Episode 1: The 1864 Presidential Election

Transcript

John Heckman: This is a really important topic going into the summer of 2024. And we need to be talking about the summer of 1864 and possibly a little bit before with Abraham Lincoln and his political existence. What was Lincoln’s political life like in the early part of 1864 and into the early days of the summer?

Harold Holzer: Well, Lincoln had not quite publicly declared that he wanted to be a candidate for reelection to the presidency.

And early ’64 was just brutal for the Union, even after Ulysses Grant was called east from the western theater, because he embarked by April and May on the Overland Campaign. And the reports back to Washington and New York were brutal. So, if Lincoln was thinking of reelection timetables, which he was, it was just a terrible time, terrible time. And there was division as well within his own party, since there was not much of a tradition for two-term presidents. It’s hard to believe, but not since Andrew Jackson had a sitting president run for reelection. And that was you know, 35 years. So, Lincoln opened the spring of ’64, anyway, with a lot of work to do and a lot of competition and, frankly, expectation from his Republican allies or critics that he was not going to stand for a second term.

John Heckman: Was he getting more critics the more this war went on, or did he still have some diehard Lincolnites in his circle?

Harold Holzer: He must have thought he was the loneliest man politically in the country. He did have admirers. He had admirers in the West.

He certainly had not shed any of the critics that he had in 1860. When you think about it, although he won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, he won about 54 percent of the northern vote. And, spoiler alert, he would win 54 percent of the northern vote again in 1864. So, he didn’t attract anybody new, one can surmise, and he didn’t lose anybody he didn’t have before.

But it was a struggle. Yes, there were Lincoln supporters. As many critics as he had, just for pursuing such a bloody war and not making gestures toward a ceasefire and reconciliation, we hear that a lot around the world now, there were people who were enormously grateful and pleased that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed the year before and it was in effect.

That was a revolutionary change, and while a number of people objected to changing the rationale for the war itself from saving the Union to eradicating its greatest hypocrisy, Lincoln was still riding on a crest. He knew it was the one thing that was going to put his name in history forever.

John Heckman: So, if Lincoln is still wondering about reelection and should he run and is he going to run, etc., what does that mean for what campaign season looked like in 1864? Because for us campaign season seemingly never stops. It’s always like we’re going through one voting cycle and we’re going right into another one. What was what we would call campaign season like in that era?

Harold Holzer: So, if we talk about campaigning the way we know campaigning in 2024, Lincoln never really started to campaign. He did not go on the hustings. He did not go from state to state. He didn’t hold rallies. He didn’t have press conferences. He did announce new immigration policy, which we just saw as we speak today, not long ago, a president, a sitting president announced new immigration policy.

Lincoln simply worked behind the scenes to get his ducks in a row for the convention, which was very early in those days, was going to be June of 1864. And his job was very simple: Get a majority of the delegates. Even though there was a challenge from Salmon Chase that a lot of people in the party thought they could talk Ulysses S. Grant into running, even though he was racking up all those big casualties as he pushed inexorably south toward Richmond, he hoped. And so it was all behind the scenes. I would say in a way Lincoln never stopped campaigning, at least by 19th century terms. If you look back at the reviews of the Gettysburg Address, you know, we obsess over the fact that in the days after November 19, 1863, he got criticism for what should have been universally applauded as a masterpiece of writing and rhetoric. But, of course, analysis B is that the Republican press applauded the speech and the Democratic press criticized it. But then, step three is that a few Democratic papers accused Lincoln of staining the graves of the soldiers. Because he essentially made a political speech designed to enhance his own prospects for reelection.

So even then there was a sensitivity about speaking out, especially in the cemetery. So, by our standards, he never campaigned. By 19th-century standards, he was out there and people had already begun to realize that he was going to, as he put it, try to persuade people that it was not a good idea to change horses in midstream, his famous aphorism, which he actually did say.

John Heckman: You brought up the Emancipation Proclamation. Is Lincoln seeing this upcoming election as the biggest referendum on that move of his career, saying, okay, the public either believes in this or they don’t. And this election is going to decide that?

Harold Holzer: Yeah, absolutely. Not only did he believe it was a referendum, he believed that the Emancipation Proclamation had to affect as many enslaved people as possible before the next inauguration.

He was very worried that he would lose. Although there were no political polls in those days, he had a sense that he was in gigantic trouble. In the days before, Sheridan and Mobile Bay and the Alabama and the Kearsarge, and ultimately Sherman and Atlanta turned the tide. Changed the momentum.

L. Prang & Co.'s 1887 color lithograph of the battle between USS Kearsarge and CSS Alabama, fought off Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864.

So, he was concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation might be his undoing, actually. Especially after he rejected this crazy plan by Horace Greeley in 1864 to hold a peace conference in Niagara Falls, Canada, which was really not a serious summit meeting at all, because the Confederates never authorized their emissaries to do anything.

Even Lincoln’s home base paper, the old Chicago Tribune, wrote that when Lincoln scuttled that peace conference in Canada and said he didn’t go, but he sent one of his secretaries, when Lincoln scuttled it by saying, I’m never going to retract emancipation, he caused a lot of resentment from middle of the road Republicans who wanted the Emancipation Proclamation to be used as a bait to get the secession crisis over with, with as little further killing as possible. So yeah, it’s much on his mind.

I’ll tell you a good 1864 story I just thought of. Eighteen Sixty-Four is the year in February, an artist from upstate New York named Frank Carpenter comes to the White House armed with a letter of introduction from an abolitionist, as it happens, Owen Lovejoy of Illinois. Dear Mr. President, this letter is being carried by a wonderful artist. He’s painted many presidents. He would like to paint you and the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. So, Carpenter creates the classic painting that launched a thousand engravings and copies. But while he’s in the White House, he observes many, many things and invaluably writes a memoir of his time called Six Months at the White House.

It’s also filled with stuff he didn’t observe, but it’s got some wonderful stories. And one of them is about a map that you can see in this famous painting in print. And it’s a map with a lot of black shading in and out of it, thickest around Virginia. And Carpenter once said, or heard Lincoln say, someone asked him, what are those black shadings?

And he said, that’s where Negroes are enslaved. And look at this spot. It’s not far from Washington. Negroes are as thick as blackberries there. We should take that territory. Now, I actually was just at a conference where someone said that was a racist statement. And it proves that Lincoln was a racist.

What he was actually saying is emancipation doesn’t take effect unless an army provides shelter for enslaved people and opportunities to flee. It’s not a magic wand. Black people just don’t say, Lincoln has done his thing, I’m leaving. They can’t. And when Lincoln points to an area that’s thickly populated with enslaved people, that means he wants them liberated.

So, in balance with the political challenges of 1864, he is definitely, although to some the proclamation is a liability, he is, I think, courageously making sure that it can be enforced to the extent possible in case he loses.

John Heckman: What is Lincoln thinking about his opponent, McClellan? What does he believe is going on there with the Democratic Party, and what could happen with a McClellan administration?

Harold Holzer: I think he thinks McClellan is formidable. I think when he extended the voting rights to absentees and the military voting separately, I think he possibly thought that McClellan was going to get a preponderant number of votes because he had been extremely popular among his troops. What historians and politicians of the day thought was extreme caution on McClellan’s part and resistance to going all in, soldiers thought was protecting men. So, they liked McClellan. I think Lincoln thought he was going to be the opponent from day one.

By the way, their convention wasn’t until the day after Atlanta fell. Talk about lousy timing for the Democrats. Lincoln had June, July, and August to be out there on his own. Of course, he didn’t go out, and he didn’t do very well. So, it was always going to be McClellan. But think of it. By the time September 1 rolls around, Atlanta falls.

Huge news in the East, in the North. Two, the democratic platform has a peace plank in it, saying that the war should end. And number three, they nominate a Peace Democrat, almost a Copperhead, as McClellan’s running mate. That’s not a bad trifecta to launch the fall campaign, and helped Lincoln get into a much better position than he had there.

John Heckman: Who is McClellan’s running mate? Because a lot of people just hear about McClellan. They don’t hear about the whole ticket.

Harold Holzer: And think about how relevant VPs were. I mean, we’re hearing again that VPs are important because both of the presidential candidates in 2024 are really old.

So, it can be very relevant. And it was more relevant in the 19th century. The goal of a vice presidential choice in those days was balance. And it really meant a lot. In 1860, the Republicans, not Lincoln, had chosen a man from Maine, Adam O’Hanlon, who was about as eastern as you can get without going to Nova Scotia, right?

And Lincoln was the quintessential westerner. I promise I’ll get to the Democrats in a second. And then Lincoln perhaps personally engineered dumping Hamlin and getting Andrew Johnson the vice-presidential nod. Not because he thought Johnson would be president, because presidents, even Biden and Trump do not think about their own mortality, but it was now Lincoln was the quintessential northerner and in Johnson he had a loyal southerner, the only southerner who had stayed in the Senate, the only southerner from a seceded state who had stayed in the U. S. Senate and not gone into the Confederacy.

Well, the Democrats decided in their wisdom to nominate George Pendleton. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I’m blanking on his first name. Maybe it was George. Two Georges. Also not a good idea for them.

But Pendleton was practically a Copperhead. He wanted the war to end. He wanted emancipation to be rescinded. And maybe it was to coalesce the real antiwar Copperheads around the McClellan candidacy. Because McClellan was not for a ceasefire. In fact, he renounced the platform plank that bound him in to it. In those days, people read platforms and candidates were expected to live up to the platform and not make their own policy. In the end, Pendleton proved a talking point for the Republican press. We don’t want this peace guy who’s going to throw all of our effort and all of our sacrifice away to be near the presidency.

John Heckman: So that’s an interesting point, because it’s almost like some in the press or some other politicians don’t want to strictly attack McClellan because he is so admired by some in the military. So go attack the VP candidate instead because it’s an easier choice.

Harold Holzer: Absolutely. And attack the platform because the platform is the serious thing on which they’re running. I don’t think the Republicans had a platform in 2020, when Donald Trump was running for reelection. I’m not sure they’ll have platform today and I go back in my own political experience back to the days in 1968 and 1972, when Democrats were killing each other over platforms and who’s going to be on the platform, what’s the alternative platform? It was serious up until 50 years ago. And I don’t think anybody has read a platform since the seventies, but I could be wrong.

So, if you read the Democratic press, you’re absolutely right. There isn’t as much attacking of McClellan as there is of what the Democrats have published as their policy. Not that McClellan was exempt. There’s a great cartoon of McClellan, “The Gunboat Candidate” for president. And it’s supposed to show him during the Battle of Malvern Hill, sitting on the mast of the ship in the water, looking at the battle through binoculars, and sitting on a saddle that’s on the mast of the ship. I don’t know, is the mast the thing that runs horizontally? I don’t know if it’s called a mast. I think it’s got a real name, like a prow head or something. And people of the day are supposed to understand what this means. Showing McClellan with binoculars means that he never got close to the actual fighting. Having him sit on a saddle reminds people that he was on a horse way in the back of the lines. Also, he was into saddles and horses at the time. And then he’s holding a little shovel in his other hand. And that’s supposed to remind people that the best work McClellan ever did was dig entrenchments.

So, there were digs at him for sure.

George McClellan Gunboat Candidate cartoon

John Heckman: Those political cartoons and caricatures are always interesting to look at and try to dive into because there’s so many things that maybe a 21st century audience doesn’t see, and we have to look at it from a different perspective and space and time, right?

Harold Holzer: You know who spoiled us is Charles Schultz and Peanuts, because all of his captions were four words and brilliant. But in the 19th century cartoons, there were word balloons with dialogue. There’s another cartoon that comes to mind that illustrates, no pun intended, the point we were making before. It’s called “Your Platform and Mine.” And Lincoln is being held aloft on this platform with poles. So, the platform becomes an actual stage that he’s being carried on. And in the back of him is a black Union soldier. And they’re talking about the great Republican ideas.

On the Democratic side, the platform is rotting away. So, McClellan’s chair is practically falling through and on the ground. And in back of him is Jefferson Davis holding a Bowie knife, the symbol of treason, and an Irishman made to look like a sort of ape who was using the N-word to say they’ll never be accepted in society. Their platform and the Republican platform.

So, you’re right, a lot of sophisticated pictorial campaigning.

John Heckman: Is Lincoln preparing anything for defeat for the long term? Is he trying to go behind the scenes and say, hey, if we lose, I still hope this becomes initiated. Can we do this even if I’m not here?

Harold Holzer: So, there are two things he does. One is he has a meeting at the White House with Frederick Douglass, who has been adversary, colleague, critic, friend. Now he’s helping to raise black regiments. And his own son was at Battery Wagner in 1863, was not killed, but close to it. And he calls in Douglass and he says, if we lose, the new administration is just going to cancel the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s an executive order and an executive order can be repealed. I’m calling for a 13th amendment in our platform. Well, he didn’t say 13th, we say that. I’m calling for a constitutional amendment to ban slavery, but until that happens, we’ve got to do something. So, I want you to raise an army, a posse, a squad of black men to go into slave territory and carry the Emancipation Proclamation with you. They had made them into little books by then for soldiers to distribute, to authorize the liberation of enslaved people.

See as many slaves as you can, give them the book, get them out of there, because we may lose. So, he does that. And anyone who thinks Lincoln wasn’t a sincere emancipator and didn’t care about that and thought it was just political, just military, look at this exchange of letters. Douglass comes up with a real plan of action, which fortunately for the country doesn’t have to go into effect.

The other thing he does is he makes his cabinet sign a pledge that it will cooperate with the new administration should it be elected, and we’ll work with him between November and inauguration day in March to end the war and save the Union. Because after that, the Union may be given up.

So, his two great causes, preserving the Union and ending slavery, are enshrined in these letters and documents that he works on in August and September 1864. When everyone tells him he’s going to lose, the editor of The New York Times happens to also be his campaign manager, and writes to him and says, you cannot be elected.

Just goes to show you, there’s always a September or October surprise that could change things.

John Heckman: And hindsight’s an interesting thing when you think about everything that transpires by March of 1865. If he would have lost the election, all that stuff transpires. It may transpire in a different way in certain cases, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing where you’re like, wow, what all transpired by the time inauguration would have come around.

Harold Holzer: I know. Think of the fact that the House authorizes the vote on the amendment in February. It takes nine, 10 months for the ratification to take place. If Lincoln had not been reelected, I’m not sure the House takes that vote again, much less sends an amendment to the states.

John Heckman: Something I never thought of until this moment. I’m like, wow, a lot happened until March of 1865 that after that it may have looked a lot different and just be pushed to the side.

Harold Holzer: Absolutely. I do think McClellan would have rescinded emancipation and opened peace talks. Because he was for the status quo antebellum. He was for restoration of the Union with slavery intact in the slave states.

John Heckman: What was life like in the White House for Lincoln with his family? We have Mary and Mary’s involved in certain things behind the scenes and has certain opinions on things. What is she thinking at this time?

Harold Holzer: Primarily, I would say Mary admires her husband beyond words, but she’s also petrified that if Lincoln is defeated, all of her retail bills will come due and that they will be bankrupt. And that he’ll be furious because he doesn’t know how much she’s bought on credit in the previous three years.

Just every scarf, and gloves, and patterns, and cloth. So, he’s got to win for her. And she enjoys her status. As tragic as the last two years had been for the Lincolns with the death of their beloved middle child, Willie, in February of 1862, they had a child they were supporting in Harvard. He was about to go to Harvard Law School. So, Mary liked her status. And she was a friend of emancipation. She used to visit the contraband camps in Washington. She would donate to contraband relief. Prod her husband, who was not exactly the most charitable person in the world, contrary to what you would think.

And so, she’s deeply invested politically, emotionally, and financially in Lincoln’s success. I’m sure she didn’t make it easy for him. It’s probably said every night, well, are the numbers changing? Are you doing better? Got to win this thing. She’s deeply into the reelection of her husband.

John Heckman: Yeah. She’s just as invested in that. So, Lincoln is thinking of all these different factors of win or lose, certain things have to transpire, at least in his mind, politically and possibly socially, militarily. Are there any other worries on his mind from the military standpoint other than the vote? I mean, it’s a while until Sherman captures Atlanta. It’s a while until the March to the Sea.

Harold Holzer: Every military loss is a notch in his political coffin for sure. And don’t forget, in May 1864 the two newspapers in New York published a fake presidential proclamation indicating that Lincoln himself was dissatisfied with Grant’s progress and was going to authorize a new draft or recruitment for 400,000 people. And Lincoln really goes bonkers when he hears that and effectively personally shuts down those two newspapers and puts their editors in confinement. Because he thought that the security of the White House had been breached to let this news out.

In fact, he was planning a draft of 500,000, not 400,000. So that’s terrible political news. And again, Grant’s inexorable progress southward just came at huge expense in terms of human sacrifice. Just think of the Wilderness and the news. It’s just devastating. Spotsylvania. Nobody had ever heard of things like that. So that is not news designed to boost a candidate. And it’s lost souls. It’s lost votes. It’s just every family with a missing chair becomes a potential opponent and enemy.

I should bring up one thing contemporaneous with the Overland Campaign, and that’s the complete break of a number of people within his party, almost all of them German. And I write this in my book about Lincoln and immigration. They had been the bedrock of support for Lincoln in the West in 1860, and they are angry at him because he hasn’t been nice enough to General von Sigel. He’s been disrespectful to Karl Schurz. Forget about General Schimmelfennig, who hides in a pigsty in Gettysburg. So, they form their own party and nominate John C. Fremont as a presidential candidate to run as a third party. It’s a threat. And in researching the delegate count, I found that they were almost all German born. So, this was a German move. This was an immigrant defection. And at the same time, the Irish were all revved up because of emancipation and the draft, witnessed the draft riots of the previous July.

So not until late summer did that third party candidacy dissolve. And then Lincoln again had clear sailing.

John Heckman: So, he has political baggage from first-generation immigrant population who are saying that you’re not standing by us at all. We don’t see how you’re going to help us.

Harold Holzer: Exactly. Resentment over the disrespect of the most undeserving military figure, von Sigel. Grant said Sigel never saw a battle he didn’t run from. It’s pretty devastating. It’s in the memoirs. Not in those exact words, but pretty much.

John Heckman: When Grant says that about someone, that’s pretty interesting. He must really not like him.

Harold Holzer: Not if he writes it 17 years later, I think.

John Heckman: Right.

Harold Holzer: And Lincoln has to bring Carl Schurz back into the fold as well. Schurz is the most famous German, the most prominent German. He’s been ambassador to Spain. He’s come back, raised regiments, fought at Chancellorsville disastrously. He was angry that Lincoln didn’t back up the Germans at Chancellorsville who were thrown under the bus by Hooker and blamed for the defeat. And he wanted to come see Lincoln and discuss all of this and Lincoln didn’t want him to come. So, Schurz I think went AWOL. Came to see him. They talked at the Soldiers’ Home and Lincoln was very good at talking Schurz down off the ledge when he got out of control. And he was a critic of Lincoln from time to time, but kept it generally private. By the time they had their meeting at the summer home in August ’64, Schurz was crying, he was saying he was going to campaign for Lincoln. Lincoln’s thought about his being a participant was, you can’t fight in the South and can’t then electioneer in the North.

Schurz ignored him. And he appeared in a lot of places for Lincoln, and I think made a big difference in getting the Germans back on Lincoln’s side. So yeah, a lot of wheels are spinning in this very complicated campaign. It’s often seen as Lincoln was in political trouble in 1864 and then Sherman took Atlanta and he won.

It was so much more complex than that. And I haven’t seen every presidential ballot that was ever created in 1864. Some of them had decorations on the back. I’ve now seen three that have the Kearsarge-Alabama duel on the back. I’ve never seen one that had Atlanta on the back.

So, I think, as George W. Bush would say, we “mis-underestimate” the other military events as contributing factors to Lincoln’s political revival. And Kearsarge and Alabama took place far away, Cherbourg, France, in June, word didn’t get here till July. And it really inspired people that this commerce raider, which had pillaged so many Federal ships during the war, including civilian ships, had been finally conquered. The Confederates were upset by it too. They said that the Kearsarge cheated because they had iron plating on the sides, and therefore they weren’t a real fighting ship, they were an ironclad. Didn’t matter. Taking that out of service was a big morale booster in the North.

And, you know, Sheridan’s Ride, and Damn the Torpedoes, and all of that stuff happens in 1864. I mean, of course, Sherman, in taking Atlanta and beginning his march, is the icing on the cake. Unless you also remember that the March wasn’t publicized. Nobody knew where he was till Christmas, practically, when he got to Savannah.

About the Guest

Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading voices on Abraham Lincoln and Civil War-era political culture. He is the chairman of the Lincoln Forum, and his latest book is titled Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (Dutton, 2024).

Additional Resources

Frank Carpenter’s “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation”
Political cartoon “Your Plan and Mine”
View illustrations about the voting process in 1864 in our photo essay, “Wartime Voting”
For more on our host, John Heckman, visit him on Linktree