The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  But if he had recanted his pledge of liberty to the slave, he would not have been Lincoln, the man who never acted until he was sure, and then never retreated once he had acted. Just the week before, in the midst of all the darkness and doubt and discouragement described by everyone around him, he had defended his slavery policy at length in a conversation with a visitor to his office, saying, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors … to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.” The one witness to this conversation wrote in his diary:

  The President appeared to be not the pleasant joker I had expected to see, but a man of deep convictions & an unutterable yearning for the success of the Union cause… . As I heard a vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his mind grew in stature like his body, &that I stood in the presence of the great guiding intellect of the age, & that those huge Atlantian shoulders were fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies. His transparent honesty, his republican simplicity, his gushing sympathy for those who offered their lives for their country, his utter forgetfulness of self in his concern for his country, could not but inspire me with confidence, that he was Heavens instrument to conduct his people thro this red sea of blood to a Canaan of peace & freedom.

  Thus, on August 25, when Henry Raymond and his party arrived at the White House to urge the mission to Davis, Lincoln rejected the proposal. He told Raymond that to follow his plan “would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” He scuttled Raymond’s scheme and accepted the almost certain fall of his presidency. Raymond returned to New York, and Lincoln’s undelivered letter remained in its envelope, unseen for the next twenty-five years.

  * * *

  While Lincoln wrestled with the devils in Raymond’s plan, the Radicals in New York were scurrying from meeting to meeting, pushing their project to hold a new convention and run a new man. On August 30 a meeting was held at the home of David Dudley Field. In attendance were the Gotham princes of the liberal press, along with other Radical leaders, such as Henry Winter Davis and Francis Lieber. On September 1, Count Gurowski distilled the purpose of the meeting into one malignant shriek: “Out Lincoln … is to be the war cry.”

  The Democrats were, of course, delighted by the stormy spectacle of the Republican house dividing. Even now Democratic delegates and thousands of onlookers were rolling and tumbling in the delirium of their own national convention. The hurrahs for their man of the hour, George McClellan, were amplified under the curved wooden dome of the same Chicago Wigwam that had four years earlier vibrated with shouts for Lincoln. Rich old Chicago Democrat Cyrus McCormick pronounced a smiling benediction over the scene: “Old Abe is quite in trouble just now… . I think he is already pretty well played out.”

  “Abraham’s Dream.” Lincoln sees McClellan ascend to the White House.

  Chapter 31

  The Election of 1864

  “The doom of Lincoln and Black Republicanism is sealed.”

  The delegates gathered in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention represented a huge following, one that anticipated a return to the dominance they had enjoyed before the Republicans’ rude interruption of 1860. In late summer 1864, Democrats everywhere were optimistic. Lincoln received a warning on August 24 from a friend in Kansas:

  Dear Lincoln

  There is an evident sign of confidence among the Democrats all over the Country of success, they feel confident that the nominee at Chicago will be elected… . I confess to you I have some fear of our success— I am not easily discouraged in politics and never come to conclusions hurriedly… .

  Very Truly Your friend

  M W Delahay

  The Democrats drew confidence from the fact that they, unlike the Republicans, were united on their nominee. George Brinton McClellan was that rare animal: a failed general still wildly popular with the soldiers and the people. He had been courted for two years by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, New York financier August Belmont, who saw in McClellan the solution to the Democrats’ problem of how to run against the Republicans without seeming to oppose the war and without being labeled traitors. McClellan, the war hero, the man shorn of power by vindictive politicians, was the one Democrat who could attack Lincoln without having his loyalty questioned or bringing his party’s patriotism into doubt.

  Almost two years before, in November of 1862, the day after being fired by Lincoln, the “Young Napoleon” had received a hero’s welcome in Trenton, New Jersey. Within a week, he had moved into the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, the hotbed of Democratic politics in the North. A tumult greeted his arrival there, with bands blaring, artillery booming, and the people shouting alleluias. Whenever he emerged from his hotel, a large crowd cheered him and followed him wherever he went. In the following weeks, New York newspapers carried regular features headed “McClellan’s Movements,” reporting all his comings and goings—to theaters, to operas, to dinner parties and galas. He was surrounded by Democratic friends from his own set, the “best people,” aristocrats of the most conservative stripe, including Belmont; “Prince” John Van Buren, the President’s son; and captains of commerce Samuel L.M. Barlow, William Aspinwall, and John Jacob Astor. Belmont and Barlow had recently bought the New York World and had installed their young friend Manton Marble as its editor, and the World was soon singing the praises of New York’s newly arrived celebrity-general.

  Pleas to run for office followed. In May of 1863, he declined an offer to run for governor of Ohio. McClellan carefully maintained his show of disinterest in politics until the Pennsylvania state election of October of 1863, when he publicly endorsed the Democratic candidate for governor. This was McClellan’s signal to Democratic Party bosses that he would play ball, and Manton Marble privately signaled their pleasure in return, writing to him, “the people’s eyes are turned all one way in their search for the candidate who will win in 1864.”

  In early 1864, McClellan’s presidential campaign unofficially opened with the publication of his book-length “Report of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, U. S. Army, Commanding the Army of the Potomac.” It was written for twin purposes: to defend his generalship during the 1862 Peninsula and Antietam campaigns, and to expose the perfidy of Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. Included in the Report was McClellan’s Harrison’s Landing Letter of July 7, 1862, now published for the first time, which had dictated to Lincoln the conservative ideals that should guide the government’s war policy. Here was the document that McClellan had always intended to be his own platform for the presidency. The New York World published a series of articles that praised the Report and singled out the Harrison’s Landing Letter, which, it said, set down “with a statesman’s vision the sound political as well as the sound military policy upon which the war should have been conducted.” To rank-and-file Democrats, the Report lifted McClellan above all others as the man to beat Lincoln, who had so evidently caused the general’s failure by neglecting to reinforce him, and who had intended to destroy him according to his own fanatical abolitionist designs.

  On the strength of the surge caused by the Report, McClellan’s backers on March 17 decked out the Cooper Union in New York for a huge rally that would announce him as a candidate for President. When a curtain at the back of the hall was dropped to reveal a gigantic portrait of their hero, superimposed over a vast Union flag, the standing-room-only crowd exploded. On one side hung a banner with the motto, “McClellan and Liberty”; on the opposite side was another banner emblazoned with weighty quotes from the Harrison’s Landing Letter. Billowed up by thunderous applause, speaker after speaker plunged the hall into bedlam with hurrahs for McClellan and groans for the tyrant in the White House.

  On June 15, McClellan, who had remained fashionably mute through all of the hoopla, broke his si
lence at the dedication of a battle monument at West Point, where he delivered an oration that lauded the Constitution and damned “extremists.” McClellan’s handlers made thousands of copies of the West Point Address together with his Harrison’s Landing Letter and titled it “McClellan’s Platform.” Every delegate at the Democratic National Convention would get one.

  Later that month, a military vindication came when General Grant, after the staggering price in blood paid for his Overland Campaign, adopted McClellan’s original strategy of crossing the James River and striking at Petersburg.

  Finally, as a prelude to the national convention in Chicago, the McClellan men on August 10 launched one of the most massive political rallies in the history of New York. Advertised on page one of the World under the headline “THE MCCLELLAN FURORE,” the mass meeting’s razzle-dazzle roared full-throated through Union Square from four stages, including bands, booming cannons, fireworks, sing-alongs, and speeches. That day, Manton Marble wrote to McClellan confidently that the next few days before his nomination in Chicago would be “your only fortnight of peace & quietness for four years.” Samuel Barlow, too, was sure of success, writing Marble, “I have no doubt of our ability to elect McClellan and to restore the Union.”

  With the Republicans in disarray and the war effort stalled, victory seemed a safe prediction. On the eve of the convention, Ben Butler’s wife Sarah wrote to her husband, “politically the chances are for McClellan, a strange thing when it was so clearly decided that his career was finished. Lincoln’s hopes are less every day.” The Republican malcontents conspiring in New York at the home of David Dudley Field concluded it was “useless and inexpedient” to run Lincoln “against the blind infatuation of the masses in favor of McClellan.” The London Morning Post published an epitaph on Lincoln’s political career:

  Mr. Lincoln will go down to posterity as the man who could not read the signs of the times, nor understand the circumstances and interests of his country; … who had no political aptitude; who plunged his country into a great war without a plan; who failed without excuse, and fell without a friend.

  As soon as the Democrats convened, however, their own problems came into view. As James Gordon Bennett put it, “They have a peace leg and a war leg, but, like a stork by a frog pond, they are as yet undecided which to rest upon.” McClellan and his handlers were War Democrats, whose headquarters were in New York. The Democratic National Convention, however, was in Chicago, in the heartland of the Peace Democrats, the Copperheads. The Peace men were led at the convention by none other than their banished leader Clement Vallandigham, whom the savvy Lincoln had allowed back into the country, sensing that he was, by now, more a danger to the Democratic Party than to himself.

  Over the next few days, the Copperheads hammered out a compromise with the War Democrats that gave the nomination for President to McClellan, but got a Copperhead as the Vice Presidential nominee, and a Peace platform, whose most important plank was distilled into the slogan, “The War is a Failure—Peace Now!”

  * * *

  The Democratic Convention had an astounding effect on dissident Republicans. It was as if a switch had been thrown, and an electric current had surged through a central pole and made a thousand scattered iron filings instantly align. For, as bad as Lincoln may have seemed, he could never be as bad as the treasonous products of the meeting in Chicago. The Democrats had chosen George B. McClellan, the man who had battled the Republicans more fiercely than he ever had the rebels, on a platform written by Clement Vallandigham, the traitor who peddled peace at any price. From Iowa, Senator Grimes wrote to Count Gurowski of the change: “One week before the Chicago convention more than one half of the republicans in the northwest wanted Lincoln defeated; one week after the convention none of them wanted him defeated by McClellan.” Even Gurowski, the most unrepentant Lincolnhater in all of Washington, admitted that the Democratic choice “makes Lincoln an anchor of salvation to escape the curse of such a lee shore as McClellan.”

  And then, on September 3, only three days after the Chicago convention adjourned, a second, even more amazing deliverance arrived at the White House in the form of a telegram from General Sherman in Georgia: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

  Its six simple words translated a military victory in Georgia into a political miracle unequalled in American history. As the news rang across the country, a reeling Zachary Chandler wrote to his wife, “There has been the most extraordinary change in publick opinion here that ever was known within a week.” That same day, Leonard Swett, who had so recently been drafted to ask Lincoln to step aside and make way for a better man, marveled to his wife, “There has never been an instance in which Providence has kindly interposed in our behalf in our national struggles in so marked and essential manner as in the recent Union victories.” He explained, “The first gleam of hope was in the Chicago convention. The evident depression of the public caused the peace men to control that convention, and then, just as the public began to shrink from accepting it, God gave us the victory at Atlanta, which made the ship right itself, as a ship in a storm does after a great wave has nearly capsized it.” Lincoln’s friend A.K. McClure sketched the election year in a stroke, writing, “There was no time between January of 1864 and September 3 of the same year when McClellan would not have defeated Lincoln for President.” On September 4, the tide was, incredibly, reversed.

  On September 5, the New York Republican malcontents struck their tent, conceding that recent events had made it “the duty of all Unionists to present a united front.” A few days later, Thurlow Weed wrote to Seward: “The conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln collapsed on Monday last.”

  Greeley’s skedaddle was the hastiest. On August 30, he told John Nicolay in New York, “I shall fight like a savage in this campaign. I hate McClellan.” A week later, a go-between from Lincoln arrived in Greeley’s office with an offer of a plum appointment to postmaster general, and the next day the Tribune heralded its new allegiance, crying, “Henceforth we fly the banner of ABRAHAM LINCOLN for the next Presidency.” By the following week, the Republican ticket was emblazoned on the Tribune masthead, where it stayed until the election.

  Another recent conspirator, political theorist Francis Lieber, wrote to Sumner that he wished Lincoln could know that people were going to vote against McClellan rather than for him, but then went to work at the Loyal Publication Society in New York, printing and mailing out more than half a million Republican pamphlets with titles like No Party Now But All for Our Country.

  Meanwhile, Zachary Chandler grudgingly set his teeth and went out to heal party wounds and marshal support behind Lincoln. As he met with other Jacobins ranged against the President, he wrote of his determination—and his reluctance—to his wife:

  I may accomplish nothing, but I would certainly prefer the traitor Jeff Davis to the equal traitor McClelland [sic] for President… . I am disgusted beyond the power of language to express & yet here I am… . If it was only Abe Lincoln I would say, go to ____ in your own way, I will not stop a second to save you[,] but it is this great nation with all its hopes for the present & future[.] I cannot abandon the effort now.

  Ben Wade and Winter Davis still refused to support Lincoln unless he removed conservative Montgomery Blair from the Cabinet. In early September, then, Chandler went to the White House and promised the support of the Radicals, including Frémont, if Lincoln would get rid of Blair. Lincoln agreed. Montgomery Blair, in fact, had seen this coming and had already immolated himself. He had given the President his resignation in June. Lincoln had refused it then, but Blair had told him that he could reconsider any time the political situation demanded it. After Chandler’s visit in late September, Lincoln sent a grateful letter to Blair, telling him, “You very well know that this proceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you personally or officially. Your uniform kindness has been unsurpassed by that of any friend.” But, “The time has come.” The dutiful Blair wrote his final resignation that day.

 
With Blair gone, Wade would stump for Lincoln, though he grumbled to Chandler, “I only wish we could do as well for a better man… . Were it not for the country there would be a poetical justice in his being beaten by that stupid ass McClellan, who he persisted in keeping in the service… . When I think of those things, I wish the d—-l had Old Abe. But the issue is now made up.” Winter Davis also promised to speak for Lincoln, but he, too, had to swallow hard. J.K. Herbert wrote in late September, “He says sometimes he feels so disgusted that he cannot talk, and therefore has not said positively that he will speak, yet they expect he will & so do I.” Both Wade and Davis campaigned— but they blasted the Democrats rather than glorify Lincoln.

  The last man standing among Lincoln’s Republican foes was the rival candidate, John Charles Frémont. Finally, under heavy pressure by Chandler and other friends, Frémont wrote a letter grudgingly bowing out of the race. Even as he withdrew, however, he fired a graceless parting shot, writing that he resigned,

  not to aid in the triumph of Mr. Lincoln, but to do my part towards preventing the election of the Democratic candidate.

  In respect to Mr. Lincoln, … I consider that his administration has been politically, militarily, and financially a failure, and that its necessary continuance is a cause of regret to the country.

  Abolitionist Wendell Phillips would never come around. On September 27 he wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in fiery epigrams: “I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election. I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing, and indeed his purpose. Lincoln wishes the end; won’t consent to the means. I still reject Lincoln’s quarter loaf. Justice is still more to me than Union.”