Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (53 page)

THE ELECTION OF 1864: “THE SECOND BIRTH OF OUR NATION”

Probably the greatest test of the ability of Lincoln’s administration to rally popular support came in the summer and fall of 1864. That year’s presidential election followed months of turbulence in public opinion. If by November the outcome appeared a foregone conclusion, that had certainly not been the case in the steamy days of summer, when Union hopes fell to one of their lowest points in the war. John Hay acknowledged those swirls of opinion when in June he reflected, “In the stress of this war politics have drifted out of the hands of politicians & are now more than ever subject to genuine popular currents.” Even so, Lincoln maintained his faith in the fundamental loyalty of the “honest . . . masses”: he was sure, he told the Congregationalist minister Edward N. Kirk, that they would never consent to disunion. But they could be misled into believing that reunion might be realized by means other than war. His administration’s task was to keep the hard reality before them. “Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.”
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Following the etiquette of the day, Lincoln avoided brashly soliciting a return to office, but by the fall of 1863 his ambition had become clear enough. His desire for reelection was understandable in human terms: however oppressive the burdens and cares of office, he conceded that “it would be a very sweet satisfaction” to win the approval of his fellow citizens. But he could invoke a public interest, too: “swapping horses in the middle of the stream” would be risky and destabilizing, and the endorsement of his policies would put a large nail in the coffin of the Confederacy.
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His hopes would depend to a large degree on factors beyond his direct control, for public confidence was intimately connected with battlefield success. Though Lincoln had real faith in Grant and Sherman, and in their plans for a broad-front spring offensive into the Confederate heartlands, he could not be sure how quickly they would press on to a signal victory; he could also reflect, as Nicolay put it, that “our Spring campaigns . . . have so generally been failures that people are beginning to feel superstitious about them.”
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But whatever the military contingencies, there was still much the president could do, and rather than allow inertia to stifle all action, Lincoln busied himself with the election throughout the year, working to ensure an efficient harnessing of the agencies of home front mobilization: party, churches, and army. Of these, the most problematic was his party, which was riven by factionalism in Washington and beyond.

Lincoln had to address these party divisions well before the election campaign, for there would be no reelection without renomination. He knew he faced opposition from a minority within most of the state parties, mainly from radicals who doubted his commitment to the rights of freedmen in the postwar order, but also from those who thought that he was simply not up to the job. Chase—radical, ambitious, confident of his intellectual superiority, and enjoying an independent power base through his command of Treasury Department patronage—posed the chief threat. In February Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy called on the party to ditch Lincoln and adopt Chase, but his circular letter provoked a sharp backlash, not least since the war at last appeared to be going well. Many state Republican organizations came out strongly for Lincoln, and even Ohio (the treasury secretary’s home state) endorsed the president. Chase unpersuasively denied advance knowledge of the circular and shortly announced he was not a candidate for his party’s nomination.

Republican intrigues against Lincoln did not end there. As Nicolay dyspeptically remarked, various other names were floated by a few malcontents who wanted to establish “the nucleus of a little faction in opposition to Lincoln, but there is not the remotest prospect that their eggs will hatch.”
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One of those named was Grant, who actually had no wish to challenge the incumbent and whom Lincoln brought to the capital to be ceremoniously promoted to general-in-chief. Another was Frémont, who was more open to overtures of this kind but who lacked any real power base outside the Missouri community of antislavery radicals and German-Americans. At Cleveland on the last day of May these westerners joined with a section of organized abolitionism, represented by Wendell Phillips, and a cluster of Democrats to nominate Frémont on an independent ticket designed to siphon off Republican votes. Few Lincolnites, and certainly not Lincoln himself, betrayed serious alarm at a movement—the Radical Democracy—lacking a broad base of public support.

By the time the Republicans gathered at Baltimore in early June, Lincoln’s nomination was a foregone conclusion. His men dominated the party’s national executive and controlled the state delegations, largely made up of federal officeholders who owed their jobs to the president. For months Lincoln had exhausted himself in pursuit of Republican harmony, intervening as mediator in factional conflicts within several states, and much of the goodwill he enjoyed in the party at large derived from a belief that he was well suited to hold it together: even antislavery radicals acknowledged the benefits of his “
patriotic
policy” of uniting “men of varying shades of sentiment upon a policy radical enough to
destroy slavery,
conservative enough
to save the nation.
”
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At the same time, even those who disliked Lincoln saw that he enjoyed a warmth of support amongst ordinary voters and soldiers that exceeded his standing with his party’s leaders.

The convention, meeting on Lincoln’s doorstep, pursued the president’s agenda. Following the Army of the Potomac’s horrendous recent losses in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania, the mood was generally somber, darkening further as delegates began to learn of yet more slaughter, at Cold Harbor; but Grant’s bulldog grit, as Lincoln termed it, and remarkable determination to keep pushing forward to destroy the enemy and capture Richmond—at whatever cost—provided its own hope and grisly inspiration.
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Delegates unanimously renominated Lincoln and rallied behind a platform which, at Lincoln’s insistence, nailed its colors proudly to an emancipation amendment to the Constitution, endorsed the vigorous prosecution of the war, celebrated the fighting men, black as well as white, and demanded the Confederates’ unconditional surrender. To this explicit emphasis on liberty (a stunning riposte to the more tentative stance of Frémont’s Radical Democrats) the convention married an equal stress on the party’s nonpartisan and inclusive Unionism: they would campaign not as Republicans but as a broad-based National Union party. To reinforce their appeal to conservatives and to border-state men, delegates chose to nominate for vice president not the New England incumbent, Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin, but the Tennessee loyalist, military governor, and War Democrat Andrew Johnson. Lincoln refused to give even a private indication of his personal preference, but many of those who swept Johnson onto the ticket did so in the firm belief that they were following the president’s wishes.

Developments in the short term served only to reinforce the sense of Lincoln’s firm control. After yet another episode in which Chase provoked a dispute with the president over patronage appointments, the secretary of the treasury proffered his resignation, now for the third time. It proved once too often. Lincoln, safely renominated and exasperated by Chase’s ill-judged attempt to assert his authority, accepted the resignation, telling the secretary that they had “reached a point of mutual embarrassment” that threatened the public good. For a replacement Lincoln turned to William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a sound party man, widely respected in Congress yet no threat to the president. Then, soon afterward, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill: to a measure which showed that some radicals continued to oppose his reelection, he gave a party leader’s unequivocal response, underscoring his authority and reassuring the moderates and conservatives of the National Union coalition that the administration would not be the prisoner of congressional radicals.

Yet during the days of high summer, in July and August, the mood in the party grew darker, increasing the pressure on Lincoln to reconsider his position. The stalemate in Virginia continued, with Grant now besieging Petersburg after the unprecedented slaughter of May and June; Sherman, defeated at Kennesaw Mountain, continued at only a snail’s pace toward Atlanta; Jubal Early’s Confederate raids from the Shenandoah on Washington and other targets, though endangering few lives, inflicted humiliating political damage. With the Union’s coffers depleted and another draft imminent, opposition Democrats played on a deepening war-weariness to demand negotiations to end the conflict.

Calls for peace extended well beyond the ranks of the usual Copperheads, who maintained that only the administration’s intransigence over emancipation prevented a settlement. Greeley, dreading a future stained by “new rivers of human blood,” learned that Confederate diplomats were at Niagara Falls on a peace mission. He urged the president to negotiate. Lincoln realized that this was not a serious overture from Jefferson Davis but a ploy to cause political mayhem and swing an election which gave the Confederacy its best hope of independence. Yet he knew, too, that the public mood would not excuse any missed opportunities for peace. Cunningly, he appointed the reluctant Greeley as his envoy to Niagara Falls, correctly believing that nothing would come of a meeting with men who, it unsurprisingly transpired, had been given no power to negotiate. He also set his political terms so high—in a letter “To Whom It May Concern”—that he knew they would be unacceptable: peace proposals, he insisted, must be based on reunion and “the abandonment of slavery.” But in setting conditions which appeared fiercer than the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln not only gave a political weapon to the opposition, but prompted howls from those National Union party conservatives, and especially War Democrats, committed to reunion alone as the war’s goal.
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The party’s demoralization reached its nadir during mid- and late August. Joseph Medill, editor of the
Chicago Tribune,
was just one who feared that “thanks to Mr. Lincoln’s blunders & follies we will be kicked out of the White House.” Alarmed at the implications of a Copperhead victory, well-to-do Republicans sold their greenbacks—federal paper currency unredeemable for precious metal—and bought land. The “diseased restlessness” of “growling Republicans,” John Hay reported from Illinois, had left the party prey to “the elements of disorganization that destroyed the whigs.” Nicolay showed a similar contempt for the “croakers” and “weak-kneed d—d fools” who had fallen into “a disastrous panic—a sort of political Bull Run” and who thought that salvation would come only by replacing Lincoln with a new candidate.
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Radical Republicans, including Tilton of the
Independent
and Greeley, met in New York to plan a new convention, at Cincinnati in late September, which would choose a new standard-bearer—perhaps Ben Butler, or Chase, or even Grant.

Four days later, on August 22, the party’s national chairman, Henry Raymond, told Lincoln that only “the most resolute and decided action on the part of the Government and its friends” could prevent the key states of Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—and so the country—“from falling into hostile hands”: a peace commission to Richmond, specifying reunion but not emancipation as the basis of negotiations, would alone persuade the Union’s doubters that the administration was not deliberately protracting the war in order to secure abolition. Lincoln dallied with the idea, believing that Davis would myopically turn down the proposal and so reinvigorate northern Unionism. But on reflection he chose to reject what would have appeared an ignominious surrender, “worse than losing the Presidential contest.” And that contest did indeed seem to be lost. In a despairing private memorandum of August 23 he deemed it “exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected”: in that case he must “so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration,” for Lincoln knew that the Democrats’ nominee—even if a Union loyalist like McClellan—would be bound by a platform that would open the door to de facto Confederate independence.
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Yet even in the darkest days Lincoln resisted all thought of withdrawing from the race, convinced it would produce not a Republican victory but party confusion and infighting. Denying that he had been “seduced by . . . the lust of power,” he caustically asked if those who charged him with hurting the common cause had “thought of that common cause when trying to break me down?” His supporters around the country voiced their alarm. “You have the hearts of the
people
and will have
their votes,
” Samuel F. Cary wrote from Cincinnati. “Your withdrawal would disintegrate the union party & destroy us. A victory by Grant & Sherman will secure you every electoral vote in the Union and we will elect you at all events.”
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It was a prescient judgment, for on September 2 Sherman would capture Atlanta—the Confederates’ workshop and a bridgehead for controlling the Gulf states—and a little later Sheridan would crush Early’s forces in the Shenandoah. In fact, the spirits of Union men had begun to lift even before then, when the Democrats adopted a “surrender platform” at their Chicago convention: nominating McClellan as presidential candidate could not disguise Vallandigham’s inky thumbprints on a program which deemed the war a failure and called for a truce as a step toward ending the conflict “on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.” However, it was mainly the breakthrough on the battlefield that effected what Nicolay described as “a perfect revolution in feeling,” for most Republicans agreed that the Atlanta victory alone “ought to win the Presidential contest for us,” and they turned to that campaign “hopeful, jubilant, . . . and confident of success.”
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The party now drew together. A flood of reports told the White House that Republican Cassandras—the “parcel of sore headed, disappointed, impracticable politicians,” as one of Lincoln’s Illinois associates dismissed them—had been silenced. One of those “soreheads,” the
Independen
t
’s Theodore Tilton, promised Nicolay that the “sudden lighting up of the public mind” would surely heal divisions. “Rather than have Chicago and McClellan triumph,” he declared, “I would cheerfully give up my life, with only an hour’s preparation for death. My hands are tired with writing private letters, far & near, counseling all my friends to unite on Mr. Lincoln.” The plans for a new convention collapsed, as state governors emphatically endorsed the president. Only Frémont’s candidacy stood in the way of electoral unity. Probably through the efforts of Senator Zachariah Chandler, concerned like other radicals that a split vote would open the door to McClellan and “treachery,” a deal was brokered by which Frémont would withdraw if Montgomery Blair left the cabinet. Lincoln liked his postmaster general and admired his administrative ability but knew he was an increasing liability. Blair’s deep conservatism on racial issues and hot-blooded propensity for making personal enemies had alienated the party’s radicals, notably in his own Maryland and in Frémont’s Missouri. “Blair every one hates,” Henry Wilson of Massachusetts told Lincoln, “tens of thousands of men will be lost to you or will give a reluctant vote on account of the Blairs.” Frémont pulled out on September 17, and six days later Lincoln wrote to the loyal Blair requesting his resignation, which was duly forthcoming.
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