It was October 14, 1862, and a massive rally to protest the Civil War was taking place in the town of Lumberland that would have an impact well beyond Sullivan County.

The rally, and the resulting manifesto that emerged from it, was orchestrated by General Archibald C. Niven of Monticello, and the Peace Democrats—members of the Democratic party who vehemently opposed the war-- and their timing was no accident, coming just one month after President Abraham Lincoln made public his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The so-called Lumberland Resolutions were a calculated counterattack to what the Peace Democrats-- or Copperheads, as the Republicans had labeled them-- considered Lincoln’s executive overreach, as well as the mounting casualties suffered by the Union Army in the Civil War.

The Copperheads had a strong presence in Sullivan County, particularly in Monticello, where General Niven, long one of the most prominent men in the village, and his acolyte, James Eldridge Quinlan, editor and publisher of the Republican Watchman newspaper, kept the anti-Lincoln sentiment burning brightly.

Quinlan wrote often in the Watchman in opposition of the administration, the abolitionists, and the war. At first, his newspaper attacks were aimed at the abolitionists, and he would sometimes strive to separate them from the mainstream Republicans he also opposed, although not nearly so vehemently. Eventually, however, all Republicans, especially Lincoln, became frequent targets of Quinlan’s often vile jeremiads. The language of the Lumberland Resolutions was replicated almost word for word less than a year later when Niven was able to convince the Sullivan County Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution designed to undermine the Union’s military draft.

Specifically, the resolutions demanded an end to the “unholy war” and called upon the federal government to immediately enter into peace negotiations with the Confederate States, even if it meant leaving the institution of slavery intact. Furthermore, the resolutions condemned the Militia Act of July 1862, which authorized the drafting of the states’ militia units into the regular army if those states failed to meet their volunteer quota. This legislation, the resolutions claimed, was unconstitutional, representing federal coercion over state citizens.

The resolutions also demanded the restoration of Habeas Corpus for all citizens. While President Lincoln would not officially suspend habeas corpus nationwide until September of 1863, he had done so on a regional basis from time to time since the beginning of the War, and in September of 1862, he issued what became known as Proclamation 94, which took those actions even further, outraging the Copperheads.

Driven by the need to enforce the Militia Act of 1862 and suppress anti-war agitators, Lincoln issued Proclamation 94, ordering that all insurgents, draft resisters, or anyone discouraging military enlistments would be subject to martial law and a military trial. To the Copperheads, these actions represented the behavior of a dictator, and they made that known in no uncertain terms.

While the Lumberland Resolutions had some influence on local elections that year, and eventually helped the Copperheads sweep their candidate, Horatio Seymour, into the state house as Governor of New York, as well as propelling Niven into the State Legislature as a Senator, it was action taken by the Sullivan County Board of Supervisors in August of 1863 that was their most obvious impact.

After a stirring speech by Niven, the Supervisors voted to use taxpayer money to pay every drafted man in the County $300 so they could buy themselves out of serving. The local law resolved to “pay every drafted man of Sullivan $300, if he responds in person to the draft, or if he hires a substitute, to pay the substitute $300.”

By structuring the text to explicitly pay out exactly $300—the precise maximum legal fee mandated by Lincoln’s Enrollment Act of 1863 in order to escape service—the Supervisors created a perfect bureaucratic loop, effectively turning the Sullivan County treasury into an automatic “get out of jail free” card for those drafted, ensuring that any local man selected in the draft lottery could immediately hand his government bounty right back to the enrollment marshals, cancelling his deployment.

In effect, this meant that municipal tax funds were going to be used to defund the draft lottery, at least locally, by paying off the commutation fees of those drafted.

Despite these early victories, the Copperhead’s strength and influence faded as the war progressed and the Union Army’s fortunes began to improve, boosting Lincoln’s popularity in the process. While A.C. Niven rode the wave of anti-war sentiment to win a seat in the New York State Senate in the 1863 elections, his tenure there was almost immediately immersed in scandal.

The Republican opponent he had defeated, Henry R. Low, formally contested the validity of the election, presenting evidence that Niven’s factions had engaged in extensive voter fraud, intimidation, and the illegal counting of ballots cast by anti-war draft evaders. The State Senate launched a massive investigation, and after a bitter year long legal battle, ruled in favor of Low. In January of 1865, Niven was stripped of his Senate seat and Low assumed the office.

Despite aggressive campaigning by the Republican Watchman, which warned that a vote for Lincoln meant endless bloodshed and economic ruin, the public voted overwhelmingly in November of 1864 to keep the President in office, and the Copperhead’s momentum was deflated nationally as well as locally.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com.