Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

When the Army of Northern Virginia invaded Maryland in September 1862, it did so in part to influence the upcoming Northern elections — an effort to “conquer a peace.” The presence of a Southern army on Union soil, Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote President Jefferson Davis, “would enable the people of the United States to determine at their coming elections whether they will support those who favor a prolongation of the war, or those who wish to bring it to a termination.” Even if the Confederacy lost its war for independence on the battlefield, the reasoning went, it could still hope to undermine the Northern public’s will to fight.

Confederates were right to see Northern political will as a Union vulnerability. When the South seceded from the Union, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas declared that “there can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots — or traitors.” As the leading Northern Democrat, Douglas’s support was important to the new administration of his old rival, Abraham Lincoln. But Douglas died in the summer of 1861. While many of his followers became “War Democrats,” and some even officially joined the Republican Party, a faction of the Democrats quickly emerged as an antiwar opposition.

These Peace Democrats rejected administration policies like suspending the writ of habeas corpus as violations of American liberties, and they blamed the Republicans, not the South, for bringing on the war. Named “Copperheads” by their detractors — a reference to a venomous snake, native to Midwestern states like Indiana, where Peace Democrats were strong — they also vehemently rejected the idea that winning the war necessitated freeing the slaves.

Indeed, Indiana was a bellwether for the Republicans’ political dilemma at the midterms. In 1860, the party had captured 7 of Indiana’s 11 congressional districts, while Democrats retained control of only 4 districts in southern Indiana. Indiana’s new Republican governor, Oliver P. Morton, was a former Democrat who, like Douglas, had promised he would “denounce treason and uphold the cause of the Union.”

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Still, the state’s Republican leaders were careful not to throw themselves wholly behind the war and antislavery. Although the party controlled the state legislature, it had not yet embraced emancipation. After the firing on Fort Sumter, legislators resolved that while Indiana would help suppress the rebellion, the state would not participate “in any aggression upon the institution of slavery or any other constitutional right belonging to any of the states.” At the same time, an Indiana Democratic convention in January 1862 blamed Northern extremists and Southern secessionists equally for causing the war. And they blamed Republicans for refusing to compromise with the South during the secession winter, while supporting the legislature’s refusal to use the war to end slavery.

But that didn’t help the Republicans two years later. By the fall of 1862, the party had to defend a record that included controversial military policies, setbacks on the battlefield and emancipation. In the months leading up to the elections (then held in October), military authorities had arrested a number of Indiana Democrats, including some candidates for office, for allegedly aiding the enemy, either by speaking against the war or discouraging enlistments. A few days before Indiana’s state elections, the state had to resort to a draft of 3,000 men to meet the War Department’s quota. Earlier, in July, Kentucky guerrillas had raided Newburg, Ind., causing the state militia to mobilize, which frightened Hoosiers with the possibility of an invasion. And later that summer, the Confederate generals Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg invaded neighboring Kentucky, a campaign that – a week before the Indiana elections – culminated in the Battle of Perryville.

Indeed, 1862 was a difficult year for the Union as a whole. It had abandoned the Peninsula campaign after a series of bloody battles and suffered defeat at Second Bull Run. Although it claimed Antietam as a victory, the North had suffered staggering, historically unprecedented losses. After the election, The Indianapolis Journal, which was the state’s leading Republican newspaper, admitted: “The terrible inefficiency with which the war has been conducted, had done more than all the President’s proclamations to dissatisfy and alienate the people from the Administration. They see their blood spilled, their money wasted, and they see no results at all commensurate with the fearful outlay.”

Many Hoosiers also felt betrayed by the Lincoln administration’s change of war aims with the preliminary emancipation proclamation. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair warned Lincoln that such a proclamation would give Democrats “a club … to beat the Administration.” Indiana Democrats objected that the proclamation was “a confession of weakness — an acknowledgement that twenty millions of white people … can not conquer six millions of whites” without black help.

According to an observer of the Democratic convention in Putnam County, Ind., “The resolutions and the speeches showed a terrible fear of negro equality.” In particular, Putnam Democrats worried that the abolitionist tendencies of the war would threaten Indiana’s constitutional provision that “no negro or mulatto shall come into or settle in the State.” Before the war, Indiana Congressman William H. English had warned that if the “Black” Republicans triumphed, the “free States” would be “overrun with free negroes, to eat out the substance of the white man, compete with his labor, and trespass upon his political rights.” Putnam Democrats called for a “vigorous prosecution” of the war to restore the national government’s authority, but “when this is accomplished the war ought to cease.”

Not surprisingly, that fall the state Republicans tried to distance themselves from the national party — a tactic they would use again in 1864 — by labeling themselves the Union Party. In doing so, Governor Morton claimed, Republicans had renounced partisanship and chosen “to lay down the partisan on the altar of country.” This title also implicitly grouped the Democrats with the opponents of the Union. James S. Athon, the successful Democratic candidate for secretary of state in 1862, called the resort to the Union label “hoodwinking,” an effort to conceal Republicans’ true identity that indicated the party’s political weakness.

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The Democrats did well in the fall 1862 elections. The historian Kenneth M. Stampp wrote that voters in Indiana went to the polls on Oct. 14 in an “atmosphere of gloom.” They reversed the results of the 1860 elections, giving 7 of Indiana’s 11 congressional districts and control of both houses of the legislature to the Democrats. The margin of victory, 9,000 votes to 10,000 votes, may have been made possible by the absence of volunteer soldiers, a claim pressed by Indiana Republicans.

Indiana wasn’t the only place where Democrats made gains: they also won the governorships of New York and New Jersey; Republicans also lost control of the legislatures of Illinois and New Jersey. After the state elections, The Cincinnati Enquirer called on Morton and David Tod, the governor of Ohio, to resign, saying their administrations had been repudiated. (The gains should be put in context, though: the historian James M. McPherson has noted that Republicans not only gained seats in the Senate but also lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than was normal for an off-year election.)

A few weeks after the election, the Democratic state central committee issued an address “to the Freemen of Indiana.” Denying Republican accusations of treasonable collusion with the Confederacy, they insisted that “Armed rebellion must be suppressed by force.” But the Indiana Democrats also added that “the insane and infuriated faction of Abolitionists must retire before the ballots of a free people.” They considered the election a victory won for “Constitutional liberty.” Governor Morton could not have disagreed more. That same day, he wrote to Lincoln warning that Northern Democrats expected the election results to mean acknowledgement of Confederate independence. As a result of the election, the governor told the president, “The fate of the North is trembling in the balance.”

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Nicole Etcheson is the Alexander M. Bracken professor of history at Ball State University and the author of the prize-winning “A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.”