CHAPTER 35

The Fire in the Rear

A Lincoln victory in the 1864 elections was by no means assured. In fact, it was a forlorn hope. The North was winning the war, but slowly and at atrocious cost. Since Gettysburg and Vicksburg the South had been fighting a defensive war and losing, but not giving in. Lincoln had brought all the North’s greatly superior numbers and industrial power to bear now. By the start of 1864, Union armies were grinding inexorably into the heart of the Confederacy. Grant’s army chased Lee’s, both sides taking appalling casualties, while Sherman marched toward Atlanta. Lincoln unleashed his generals to wage all-out war, laying waste to cities, farmlands, rail lines.

But the progress was too slow for many war-weary Northerners, and there were demoralizing setbacks. In May 1864, Benjamin Butler, who was as incompetent in the field as he was tough in urban settings, muffed the opportunity to seize a virtually undefended Richmond and took a drubbing from an inferior Confederate force, losing four thousand men. Franz Sigel suffered a similar thrashing that same month. Lincoln had given in to Germans’ call to have Sigel back and sent him to West Virginia. Colonel Strother, who was serving there, grumbled, “The Dutch vote must be secured at all hazards for the Government and the sacrifice of West Virginia is a small matter.” Patrolling the Shenandoah Valley, Sigel led a small force to defeat against an even smaller Rebel force, which included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute. He was removed from command and would return to New York City for good.

Lincoln found himself besieged on all sides. He was fighting not just the Confederacy but the Democrats, the Copperheads and Butternuts, many members of his own party, and members of his cabinet. He was so unpopular with so many factions for so many reasons that even he considered it “exceedingly probable” that he would not be reelected.

As before, New Yorkers figured prominently among Lincoln’s enemies in the North and vigorously fanned the flames of what he called “the fire in the rear.” At the end of 1863 the Nassau Street publishing firm Dexter, Hamilton & Co. published a seventy-two-page pamphlet that appeared on city newsstands and was mailed to various opinion-makers and politicians, including President Lincoln. It was called Miscegenation, a new term for race-mixing. The anonymous author expressed a remarkably progressive attitude, predicting that “in the millennial future, the most perfect and highest type of manhood will not be white or black, but brown, or colored.” He argued that “whoever helps to unite the various races of men, helps to make the human family the sooner realize its great destiny.” He further suggested that the Republicans should add a pro-miscegenation plank to their upcoming campaign platform.

It all sounds reasonable enough today, but in the racial context of the Civil War a pro-miscegenation stand was outrageous and controversial in the extreme. The threat of the amalgamation of the races through sexual union had terrified conservative whites since colonial days, despite the fact that it went on constantly on the plantations of the South and in urban areas in the North like the Five Points, where the poor of all races and types were tossed together and did what came naturally. Most abolitionists had always been chary of the amalgamationist label. Some who were mailed the pamphlet approved of it and ran notices for it in their papers, but others were more circumspect.

It was Copperheads who reacted to Miscegenation the most hotly. Democrats thundered denunciations in Congress. Day-Book editor John Van Evrie coined a new word of his own, “subgenation,” for the natural inferiority of blacks, and frothed that white workers “had better cut the throats of their children at once” rather than let them grow up in a world of “degradation and amalgamation.” James McMaster used the opportunity to complain, “Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere.” Greeley made note of the “tolerably warm discussion” and of course weighed in, arguing that “if a white man pleases to marry a black woman, the mere fact that she is black gives no one a right to interfere to prevent or set aside such marriage. We do not say that such union would be wise, but we do distinctly assert that society has nothing to do with the wisdom of matches.” Manton Marble used this as a pretext for charging that Greeley and his fellow Black Republicans had indeed always been secret amalgamationists.

The pamphlet mailed to Lincoln included a respectful note from “Author of ‘Miscegenation’” with the request, “May I ask your permission to dedicate it to your excellency?” Lincoln was wise enough not to respond.

In November, two weeks after the election, Marble’s New York World would reveal that Miscegenation was a hoax, a satire of Republican attitudes toward race. An editor and a correspondent at the World had cooked it up. They had intended to trick Republicans into admitting their amalgamationist beliefs, but it was their fellow Copperheads who were most fooled.

A few months after Miscegenation first appeared, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce printed another hoax, this time unwittingly. On the morning of May 18 the two papers published an Associated Press dispatch from Washington reporting that because the war was not going as well as President Lincoln hoped, he was about to order a new draft of four hundred thousand more men. No other papers carried the report. New Yorkers responded with howls of dismay. Fearing the economic effects of the news, investors rushed to Wall Street that morning and sold off their stocks, switching to the comparative safety of gold. The stock market plunged and gold prices soared.

Within hours both the Associated Press and Secretary of State Seward declared the report fraudulent. Irate, Lincoln ordered General Dix to seize the two papers’ offices and arrest the editors for “wickedly and traitorously” printing false material “with intent to give aid and comfort to the enemy.” Dix wisely chose not to make any arrests, but he did shut the papers down for a few days. Since it was obvious that the two papers had been among the victims of the hoax, Lincoln’s already seriously sullied reputation regarding the rights of free speech and a free press took more damage he didn’t need in an election year. Democrats denounced the administration’s despotism once again; Governor Seymour went so far as to order the district attorney, A. Oakey Hall, to arrest Dix on a charge of kidnapping, but because Dix had not actually jailed the editors nothing came of it.

On Saturday, May 21, detectives did arrest the hoaxer: Joseph Howard, who happened to be the thirty-five-year-old son of Reverend Beecher’s friend John Tasker Howard. Joe Howard was a well-known journalist, formerly on the staff at the Times, now city editor at the Brooklyn Eagle. He was also a notorious practical joker. This time he went too far. He had invested in gold, forged the Associated Press report, then sold his gold when the price shot up. He was promptly sent to Fort Lafayette.

In July the war effort was still progressing too slowly for Lincoln, at least if he had any hope of being reelected. Sherman was bogged down in his siege of Atlanta, and Grant at Richmond. Lincoln did in fact issue a call for more conscripts—five hundred thousand, or one hundred thousand more than “Bogus Joe” Howard had put in his fraudulent dispatch. Lincoln ordered Howard’s release after one month. Reverend Beecher had quietly reached out to the president and interceded for his friend’s son. Granting Beecher’s request was Lincoln’s way of thanking him for a service he’d rendered in the spring of 1863. On a trip to England, supposedly to rest, Beecher had given a series of speeches, facing down hostile audiences from Edinburgh and Liverpool to London. The nearly complete shutting down of cotton shipments due to the Union blockade of the South had idled thousands of workers in British textile mills and seaports. The English government, which had always been sympathetic to its major supplier of cotton, was considering intervening in the war against the Union. Beecher spoke out passionately for the Union, against slavery, and against intervention. No one, not even he, believed his talks alone turned the tide, but England did stay out of the war, and Lincoln was very grateful for his effort.

Another newspaperman was thrown in jail the following month. In issue after issue of the Metropolitan Record, John Mullaly had been railing against the draft for more than a year. His extremism had prompted Archbishop Hughes to withdraw his support of the paper. Now federal marshals arrested Mullaly in his office on Broadway for his “incendiary, disloyal, and traitorous” editorials. He was released on $2,500 bail put up by a supporter and would continue editing the paper for the remainder of the war and several years after.

The Republicans held their convention in Baltimore that June. In the months leading up to it, of the New York papers only Raymond’s Times stood firmly behind Lincoln. “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten,” Greeley groaned, “and we must have another ticket.” In a February 23 Tribune editorial, he damned Lincoln with faint praise as “patriotic, honest, and faithful,” but “not infallible—not a genius—not one of those rare great men who mold their age.” In the Herald, Bennett was back to haranguing Lincoln. His February 19 editorial was an amazing rant: “President Lincoln is a joke incarnated. His election was a very sorry joke. The idea that such a man as he should be President of such a country as this is a very ridiculous joke.… His Cabinet is and always has been a standing joke. All his State papers are jokes.… His emancipation proclamation was a solemn joke. His recent proclamation of abolition and amnesty is another joke.… His intrigues to secure a renomination and the hopes he appears to entertain of a re-election are, however, the most laughable jokes of all.”

A week before the Republican convention, Greeley and the Radicals held their own separate gathering and nominated Frémont. Their platform included a proposal for a new amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery forever. Lincoln’s mainstream Republicans responded by renaming themselves the National Union Party. The Baltimore convention was tumultuous, but Lincoln and his supporters held out and trounced Frémont and the Radicals, winning the nomination with 507 votes to 22. Lincoln, seeking any inroad with Democrats, asked Vice President Hamlin to step aside. The party nominated as Lincoln’s running mate the only Southern Democrat who had backed him throughout the war, Andrew Johnson.

As chairman of the party now, Raymond—who was running for Congress himself—wrote most of the platform. It included language that opposed the Peace Democrats and any compromising with the Rebels; approved of the Emancipation Proclamation and included its own proposal for an amendment to the Constitution banning slavery for good; and added a plank meant to woo immigrant voters away from the Democracy, stating that “foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”

A month after the Republican convention, probably seething with envy of Raymond, Horace Greeley made one of his most foolish attempts to grab some political glory for himself: Uncle Horace would single-handedly broker an end to the war.

After the fall of Vicksburg and Lee’s failed coup at Gettysburg, Jefferson Davis was forced to admit that the South could not win on the battlefield. By the end of 1863 he was pinning wan hopes on using terrorism and guerrilla warfare to turn the population of the North against the war. He created the Confederate Secret Service and appointed two politicians with no military or spy experience to be its commissioners. Jacob Thompson was a former Mississippi congressman and Buchanan’s secretary of the interior. His assistant Clement Clay had been an Alabama senator before the war. Early in 1864, Davis sent them to Canada with $1 million in gold and silver coin and the vague directive to meet with Copperheads and Confederate exiles and stir up whatever trouble they could in the North.

Setting themselves up at the Queens Hotel in Toronto, they linked up with a Captain Thomas Hines, who’d ridden with John Hunt Morgan’s Kentucky cavalry and escaped a Union prison. Hines was one of the more upstanding men in their cabal, which included a number of shadowy and dubious characters. One of them was William “Larry” McDonald, a carriage-maker from New York. In his shop on Broadway he’d done most of his business with Southerners, and when the war cut that off he became an embittered Copperhead. As a sutler with a New Jersey brigade, he deliberately drove his wagons across Confederate lines to defect. McDonald had a sideline that was most interesting to Thompson and Clay: He dabbled in building mines, bombs, and incendiary devices.

Then there was the debonair George Sanders, a former editor at John L. O’Sullivan’s United States Magazine and Democratic Review and purchasing agent for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. (O’Sullivan had coined the term “Manifest Destiny”; his magazine presented the intellectual high end of Democratic and conservative opinion.) When the war started Sanders had toured Europe trying to raise funds for the Confederacy. His son Reid, who had attended the Free Academy (later City College), became a Confederate officer. In 1862, Reid was captured aboard a Rebel ship bound for Europe with dispatches from Richmond. He died in the Fort Warren POW camp outside Boston.

And there was William Cornell “Colorado” Jewett, scion of a prominent Maine family who’d gotten rich mining gold in Colorado. A pacifist and Peace Democrat, he had traveled to the capitals of Europe and spoken to various heads of state, including Queen Victoria and France’s Louis Napoleon III, about moderating a peace conference between the North and South. In 1863 he had gotten Greeley involved, and the two of them convinced the French minister in Washington to try to speak to Seward. Seward rebuffed the offer.

Clement Vallandigham met with Thompson and Clay and convinced them that a vast underground of Copperheads in the Northwest was ready to rise up in armed revolt. The commissioners devised a plan, possibly originating with McDonald, to send terrorist teams to Chicago and New York with incendiary materials. The burning cities would be the signal fires for the start of the uprising.

Captain Hines later testified that Fernando and Benjamin Wood went to Niagara Falls to meet with Thompson. According to Hines, the brothers promised to help raise arms for the revolt and assured the commissioners that if the Northwest rose up, tens of thousands of New York Copperheads would too. Hines also said the commission paid Benjamin tens of thousands of dollars to keep writing his antiwar screeds in the Daily News. If Hines’s story is true, this was the moment when the Wood brothers crossed the line from opposing the war to actual sedition.

Fernando Wood allegedly put the conspirators in touch with the Copperhead proprietor of a violin shop near Washington Square, who sold them a number of rifles and pistols, ammunition, and the chemicals for making “Greek fire,” the phosphorus-based precursor to napalm. These supplies were smuggled into Canada and from there into Ohio and Indiana, where they were hidden in “haystacks, graveyards, and barnyards,” to be used in the Northwest uprising.

As spymasters, Thompson and Clay proved to be hopelessly inept. Everyone in Canada—and Washington—was aware of their “secret” service. Stanton and Dana sent double agents who effortlessly infiltrated the group. Thompson and Clay actually hired one of these Union spies to be their courier for secret messages to Davis. On his way to Richmond he’d stop off in Washington, where Stanton and Dana read the messages, resealed them, and sent him on his way. This was how the War Department learned of the plan to set fire to Chicago and New York simultaneously. Dana instantly informed General Dix in New York, who at first was “very unwilling to believe that any such design could be seriously entertained.”

Besides plotting guerrilla war, the commissioners also tried their hand at public relations. This is where Horace Greeley got involved. In July, Jewett wrote Greeley, “I am authorized to state to you, for our use only, not the public, that two ambassadors of Davis & Co. are now in Canada, with full and complete powers for a peace.” He asked Greeley to intercede for them with the president.

Greeley excitedly dashed off a letter to Lincoln. “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood,” he lectured the president. “I entreat you to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents.”

Lincoln didn’t believe for one second that the “ambassadors” were bona fide, but he directed his aide John Hay to accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls anyway. Hay carried a letter from the president stating that he was ready to entertain “any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery.” Sanders now admitted to Greeley and Hay that his group had no real negotiating authority from “Davis & Co.” Disgusted but not surprised, Hay reported back to Lincoln and the cabinet; Attorney General Bates snorted that Jewett was a “meddlesome blockhead” and “crack-brained simpleton.” Lincoln sighed that Greeley was like “an old shoe… so rotten that nothing can be done with him.” Andrew Johnson later said that Greeley “seemed to me like a whale ashore. He nearly bothered the life out of Lincoln and it was difficult to tell whether he wanted union or separation, war or peace. Greeley is all heart and no head. He is the most vacillating man in the country.”

The story went public and Greeley’s competitors had another field day mocking him. Dana recalled that “the poor man… was almost universally laughed at.” Greeley expressed no remorse this time, but instead blamed Lincoln for thwarting the peace effort.

At their convention, the Democrats were just as divided as the Republicans were. The War Democrats backed the front-runner, McClellan. Moderate Peace Democrats promoted New York’s Governor Seymour. Hard-line Copperheads preferred another Governor Seymour, Thomas Hart Seymour of Connecticut. In New York, Fernando Wood, James McMaster, and other Copperheads tried to devise ways to derail McClellan’s candidacy. Solidly pro-McClellan Tammany mounted a successful campaign to eject the “dis-unionist” Wood from the Democrats’ state convention. He trudged out of the hall to a chorus of “groans and hisses.” Having made enemies on all sides yet again, Wood waged a lonely campaign for reelection to Congress. “Fernando Wood,” Bennett’s Herald japed, “is the nominee of Fernando Wood. Fernando Wood is patrolling the district, making speeches for Fernando Wood.”

The War Democrats prevailed and McClellan was nominated, but the Peace Democrats got one of their own, Ohio representative George Pendleton, nominated as McClellan’s running mate. They also forced the party to accept a platform that included a “peace plank,” which McClellan, still clinging to his image as warrior hero, could not accept. The peace plank proposed that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States,” so “peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.” Harper’s Weekly declared the platform “craven, abject, humiliating,” and joked that McClellan was like a trick equestrian trying simultaneously to ride two horses going in opposite directions. In fact, McClellan would ride neither; he sat out the campaign, barely appearing in public.

Vallandigham wrote the peace plank. Finding it impossible to sit on the sidelines across the border at such a momentous political juncture, he had donned false whiskers and sneaked by train back into Ohio in July. Democrats toasted his return. Greeley wrote an editorial advising Lincoln to let Vallandigham stay rather than making a Copperhead martyr of him a second time, and for once Greeley and the president were in agreement. Emboldened, Vallandigham came to New York and did some speechmaking with Fernando Wood, promoting a negotiated end to the war. They traveled together to the Chicago convention.

Despite their internal differences, the Democrats were on a roll and both sides knew it. Then Lincoln’s fortunes brightened. In August, Admiral Farragut achieved his last great victory at the Battle of Mobile Bay, a titanic clash of wooden and ironclad warships. With rows of cannons on ship and shore thundering in all directions, banks of smoke so choked the broad and shallow bay that captains and crews could barely see where they were going or what they were firing at. Farragut, who had just turned sixty-three, clambered up the Hartford’s rigging and shouted directions down to his officers. They were so frightened for his safety that they sent a man up to lash the admiral to the mast. The Confederates had seeded sections of the bay with mines, called “torpedoes” at the time. A Union ironclad struck one and sank in minutes with most hands trapped inside. When this caused another captain to hesitate, Farragut shouted, “Damn the torpedoes,” and gave directions for a full-speed advance. Over time his more detailed instructions were compressed into “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

When Farragut returned to New York the following December, the reception was even more jubilant than it had been in 1863. Congress would create a new rank, vice admiral, just for him. He and his wife would tour Europe and be feted everywhere. On his death in 1870, New York City would win the honor of hosting his funeral. The city shut down for the day, and President Grant led a long list of dignitaries who attended. Farragut was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.

On September 2, Sherman finally took Atlanta. A month later, Phil Sheridan would gouge the last Rebels out of the Shenandoah Valley, which had been both a redoubt and a pantry for the Confederacy. Optimism swept the North. The Times crowed and gloated, and even Bennett declared final victory near at hand. Greeley had yet another change of heart, now exhorting everyone in the Union to rally behind the president and the war effort—“a little more energy, a little more courage, and we shall soon see the end of it.” August Belmont, who chaired the Democrats’ national committee, and the World’s Manton Marble, who spearheaded their public relations, desperately tried to play down the Pendleton-Vallandigham wing and focus voters’ attention on McClellan the war hero. But the Democrats’ moment had passed.

The issue of Harper’s Weekly that hit the stands the day after Atlanta fell fortuitously included a Nast illustration that may have helped as much to get Lincoln reelected as Brady’s portrait had helped elect him the first time. Nast was already the most popular illustrator in the country. He was starting to be the most influential as well. Growing up in the Tammany stronghold of the Lower East Side had marked him with a lifelong distrust of Democrats. He was appalled by the Chicago peace platform. The illustration “Compromise with the South” was his response. Nast drew a haughty Confederate and a wounded, demoralized Union soldier shaking hands over a grave with a headstone that reads, “In Memory of the Union Heroes Who Fell in a Useless War.” The female figure Columbia kneels between the soldiers, weeping. In the background, a Negro family in chains grieves. Below the image it reads, “Dedicated to the Chicago Convention.”

The timing could not have been better. The issue quickly sold out and a startled and delighted Fletcher Harper rushed to print more to meet the continuing demand. As Lincoln’s campaign manager, Raymond had the image printed and distributed as a poster.

By October the momentum was gathering behind Lincoln, and McClellan, as he had on the battlefield, still refused to come out and fight. “The times seem to me so out of joint that I can scarcely bear to write,” Maria Daly lamented. “It seems to me that the country is mad.… Lincoln, a rail-splitter, and his wife, two ignorant and vulgar boors, are king and queen.”

Nast produced one more striking illustration to cap the campaign. For the first time, Union states allowed soldiers to cast absentee ballots. Each state was responsible for sending agents into the field to collect the votes of its men in uniform. In late October the army arrested five of New York’s agents, all appointed by Governor Seymour, who were caught forging soldiers’ signatures, as well as recording numerous votes from dead or imaginary men. All the fraudulent votes were for McClellan. A military court sentenced three of the men to life in prison, though they were later released. “ASTOUNDING FRAUDS!” the Times cried. “Arrest of New-York Voting Agents. Soldiers Proxies Forged by Gov. Seymour’s Appointees. FULL PARTICULARS OF THE RASCALITY.” Nast’s cartoon in Harper’s, titled “How the Copperheads Obtain Their Votes,” shows a pair of agents in a dark cemetery recording a soldier’s name off his gravestone, while his ghost looms above and curses them “for making me appear disloyal.”

That month the Canada commission struck. Twenty-one young Confederate soldiers, all escapees from Union prisons, wearing new gray uniforms tailored in Montreal, crossed the border into Vermont and, on October 19, laid siege to the small town of St. Albans. It was the northernmost Confederate attack of the war. They robbed three banks of almost $90,000 and tried to set the town ablaze using bottles of Greek fire, which merely sputtered and smoked. Driven off by the locals in a hail of bullets, they filtered back across the border, where Canadian authorities promptly arrested and jailed them. The commission paid for their defense attorneys. To maintain neutrality, Canada decided to release the young men, but returned the confiscated loot to St. Albans.

Through the rest of October, New York buzzed with rumors that the Confederates and Copperheads had more terrorist actions in the works. There were predictions that “rioters would occupy the United States Sub-Treasury on Wall Street; others would seize City Hall for use as a fortress, flying the Stars and Bars from its roof,” historian Edward Longacre writes. They would burn down other federal buildings, release the prisoners at Fort Lafayette, and take General Dix hostage. At the same time, Wall Street brokers acting on the South’s behalf were said to be buying and hoarding so much gold bullion that greenbacks “would become virtually worthless.”

Democrats like Governor Seymour and Mayor Gunther waved off the stories. But based on the wealth of intelligence Stanton and Dana’s spies had gathered in Canada, the Lincoln administration opted for a large military presence in the city to keep the peace on election day. They gave General Benjamin Butler, the Beast of New Orleans, the task. He arrived on November 4 trailing five thousand officers and men. He had such a contingent of staff officers that the Fifth Avenue Hotel couldn’t accommodate them and they moved to the larger Hoffman House. Then Butler and Dix spat over how large and visible a show of force was needed. Butler wanted a full New Orleans–style lockdown; Dix thought this unnecessary and provocative. He restricted Butler to putting just two thousand of his men in the city.

Butler moved instantly against the gold speculators on Wall Street, summarily ordering one broker, H. J. Lyons, to an interrogation at the Hoffman House. Lyons was definitely worthy of Butler’s suspicions, a Southerner who had come to New York from Montreal less than a year earlier and bought up some $3 million in gold bullion. Butler gave him such a fierce grilling, reminding him that the punishment for treason was death, that the ashen-faced man promised to sell off his gold that very day. Butler repeated this performance with principals of four other brokerages, and the price of gold had eased by November 8.

On his own hook, Butler shocked New Yorkers by issuing a proclamation that in effect declared the city under martial law. His troops were in the city as “safeguards of constitutional liberty,” he wrote, “which is freedom to do right, not wrong. They can be a terror to evil doers only.” Interpreting “do right” as “vote for Lincoln,” Seymour, Gunther, and other Democrats protested furiously.

When election day dawned, Butler positioned his troops. As Dix wanted, he did it discreetly, to avoid giving New Yorkers the sense that they lived in an occupied city. The bulk he stationed on ferries in the two rivers, where they were out of sight but could quickly get to any trouble spots. The rest he placed at strategic spots like Wall Street, bridges, telegraph offices (a responsibility handed to Dan Butterfield, who was temporarily serving under Dix), and Mackerelville, the east side neighborhood where many Irish thought to have participated in the draft riots lived.

Either despite or because of all the precautions, it turned out to be the quietest election day New Yorkers had seen in years. The only rumble came late in the day, when a large crowd gathered outside the Hoffman House to heckle Butler. Superintendent Kennedy and his Metropolitans dispersed them. Crisis averted, Dix pressed for the immediate removal of Butler’s troops, whom he’d never felt comfortable about. Succumbing to the lure of the metropolis, a number of Butler’s soldiers and even a few officers went AWOL and vanished in the city; the rest sailed back to the front. Butler stayed on a few days to be wined and dined by the city’s grateful elite, including a gala banquet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel at which Reverend Beecher gave the keynote toast.

Lincoln won the election by a 10 percent margin in the popular vote, roughly 2.2 million votes to McClellan’s 1.8 million, and thoroughly trounced him in electoral votes, 213 to 21. He won New York State by a mere 1 percent. Once again, he lost by landslides in both Brooklyn and New York City, where McClellan outpolled him two to one. In Manhattan, only the Fifteenth Ward—the posh, Republican “Empire Ward” around Washington Square—voted for Lincoln.

Governor Seymour was turned out and replaced by a Radical Republican, Reuben Fenton. Fernando Wood lost his seat in Congress as well. The Herald jeered, “Fernando is a played-out politician, we advise him to die gracefully.” Wood would use his final lame-duck weeks in the House to try to obstruct passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. “The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races,” he declared. “The Almighty has made the black man inferior, and, sir, by no legislation, by no partisan success, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction.” Henry Raymond won election to Congress. In fact, the elections were a disaster for Democrats generally. Republicans came out with a three-to-one dominance in Congress.

Abandoning the country that had rebuffed him, McClellan, his wife, and his children sailed from New York for a long European idyll. He would still be away when the war ended, and would not return to the United States until 1868.