The string of Union victories in August and September transformed the election. With the removal of Montgomery Blair on September 24 in exchange for Frémont’s agreeing to drop out of the race as a dangerous third-party candidate, Lincoln understood it was now a two-man race for the presidency. He did not have to be perfect, just a better alternative than the other man. McClellan was running on a platform that the war had failed. The cacophony of criticism (from him and many others, including Radical Republican leaders) leveled at Lincoln at every downturn of the war subsided with the unprecedented string of victories, as well as the awareness that if Lincoln lost, someone who would do far less for the Union’s preservation would be president.
Buoyed by the news of Union victories and knowing his opponent’s weaknesses, Lincoln fortified support among key constituencies, including free men of color in several states, Protestant religious groups, the growing German American population, and the army. Nineteen northern states passed laws allowing soldiers to vote away from home. Lincoln declared holding the election despite the war a “necessity,” but Democrats were caught stuffing Democratic ballots into New York soldiers’ absentee voting envelopes while War Secretary Stanton dismissed dozens of officers from the Union Army because they were Democrats, and commanders punished Democratic-leaning soldiers and granted furloughs for Republican soldiers to vote.64 Radical Republican leaders and major newspapers increasingly recognized that, between the two alternatives, Lincoln was the only choice to be made by those who wanted to preserve the Union and the Constitution.
When the votes were counted on November 8, 1864, it was not close—Lincoln won in a landslide. As Civil War historian James McPherson notes, Lincoln “won 78 percent of the soldier votes in the states that tabulated them separately. The percentage was probably similar in states that lumped those votes” together with the civilian tallies.65 Lincoln won 53 percent of the popular vote, but, as McPherson adds, “the most impressive thing about the 1864 election was that the men who would have to do the fighting and dying had voted overwhelmingly for their commander in chief to help him finish the job.”66 Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. It was a massive triumph by any measure, bigger than Jackson’s reelection defeat of Clay in 1832.
IV
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On hearing the news of Lincoln’s reelection, Jefferson Davis proclaimed, “He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue that can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”67 Davis directed the Confederate armies to dig in their heels. (The nickname given to North Carolinians, “tar heels,” described how their militias held their ground so fiercely, they must have had tar on their feet that prevented them from ever being budged.) Davis had not yet lost faith in his commander, Robert E. Lee, nor in his army. He intended to keep the war going until the South won, knowing that the more Union deaths, the more their zeal and energy could be broken. At some point, Northerners, in Davis’s estimation, would tire of all the bloodshed, or their economy would collapse as the national government could not afford to keep the army funded and fully staffed for much longer.
One issue that had arisen before the election had yet to be settled. On October 12, 1864, Chief Justice Roger Taney died. Lincoln issued no public statement but did attend a simple funeral ceremony at Taney’s home. Others expressed the relief that Lincoln likely felt. In a letter to Lincoln, Senator Charles Sumner wrote that “Providence has given us a victory in the death of Chief Justice Taney. It is a victory for Liberty and the Constitution.”68 Lincoln agreed, but he deliberately left the decision about who would replace Chief Justice Taney for after the election, the spoil of choice belonging to the victor. Given that Taney had died when Lincoln expected to win the election, he expected that selection to be his.
It is possible Lincoln may have also pushed the decision off until after the election to give him time to calmly think through who his choice should be. He had not rushed to fill the four other positions he had filled on the Court. This would be his fifth nomination—the same number Jackson had made, but Lincoln had achieved that number in nearly half the time it had taken Jackson, and Taney’s appointment had not happened until near the end of his second term. Just as important, if not more so, such an appointment had the potential to transform the Court, both because it was Lincoln’s fifth justice for the ten-member Court (with 5–5 splits reaffirming the lower courts’ decisions) and because there had been only four other chief justices appointed in American history. Whoever led the Court would likely lead it for decades. Only Washington, Adams, and Jackson had appointed chief justices before. The fifth appointment would make this Lincoln’s Court.
Unsurprisingly, there was a rush of people who wanted the position. Blair’s family pushed for Montgomery, whose father pleaded with Lincoln “to remove the cloud which his ostracism from the Cabinet” had caused, but Lincoln had removed Blair not long before and those who had pushed for his ouster would likely not be pleased with a promotion.69 Also, Lincoln was unsure whether Blair had the leadership and consensus-building skills that he believed the position required. Lincoln thought that the post should go to a Radical Republican, not only to appease that faction, but also to ensure that the person had strong, unshakable convictions about the war, the Union, and the constitutionality of Lincoln’s actions and policies if they were to come further before the Court. That man was unlikely to be Montgomery Blair. Also jumping in was Orville Browning, who pushed for Edwin Stanton. Lincoln respected Stanton but decided it was more important for him to be by Lincoln’s side for the remainder of the war and the reconstruction to follow.
In spite of many other candidates being pressed upon Lincoln, one name that kept crying for attention was that of Salmon Chase. After having pushed for himself as president for much of the year, Chase had grudgingly accepted Lincoln’s candidacy. After Taney’s death, Chase called upon Lincoln to lobby for his own appointment, but during the meeting Lincoln was, as Chase recorded, “not at all demonstrative, either in speech or manner.”70 Chase wrote Lincoln more than once to press his case, but the president gave no signal of his intentions. Once Chase realized that he could endear himself by campaigning for Lincoln, the ice thawed.
It is a credit to Lincoln that he was able to look beyond Chase’s previous treachery and conclude that he had all the right qualities and convictions to fill the spot. As he explained to Ward Lamon shortly after making the nomination, Chase’s “appointment will satisfy the Radicals and after that they will not dare kick up against [appointments] I may make.”71
On December 6, 1864, Lincoln nominated Chase to be the nation’s fifth chief justice; the Senate confirmed him that same day. Lincoln must have enjoyed having the power to replace Taney with his own former Treasury secretary, whose devotion to the Union and Lincoln’s war policies was at least as strong as Taney’s had been to Jackson’s vision of a Union with a weaker federal government and stronger states.
V
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When Congress reconvened in December 1864, Lincoln declared the “election has been of vast value to the national cause.” Radical Republicans, emboldened, too, by Lincoln’s and the party’s successes at the polls, placed at the top of their agenda the drafting and approval of a new constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in the United States. Though he had not mentioned it to the committee of delegates from the convention informing him of his nomination, Lincoln had urged the National Union Convention to make ratification of the amendment a central component of its platform. Once again, and contrary to what he had said when he was in Congress and how Clay had argued about how presidents should defer to Congress in formulating national policy, Lincoln put all of his prestige, influence, and energy into pushing hard for the new amendment. Always keen on keeping track of his support in conventions or legislatures, Lincoln recognized that t
he time for historic change had finally come.
In his Annual Message in December 1864, Lincoln reminded Congress and the nation “the purpose of the people” to “maintain the integrity of the Union, was never more firm, nor more clearly unanimous, than now.”72 Accordingly, he urged Congress to support the proposed amendment abolishing slavery in the United States. He was aware that the House had fallen four votes short previously to approve the amendment, but he believed his election signaled the path forward. “Without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition,” Lincoln pushed the House to approve the amendment, which the Senate had done earlier in the year.73 “Of course,” he acknowledged, “the abstract question is not changed; but an intervening election shows, almost certainly, that the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not.”74 Since approval was only a question of time, he asked, “may we not agree that the sooner the better?”75 Echoing Jackson, he reminded the members of Congress that “some deference” should “be paid to the will of the majority, simply because it is the will of the majority.”76
Lincoln worked closely with the sponsor of the bill, Ohio representative James Ashley, to identify any members who were wavering, and invited individual members of Congress to the White House so that he could lobby them in person, and he pressured Unionists from the border states to approve the new amendment. One of those invited to the White House was Representative James Rollins of Missouri, who had voted against the amendment the first time it had come before the House. Lincoln spoke to Rollins as a fellow Whig, who had, like him, revered Clay. Lincoln urged him as a follower of “that great statesman Henry Clay,” to join in support of the amendment.77 Once Rollins agreed, Lincoln urged him to rally other members to the cause. He described the amendment as “a king’s cure for all the evils” that slavery had wrought upon the nation,78 and assured him that its passage “will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close.”79
When rumors spread that Confederate peace commissioners were en route to Washington to negotiate the end of the war, Ashley considered delaying the vote, but Lincoln assured him that there were no peace commissioners in the city, and the vote went ahead as planned on January 31, 1865. More than two-thirds of the House voted in favor. Several Democrats joined in endorsing the proposed amendment, but one who did not was John Todd Stuart, reflecting the ideological divide that had arisen between him and Lincoln since Lincoln first campaigned for Stuart three decades earlier.
Because the amendment had previously been approved 38–6 in the Senate (exceeding the constitutionally mandated minimum of at least two-thirds), the resolution went from the House to the states for ratification. Even though the Constitution gave the president no role in authorizing a new amendment, Lincoln made a point of signing the resolution on February 1, 1865, as if it were a bill being made into law. When senators reminded him that his signature was unnecessary, he told them that he was confident that the new amendment would eliminate “the original disturbing cause” of the war and permanently settle any question about the validity of his Emancipation Proclamation.80
Yet Lincoln was not entirely truthful with Rollins. He knew that a peace commission was on its way—not to Washington but south of it, in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He later explained that he had kept the news to himself (and made a technically true but misleading statement to Ashley) because the “Democrats would have gone off on a tangent at the last moment had they smelt Peace.”81 Lincoln was more concerned with the need to get sufficient support in the House.
Leading the Confederate delegation was Lincoln’s old friend Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had reached out to Lincoln earlier to negotiate in 1863 and again in 1864. Coming with Stephens were former Supreme Court justice John Campbell of Alabama and Robert Hunter, a Virginia senator in the Confederacy. Lincoln had long resisted any such meetings because he had no interest other than having the rebels accept the conditions he had been suggesting since the war began—relinquishing their arms and pledging fealty to the federal Constitution.
There had been other efforts, too, to broker peace, though only a couple had Lincoln’s blessing or approval. One involved a proposal brought to the White House’s attention by Orville Browning. With Browning’s support, a leading Illinois Peace Democrat (a faction within the party urging peace at any price), James Singleton of Illinois, received Lincoln’s permission to go to Richmond to explore Confederate interest in ending the war. Singleton met with several leaders, including Davis and Robert E. Lee. When he returned to Washington, he told Lincoln that the Southerners were eager for peace but were unwilling to agree to any policy requiring them to give up their slaves unless they received in exchange “a fair compensation coupled with other liberal terms of reconstruction secured by Constitutional Amendments.”82 Lincoln was no longer interested in any scheme of compensated emancipation (in spite of his many years supporting such a plan, which Clay had long advocated), and the deal held no appeal for him or the Union.
Montgomery Blair’s father, Frank Blair, went to Richmond with the president’s approval. Whereas Singleton’s efforts were focused on requiring the federal government to buy Confederate produce and products (a plan Lincoln never endorsed), Blair went with no instructions at all except perhaps for the long-standing confidence that Lincoln had in his fidelity to the Union. Blair had a lengthy meeting with Jefferson Davis, whom he had known for many years, as they had both been longtime faithful Jacksonian Democrats. Blair told Davis that slavery was no longer an “insurmountable obstruction to” peace, due to the recent enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army (effectively signaling to Davis that the Confederacy’s objective of maintaining slavery was already a lost cause), and that reunion was inevitable.83 Blair suggested that the only obstacle to peace came from France, which was scheming to take control of Mexico, and he proposed that Davis reach an armistice with the Union and send his armies to defeat the threat to the country from the south.
Blair relayed to Lincoln that this argument got Davis’s attention. He told Lincoln that Davis did not trust Seward in any negotiations, but he did trust Blair and said he was willing to accept his assurance that Lincoln would “maintain his word inviolably.”84
Davis gave Blair a letter, signed in Richmond on January 12, 1865, to take to Lincoln, which promised the appointment of a special commission that would enter into negotiations for peace. Lincoln rejected the offer and sent Blair back to deliver a letter to Davis, dated January 18, saying that he would be willing to meet with a Confederate commission that had serious interest in “securing peace to the people of our one common country.”85 Davis responded that he would send a commission to discuss “the issues involved in the existing war.”86 Lincoln found this unacceptable, because he did not wish to engage in negotiations with the commissioners as if the Confederacy was a separate nation. The war’s premise was that it wasn’t, and yet Lincoln was preparing to meet with this commission in Hampton Roads no doubt bent on parroting the Confederacy’s rebellious views.
Before he agreed to attend the meeting himself, Lincoln had written down three nonnegotiable terms: “restoration of the National authority throughout all the United States,” no “receding by” himself on “the Slavery question,” and “no cessation of hostilities short of an end of war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.”87 Though wary, Lincoln brought Seward with him. For four hours, the five men discussed options. Stephens initially tried to steer the conversation to Blair’s Mexican project, but Lincoln disavowed it. Campbell inquired about what terms of reconstruction would be offered if the Southern states returned to the Union. Lincoln insisted that he would not negotiate terms as long as the Southern states were in armed conflict against the United States. When Hunter pointed out how he had previously negotiated during wartime and Charles I had done the same, Lincoln responded, with a smile, “I do not profess to be posted in history. On all such matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the ca
se of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.”88 Seward reminded the commissioners of Lincoln’s pledge in his most recent message to Congress: “I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that Proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.”89 Seward then told them of the recent approval in Congress, on January 31, of a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The commissioners appeared too stunned to say much else. The meeting ended when they inquired about an exchange of prisoners, and Lincoln said he had put Grant in charge of that question. On leaving the boat where they had held their meeting, Stephens urged Lincoln to reconsider. He promised he would but pointedly added, “I do not think I will change my mind.”90 Nothing had ultimately been accomplished, except for, perhaps, the implicit agreement that the war would continue.
Not always reliable in his recollections, Stephens wrote later that during the discussions he had an exchange with Lincoln about reconstruction, in which Lincoln did not insist on the abolition of slavery as a condition for peace. He recalled Lincoln’s telling him that he did not consider the Emancipation Proclamation to be anything other than “a war measure, and would have effect only from it being an exercise of the war power, as soon as the war ceased, it would be inoperative for the future. It would be held to apply to slaves as had come under its operation while it was in active exercise.”91 Stephens’s recollection is not without confirmation from other sources, including Lincoln’s telling Browning, just before Christmas in 1864, “that he had never entertained the purpose of making the abolition of slavery as a condition precedent to the termination of the war, and the restoration of the Union.”92
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