The presidential campaign of 1864 is remarkable for the very fact that it actually occurred, given the state of civil war in which the country was embroiled and the ease in which a postponement or suspension of a presidential election could have been justified given the circumstances at hand. President Abraham Lincoln, embattled as he was, understood that not only was an election feasible in spite of the tide of events, but it was both desirable and necessary, even critical for the future of the republic that now wrestled with its most fateful challenge since the Revolutionary War.
With eleven states in rebellion, the presidential election was confined to the Northeast, the Midwest, the West, and border states such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri, and the newly created state of West Virginia (those mountainous Unionist counties of western Virginia that refused to recognize the state of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession and subsequently were joined together and admitted to the Union as a free and separate state in 1863). Not only was the nation divided, but also the two main parties experienced serious divisions within their ranks. The party out of power, the Northern Democrats, broke into three factions, two of which shared the moniker “Peace Democrats”: moderate Peace Democrats led by Horatio Seymour of New York, who were critical of the war and its conduct and who advocated negotiating an armistice with the Confederacy, but in a way that would leave the impression of at least a modicum of victory for the Union; and the more radical Peace Democrats, also known as “Copperheads” (pejoratively named by Republicans after the poisonous snake, a nickname that was soon embraced by the Peace Democrats, associating it with the image of Liberty portrayed on copper pennies), who, as the name implies, openly opposed the war, were sympathetic to the South (earning them another nickname, the “Butternuts,” after a color worn on the Confederate uniform), and were prepared for peace at any price. Ohio’s Clement Vallandigham, Connecticut’s Thomas Seymour, and Daniel M. Voorhees of Indiana were the more influential leaders of the Copperhead cause. The third faction was the “War Democrats,” or those Democrats who openly supported President Lincoln and the military effort to bring the South back into the Union while still distancing themselves from Lincoln’s economic policies as well as some of his more controversial measures recently taken against political dissent. Among the more notable War Democrats were Andrew Johnson of Tennessee—who had become widely admired in the North for retaining his seat in the Senate and refusing to recognize his home state’s act of secession—Edwin M. Stanton of Ohio (Lincoln’s secretary of war), and Union generals such as U. S. Grant and George B. McClellan. Within the Democratic Party, the Copperheads held, at least during the first two years of the war, enough influence to prompt some War Democrats to drift away from their party and move toward an alliance with Republicans, eventually fully merging with the Republicans to form what would be called the Union Party, although some Democrats switched affiliation to the Republican Party outright. It was under the banner of the Union Party that President Lincoln sought reelection, a goal that seemed uncertain even as late as early 1864.
In 1832, Andrew Jackson was the last incumbent president to win reelection; since then, no sitting president had been returned to office (two—William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor—died early in their first term; James K. Polk probably would have been reelected but, in keeping a promise, elected not to run; Buchanan also promised at the outset of his administration not to run for a second term, but had he changed his mind, he easily would have lost any reelection bid). Antebellum politics was hard on presidencies, setting a trend that President Lincoln would have to work diligently to break.
Moreover, Lincoln’s particular position had been seriously weakened by the course of the war itself. The Union army did well in the West and along the Gulf of Mexico; but in the East, where it fought much closer to the nation’s capital, its record was not nearly as encouraging. Indeed, in the first few months of the war, the Confederate army succeeded in throwing Union forces on their heels in Virginia and threatened major cities in the North, significantly including Washington, DC, itself. Meanwhile, Richmond, the Confederate capital, seemed invulnerable to the Union army, at least midway through 1863. The tide began to turn for the Union, first with stalemate at Antietam in September 1862 and then victory at Gettysburg in early July 1863, along with a simultaneous victory at Vicksburg along the Mississippi in the western theater. Much fighting, devastation, and bloodletting still remained in the nation’s future, but the results of these three horrific battles signaled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy and restored confidence in the president. In the interval between these two battles, President Lincoln seized the opportunity and, having already decided to do so months earlier, famously issued the formal Emancipation Proclamation, an act that left no question—if any question genuinely remained—as to what the war was really about. The salvation of the Union was publicly, openly, unequivocally, and inextricably tied to the eradication of slavery, the precedent fact of which was now thoroughly congruent with what the public was willing to admit.
Politically, the president’s fortunes began to improve and would steadily continue to strengthen, but even with the turning of the tide, fainter hearts within the Republican Party still harbored reservations. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, a leading figure in the party since its inception, drew the attention of a minority of supporters, but he withdrew his name from any consideration before the onset of spring. General Benjamin Butler, a recent defector from the War Democrats, was an appealing candidate to the party’s more radical wing. The Radical Republicans, however, preferred John C. Fremont, the party’s erstwhile nominee in 1856, and he was indeed actually nominated by bolting radicals who broke from the main party and held their own convention in Cleveland in late May. The main branch of the party, as indicated above, held firm and joined with War Democrats to form the coalition that was officially named the National Union Party, or simply Union Party, gathering in Baltimore in June to nominate Lincoln for reelection.
Prior to the convention, there were still murmurings of a challenge to Lincoln. As late as February 1864, Lyman Trumbull, a Republican senator from Lincoln’s home state, for example, worried, “There is a distrust and fear that [Lincoln] is too undecided and inefficient to put down the rebellion,” and Lincoln himself shared his doubts, writing in a memorandum as late as August 23 of that year, “It seems exceedingly probable that the Administration will not be reelected.” But the president soldiered on and, in spite of his own doubts, managed to win the convention over to his cause, just as he had in 1860, but this time with surprising ease. And it eventually became apparent that all was not lost, for even though Lincoln had been roundly criticized in the first half of his term, he was nonetheless held in a high degree of esteem across the electorate. “Lincoln,” William Cullen Bryant observed, “is popular with the plain people, who believe him honest, with the rich people, who believe him safe, with the soldiers, who believe him their friend, and with the religious people, who believe him to have been specially raised up for crisis.” This reality led the leadership within the Union Party to fall in rank, and Lincoln cruised to renomination on the second ballot. Except for twenty-two first-ballot votes cast for General Grant, who was not seeking the nomination, the delegates unanimously backed Lincoln, a unanimity that became official on the second round.
As a part of his desire to form a coalition with the defecting War Democrats, the president worked to replace his current vice president, Radical Republican Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, with Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson. Hamlin’s desire was to remain in office, but Lincoln was insistent. By most accounts, it is not that Lincoln disliked Hamlin, but only that they never developed a close relationship; Hamlin remained somewhat aloof from the administration, which was not unusual for vice presidents in the nineteenth century, or even well into the twentieth century. Some have claimed that Hamlin’s influence helped the president in his decision regarding emancipation; but on the whole, Hamlin’s vice presidency was noted for its inactivity. More importantly in this case, Lincoln strongly felt the need to cement the Union Party coalition with a War Democrat as his running mate. Johnson had proven his loyalty to the Union, and as his reward, he had served successfully as military governor of Tennessee. At the time, he appeared to be a logical means to symbolize Lincoln’s overall vision of restoration and reconciliation.
As a result of Lincoln’s skill at behind-the-scene politics, Johnson was able to win 200 votes on the first ballot, to Hamlin’s 150 and 108 for another War Democrat, Daniel Dickinson of New York. Sixty-one remaining votes were distributed across seven candidates, including generals Butler, Lovell Russell, Ambrose Burnside, and Indiana’s Schuyler Colfax, who at the time was the Speaker of the House. The first ballot identified Johnson as Lincoln’s new running mate, confirmed on the following ballot with 492 delegates in support of the change. Lincoln was also able to win over Radical Republicans, or at least those who did not join the bolters to nominate Fremont, through his inclusion of certain platform measures, including the demand for the unconditional surrender of rebel forces. The radical wing was also encouraged by emancipation and the real promise of a future amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery. After a protracted period of grave doubts about his prospects, victory on the battlefield and the moral victory of the Emancipation Proclamation, along with his own political savvy and firmness of character, propelled Lincoln toward electoral triumph in 1864.
The party platform was nailed together under the sway of the Radical Republicans, breaking from the gradualist/containment position regarding slavery affirmed in the platforms of 1856 and 1860 and now adopting a direct, immediate abolitionist position. The party officially admitted that the cause of the war was slavery and demanded its “utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.” The Republican platform also demanded “unconditional surrender” of all rebel forces, rejecting all suggestions of compromise with Confederate rebels. Equally important, the platform endorsed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by guaranteeing the “full protection of the laws” to freed slaves serving in the Union army. Rejecting the pre-Civil War nativism movement, the platform encouraged foreign immigration, particularly as a means of asylum for those fleeing from Old World oppression. Even though the party as a whole now supported immediate rather than gradual abolition, the Radical Republicans wanted still more extensive—some would say drastic—social reform at the end of the war, including punitive measures targeted at the old Southern slaveocracy. When Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Manifesto outlining reconstruction measures more extreme than Lincoln’s more moderate plan, Radical Republicans bristled, and at this point, a number of them bolted to endorse Fremont. This intraparty division was not lost on the general public, and particularly the Democrats, who detected vulnerable fracture lines dividing the radical wing that commanded the platform and the moderates who represented a solid base for the president. The Democrats needed a personality to match Lincoln’s, an order that they would find exceedingly difficult to fill.
With the untimely death of Senator Stephen Douglas at the age of forty-eight, Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisan and longtime rival, the Democrats lost their most influential and capable standard-bearer, and between the secession that cut the party in half and the many defections of a number of War Democrats to the Union Party, the Democrats experienced, for the first time in the party’s history, a dearth of substantive leadership. Nonetheless, they were confident that they could unseat Lincoln, for they were convinced that the factionalism in the Republican Party was a clear indicator of the president’s vulnerability.
Waiting until late August to hold their convention in Chicago in the hope that the war might by that time turn once again against Lincoln, the Democrats (also now known as the Northern Democrats or Grand National Democrats) proceeded with an apparent confidence that concealed their own inward doubts and divisions. The party turned to General George B. McClellan, still on active duty, a War Democrat who was zealously opposed to emancipation and who had served as President Lincoln’s commander of the Army of the Potomac until he was relieved and reassigned after the Battle of Antietam. It was well known that McClellan and Lincoln were frequently at odds over war strategy, and it was natural for the Democrats to turn to such a notable figure to compete against the president. Even though he looked with disdain upon emancipation—while commanding the army, he refused to protect escaped slaves and chose to obey the old Fugitive Slave Law—and the recruitment of African Americans for military service, McClellan did support the war and the defeat of the Confederacy, a position that placed him in direct conflict with the Copperhead faction that was involved in building the party platform. The platform urged an end to the war and negotiation with the rebellious states, planks that McClellan could not support. Unlike Copperheads, McClellan believed fervently in preserving the Union. The platform of the Democratic Party reaffirmed its commitment to the Constitution and the Union and drew upon fidelity to both in demanding the “immediate cessation of hostilities [with the South].” Additionally, the Democratic platform accused Lincoln and his administration of violating the Constitution by suspending basic civil liberties in the conduct of the war. The platform remained silent on slavery, but Democrats in general supported its retention, at least those who had not defected to the coalition Union Party.
During the convention, General McClellan was not seriously challenged. Both Seymours—Thomas, the Copperhead from Connecticut, and Horatio, the moderate Peace Democrat from New York—drew limited and brief support early in the convention, but not enough to challenge McClellan, who was a figure nationally known and identified as someone who, through his history of conflict with Lincoln, might be the person capable of handling the president in a political campaign. Thus McClellan won nomination on the second ballot with little effort, the party then unanimously nominating George Pendleton of Ohio on the second ballot after he finished in second place to Kentucky’s James Guthrie on the first. Pendleton, though only thirty-nine years old at the time of his nomination, was an old-school Jacksonian who, typically, was critical of centralized government; and yet, throughout his political career, he developed a pragmatist’s disposition and would later become more famously known as an advocate for civil service reform, the famous Pendleton Act of 1883 (formally known as the Civil Service Reform Act) bearing his name.
Lincoln and his supporters made use of the same campaign tactics that had proven effective four years earlier. Wide-Awake clubs conducted torchlight parades through major northern cities. Lincoln supporters rallied around three prominent slogans: “Don’t Change Horses in Mid-Stream,” “The Constitution and the Union, Now and Forever,” and “Slavery Is a Moral, Social, and Political Wrong,” the latter two recycled from 1860. Lincoln partisans insulted McClellan’s allegedly lackluster war record and made much of the tension between the two men during the early months of the war, which McClellan’s critics in rebuttal claimed to have been to the detriment of the Union cause. Once the campaign was under way, all Republicans threw their full support behind the president. The Radicals backed away from their rump support of Fremont, and the party leadership stumped hard for the president, most notably—and energetically—Salmon Chase and William Seward. This time, the Democrats exhibited the unity that they lacked in 1860, closing ranks behind McClellan with a cohesion that had been elusive to them throughout the antebellum period, unseen really since the election of Martin Van Buren in 1836, in spite of their general dominance prior to the war. Along with the Wide-Awake clubs and the now-obligatory barbecues, fairs, and rallies, Republicans aggressively campaigned throughout the Union, publishing broadsides, pamphlets, and editorials and forming new associations such as the Union League and the Loyal Publication Society. Democrats responded with the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge and similar groups.
Lincoln, as he had done in 1860, kept a quiet distance from the campaign, but McClellan waded in, an atypical (but not unheard-of) tactic at the time. The Democrats vigorously attacked Lincoln on the issue of civil liberties raised by some emergency measures adopted by the president against Confederate sympathizers that were openly questioned on constitutional grounds. In response, Republicans emphasized the choice between two possible futures: that of disunity, treason, and slavery offered by McClellan and the Democrats; or that of freedom, union, and the rule of law as embodied by President Lincoln and the Republicans. Taking the low road, McClellan’s campaign resorted to attacks on Lincoln’s character. Democrats accused Lincoln of corruption and tyranny, claimed him to be incompetent, insinuated that his racial background was ambiguous, and hurled a variety of insults at him, calling him a buffoon, a fanatic, a third-rate lawyer, a filthy storyteller, a ridiculous joke incarnate, a liar, an ignoramus, a butcher, and a baboon.
Lincoln’s anxieties over reelection were soon allayed. With more Union military victories against Confederate forces and effective electioneering in the North, Lincoln enjoyed a pre-election boost that would carry him toward a genuine landslide, winning over 2,200,000 popular votes—setting a new record for total votes (Lincoln being the first candidate for president to win over 2 million votes)—which amounted to slightly more than 55 percent of the total vote, to McClellan’s 1,800,000 votes, falling just under 46 percent. Lincoln’s share of the popular vote, 55.03 percent, was second only to Andrew Jackson’s share of 55.9 percent in 1828 (the popular vote first being recorded on a national scale in 1824), and only the second time since 1844 that a candidate for president won over 50 percent of the popular vote (Franklin Pierce winning just under 51% in 1852). The difference in the Electoral College was even greater. There, Lincoln won every state (not including the states in rebellion) except Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey, earning a total of 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21, or 91 percent to 9 percent of the total electoral vote count, which was the biggest Electoral College landslide since President Monroe’s nearly unanimous electoral reelection in 1820. In the popular vote, McClellan did come close in New York (losing by less than 1% in the Empire State) and Pennsylvania, but these two electoral giants in the end went for the president.
Thus Lincoln succeeded in becoming the first incumbent president to win reelection in thirty-two years, a remarkable achievement given the severe circumstances that he faced. Indeed, the situation was so dire that there was a general expectation that the election would be suspended or postponed until the cessation of hostilities; but to his credit, Lincoln insisted otherwise, a position that he summarized in an impromptu address delivered two days after his reelection, observing, “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies.” Lincoln continued, “We can not have free government without elections, 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. . . . [The recent election] has 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.”
Lincoln’s peerless eloquence reached its zenith the following March, his second inaugural address being a triumph of sober reflection, honest assessment, unreserved confession, and compelling reaffirmation of principle, lucidity, and above all, compassionate reconciliation and transformation. These qualities, and the overall record of his conduct throughout the crisis, though certainly not without blemishes, have led historians and students of politics to regard Lincoln as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and perhaps the greatest. Only President George Washington before him and President Franklin Roosevelt after him are considered among his equals. Tragically, Lincoln would fall to an assassin’s cruel bullet the following April, scarcely a month after his second inaugural address wherein he mercifully challenged the nation to hold “malice toward none” and to seek “charity of all.” With Lincoln’s death he would, as Edwin M. Stanton poignantly remarked, “belong to the ages” and become numbered among the fallen heroes of freedom. Vice President Andrew Johnson would thus ascend to the presidency, and the course of the nation would be irrevocably altered.
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