Jehoiada "Jee" Hagadorn (died 1862) was an American miller and Radical Republican activist from Cortland County, New York. During the American Civil War, he enthusiastically supported abolitionism and the Union war effort. After Copperhead Democrats won the 1862 state elections in New York, Hagedorn spread rumors of a pro-Confederate conspiracy to spread smallpox throughout the North and sabotage the Union war effort. He ultimately committed suicide after leading a riot he believed had caused his daughter's death, unaware that she had survived.
Biography[]
Jee Hagadorn and his family
Jehoiada Hagadorn was born in Munsons Corners, Cortland County, New York, and he became an evangelical Methodist and temperance fanatic during the Second Great Awakening. Hagadorn developed staunch abolitionist views due to his theology, and he became a leading Radical Republican in his small community. However, he was opposed to the enfranchisement of women, seeing Susan B. Anthony and her allies as preaching the "heretical doctrine of free love." He had two children, Benaiah (nicknamed "Ni") and Esther. During the American Civil War, Hagadorn and the other moralistic Republicans in town harassed and ostracized the vocal Copperhead Abner Beech, who believed that the violent coercion of the Confederacy into rejoining the Union was unconstitutional. He opposed his daughter's courtship of Thomas Jefferson Beech, Abner's son, despite Thomas' staunch support for the war effort. After the Battle of Antietam, Hagadorn accused traitors in the Union Army of letting Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia escape across the Potomac River and called for them to be burned. He also called his son Benaiah a "sorry disappointment" for refusing to enlist in the Union Army.
Hagadorn's body
After the November 1862 midterm elections saw the election of Copperhead Democrats like gubernatorial candidate Horatio Seymour down the ballot in New York, Hagadorn incited a mob of radicals to attack Beech's home in retribution. Hagadorn spread conspiracy theories that Confederate agents across the North shared in an imagined conspiracy by George B. McClellan and other Democratic Union Army generals to betray the North, and that Confederate agents from Canada would spread smallpox throughout the North. Hagadorn and his mob set fire to Beech's farmhouse, where his daughter had attempted to warn the Beeches and the Hurley family about her father's plans. On finding his daughter's locket in the smoldering rubble of the farmhouse, Hagadorn mistakenly believed his daughter to have died in the blaze and, distraught, he returned to his mill and hanged himself.