Lincoln (109 page)

Only once was he tempted to reply to a personal attack. Democratic newspapers now revived the canard that while touring the Antietam battlefield in September 1862 he had asked Ward Lamon to sing “a comic negro song”; they claimed that such behavior demonstrated that he was not “fit for any office of trust, or even for decent society.” Belligerently Lamon attempted to refute the slander, but Lincoln, thinking it would be better simply
to state the facts, wrote out his own account of how he had indeed—days after the battle and far from the soldiers’ cemetery—asked Lamon to sing “a little sad song.” Then he told Lamon not to publish his reply, saying, “I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right.”

Lincoln’s public appearances during the campaign were rare. In June he did attend the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia to raise money for the Sanitary Commission and other groups providing for the needs of the soldiers, but he said little. “I do not really think it is proper in my position for me to make a political speech,” he told a group at the Hotel Continental, “and ... being more of a politician than anything else,... I am without anything to say.” When volunteer regiments, on their way home as their terms of enlistment expired, came by the White House, he thanked them for their service and said nothing more partisan than that they should “rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government.”

But if Lincoln did not take a public role in the campaign, he was intimately involved in all the details of behind-the-scenes management. Indeed, as Fessenden remarked, “The President is too busy looking after the election to think of any thing else.” Repeatedly he intervened to end party squabbling. In Pennsylvania, for example, antagonism between the Cameron and Curtin factions was so great that, as Lincoln was told, it produced “distraction and indifference,
which may, possibly, be fatal.
” Cameron seemed to be conducting the campaign primarily with a view to his own election to the Senate, while Governor Curtin was so disaffected that he predicted “the reelection of this admin[istration] is [going] to send us to hell.” Lincoln summoned the Pennsylvania governor, with his aide, Alexander K. McClure, to the White House and used all his personal powers of persuasion to get his people to work with the Cameron forces until after the election.

The President intervened in congressional contests when local feuds among Republicans threatened to affect the outcome of the election. In New York, a group of Conservative Republicans was working to defeat the election of Roscoe Conkling, the party’s nominee for Congress. When Conkling’s friends asked Lincoln’s assistance, he replied with a strong letter: “I am for the regular nominee in all cases; and... no one could be more satisfactory to me as the nominee in that District, than Mr. Conkling.” Again, when he learned that the postmaster of Philadelphia was using his influence to defeat Representative William D. Kelley, he summoned the official to Washington and told him bluntly: “I am well satisfied with Judge Kelly as an M.C. and I do not know that the man who might supplant him would be as satisfactory.” The postmaster could vote for whom he chose, but he must “not constrain any of [his] subordinates to do other than as he thinks fit.”

Lincoln recognized the influence that newspapers had on public opinion, and he tried to enlist the support of prominent editors. He even went so far as to approach the notorious James Gordon Bennett, whose
New York Herald
had yet to take a public position on the election. Because the circulation and influence of the
Herald
were so great, Lincoln’s New York friends suggested that it might be worthwhile to woo the editor with flattery. They knew that Bennett, whose reputation for immorality was as well deserved as his paper’s reputation for scandal, longed for respectability. When they approached him, the canny editor asked bluntly, “Will I be a welcome visitor at the White House if I support Mr. Lincoln?” The President may have shared John Hay’s conviction that Bennett was “too pitchy to touch,” and he initially offered only a vague promise that “whoever aids the right, will be appreciated and remembered” after the election. Bennett responded that the offer “did not amount to much.” When intermediaries began to explore the possibility that Lincoln might offer Bennett an appointment as American minister to France, the tone of the
Herald
toward the administration became notably kinder. Bennett did not endorse Lincoln, telling a go-between to say to the President “that puffs did no good, and he could accomplish most for you by not mentioning your name.” But the bitterness of his attacks on Lincoln diminished. Though he continued to call Lincoln a failure, he termed McClellan “no less a failure... though a failure perhaps in a less repulsive way,” and in the end the
Herald
endorsed neither candidate. After the election Lincoln paid the price for Bennett’s neutrality by offering the editor the French ministry, which he knew he would decline.

But there were limits to what Lincoln would do to secure a second term. He did not even consider canceling or postponing the election. Even had that been constitutionally possible, “the election was a necessity.” “We can not have free government without elections,” he explained; “and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” He did not postpone the September draft call, even though Republican politicians from all across the North entreated him to do so. Because Indiana failed to permit its soldiers to vote in the field, he was entirely willing to furlough Sherman’s regiments so that they could go home and vote in the October state elections—but he made a point of telling Sherman, “They need not remain for the Presidential election, but may return to you at once.”

Though it was clear that the election was going to be a very close one, Lincoln did not try to increase the Republican electoral vote by rushing the admission of new states like Colorado and Nebraska, both of which would surely have voted for his reelection. On October 31, in accordance with an act of Congress, he did proclaim Nevada a state, but he showed little interest in the legislation admitting the new state. Despite the suspicion of both Democrats and Radicals, he made no effort to force the readmission of Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Southern states, partially reconstructed but still under military control, so that they could cast their electoral votes for him. He reminded a delegation from Tennessee that it was the Congress, not the Chief Executive, that had the power to decide whether a state’s
electoral votes were to be counted and announced firmly, “Except it be to give protection against violence, I decline to interfere in any way with any presidential election.”

Both what Lincoln did in the campaign of 1864 and what he refrained from doing reflected his sense of the importance of this election. In part, as he admitted, he sought a second term out of “personal vanity, or ambition.” “I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” he said frankly. “God knows I do not want the labor and responsibility of the office for another four years. But I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years Administration endorsed.” Honestly believing that he could “better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do,” he wanted the opportunity “to finish this job of putting down the rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country.”

His wife wanted a second term at least as much as he did. To Mary Lincoln, reelection meant not merely vindication of her husband but escape from her own personal difficulties. After Willie’s death she had largely given up on refurbishing the White House and had turned to decorating and ornamenting herself. She went deeply into debt, purchasing clothing and jewelry from New York and Philadelphia merchants such as a white point lace shawl valued at $2,000, a pearl-and-diamond ring, an onyx breast pin with earrings, and two diamond-and-pearl bracelets. David Davis heard a rumor that she purchased three hundred pairs of kid gloves from a Washington merchant. “I must dress in costly materials,” she explained to Elizabeth Keckley, her dressmaker. “The people scrutinize every article that I wear with critical curiosity. The very fact of having grown up in the West, subjects me to more searching observation.” Convinced that her appearance was helping her husband’s bid for reelection, she also saw victory in November as a means of postponing a reckoning of her debts, which Lincoln did not know about. “If he is re-elected,” she told Mrs. Keckley, “I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs; but if he is defeated, then the bills will be sent in, and he will know all.”

Lincoln believed that there was more than personal satisfaction at stake in the 1864 election. He saw it as a test of the feasibility of democratic government. The will of the people was “the ultimate law for all.” If the people supported the Union cause, he said, they would act “for the best interests of their country and the world, not only for the present, but for all future ages.” If, on the other hand, “they should deliberately resolve to have immediate peace even at the loss of their country, and their liberty, I know not the power or the right to resist them. It is their own business, and they must do as they please with their own.” The decision they made would determine “the weal or woe of this great nation.”

This view of the 1864 election was shared by many Americans, including
some who had not hitherto been notably warm toward the Lincoln administration. Most African-Americans hoped and prayed for Lincoln’s reelection, even though few of them were allowed to vote. A few black spokesmen were reluctant to support this “fickle-minded man” who had been reluctant to announce emancipation, slow to enroll Negro troops, unwilling to fight for equal pay for blacks who did enlist, and publicly silent on Negro voting, and some, like Frederick Douglass, initially favored Frémont. But when the election narrowed to a choice between Lincoln and McClellan, African-Americans saw their duty clearly. At the National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse in October, the black Massachusetts lawyer John S. Rock put the choice concisely: “There are but two parties in the country today. The one headed by Lincoln is for Freedom and the Republic; and the other, by McClellan, is for Despotism and Slavery.”

Impressive as were the endorsements of such black leaders, Lincoln may have gained more solace from individual African-Americans who spoke only for themselves. Early in 1864 his old acquaintance William de Fleurville (Billy the Barber) wrote from Springfield, hoping that Lincoln would be reelected because then “the oppressed will shout the name of their deliverer, and generations to come will rise up and call you blessed.” Late in October the President had a visit from Sojourner Truth, the elderly black woman who, after having been sold three times on the auction block, escaped to freedom and afterward brought out other fugitives on the Underground Railroad. She declared that she “never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality,” and she was proud that the President wrote in her autograph book “with the same hand that signed the death-warrant of slavery.” “I felt that I was in the presence of a friend,” the old woman said, “and I now thank God from the bottom of my heart that I always advocated his cause.”

Though abolitionists had often been sharply critical of Lincoln, a majority of the reformers now favored his reelection. Earlier in the year the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was shattered after a debate between its two most notable leaders—Wendell Phillips, who announced that Lincoln had no commitment to liberty and was “knowingly preparing for a peace in disregard for the negro,” and William Lloyd Garrison, who countered that the President had shown great capacity for growth and had moved as fast as public opinion allowed. In the months that followed, Phillips became one of the most conspicuous supporters of Frémont’s candidacy and vowed that he would “cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election,” while Garrison insisted that if Lincoln had made mistakes “a thousand incidental errors and blunders are easily to be borne with on the part of him who, at one blow, severed the chains of three millions three hundred thousand slaves.”

The quarrel splintered the abolitionist movement, but Garrison and his followers retained control of the two most important periodicals, the
Liberator
and the
Anti-Slavery Standard,
both of which gave consistent support to
Lincoln’s campaign. Garrison himself attended the National Union Convention in Baltimore, and afterward he had two long interviews with the President. Much pleased “with his spirit, and the familiar and candid way in which he unbosomed himself,” the veteran abolitionist was more confident than ever of Lincoln’s desire “to uproot slavery, and give fair-play to the emancipated.”

The support the President received from Protestant religious groups was overwhelming. He had made a point of consulting religious leaders and of praising their contribution to the war effort. In May when a delegation from the Methodist Episcopal Church pointed out the denomination’s record for loyalty and support of the administration, he replied, “God bless the Methodist Church—bless all the churches—and blessed be God, Who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches.” The same month he offered thanks to the American Baptist Home Mission Society for “the effective and almost unanimous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country, and to liberty.” Now they returned the compliment. Methodist Bishop Gilbert Haven announced the church’s duty of the hour was to “march to the ballot-box, an army of Christ, with the banners of the Cross, and deposit, as she can, a million of votes for her true representative, and she will give the last blow to the reeling fiend.” As the
Christian Advocate and Journal
observed, “There probably never was an election in all our history into which the religion element entered so largely, and nearly all on one side.”