Lincoln (110 page)

Northern men and women of letters also endorsed Lincoln’s reelection with unprecedented unanimity. Mostly from the Northeast, these writers initially viewed Lincoln with skepticism, thinking him an uncouth, uneducated frontiersman who was certainly not a gentleman, and his hesitant course on slavery had reinforced their suspicions. But their appreciation of the difficulties the President faced and of the skill with which he handled them had grown, and now, faced with a choice between McClellan and Lincoln, virtually all supported the Union candidate. Ralph Waldo Emerson was not active in politics, but he shared Lincoln’s view of the significance of the election. “Seldom in history,” he said, “was so much staked on a popular vote.—I suppose never in history.” “We breathe freer,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote when he felt confident that the President would have a second term. “The country will be saved.” Harriet Beecher Stowe was a firm supporter of Lincoln. She remembered how kindly the President had received her in the White House back in 1862, when, according to a family story, he exclaimed, “So this is the little lady who made this big war?” She defended Lincoln from irresponsible attacks, remarking, “Even the ass can kick safely and joyfully at a lion in a net.” Though John Greenleaf Whittier preferred Frémont, he was happy enough to see “all loyal men rallying in favor of Lincoln” and exclaimed, “Between him and that traitor platform [of the Democrats] who could hesitate!” With great pleasure Edward Everett
agreed to be one of the Massachusetts Republican electors, pledged to vote for Lincoln as an “entirely conscientious” and “eminently kind-hearted” man, who had “administered the Government with the deepest sense of responsibility to his country and his God.”

None of Lincoln’s literary supporters was more loyal or more influential than James Russell Lowell, one of the editors of the
North American Review.
The four long articles he published in 1864 amounted to an extended argument in favor of Lincoln’s reelection. The final one, “The Next General Election,” which appeared on the eve of the election, ridiculed Democratic talk of conciliating the Confederates and praised Lincoln as “a long-headed and long-purposed man,” who had “shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman.”

Even with such a strong party organization and so many influential backers, Lincoln could not be sure of reelection. The October elections for state officials in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania suggested how close the race still was. Lincoln spent the evening of October 11 at the War Department, where he, Stanton, Assistant Secretary of War Dana, and Hay eagerly scrutinized the telegraphic returns as they trickled in. Between dispatches the President read aloud several chapters from the recently published
Nasby Papers
by David Ross Locke. Lincoln found these comic sketches about Petroleum V. Nasby, a dissolute, semiliterate Copperhead who lived at Confederate X Roads, vastly amusing, and he once told Charles Sumner, “For the genius to write these things I would gladly give up my office.” Usually Stanton found Lincoln’s humor irritating, but this time he was in a good mood and enjoyed Nasby’s adventures almost as much as the President did.

From the beginning the news from Ohio and Indiana was good. But the Pennsylvania reports, as Hay remarked, began to be “streaked with lean.” Lincoln grew anxious because, he said, Pennsylvania’s “enormous weight and influence which, [if] cast definitely into the scale, w[oul]d close the campaign.” The final totals were not in for several days, when it became evident that the continuing Cameron-Curtin feud had hurt the ticket and the anticipated huge Republican majority had been whittled down to about 400 home votes in the entire state. Only the soldiers’ vote, overwhelmingly Republican, assured victory.

Two days after the October elections Lincoln tried to predict the national vote in November. Jotting down an estimate of the electoral vote, he calculated that McClellan would carry New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, all of the border states, and Illinois, with a total of 114 electoral votes, while he would get 117 from all the rest of the states. (Someone else added the three electoral votes of Nevada to his column.) It was too close for comfort.

But in the next few days he became more optimistic. Republican strength in Indiana and Ohio proved greater than anticipated. Maryland adopted a constitution outlawing slavery. The soldier vote was overwhelmingly Republican. And Republicans could take heart from the vigorous campaign that Sheridan was waging to clear Early’s Confederates out of the Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln revised his thinking. “It does look as if the people wanted me to stay here a little longer,” he told a visitor, “and I suppose I shall have to, if they do.”

During the remaining weeks of the campaign he did his best to make the outcome certain. He continued to try to consolidate his party by sending his private secretary out to Missouri with a view to mediating between the Charcoal and Claybank factions. Nicolay found that the endless party feud in that state “hinged, not on either principle or policy, but upon personal spite and greed for spoils,” and he tried to persuade both factions that it was in their best interests to support Lincoln’s reelection. Lincoln encouraged soldier voting in the field so enthusiastically that E. B. Washburne said, “If it could be done in no other way, the president would take a carpet bag and go around and collect those votes himself.” He even went so far as to permit Republican agents to use a government steamer on the Mississippi River to collect the ballots of sailors on the federal gunboats. On election day hundreds of federal employees in Washington were furloughed in order to return to their homes and vote. “Even the camps and hospitals are depleted,” reported the banker Henry D. Cooke; “the streets wear a quiet Sunday air—in the Department building[s], the empty corridors respond with hollow echoes to the foot fall of the solitary visitor; the hotels are almost tenantless, and the street cars drone lazily along the half-filled seats.”

The election went off smoothly. From the earliest returns it was clear that the Republicans had won a huge victory; they carried every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky. The Democrats had waged a vigorous campaign with a united party, and Democratic candidates made a strong showing in the cities and in those counties where there were large numbers of Irish-American and German-American voters. The 45 percent of the popular vote that McClellan received was more than respectable, especially in view of the fact that all the Southern states were still out of the Union and, of course, not voting. Republican success was due largely to the same groups of voters who had supported the party in 1860—native-born farmers in the countryside, better-off skilled workers and professional men in the city, and voters of New England descent everywhere. As in 1860, younger voters were especially attracted to the Republican party, and the soldier vote went overwhelmingly for Lincoln.

Election night was rainy and foggy in Washington, and the President spent the evening at the War Department waiting for the returns. The first reports were encouraging, and he sent them over to Mrs. Lincoln, saying, “She is more anxious than I.” Presently Thomas T. Eckert, head of the telegraph office, came in, wet and muddy because he had fallen while crossing the
street. In a genial mood, the President was reminded of another rainy evening back in 1858 when he had been on the square at Springfield reading the returns on his contest with Douglas for the Senate. On his way home he nearly fell in the muddy street, but he recovered himself and thought, “It’s a slip and not a fall.” “For such an awkward fellow,” he remarked to the group in the telegraph office, “I am pretty sure-footed.”

With Charity for All

“L
aus Deo!”
George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary on the day after the election. “The crisis has been past, and the most momentous popular election ever held since ballots were invented has decided against treason and disunion.... The American people can be trusted to take care of the national honor.” “How glorious the result of the election,” echoed one of Senator John Sherman’s correspondents. “Language cannot describe nor imagination conceive its importance to our country and the world. It is the great political event in all history.”

Lincoln himself rejoiced that the balloting “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.” But he was careful not to seek personal advantage from his victory. On election night when Gustavus V. Fox pointed out to him that two of the most vehement Radical critics of the administration had been defeated and crowed that “retribution has come upon them both,” Lincoln remarked: “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. Perhaps I may have too little of it, but I never thought it paid.” He had no intention of using his impressive mandate to settle old quarrels with his Republican critics. “I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics,” he said. Nor did he gloat over the defeat of the Democrats. On November 10, when serenaders came to the north portico of the White House to celebrate his victory, he appeared in a second-floor window to make a brief response. Instead of celebrating the Republican triumph, he sought reconciliation with his political foes, asking, “Now that the election is over, may not all... reunite in a common effort, to save our common country?” “For my own part,”
he continued, “I have striven, and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”

The President’s address did not placate his bitterest enemies. Pro-Confederate sympathizers in the North viewed Lincoln’s reelection as a disaster. Most leaders of the Confederacy shared that opinion. Jefferson Davis and his associates had cherished the hope that Lincoln would be defeated. To that end, in the months before the election Confederate emissaries in Canada had tried to influence Northern opinion through the aborted peace negotiations with Horace Greeley and through financial subvention for the Vallandigham Peace Democrats; they had planned an uprising at Chicago during the Democratic National Convention; they had sent agents to incite violence in Chicago and New York on election day; and they had staged raids on the Great Lakes and at St. Albans, Vermont. None of these tactics had persuaded the North to repudiate Lincoln. Sadly Confederate newspapers lamented that henceforth Southerners had to recognize that “the people who lately called us brethren” were “insatiable for our blood”—at least so long as they were led by “a vulgar buffoon” who exercised more autocratic powers than “King, Emperor, Czar, Kaiser, or even despotic Caesar himself.”

Facing certain defeat unless some drastic measures could be taken, Confederates in the final months of 1864 began to explore their options. Some looked to further peace negotiations with the North. Others sought foreign intervention, and President Davis sent the wealthy Louisiana planter Duncan Kenner abroad to offer emancipation of the slaves in return for British and French recognition. Many Southerners were willing to take the desperate risk of enrolling blacks in the Confederate armies. And, inevitably, a few began to think that the only way to avert Confederate defeat was by removing the head of the Union government.

The idea of eliminating Abraham Lincoln was not a new one in 1864. Even before his first election in 1860 he began to receive threats against his life. Initially these threats caused him some concern—and they made Mary frantic with worry. As President-elect, he had felt obliged to make a secret night trip through Baltimore to avoid attack by secessionists. But once he was settled in the White House, he ceased to pay much attention to the danger and directed his secretaries to throw away most threatening letters without showing them to him. By 1864, Lincoln told Francis B. Carpenter such letters no longer caused him apprehension. When the artist expressed surprise, he replied, “Oh, there is nothing like getting
used
to things!”

Lincoln believed that in a democratic society the Chief Executive must not be screened from the public. “It would never do,” he told a member of Halleck’s staff, “for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an
emperor.” In addition, he recognized that it was impossible for him to be fully protected. If a group of conspirators plotted his death, he said, “no vigilance could keep them out. . . . A conspiracy to assassinate, if such there were, could easily obtain a pass to see me for any one or more of its instruments.”

Consequently, like many other American presidents, Lincoln took few precautions to protect his security. During the first years of his presidency he often took long walks through the streets of Washington late at night or in the early morning hours, either alone or with a single companion. Nearly every night before going to bed Lincoln strolled through the densely shaded White House grounds to the War Department, often with no escort or guard. During the hot months when the Lincolns stayed at the Soldiers’ Home, he often rode back and forth to the White House on horseback or in an unguarded carriage. He frequently attended the theater in Washington accompanied only by Mary, or sometimes Tad, and one or two civilian friends. His indifference to security on these occasions drove his old friend Ward Lamon, the marshal of the District of Columbia who felt responsible for his safety, nearly to distraction. Once Lamon angrily offered to resign when he heard that the President had gone to the theater attended only by Charles Sumner and the Baron Gerolt, the elderly Prussian minister, “neither of whom,” Lamon sneered, “could defend himself against an assault from any able-bodied woman in this city.”