea that Democrats were merely disloyal traitors and southern sympathizers was also challenged by the rise of the new political history. Favoring quantification and analysis, scholars of politics plumbed voting statistics along with documentary evidence to assess party structures, methods, and voter behavior. One of the most significant works regarding the Democratic Party appeared in 1977 by Joel H. Silbey. His A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868, the only book-length treatment of the Democratic Party in the period, argued among other things that Democratic opposition was respectable. He depicted the party as divided between partisan legitimists and principled purists who struggled for control and power. He also asserted that Democratic leaders obeyed a partisan imperative that was constitutionally conservative in nature but consistently maintained their status as a minority. Klement among others criticized Silbey for ignoring the socioeconomic underpinnings of party loyalty.¹² A Respectable Minority improved upon Klement in one important regard: it addressed the underlying racism of the Democratic appeal.

Klement’s research accomplished a great deal but it played down a major theme of Democratic opposition—the pervasive white supremacy espoused by party leaders. Ohio Congressman Samuel S. Cox summarized the basic conviction of many in his party in an 1862 speech: I have been taught in the history of this country that these Commonwealths and this Union were made for white men; that this Government is a Government of white men; that the men who made it never intended by anything they did, to place the black race on an equality with the white.¹³ Practically all mainstream historical writings on the subject avoided serious discussions of racism. Historians on the margins, often black authors, had written works in the years before World War II on race and the Democratic Party that appeared in sources such as the Journal of Negro History . They outlined the racist content of Democratic speeches and writings, identifying for instance the exploitation of miscegenation fears in the 1864 election.¹⁴ The Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged some historians to look anew into Civil War–era racism. Jean H. Baker devoted an entire chapter to the issue of race in her 1983 book Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century .¹⁵ Baker’s work was an important step in addressing a crucial motivation for Democratic opposition. Her study could not dispel the unappealing nature of the Democratic Party, and the tendency toward historical silence or disinterest attests to this fundamental problem.

Despite scholarly attempts to dispel the paradigm of a disloyal opposition, the old view lingers on in both academic and popular history of the war. Klement felt himself persecuted throughout his career even though his evidentiary strength has won him many converts to the cause. James M. McPherson was one of those scholars who disagreed with Klement, and his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War is a good example of scholarship that considers Peace Democrats a real threat to both the war and the Lincoln administration.¹⁶The most recent and damning book on the Copperheads was authored by Jennifer Weber, a doctoral student of McPherson. Weber’s Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North reasserted the Republican paradigm of Democratic treason.¹⁷ Weber disagreed fervently with Klement and stressed the perils of Copperheadism. Her book argued that resistance was not a fringe issue but materially undermined the war effort by curtailing Lincoln’s powers, discouraging enlistments, and wasting military resources on the home front. Weber’s book breathes new life into the wartime Republican interpretation of Peace Democrats and will likely influence scholarship in the near future.

The divergence of opinions on political opposition, however, underscores the need for historians to look at the broad social, political, and economic context, making often difficult evaluative judgments. More importantly, however, this study is an appeal to look more closely at the causes and developments of wartime dissent rather than to turn away from it in embarrassment and shame. The widespread scholarly neglect of Civil War Democrats suggests that the taint of aggressive racism has sunk their fortunes as low or lower than the incubus of disloyalty did in the post-Civil War era.

In what ways do the actions of Pennsylvania antiwar protesters conform to the interpretations laid out above? To answer this question, this book will survey broader studies on dissent in the North, looking for informative patterns. While the conflict fostered widespread discontent in the North, scholarship has largely focused on the unrest of immigrant wage-laborers and northern industrial cities as hotbeds of violent protest. Those who lived through the Civil War contributed to this emphasis. General James B. Fry was the head of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau and one of the architects of the unpopular draft laws. In his final summarizing report of the Bureau’s achievements, Fry discussed the roots of army desertion placing blame for the practice on immigrants from abroad. He argued that a further investigation would likely reveal that desertion is a crime of foreign rather than native birth, and that but a small proportion of the men who forsook their colors were Americans.¹⁸ In the aftermath of Union victory, it was reassuring for northerners to imagine that Americans were not the cause of bloody resistance. Historians have taken cues from Fry and others, focusing on episodes such as the New York City draft riots and the confrontation of Irish miners in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Their work leads us to miss the most important fact about northern opposition. The majority of war opponents were not the immigrants living in the North’s crowded manufacturing cities but the backbone of rural America. When historians have noted the distinction, they have often failed to stress its significance for the war’s causation or outcome.¹⁹ Popular resistance undermined the northern war, nearly bringing the Union to the brink of defeat.

Socioeconomic factors clearly animated antiwar sentiment among many Pennsylvanians. Labor historians especially have stressed the importance of class tensions in furthering antigovernment protest. Their historical interests influence them to focus on the workings of class formation and identity. Iver Bernstein’s nuanced study of the New York City draft riots explains how predominantly Irish wage-laborers felt their own autonomy and livelihood threatened by Republican war measures.²⁰ Their shared ethnicity and economic vulnerability formed a crucial context for the bloodshed and rioting that ensued in July 1863. In the mountains of the Keystone State, class and ethnic identity were less important but economic concerns remained central. The social and economic impacts of war accompanied other disruptive changes in the rural economy. The extension of market forces and of industrial lumbering in particular undermined the stability of small farmers and increased young men’s dependency on migrant wage-work. Reports identified lumbering farmers and migrant wage-laborers as the core of protestors. Antebellum farmers in the mountains of Pennsylvania faced the challenge of industrial logging. For generations, small farmers in this poor agricultural region supported their families by cutting timber and floating large-scale rafts to markets. In the 1850s, many mountain farmers felt their livelihoods threatened by new methods of industrial logging. Armies of lumberjacks cut down the great trees and tumbled the logs into the rivers. Choked with floating logs, the rivers of Pennsylvania no longer supported rafting. They perceived state Republican leaders as behind these dramatic changes, urging on the accelerated exploitation of the forests. The thousands of raftsmen that once plied the inland waterways dwindled steadily under the expansion of industrial logging but they did not go quietly. After repeated failures to share the river, rafting lumbermen fought back. When appeals to the legislature met deaf ears, locals took up rifles and axes to redress grievances through vigilantism. A brief raftsmen’s rebellion in the late 1850s represented a pattern of protest that area residents repeated during the war. If anything, wartime demands for lumber accelerated the death of the rafting culture. This underlying economic battle caused anti-Republican bitterness to simmer beneath the surface.

While the groups overlapped, they responded to different economic concerns. Industrial exploitation of the region’s coal, oil, and wood also attracted migrant wageworkers facing their own economic concerns. Coal patches, lumber camps, and the boomtowns of the oil region were chaotic landscapes devoted to extracting the rich natural resources of Pennsylvania. They drew roving young men, willing to work difficult jobs in the hopes of someday getting ahead. Their labor accommodated a certain anonymity and mobility that left little record of their efforts. When called upon to serve in the war, they effortlessly melted away. In their case, a lack of community ties freed them from the peer pressures to uphold civic duties. Cut loose from community, they were free to pursue economic self-interest. While wartime inflation outpaced the rise in wages, it was easy to find steady work at higher pay than before the war. Army wages were pitifully low and accompanied by the real possibility of death. In comparison, few were willing to miss the opportunity for