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Election 1864

Popular governments must fashion a strategy of military means and political ends that conform to public opinion. In the wake of Fort Sumter, the American people were captivated by the idea of a quick and glorious conclusion to the Civil War. Northern policy devoted to conciliation in 1861 gradually evolved into a hard war strategy committed to ending slavery, to annihilating Confederate armies, and to destroying the South's capacity to wage war. Abraham Lincoln was re-elected president in 1864, defeating George McClellan, a former Union Army general.

George McClellan had proven himself to be an efficient organizer with strong personal magnetism. Victories over the Confederate forces in western Virginia, for which he received largely undeserved credit, established his reputation as the “Young Napoleon”, though he lacked his namesake’s aggressive boldness. For this reason President Lincoln approved him Major General in the regular army. He was outranked only by General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. At age thirty-four he briefly replaced the aging Scott as general-in-chief.

As a commander, McClellan’s chief contribution to the Union cause was his brilliant ability to organize and train troops. McClellan played an important role in raising a well-trained and organized army for the Union. His policies helped weed out unqualified soldiers and officers and provided a more efficient means of leadership selection. Otherwise, he proved to be a cautious and indecisive leader. He repaid President Lincoln’s patience with him with disrespect. In command of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan belatedly mounted the Peninsula Campaign, the object of which was the capture of the Confederate capital at Richmond.

His dilatory movement and belief that the numerically inferior Confederate force was larger than his own condemned the operation to failure. As he was to do repeatedly throughout his Civil War career, “Little Mac” blamed the administration for not yielding to his demands for more soldiers and supplies. Failure was unknown to the Young Napoleon, which was unfortunate, for he could have profited from that painful experience as Lincoln, U.S.Grant, and other successful leaders in the war had done.

Plagued by poor generalship, the Federal army in the East was roundly trounced in 1861 and through most of 1862. McClellan’s only major battlefield success (albeit a qualified one) was at Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in 1862. Despite obtaining a copy of Robert E. Lee’s plans, he again moved slowly and cautiously. The bloody engagement did not result in a decisive defeat of the rebels, but it did check Lee’s northern advance. It was also enough of a victory to motivate Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

McClellan, who had been returning runaway slaves to their masters, vehemently opposed turning the conflict into a war against slavery. McClellan was opposed to federal interference with slavery and believed in white supremacy. Some of his Southern colleagues also approached him informally about siding with the Confederacy, but he could not accept the concept of secession. McClellan hoped to preserve the Union, keeping intact the system of slavery if possible.

He favored a war that would impose little impact on civilian populations, and one that would require no emancipation of slaves. McClellan's antipathy to emancipation would add to the pressure on him, as he received bitter criticism from Radical Republicans in the government. He viewed slavery as an institution recognized in the Constitution, and entitled to federal protection wherever it existed.

The Young Napoleon denounced Radicals in Congress for their ideology as well as their meddlesome ways. A partisan Democrat, he had little sympathy for the antislavery cause or for blacks. His writings after the war were typical of many Northerners: "I confess to a prejudice in favor of my own race, & can't learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers."

Radicals insisting on immediate emancipation, he thought, “had only the negro in view” and “cared not for the results” of the war, “knew little or nothing of the subject to be dealt with, & merely wished to accomplish a political move for party profit, or from sentimental motives.” He told his wife, “I will not fight for the abolitionists.” Tactlessly he made these views known to leading Radicals, including the influential Senator Charles Sumner,

Lincoln once chastised e McClellan for his timidity saying, ‘If you do not want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while". At Fredericksburg in late 1862 and at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863 the North again suffered large-scale and critical defeats. McClellan proved insufficiently bold before the enemy, moving slowly and failing to strike aggressively when the occasion called for it. After the Battle of Antietam, he was ordered to turn over his command to his good friend Ambrose E. Burnside and to go home to New Jersey to await further orders. They never came.

By June, 1864, the American Civil War was entering its 4th year at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, both North and South, and incalculable amounts of government spending on both sides to support troops in the field and navies on the rivers and seas. Since major victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July, 1863, the South was on the defensive on its own soil.

A new phase of Total War was developing where civilians were increasingly impacted by hardship. Both sides had resorted to drafting soldiers. Both had imposed martial law in areas of unrest. As of the Emancipation Proclamation in January, 1863, the North had made the abolition of slavery in the rebelling states a war goal, and begun enlisting African-American troops. The South held to its war goal of winning independence. As of the Summer of 1864, no end to the war was yet in site.

For much of Lincoln’s first term, he had been an unpopular president. Upon his first election, Lincoln desperately tried to keep the nation together. Pro-Confederacy citizens in the border-states and parts of the midwest, as well as Peace Democrats in the north, opposed him from the beginning. Lincoln’s quest for emancipation and the military draft polarized these factions even more.

Following on the heels of the victory at Gettysburg, the war-torn nation experienced draft riots across the north. The riots in New York City constituted the worst civil uprising in United States history. What began as a low and middle class revolt against the draft soon turned into a violent race riot. By the time it was over, several thousand were injured, fifty buildings, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, had been burned, and more than 100 people had been killed. The majority of those killed were African American men, and eleven of these deaths were due to lynching.

The election of 1864 was, in several ways, unique. Although there would have been ample reason to postpone the election, the nation went forward with the democratic process, despite the lack of precedent for voting in a divided nation. For the first and only time, a portion of the United States did not participate in the election. The states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia did not cast votes, upholding Jefferson Davis as their own president.

In an effort to broaden their constituency, the Republican Party chose to join with the War Democrats and called themselves the National Union Party. The National Union platform called for concluding the war with an unconditional Confederate surrender, an amendment to end slavery, and support for disabled veterans. If Lincoln was to be reelected, it would be the first time in over thirty years that an incumbent president won a second term. As President Lincoln’s first term drew to a close, the war was not yet settled, nor were the chasms of political division within the Republican Party. The situation was made all the more complex by the fact that many registered voters who presumably would vote for the reelection of their current commander in chief were unable to return home to cast their ballots.

The problem of voting in the 1864 election had occurred to a number of state legislators in the early days of the Civil War. The difficulty with voting in the 1862 mid-terms had given them a glimpse of the difficulties they would have during the election for the next president, so a number of states acted quickly to set in place a mechanism by which soldiers in the field could vote by mail.

Despite warnings and accusations of potential fraud in the soldier vote, only one case of voter fraud was brought to trial, and it involved several New Yorkers who attempted to record the votes of recently deceased and incapacitated New York soldiers in order to swing the “Soldier Vote” for McClellan. The anomaly was caught, and glaringly obvious, when the results of one district which had raised an entire regiment of soldiers saw their results did not match those of any other districts. The fraudulent report there had McClellan winning over 90% of the vote rather than losing almost three to one as was the case in nearly every other district.

In the spring of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman's force of 100,000 men marched from Chattanooga toward Atlanta, Georgia, the industrial hub of the Deep South. Twenty miles north of Atlanta, Sherman's army is soundly defeated at Kennesaw Mountain. Sherman's defeat combined with Grant's stalemate in Virginia, enrages a Northern electorate already weary of war. The presidential election is in November, and Abraham Lincoln's chances for a second term are dwindling by the day.

The summer of 1864 was one of Lincoln's most difficult. Peace negotiations were begun, but fell through. There was discord in the Cabinet, and in August Lincoln broke with the Radicals in Congress. He soon came to believe that he had no chance of winning reelection. Yet the tide was slowly turning.

The Democrats nominated George McClellan, who became the leader of all the copperheads as well as of the war Democrats. The party's platform called for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy in which slaveholders will be allowed to keep their property. If McClellan were elected, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would almost certainly be struck down.

The Democrat's platform, adopted 29 August 1864, stated that " this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity of war-power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States....

"... the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired, and they hereby declare that they consider that the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution; the subversion of the civil by military law in States not in insurrection; the arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial, and sentence of American citizens in States where civil law exists in full force; the suppression of freedom of speech and of the press; the denial of the right of asylum; the open and avowed disregard of State rights; the employment of unusual test-oaths; and the interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms in their defense is calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union..."

McClellan himself repudiated the platform on which he was nominated and insisted on "Union before peace, not peace before Union", the opposite to the order spelled out by the Peace Democrats. He would not be the candidate of a peace party willing to treat with the South on conditions that did not include reunion. McClellan and his VP running-mate Vallandigham both studiously avoided the awkward word "slavery" altogether

Though victorious at Kennesaw Mountain, the outnumbered Confederate Army fell back to a defensive position at Atlanta. Two days after the Democrats nominated McClellan for the Presidency, Atlanta fell to W. T. Sherman and Northern morale soared. After 6 weeks of bloody conflicts around Atlanta, Sherman wired Washington: "Atlanta is ours and fairly won." For the first time in the war, many in the North now believe victory can be achieved.

McClellan's soldiers had adored him, but most of them, as well as the majority of other voters, preferred Lincoln, who won reelection handily. Lincoln won the November election carrying 22 of the 25 participating States. Lincoln received 55% of the popular vote to George B. McClellan's 45%. The war was fast drawing to a close as Lincoln began his second term. George B. McClellan is one of the most controversial military figures of the Civil War, and his historical reputation is largely negative.