The Civil War, often glorified in films, wasn’t exactly a hit with everyone. Sure, Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of praise now, but back then, his wartime presidency faced some serious pushback for various reasons. Hidden within the grand stories of battles and politics is a quieter, yet powerful, struggle. This is the almost forgotten tale of a group of fathers who made a solemn promise: to keep their sons out of the bloody maw of the American Civil War.
They stood strong against a government they saw as a mindless, hungry beast, devouring the nation’s young with an insatiable appetite for blood and sacrifice. Their desperate, clever schemes to disrupt the war machine and snatch their sons from the battlefield are now barely a whisper in history, almost lost to memory. But their bold resistance, their sheer determination against overwhelming odds, deserves to be remembered. It speaks to a basic human truth: the deep and lasting love of a parent for their child, a love powerful enough to challenge the very forces of history itself.
My great-great-grandfather, Francis “Frank” Gaume, a 19-year-old farmhand, volunteered for the Union Army, lured by a $300 bonus—a substantial sum at the time. Concerns about a potential Confederate invasion of Ohio and other northern states also motivated his decision to defend his country. At this point, there was no widespread talk of forced conscription into an unpopular war. Public sentiment had recently seen a minor uplift following news of a Union victory in a horrific battle, where Confederate casualties significantly outnumbered those of the Yankees.
Frank was what was known as a “repeater.” He enlisted more than once during the war. His first enlistment was for nine months from the fall of 1862 to the spring of 1863. In that time, Frank saw action in three battles, one of which lasted four days and during that time he was wounded.
When his first enlistment ended in June of 1863 Frank returned home to his family farm in Stark County Ohio. Frank’s father, Jean Baptiste Xavier Jennin-Gaume, died before the start of the war. Though many of Frank’s father’s relatives and the relatives of his mother, Elise, lived in Stark County, there was a branch of the Gaume family who had moved to nearby Holmes County, Ohio, before the start of the war.
It was the family of Frank’s uncle, his father’s brother, Louis Jeanin-Gaume. Sometime in the 1850s, Louis moved his family to the bucolic hill country of Holmes county, to take up farming and perhaps some mining. These were tight knit families that like all patriotic Americans, loved this country for many reasons and three of those were being allowed to practice their religion without fear, freedom to speak in their own languages, and to be able to vote for whomever they choose, and for this, they expect only one thing in return, and that is to be left alone.
Following the untimely death of my great-great-grandmother, Della Pickering, in 1868 and into the later part of the 1870s, my great-great-grandfather’s whereabouts were at times uncertain. He liked to roam around. However, it is established that 28-year-old, Frank Gaume, married 19-year-old, Justine Blanchard in 1871 (some records suggest that Justine may have been as young as 14 when she married Frank) .
Although no death certificate for Frank Gaume is available in the records I received from the National Archives, one exists for his second wife, Justine (Blanchat) Gaume, who passed away on April 7, 1936, in Kansas City, Missouri. Her death certificate identifies Justine’s father as “Laurance O. Blanchat,” a name that surfaces in a distinct context related to an event involving armed resistance against the US government deep in central Ohio during the darkest days of the Civil War. This incident ended with the indictment and apprehension of Justine’s father, as well as similar charges brought against Frank Gaume’s uncle, Louis.
In the spring of 1863, anti-draft protests erupted in the northern states, including an incident in Holmes County, Ohio, where some of Frank Gaume’s family members were involved. Justine’s father, Laurence Blanchet (Blanchard), emerged as a key figure in the uprising. Although relatively obscure, I found this incident intriguing and conducted research using contemporary newspaper accounts, official military records, and a book written by a retired Ohio history teacher. (Drouhard, Patrick J. It Don’t Look Right For The Times: The Factual History of the Holmes County Rebellion. Private publication (2005),)
In March of 1863, the U.S. Congress enacted the draft (The Conscription Act), which affected male citizens aged 20 to 45. Exemptions were granted to those who paid $300 or provided a substitute. The draft’s enforcement encountered resistance in the Northern states, with some expressing discontent over the unequal treatment of rich and poor citizens.
Opposition grew as federal enrollment officers prepared to enforce the act. In several instances, these officers faced armed resistance. In Holmes County, Ohio, in June 1863, an enrollment officer’s request for 300 soldiers to handle a group of insurgents illustrated the intensity of the opposition. The conflict began with confrontations between enrollment officers and locals. It started with a few rocks thrown at an enrollment officer. Eventually, armed resistance escalated, leading to exchanges of gunfire between draft opponents and soldiers.
The outcome involved indicting 26 men, with 13 facing treason charges. One of the men arrested for treason was Laurent Blanchat, whose daughter, Justine, later married my gg-grandfather, Frank Gaume. In several accounts, Mr. Blanchat has been described as the ringleader of the men involved in the incident, and the group had met and planned at his farm.
Also arrested was Mr. Blanchat’s neighbor, Louis Gaume, the uncle of Frank Gaume and another neighbor, Peter Drouhard, whose descendant, Patrick J. Drouhard, an Ohio historian, wrote and published a history of the events of Holmes County.
Louis Gaume was never actually arrested and his case was nolled in 1866. Laurant Blanchat was arrested by the Army; while Peter Drouhard surrendered himself in Cleveland in 1864.
Those charged with treason saw their cases nolled in the end. However, Mr. Blanchat was found guilty of conspiring to resist the execution of the law and assaulting an officer. He was sentenced to six months hard labor in the Ohio penitentiary, but was pardoned by President Lincoln in September of 1864.
In his analysis of the Holmes County Rebellion, Mr. Drouhard, categorizes the event as “not as an insurrection, nor rebellion against the US government, [but] was one of resistance to the [military] enrolment” and was only “loosely organized”.
Most of the men involved in the resistance were Franco-Swiss Catholic immigrants who had been in this country since the 1830s. These were hard-scrabble, dirt-poor farmers who probably had come to see the war as a huge monstrous machine gobbling up their sons and destroying the economy under the leadership of tyrants. A thing that many Americans can relate to.
Augustina Blanchard, also known as Josephine Blancherd, Justine Blanchet, and Jessie M. Gaume, was born in 1850 in Stark County, Ohio. Census records detail her presence in various households, including that of Lawrence Blanchard and Marguerite Duplain in Black Creek, Holmes County, Ohio, during 1860. She married Francis Gaume on July 12, 1871, in Napoleon, Holmes County, Ohio. Kansas census records show their family had seven children, all half-siblings to my great-grandmother, Della Gaume DeBacker.
Attached is a PDF clipping of an article that appeared in the November 14, 1967 edition of the Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune. It is an opinion piece written by a woman in Millersburg, Ohio, a village in Holmes County.
The writer doesn’t seem to know or care whether “their rebellion stemmed from a religious, political, or humanitarian basis.” Which seems to make her position a neutral one.
I take issue with only one thing, and that is when the writer makes the wild accusation that “the belligerent men of Holmes County took the logical course open to them and met in secret in the “castles” of the ”Knights of the Golden Circle.”
The problem is she repeated a hundred-year-old slur – the lie was that the group of men from the village Napoleon, Ohio, numbering no more than a 1000 men, were part of the vast conspiracy led by the Knights of the Golden Circle whose goal was to create a Confederacy of the (Old) Northwest by having the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio secede from the Union and force an end to the war. The supposed outcome of this would be that the South would be allowed to form a vast slave Empire encircling the Gulf of Mexico centered on the port of Havana Cuba.
Of course none of this fantasy is true. According to a descendant of one of the men involved, the group had only one goal in mind and that was preventing their sons from being taken by the US Marshalls and forced into the army where they were certain to die either on the battlefield, in a hospital bed, or in a POW Camp.
Moving on, Ms. Stoner then observes: “What is relevant is the fact that when people disagree with what is imposed upon them by their government, they will demonstrate, whether it be by picket signs and marches, or by joining secret organizations and carrying rifles. The rebels who demonstrated against the draft in 1863 are scarcely different from the Youth of today in their demonstrations. Only the method differs. The resentment is the same.”
Gathering Leaves 
What a powerful and interesting post. Now you’ve made me wonder about hubby’s ancestors who were early into the Union Army…maybe that bonus was a sweetener?
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