Quotes About Copperheads

My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads.

Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all." "Abraham Lincoln was no Republican." "Hello?" "The Republicans in Congress hated him like poison. The goddammed Copperheads did everything they could to sabotage him. They cheered when he was killed, because then they could claim him as a martyr and rip off the South in his name.

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight"—a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.