The Fiery Trial (53 page)

The stark fact remained, however, that in August 1864, a majority of the 3.1 million slaves covered by the proclamation still resided in parts of the South where the Union army had not yet penetrated. What would happen to them if the Confederacy suddenly gave up the struggle or a Democrat were elected in 1864? In an undated memorandum, Lincoln mused on this problem. He would “dread,” he wrote, to see slavery survive the war. So long as he remained in office, the government would not return to slavery any person “who is free according to the proclamation, or to any of the acts of congress,” unless the Supreme Court ordered it to do so. In that case, “I will promptly act as may then appear to be my personal duty.” The implication was that he would resign.
⁴³

On August 29, four days after Lincoln decided not to dispatch the peace mission to Richmond, the Democratic National Convention gathered in Chicago. The nomination of General George B. McClellan was already assured but the “ultra peace men,” led by Clement Vallandigham, who had returned to the United States from exile in Canada, controlled the platform committee. They drafted a document that called the war a failure and demanded a “cessation of hostilities” and a convention of all the states to restore peace and “the Federal Union of the States.” Republicans immediately characterized this as a recipe for surrender. McClellan’s letter of acceptance repudiated the “peace plank.” While implying that he was willing to abandon emancipation (the war, he said, should be conducted for the “sole object” of national unity), McClellan affirmed that there could be no armistice until the South agreed to the restoration of the Union.
⁴⁴

On August 31, a New York Republican reported Lincoln as declaring, “I am a beaten man, unless we can have some great victory.” Two days later, William T. Sherman’s army finally occupied Atlanta, a key railroad hub and the communications and transportation center for the entire Southeast. Sherman’s triumph made him a Union hero and dispelled the northern public’s sense of futility about the war. The combination of the Democratic convention and Sherman’s victory reinvigorated Republican optimism and “had a magical effect towards uniting our friends,” as one politician reported. “We are going to win the Presidential election,” exulted Theodore Tilton, the editor of the
Independent
, who had been among those hoping to have Lincoln replaced at the head of the ticket. “I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of the public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta. This great event, following the Chicago platform—the most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.” Now it was the Democrats’ turn to worry. One party leader reported from Albany, “The Republicans gather heart, resume the aggressive, and are confident enough to bet on the result.”
⁴⁵

Leaving nothing to chance, Lincoln moved to shore up his support from Radicals. On September 23, he asked Montgomery Blair, whose racist tirades had made him “odious” to Radical voters, to resign from the cabinet. This was part of an agreement, brokered by Senator Zachariah Chandler, by which John C. Frémont abandoned the race (but not before denouncing the administration as a “failure”). The Republican party was now united behind Lincoln’s candidacy.
⁴⁶

In the fall campaign, McClellan’s supporters continued to harp on the To Whom It May Concern letter to demonstrate that Lincoln’s “abolition policy” was needlessly prolonging the war. In the event of McClellan’s election, declared party leader August Belmont at a rally at Cooper Institute, “you will see State after State leave the Confederacy.” But along with promising to restore peace, Democrats in 1864 conducted what one historian has called “the most explicitly and virulent racist campaign by a major party in American history.” At the convention that nominated McClellan, speaker after speaker referred to blacks in the most derogatory terms. One spoke of the “flat-nosed, long-heeled, cursed of God and damned of men descendants of Africa.” Democratic speakers and newspapers warned of the danger of “miscegenation,” a term two journalists for the
New York World
had coined to describe the sexual mixing of the races, which, they claimed, abolitionists and Republicans desired. One campaign lithograph, “The Miscegenation Ball,” depicted white men dancing with black women at the Lincoln Central Campaign Club in an atmosphere of debauchery. As in the past, Democratic speakers warned that emancipation would flood the north with an influx of unwanted blacks.
⁴⁷

Union, military victory, and Democratic “treason” formed the keynotes of the Republican campaign. “The platform of the Chicago Convention,” announced
Harper’s Weekly
, “will satisfy every foreign and domestic enemy of American Union and Liberty.” Stung by Democratic charges that emancipation was the sole reason the war continued, Republicans initially tried to play down the subject of slavery, although as the campaign neared its conclusion more and more speakers defended abolition on moral and pragmatic grounds. But even Radicals like William D. Kelley, who insisted that the war was “a conflict between two orders of civilization” in which slavery must perish, added that once emancipation had been secured, not only would southern blacks lose any desire to move to the North, but “there are not a thousand negroes in Pennsylvania who would not leave [for] the tropics.” Republicans, Frederick Douglass wrote in disgust in October, seemed “ashamed of the Negro.” But, along with nearly all the abolitionists, Douglass ended up supporting Lincoln’s reelection. He would have preferred a candidate “of more decided antislavery convictions,” Douglass wrote, but since the choice had come down to Lincoln and McClellan, “all hesitation ought to cease.”
⁴⁸

Partly to get discussion of the postwar rights and status of blacks onto the political agenda, a national black convention, the first since 1855, assembled in October in Syracuse, New York, with delegates from throughout the North and parts of the South. Some, including Abraham H. Galloway of North Carolina (who had led a black delegation to the White House in May to present a petition for the right to vote), James H. Ingraham of Louisiana, and Francis L. Cardozo of South Carolina, would go on to play major roles in Radical Reconstruction. Written by Douglass, the address of the convention demanded complete abolition, equality before the law, and black suffrage. It condemned the racism of the Democratic party but complained that Republicans, too, remained “largely under the influence of the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored man.” It noted that neither Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan nor the Wade-Davis Bill recognized blacks as having “any political existence or rights whatever.” The convention established the National Equal Rights League to press the cause of equality.
⁴⁹

In keeping with tradition, Lincoln did not campaign, although he delivered impromptu remarks to a number of army units in Washington and penned public letters. He spoke of the need to preserve a form of government based on “liberty and equality,” which guaranteed to all “an open field and a fair chance…in the race of life.” “Mr. Lincoln,” observed the
North American Review
, “represents and contends for the democracy of free labor.” When he received resolutions of support from a group of Methodists opposed to slavery, Lincoln responded, “I trust it is not too early for us to rejoice together over the speedy removal of that blot upon our civilization.” Lincoln also sent a letter to be read to a mass meeting in Maryland supporting ratification of the state’s new antislavery constitution. “I wish all men to be free,” he wrote. “I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring. I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war.”
⁵⁰

As late as mid-October, Lincoln expected to lose half a dozen or more states and to be reelected by only three electoral votes. But early in November, he swept to a resounding victory, carrying every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky. Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote, the largest majority since Andrew Jackson in 1828. Nineteen states counted the votes of the soldiers cast in army camps, and Lincoln won over 70 percent of these ballots. The soldiers, one officer wrote, believed in Lincoln because he recognized that “this war is
not
a failure, that slavery must die.” Republicans also strengthened their control of Congress, ensuring that if the second session of the Thirty-eighth Congress did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, the Thirty-ninth would certainly do so. To a crowd that gathered at the White House to celebrate his victory, Lincoln called the fact that elections had been held in the midst of the war a vindication of popular self-government. The aristocratic New York diarist George Templeton Strong agreed. The result of “the most momentous election ever held since ballots were invented,” he wrote, had somewhat mitigated “my contempt for democracy and extended suffrage.”
⁵¹

T
HE
P
RESIDENTIAL
E
LECTION OF
1864

III

D
ESPITE
R
EPUBLICANS’
rather cautious embrace of emancipation during the campaign, they chose to interpret the election as an endorsement of irrevocable abolition. Richard J. Oglesby, who had just been elected governor of Illinois, assured Lincoln that he was now “at liberty to say to the rebels about what you said to ‘whom it may concern.’” Lincoln himself understood the result in this way. In his annual message to Congress in early December 1864, he claimed that “the voice of the people” had been heard in favor of ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Since “the next Congress will pass the measure if this does not,” he added, “may we not agree that the sooner the better?” Lincoln then discussed prospects for peace, reiterating his offer of amnesty to rank-and-file Confederates who took an oath of loyalty but also warning that the day would “probably” come when he would adopt “more rigorous measures” to secure reunion. He repeated his previous declarations that he would not return to slavery any person freed by the Emancipation Proclamation or Congress. The message made no mention of colonization. “We shall hear no more of that suicidal folly,” wrote a correspondent of the black-owned
New Orleans Tribune
.
⁵²

Lincoln took further steps to cement party unity and ensure the completion of emancipation. In December he appointed James Speed of Kentucky, the brother of his friend Joshua Speed, as attorney general. Unlike his brother, James Speed was one of the most radical Kentucky Unionists; early in the war, he had described himself to Lincoln as “almost an abolitionist.” And Lincoln named Salmon P. Chase chief justice of the Supreme Court. He did so in part to placate the Radicals, who had bombarded him with letters urging Chase’s appointment, but also, Lincoln told a group of visitors, to guarantee that the Court did not challenge the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation. “You at the head of the Nation—and Chase at the head of the Supreme Court,” Lincoln’s old friend Norman D. Judd exulted. Judd was not the only person who could scarcely believe how the national government had been transformed since 1860. “Mr. Speaker,” a Democratic member of Congress proclaimed, “the anti-slavery party is in power. We know it; we feel it.”
⁵³

The first order of business of the Republican majority when Congress reconvened in December 1864 was to reconsider the House vote of the previous June that had failed to approve the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln threw his support to the endeavor, intervening more directly in the legislative process than at any other point in his presidency. He pressured border Unionists, most of whom had opposed the amendment in June, to change their position. Congressman John Alley of Massachusetts later claimed that Lincoln told him to procure votes in any way he chose, remembering that the president is “clothed with immense power.” One border congressman who voted for the amendment was subsequently appointed ambassador to Denmark. Lincoln also authorized Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax to announce that if the amendment failed again, Lincoln would call a special session of the next Congress in March, as soon as the current one adjourned.
⁵⁴

Current and former cabinet members joined in the lobbying campaign. Seward promised patronage appointments to Democrats who had been defeated for reelection and agreed to vote for the amendment. Montgomery Blair urged the influential Samuel L. M. Barlow to swing Democratic votes in its favor, arguing that passage would enable the party to recoup its fortunes “on the
negro
question as contradistinguished from the
slave
question.” In December 1864, “around a table at Delmonico’s,” leading New York Democrats including Barlow, Samuel J. Tilden, and
New York World
editor Manton Marble debated whether the amendment’s passage would benefit their party. Barlow remained unconvinced, but the
World
wrote almost nothing about the amendment as the vote neared, to the relief of the measure’s supporters.
⁵⁵