The people whose support Lincoln most dreaded losing, and seemed closest to losing by 1864, were the 21 million citizens of the North and border states. To Lincoln, it seemed that they, too, had lost faith in him. Emancipation, even delayed as long as it had been by Lincoln, was still far in advance of the racial consciousness of most Americans, and the Democratic press in particular dwelt heavily upon the economic penalties white workers would have to pay if emancipation unleashed a flood of free blacks who came north and competed for jobs. Worse than emancipation, however, was the backlash stimulated by Congress’s decision to institute military conscription in 1862 and then adopt a federal conscription law in March 1863.
No one in Washington in 1861 had really planned to resort to mass conscription to fill the armies, simply because no one had thought it would be necessary. The flood tide of volunteers who enlisted in 1861 seemed to provide all the manpower anyone could possibly want for the war. But the enlistments of the forty regiments that Congress had authorized for two years back in 1861 ran out in mid-1863, and as they did, few of the two-year veterans showed much enthusiasm for reenlistment. At the same time, the tide of volunteers who had enlisted in three-year regiments in 1861 and 1862 had noticeably flattened by 1863. In July 1862, Radical Republican senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts drew up a new Militia Act to replace the outdated 1795 Federal militia ordinance, and in addition to setting aside the racial color line and permitting black enlistment, the new act mandated the enrollment by each state of all male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, and authorized the president to set quotas for each state to meet in the event that a draft would be necessary.85
In order to avoid resorting to an outright draft of unwilling men, the states tried to stimulate volunteering by offering bounties to recruits. “Most of us were surprised,” wrote one Pennsylvania volunteer in 1862, “when, a few days after our arrival in [Camp Curtin], we were told that the County Commissioners had come down for the purpose of paying us each the magnificent sum of fifty dollars. At the same time, also, we learned that the United States Government would pay us each one hundred dollars additional. …” 86 By 1863, these bounties were no longer a surprise. Considering that the average workingman’s annual wages ranged between $300 and $500 in the 1860s, these bounties were considerable sums of money, and reluctant volunteers could frequently be enticed into service by the prospect of a bounty that could buy enough land for a farm or a homestead.87
The prime difficulty with the bounty system—apart from the appearance it gave of bribing Northern males to do what should have been their civic duty—was how liable it was to abuses of various sorts. Communities and states eager to fill up state volunteer quotas found themselves competing with other communities and states for volunteers. Presently the politicians began a bidding war for recruits and offered multiple bounties that could total more than $1,000 when added up. That, in turn, invited the appearance of “bounty jumpers,” who enlisted in one state or community to receive a bounty, then deserted and reenlisted under another name in another state to pick up another bounty. One bounty jumper, John O’Connor, who was caught in Albany, New York, in March 1865, confessed to having bounty-jumped thirty-two times before being caught.88
If the bounties were the carrot for enlistment, then the draft was clearly the stick. It did not take long for a draft to become necessary: little more than two weeks after the passage of the new Militia Act, Lincoln authorized Stanton to initiate a draft that would yield 300,000 men. On August 9, Stanton issued orders describing how the governors of the states were to implement the enrolling and drafting of soldiers. It did not turn out to be that easy. The formula for establishing state quotas was complex and unclear, various categories of exemptions from the draft were fuzzy, and above all, draftees were permitted to hire substitutes, in what amounted to a personalized bounty system. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the county quota for draftees was set at 1,800 men, local notables passed the hat to raise a local bounty fund that they hoped would entice volunteers to fill up the county quota; another three hundred draftees, such as Samuel Pennypacker, hired a substitute. “My grandfather… paid $300 for a substitute in Norristown who was only too willing to go to the front in my stead. I do not know of his name or his fate.” 89
The need for men in this war was insatiable, and so in March 1863 Congress passed an Enrollment Act that bypassed the state governments entirely and created a series of federal enrollment boards that would take responsibility for satisfying the federally assigned state quotas. Each congressional district was expected to establish an enrollment board of three members, headed by a provost marshal, which would draw up a roll of all eligible males within their district. Despite the anger and anxieties that enrollment touched off, enrollment did not necessarily mean conscription. Although each congressional district was issued a quota of volunteers to recruit for each draft call, men would be drafted only from those districts that otherwise failed to meet that quota through volunteering. Districts that could provide sufficient volunteers, or bounties high enough to lure volunteers, would not need to draft anyone, and in the end only seven Northern states would be subject to all four of the draft calls issued under the Enrollment Act.90
Even conscription itself did not necessarily translate into war service. Of the 292,000 names that were drawn from the enrollment lists for the first draft call in 1863, less than 10,000 actually wound up in uniform. Most of the rest were released for disability or on claims to exemption, while another 26,000 hired substitutes (among the hirers being a future president of the United States, Grover Cleveland). Over 50,000 Northerners escaped service by another provision in the Enrollment Act known as “commutation,” which allowed draftees to pay $300 as an exemption fee to escape the draft. Immigrants proved to be equally adept at avoiding conscription: far more entered the army as substitutes, taking the chance of battles and disease in exchange for the benefits of hiring themselves out as soldiers. Even when subsequent draft calls in 1864 and 1865 are added to these figures, no more than 47,000 men were actually conscripted into the Union armies.91
Yet despite the loopholes and commutation provisions, the idea of a compulsory military draft was still a strong dose for Americans to swallow, especially since after 1863 conscription now meant fighting in a war to free black slaves. Moreover, the commutation fee cast the ugly specter of class conflict over the draft: a wealthy man might have no difficulty coming up with the $300 commutation fee or finding and hiring a substitute, but a workingman was looking at what might be an economic wall too high to scale, while the availability of substitutes grew scarcer with each passing month. That, together with the inherently repulsive notion that in a democracy someone could hire a substitute to get shot in his place, was calculated to provoke the bloodiest sort of response among the poor. Anti-draft disturbances erupted within days of the implementation of the Enrollment Act and a new draft call.
The worst incidents of anti-draft violence erupted in New York City in midsummer 1863, two days after the first draft of names was drawn in the 9th Congressional District. Almost from the beginning of the war, New York City had been a hotbed of labor unrest: as men marched off to war and as war contracts sent manufacturing production soaring, New York workingmen found that labor was suddenly at a premium, and they did not hesitate to use the situation to bargain and strike for higher wages. Rumors that the government would use prisoners of war and even South Carolina “contrabands” to break strikes against war-related business had already inflamed working-class tempers when the Enrollment Act became public in the spring of 1863. The terms of the act looked like nothing so much as an attempt to draw workingmen out of this highly attractive labor market and send them into battle so that more blacks could be free to compete for wages and break up strikes—all the while offering a $300 commutation fee for factory owners and their sons.
On July 13, angry crowds of workingmen erupted. For four days, mobs of whites attacked and burned the homes of
Republican politicians, tried to demolish Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and lynched any African Americans they happened to lay their hands on, in addition to burning the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Dr. John Thayer, a chemist who worked in the U.S. Assay Office in Wall Street, saw “the whole road way & sidewalks filled with rough fellows (& some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telegraph poles & setting fire to buildings.”
The furious, bareheaded & coatless men assembled under our windows & shouted for Jeff Davis!… Towards evening the mob, furious as demons, went yelling over to the Colored-Orphan Asylum in 5th Avenue… & rolling a barrel of kerosine in it, the whole structure was soon in a blaze, & is now a smoking ruin. What has become of the 300 innocent orphans I could not learn. … Before this fire was extinguished, or rather burnt out, for the wicked wretches who caused it would not permit the engines to be used, the northern sky was brilliantly illuminated, probably by the burning of the Aged Colored-Woman’s Home in 65th Street. … A friend… had seen a poor negro hung an hour or two before. The man had, in a frenzy, shot an Irish fireman, and they immediately strung up the unhappy African. … A person who called at our house this afternoon saw three of them hanging together.92
Eventually Federal troops fresh from Gettysburg were brought into New York City. They calmly shot the rioters down, and the riots collapsed. But riots popped up elsewhere—in Boston, in Milwaukee, in the marble quarries of Vermont, and across the upper Midwest—and they were often linked, like the New York City riots, to labor disputes. In the Pennsylvania coalfields, bitter labor disputes between the miners and mine owners were dragged into the operation of the draft when appointments as provost marshals and enrollment officers went to mine officials and the families of mine owners, ensuring that the draft would be used, and perceived, as a weapon in labor disputes. “Now is the time for the operators… to get rid of the ringleaders engaged in threatenings, beatings, and shooting bosses at the collieries and put better men in their places,” argued one Pennsylvania coal mine owner. “It is far better to send them into the army and put them in the front ranks, even if they are killed by the enemy, than that they should live to perpetuate such a cowardly race.” Miners took their cues from such lines, evading the draft and waylaying enrollment officers as just one more aspect of their struggle against the mine bosses. Unfortunately for the miners, the mine owners had the authority of the Federal government behind them: in Luzerne County, a hundred miners were arrested, and seventy of them were imprisoned in the dungeons at old Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia.93
Aggravating all of these problems for Lincoln behind the lines was the uniformly bad news from the lines in the summer of 1864. As he feared, that May a Radical Republican splinter group called a convention in Cleveland to dump Lincoln and nominate John Charles Frémont for the presidency instead. In late August, the Democratic National Convention adopted a “peace and union” platform for the 1864 presidential campaign, and it was obvious that they would nominate as their candidate Lincoln’s former general, George Brinton McClellan.
The little general had become the darling of Lincoln’s Democratic critics, endorsing Democratic candidates for governorships and allowing himself to be discussed for the presidential nomination for more than a year. “I think that the original object of the war… the preservation of the Union, its Constitution & its laws, has been lost sight of, or very widely departed from,” McClellan wrote in July 1864, when the Republican Francis Blair attempted to elicit from him an assurance for the newspapers that he would not be interested in the Democratic presidential nomination: “I think the war has been permitted to take a course which unnecessarily embitters the inimical feeling between the two sections, &… I deprecate a policy which far from tending to that end tends in the contrary direction.” 94
This was as much as begging for the Democratic nomination, and when the Democratic convention met in Chicago a month later, McClellan won the nomination easily. He was also confident that, at least this time, he would easily win a national campaign. In his acceptance letter on September 4, 1864, McClellan declared that “I believe that a vast majority of our people, whether in the Army & Navy or at home, would, with me hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace on the basis of the Federal Union of the States without the effusion of another drop of blood.”95
Abraham Lincoln was not sure that McClellan was wrong. On August 22, Henry J. Raymond, the chair of the Republican National Committee, warned Lincoln that “the tide is setting strongly against us.” Pennsylvania “is against us”; Indiana “would go 50,000 against us to-morrow. And so of the rest.” On the same day, William H. Seward’s longtime political manager, Thurlow Weed, warned Lincoln “that his re-election was an impossibility. … The People are wild for Peace.” Lincoln was not even sure he could rely on Grant to rally around, and he told Alexander McClure that, as far as he knew, “I have no reason to believe that Grant prefers my election to that of McClellan.” Weighed down with grief, a morose Lincoln wrote out a memorandum that he folded and had all the members of his cabinet endorse without reading. Inside its folds, the memorandum read:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.96
Lincoln later explained the memorandum as a last-ditch war plan, a challenge to McClellan to use the lame-duck period between the election and the next president’s inauguration to rally all the nation’s energies for a “final trial.” Seward poured scorn on any idea that presumed action on the part of George McClellan: “And the General would answer you ‘Yes, Yes;’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, Yes;’ & so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.” At least in that case, Lincoln said, “I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.” Looking back, McClure had been certain that “there was no period from January, 1864, until the 3rd of September of the same year when McClellan would not have defeated Lincoln.”97
In fact, the election was not going to turn out that way. On the day Lincoln drafted his letter, Farragut shot his way into Mobile Bay; a week later, Atlanta fell to Sherman. The Alabama went to the bottom of Cherbourg harbor in June, and in October, Grant’s cavalry commander, an aggressive knock-down brawler named Philip Sheridan, cleared Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of Jubal Early’s Confederates in a spectacular miniature campaign. These triumphs buoyed Northern morale higher than it had been since Vicksburg, and made talk of peace seem like a giveback of victory.
To make matters worse for the Democrats, McClellan alienated the peace faction of the party (including his vice presidential nominee, George Pendleton, who was “an avowed peacemonger,” according to George Templeton Strong) by insisting that reunion rather than peace be made the first priority of the platform. While Pendleton announced that he was “in favor of exacting no conditions, and… opposed to any course of policy which will defeat the reestablishment of the Government upon its old foundations,” McClellan had no intention of espousing any peace platform that simply allowed the Confederacy to go its own way as an independent nation. He would make whatever concessions the Confederates asked so long as those concessions led the Confederacy back into the Union, but if the Confederate government was not interested in reunion, then “we must continue the resort to the dread arbitrament of war.”98
McClellan was aware that this would cost him the support of the hard-core Peace Democrats, but he could not reconcile the battles he had fought and the lives that had been lost with a settlement that permitted the North and South simply to walk away from each other like strangers. “I intend to destroy any and all pretense for any possible association of my name to the Peace Party,” McClellan wrote two weeks before the elec
tion, “I, for one, could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army & Navy who have survived so many bloody battles, & tell them that their labors and the sacrifices of such numbers of their slain & crippled brethren had been in vain.”99 The result was to divide Democratic loyalties at just the moment when only united effort could hope to upset the incumbent Republicans.
So, almost when it was past expectation, Lincoln was handed hope again for the war—or rather, for both of his wars. On September 22, 1864, Frémont, the Radical splinter candidate, withdrew his competing nomination, and Lincoln was allowed to go on bearing the party banner alone. And not only the banner of the Republicans—in a last appeal to the War Democrats, the Republican nominating convention had chosen as Lincoln’s vice presidential candidate the Tennessee Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, and announced they would not run under the banner of the Republican Party only, but as the “National Union Ticket.” On election day, November 8, 1864, Lincoln and Johnson carried 55.1 percent of the popular vote (2.2 million to McClellan’s 1.8 million), and 212 out of 233 electoral votes, while the Republicans/ Unionists in Congress won 145 out of 185 seats in the House and 40 out of 52 in the Senate. Most surprising of all, Lincoln garnered 78 percent of the votes of the soldiers, including the Army of the Potomac, thus destroying forever the mystique of McClellan as the hero of the armies. 100 At last, Lincoln had the political mandate that had eluded him for the four years of his first term. He had, at least for the time being, won his political war. It now remained to be seen how he would win the war that still waited for him down below Petersburg.
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 64