CHAPTER 24

“ATLANTA IS OURS”

UNION HOPES FOR imminent victory faded as the spring of 1864 gave way to summer. “Our troops have suffered much and accomplished but little,” Gideon Welles recorded in his diary on June 20. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all.” Unable to dislodge Lee’s troops, who displayed what the White House secretary William Stoddard called an awe-inspiring “steady courage,” Grant settled in for a siege at Petersburg. Meanwhile, Sherman was encountering tough resistance as he moved slowly through Georgia.

Daily reports of the brutal battles in Virginia and Georgia provoked a particular dread in the Sewards, the Blairs, the Bates, and the Welleses, all of whom had loved ones at the front. For the Sewards, whose youngest son, William, nearly lost his life at Cold Harbor, there were many sleepless nights. “I cannot yet bring myself to the contemplation of your death or of your suffering as others have done,” Frances Seward told Will, though she considered that he was “fighting for a holy cause” in a “righteous” conflict, unlike the Mexican War, which she had vigorously opposed when her older son, Augustus, had been in the army.

Elizabeth Blair had become “so nervous” with her husband in the navy and her brother Frank moving toward Atlanta with Sherman that she “quake[d] all night with terror.” Even her normally cheerful father was perpetually “grave & anxious,” certain that if Frank were taken prisoner, the Confederates “would be as eager to kill him physically—as the Radicals are politically.” Bates feared for his twenty-one-year-old son, Coalter, who was with General Meade and the Army of the Potomac, and Welles was pained “beyond what I can describe” when his eighteen-year-old son, Thomas, departed “with boyish pride and enthusiasm” to join General Grant. “It was uncertain whether we should ever meet again,” he recorded in his diary, “and if we do he may be mutilated, and a ruined man.” His anxiety left Welles “sad, and unfit for any labor.” The painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.

Lincoln knew the ravages of this most bloody war had touched every town and household of America. The time had come to revive the oppressed spirits of the people. In mid-June, he found the perfect forum for a public speech when he journeyed to the Great Central Fair in Philadelphia, designed to benefit the Sanitary Commission. Thousands of citizens had come from the surrounding area to enjoy the collections of art, statuary, and flowers, the zoological garden, restaurants, raffles, and games that covered a two-mile concourse and were said to offer “miracles as many as Faust saw in his journey through the world of magic.”

At seven o’clock on the morning of June 16, Lincoln, Mary, and Tad left for Philadelphia by train. Word of their journey had spread. At every depot along the way, cheering crowds gathered for a glimpse of the first family. Arriving before noon, they were escorted in an open carriage up Broad Street to Chestnut Street and the Continental Hotel. The streets were “lined with citizens” and the windows “crowded with ladies waving their handkerchiefs.” The unbounded ardor and spontaneous applause was such, one reporter noted, “as has not been heard for many a day in Philadelphia.” Lincoln declined to speak at the hotel or at the fairgrounds that afternoon, preferring to wait until the dinner that evening. Perhaps he knew that his remarks, which he had carefully drafted, would be recorded more accurately in that setting.

“War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible,” he began. “It has destroyed property, and ruined homes; it has produced a national debt and taxation unprecedented…. It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’” Nonetheless, he reminded his listeners, “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.” The force of his words and the unshakable determination they embodied instantly uplifted and emboldened his audience.

A few days later, in order to stem his own “intense anxiety” about the stalemate in Virginia, Lincoln decided to visit Grant at his headquarters at City Point. Welles strongly disapproved of the decision. “He can do no good,” he predicted. “It can hardly be otherwise than to do harm, even if no accident befalls him. Better for him and the country that he should remain at his post here.” The navy secretary failed to understand the importance of these trips to Lincoln, who needed the contact with the troops to lift his own spirits so that he, in turn, could better buoy the spirits of those around him.

Accompanied by Tad and Assistant Navy Secretary Gustavus Fox, Lincoln left the Washington Navy Yard aboard the river steamer Baltimore in the early evening of June 20. The journey to City Point, which was about 180 miles farther south by water than Aquia Creek, took more than sixteen hours. Horace Porter, Grant’s aide-de-camp, recalled that when the steamer arrived at the wharf, Lincoln “came down from the upper deck…and reaching out his long, angular arm, he wrung General Grant’s hand vigorously, and held it in his for some time,” as he expressed great appreciation for all that Grant had been through since they last met in Washington. Introduced to the members of Grant’s staff, the president “had for each one a cordial greeting and a pleasant word. There was a kindliness in his tone and a hearty manner of expression which went far to captivate all who met him.”

Over a “plain and substantial” lunch, typical of “the hero of Vicksburg,” noted the Herald correspondent, Lincoln conversed entertainingly and delivered “three capital jokes” that provoked hilarity. When the meal was finished, Grant suggested a ride to the front ten miles away. Porter noted that Lincoln made an odd appearance on his horse as his “trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes.” The sight “bordered upon the grotesque,” but the troops he passed along the way “were so lost in admiration of the man that the humorous aspect did not seem to strike them…cheers broke forth from all the commands, and enthusiastic shouts and even words of familiar greeting met him on all sides.”

Reaching the front, the president took “a long and lingering look” at the sights of Petersburg, where Lee’s armies were gathered behind formidable earthworks. On the return trip, they passed a brigade of black soldiers, who rushed forward to greet the president, “screaming, yelling, shouting: ‘Hurrah for the Liberator; Hurrah for the President.’” Their “spontaneous outburst” moved Lincoln to tears, “and his voice was so broken by emotion” that he could hardly reply.

That evening, Porter recalled, as Lincoln sat for hours with General Grant and his staff, “we had an opportunity of appreciating his charm as a talker, and hearing some of the stories for which he had become celebrated.” The young aide-de-camp observed what so many others had seen before, that Lincoln “did not tell a story merely for the sake of the anecdote, but to point a moral or clench a fact.” Seated on “a low camp-chair,” with his long legs wrapped around each other “as if in an effort to get them out of the way,” he used his arms to accompany his words and “joined heartily with the listeners in the laugh which followed.” Discussion of a new form of gunpowder prompted a story of two competing powder merchants in Springfield. The sight of a newly patented artillery trace led to the recitation of a line from a poem: “Sorrow had fled, but left her traces there.” Reference to the electoral college brought forth the quaint observation that “the Electoral College is the only one where they choose their own masters.” When the convivial evening came to a close, the president walked with Porter to his tent, taking a peek inside, “from curiosity, doubtless, to see how the officers were quartered,” before returning to his stateroom on the Baltimore.

The next morning, “in excellent spirits,” Lincoln steamed up the James River with Grant to visit General Butler and Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee, Elizabeth Blair’s husband. Talking with Butler about Grant, he observed that “When Grant once gets possession of a place, he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.” After lunch, it was time to return to Washington. On taking leave, General Grant took Lincoln aside, assuring him with a rousing pledge that the president would repeat and cite in the weeks ahead: “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer day, but I will go in.”

On the morning of June 23, John Hay reported that Lincoln returned to the White House “sunburnt and fagged but still refreshed and cheered. He found the army in fine health good position and good spirits.” The next day, at the regular Friday cabinet meeting, the skeptical Welles conceded that the trip to the front had “done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally in confidence in the General and army.” And of signal importance, Lincoln could now better project his own renewed hope to the anxious public, lauding Grant’s “extraordinary qualities as a commander” to one reporter, and speaking to another “of the condition of army matters in the very highest terms of confidence.”

Acutely aware of his own emotional needs, Lincoln had chosen exactly the right time to review the troops, for his conversations with Grant and his interactions with the soldiers sustained and inspired him during the troubling days ahead. “Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.” More clearly than his colleagues, Lincoln understood that numerous setbacks were inevitable before the war could be brought to a close. Yet in the end, he firmly believed the North would prevail. “We are today further ahead than I thought one year and a half ago we should be,” he told Noah Brooks that June, “and yet there are plenty of people who believe that the war is about to be substantially closed. As God is my judge I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year.”

BY THE LAST WEEK of June, the forbearance Lincoln had long shown toward his ambitious secretary of the treasury was finally exhausted. The dramatic upheaval in the cabinet began when John Cisco, assistant treasurer of New York, announced his resignation. Cisco had held the prestigious post through three different administrations and was well respected by all factions. Lincoln was anxious that his replacement satisfy both wings of New York’s Republican Party. For several months, the president had been bombarded by complaints from friends in New York, including Thurlow Weed and Senator Edwin Morgan, that Chase was filling all the customs house positions with his own partisans—former Democrats who were now radical Republicans supporting Chase’s own presidential hopes.

Sensitive to Weed’s concerns, Lincoln told Chase to consult with Senator Morgan and ensure that his selection was satisfactory to all sides. Chase discussed the matter with the powerful New York senator but then proceeded, over Morgan’s strong objection, to send Lincoln a formal nomination for Maunsell Field. A Democratic journalist with ties to New York society, Field was serving as third assistant secretary of the treasury, a post Chase had designed especially to compensate Field for the access he had provided Chase to the inner circles of New York literary and social life. The appointment was stunning, recalled the treasury registrar, Lucius Chittenden, for Field “had no financial or political standing, and his natural abilities were of a literary rather than an executive character.”

Undeterred, Chase apparently assumed that his own services were so indispensable that Lincoln would sanction a controversial nominee rather than risk a messy squabble when the financial health of the nation was at stake. Chase awoke the morning after sending the Field nomination to the White House and cheerfully undertook his daily reading of the Bible, which on that summer morning included a letter St. Paul sent to the Ephesians imploring them to “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness.” When he reached the department, however, he found a disturbing note from the president on his desk. “I can not, without much embarrassment, make this appointment,” Lincoln informed him, “principally because of Senator Morgan’s very firm opposition to it.” It would “really oblige” him, he said, if Chase and Senator Morgan could agree on another nominee.

Still confident that he could change the president’s mind, Chase wrote an immediate request for a personal interview. When Lincoln did not respond, Chase decided to resolve the difficulty on his own. He telegraphed Cisco in New York and pleaded with him to withdraw his resignation and stay on for another three months. Before obtaining Cisco’s answer, he received Lincoln’s reply to his interview request. “The difficulty,” wrote Lincoln, “does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.” Lincoln went on to explain the criticism he had faced in the previous months over treasury appointments in New York, and noted that to disregard Morgan’s judgment in this instance might trigger “open revolt.”

Cisco’s agreement to stay on should have ended the matter; but Chase, peeved at Lincoln’s refusal to meet in person and bent on reestablishing his authority over his own appointments, could not rest. He decided to chasten the president with what was essentially his fourth letter of resignation, certain it would again be rejected. He began his letter by enclosing Cisco’s telegram withdrawing his resignation, which, he acknowledged, “relieves the present difficulty.” But then he went on: “I cannot help feeling that my position here is not altogether agreeable to you; and it is certainly too full of embarrassment and difficulty and painful responsibility to allow in me the least desire to retain it. I think it my duty therefore to enclose to you my resignation.”

Lincoln was seated at his desk in his office, he later recalled, when a messenger handed him a letter from the Treasury Department. “I opened it, recognized Chase’s handwriting, read the first sentence, and inferred from its tenor that this matter was in the way of satisfactory adjustment. I was truly glad of this, and, laying the envelope with its inclosure down upon the desk, went on talking. People were coming and going all the time till three o’clock, and I forgot all about Chase’s letter. At that hour it occurred to me that I would go down stairs and get a bit of lunch. My wife happened to be away, and they had failed to call me at the usual time [Mary was in Massachusetts for Robert’s graduation from Harvard]. While I was sitting alone at table my thoughts reverted to Chase’s letter, and I determined to answer it just as soon as I should go up stairs again.

“Well, as soon as I was back here, I took pen and paper and prepared to write, but then it occurred to me that I might as well read the letter before I answered it. I took it out of the envelope for that purpose, and, as I did so, another inclosure fell from it upon the floor. I picked it up, read it, and said to myself, ‘Halloo, this is a horse of another color!’ It was his resignation. I put my pen into my mouth, and grit my teeth upon it. I did not long reflect.”

Lincoln quickly perceived that Chase was essentially saying: “You have been acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, & ask me to stay & agree that I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for it, I will go.” This presumption the president could not and would not countenance. He took his pen from his mouth and began to write.

“Your resignation of the office of Secretary of the Treasury,” he tersely opened, “is accepted. Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.”

Early the next morning, Lincoln called John Hay into his office and asked him to deliver the news of Chase’s resignation to the Senate as soon as it convened, along with his recommendation of former Ohio governor David Tod as his successor. “It is a big fish,” he said. “I thought I could not stand it any longer.” Though worried that the president was making a costly mistake, the loyal Hay proceeded to the Capitol, reaching the Senate just as the chaplain recited the opening prayer.

Still ignorant of the president’s letter, Chase went about his daily business, anticipating Lincoln’s penitent request for him to continue his duties. Perhaps Lincoln would personally visit his office, put his arm around him, and again tell him how much he was needed. After breakfast, Chase went to his office, where he received word that Senator Fessenden of Maine wanted to see him immediately at the Capitol. Riding in his carriage, he surmised that the chairman of the Finance Committee wanted to discuss the various financial bills currently before him. In the midst of his conversation with Fessenden, a messenger arrived to tell the senator of David Tod’s nomination. “Have you resigned?” the distraught Fessenden asked. “I am called to the Senate & told that the President has sent in the nomination of your successor.” Stunned, Chase explained that he had indeed sent in his resignation, but did not know that it had been accepted.

Returning at once to the department, Chase found the letter from Lincoln. Reaching the part where Lincoln spoke of “mutual embarrassment” in their relations, Chase was dumbfounded. “I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him,” he recorded in his diary that night, “but what he had found from me I could not imagine, unless it has been created by my unwillingness to have offices distributed by spoils or benefits with more regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques and individuals, than to fitness of selection.” Blinded by self-righteousness and donning what Nicolay and Hay termed “his full armor of noble sentiments,” Chase refused to see that in choosing the inexperienced Field, he, not the president, was filling an office on the basis of faction rather than fitness.

The startling news spread quickly on Capitol Hill. “The Senators were struck dumb with amazement,” Noah Brooks reported. The members of the Senate Finance Committee convened an emergency meeting and decided to go as a body to the White House to lodge a vehement protest. “Fessenden was frightened,” Lincoln later told Hay; “Conness [of California] was mad.” Lincoln listened patiently to their concerns about losing Chase at this perilous time and their doubts about Tod as a viable successor. Then, reaching into his desk, he pulled out Chase’s previous letters of resignation and read them aloud to his visitors, along with the gracious replies that had kept Chase in the cabinet each time. Moreover, though he agreed that “Mr. Chase had a full right to indulge in his ambition to be President,” he suggested that the indiscretions of Chase’s friends had so complicated matters that the two of them “disliked to meet each other” in person. In fact, in recent weeks, Chase had declined to attend most of the regular cabinet meetings. The situation had become “unendurable,” Lincoln concluded, this most recent controversy being simply “the last straw.” Though the committee left dissatisfied, they at least departed with a true picture of the long history behind the final break.

Chase’s friend Massachusetts congressman Samuel Hooper came in to see the president later that afternoon. He said he felt “very nervous & cut up” by Chase’s departure. Treasury Registrar Lucius Chittenden was equally distraught, telling Lincoln that the loss of Chase was “worse than another Bull Run defeat,” for there was not a single man in the country who could replace him. “I will tell you,” Lincoln said, “how it is with Chase. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to fall into a bad habit. Chase has fallen into two bad habits…. He thinks he has become indispensable to the country…. He also thinks he ought to be President; he has no doubt whatever about that.” These two unfortunate tendencies, Lincoln explained, had made Chase “irritable, uncomfortable, so that he is never perfectly happy unless he is thoroughly miserable.”

At this point, according to Chittenden, Lincoln paused. “And yet there is not a man in the Union who would make as good a chief justice as Chase,” he continued, “and, if I have the opportunity, I will make him Chief Justice of the United States.” Chittenden concluded that this extraordinary want of vindictiveness toward someone who had caused him such grief proved that Lincoln “must move upon a higher plane and be influenced by loftier motives than any man” he had ever known. Yet while Lincoln did indeed possess unusual magnanimity, he was also a shrewd politician. He mentioned the chief justiceship to Chittenden knowing that when Chase learned of it, the prospect might dampen his public opposition. Lincoln made a similar remark to Congressman Hooper. In a relaxed conversation, he expressed his “esteem” for the secretary and his sincere “regret” that the two of them had become so “awkward” and “constrained” when they got together. When Hooper relayed these comments to his friend, Chase was moved, suggesting that “had any such expressions of good will” been tendered before his resignation, he might have acted differently. Unfortunately, it was too late.

The news of Chase’s resignation was met with dismay and regret in the country. He was “the great magician of the treasury,” the Chicago Tribune wrote; “his name will be handed down to history as the greatest financier of his century.” Greeley’s Tribune went even further, claiming that “Mr. Chase is one of the very few great men left in public life since the almost simultaneous decease of Messrs. Clay, Webster and Calhoun.”

Choosing a worthy successor was vital, and it was not clear that David Tod was up to the task. Any concerns Lincoln might have had about his hasty choice were alleviated, however, when he received a telegram from the former governor declining the post for reasons of health. According to Francis Carpenter, Lincoln “laid awake some hours, canvassing in his mind the merits of various public men.” By morning, he had found the ideal solution, a candidate so perfect he should have considered him from the start: William Pitt Fessenden. “First,” he told Hay the next morning, “he knows the ropes thoroughly: as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance he knows as much of this special subject as Mr. Chase. 2nd he is a man possessing a national reputation and the confidence of the country. 3d He is a radical—without the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.”

In a far better humor, Lincoln handed Hay his official nomination of Fessenden to carry to the Senate. When Hay told him that Fessenden was in the reception room waiting to see him, Lincoln said: “Send him in & go at once to the Senate.” Understanding that Fessenden might be reluctant, and perhaps remembering that three years earlier he had sent in Chase’s nomination before securing his acceptance, the president hoped that a fait accompli would once again move the process forward.

Lincoln greeted Fessenden warmly and listened politely for a few minutes as the senator suggested a few names for the vacant Treasury post. Smiling, Lincoln finally interrupted and told Fessenden there was no need to continue. He had found his man, and the nomination of Fessenden was already en route to the Senate. “You must withdraw it, I cannot accept,” Fessenden cried out, jumping to his feet. He explained that his health was not good, and he was certain that the pressures of the new job would kill him. “If you decline,” Lincoln said, “you must do it in open day: for I shall not recall the nomination.” Fessenden left with a promise that he would think on it further, though his acceptance was doubtful.

Returning to the Senate, Fessenden discovered that his colleagues had unanimously approved his nomination. Encircled by the warmth of their good wishes and congratulations, he began to waver. “Telegrams came pouring in from all quarters,” he later recalled, insisting that he accept for the good of the nation, that he was an inspired choice for the critical post. It was both the most rewarding and “the most miserable” day of his life, for he still feared that the duties of the post would be his death. “Very well,” the always blunt Stanton told him, “you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.”

As he was driven to the White House the next morning, however, Fessenden carried with him a letter declining the nomination. It took all of the president’s persuasive powers to change his mind. “He said the crisis was such as demanded any sacrifice, even life itself,” Fessenden recalled, “that Providence had never deserted him or the country, and that his choice of me was a special proof that Providence would not desert him. All this and more.” In the end, Fessenden felt he “could not decline but at the risk of danger to the country.”

Fessenden’s appointment received universal praise. “He is a man of undoubted financial ability, and of unsurpassed personal integrity,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, reflecting the sentiment of many Northern papers. Radicals felt he was one of their own, while conservatives applauded his intelligence and experience. “He is honest,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband, “& as Mrs Jeff [Davis] once said the ablest of all the Republican Senators.” The business world, long familiar with his work on the Senate Finance Committee, breathed a sigh of relief. “I am the most popular man in my country,” Fessenden wryly noted several days after his acceptance.

“So my official life closes,” Chase recorded in his diary on the last day of June. Sadness pervades the entry, written when the oppressive heat of Washington was such, observed Bates, that “even the trees in the streets are wilting.” Chase believed he had “laid broad foundations” to secure financial support for the troops, but he knew the job was still unfinished. From this point on, he would not have any real influence.

If Chase had hoped his resignation would produce consternation and regret among his cabinet colleagues, he was disappointed. On the night his departure was announced, Blair and Bates called on Welles to talk over the startling event. While they were all surprised, none was sorry to see him go. “I look upon it as a blessing,” Welles said. On numerous occasions Welles had confided doubts about Chase’s character to his diary, observing that he lacked “the courage and candor to admit his errors,” and that “his jokes are always clumsy—he is destitute of wit.” Bates greeted Chase’s retirement with “a vague feeling of relief from a burden, and a hope of better things,” observing that Chase’s relations with his fellow cabinet ministers had long since failed “to be cordial.” And Monty Blair, whose family regarded Chase as a mortal enemy, was thrilled. Old Man Blair happily informed Frank that Chase had “dropped off at last like a rotten pear unexpectedly to himself & every body else.” Seward, unlike his other colleagues, expressed no personal pleasure in Chase’s demise. He simply informed Frances of his relief that the “Cabinet crisis” did not engender a “severe shock” in the country. He traced the origin of the present upheaval back to “the first day of the Administration,” when, against his advice, Lincoln had created his compound cabinet.

As Chase prepared to leave Washington, he noted sadly that Stanton, “warm & cordial as ever,” was the only former colleague who came to see him “—no other Head of Dept. has called on me since my resignation.” If Chase believed the powerful war secretary might feel the slightest compulsion to resign his own place in solidarity with his old friend, however, he was mistaken.

In his misery, Chase searched for reasons why Lincoln had so abruptly accepted his resignation. His answers betray an unwillingness to take the slightest responsibility for his own missteps. “I can see but one reason,” he wrote, “that I am too earnest, too antislavery, &, say, too radical to make him willing to have me connected with the Admn., just as my opinion that he is not earnest enough; not antislavery enough; not radical enough,—but goes naturally with those hostile to me.” As his melancholy deepened, he generated another explanation that displayed the obtuseness that had always proved his undoing as a politician. “The root of the matter,” he told his friend Whitelaw Reid, “was a difficulty of temperament. The truth is that I have never been able to make a joke out of this war.”

To Kate, who remained at the Sprague mansion in Narragansett through the summer, he confessed that he was “oppressed” by anxiety. “You know how much I have endured rather than run counter to those friends who have insisted that I should remain in my place.” He should have resigned earlier, he told her, right after Frank Blair’s attack. Then he might have departed while heroically defending the radicals against the conservatives, but now “I am reproached with having left my post in the hour of danger.” And though “the crushing load is off my shoulders,” there is the regret that “I cannot finish what I began.”

Chase’s gloom was mirrored by the distress of his daughter, whose marriage to William Sprague was in trouble. Kate had seemed to hold “the balance of power” throughout the courtship, yet William now believed he had a right to control his high-spirited wife. Though he had made her responsible for redecorating his several multimillion-dollar households, he angrily rebuked her in private and in public for exorbitant spending. “Can it be,” she later lamented in her diary, “that he would keep this hateful thought of my dependence ever before me, forcing me to believe that every dollar given or expended upon his home is begrudged?” She worried that, “reared in a pinched, prejudiced narrow atmosphere,” with the thought of the “insatiable Moloch—money” always before him, he had vested in it “all the power when after all it is only a tributary…. My father was, in comparison with my husband, a poor man, but he felt himself rich when he was enabled to bestow a benefit upon the needy or a pleasure upon those he loved & a treasure laid up in his home was money well invested.”

Though she was proud of her new husband’s “worldly success” as both a senator and businessman, she had hoped to be a partner in all his endeavors, as she had been with her father. She “would gladly follow all his interests with sympathy & encouragement,” she wrote, “but I cannot make them mine for his effort would seem to be to show me that I have no part in them.” In fact, he rebuffed her when she tried to talk of business or politics, complaining in public that she had “different ideas & ways of life, from his own.”

Most hurtful of all, Sprague had started drinking again. He would lash out at her when drunk, provoking bitter arguments that would take days to resolve. Kate could not restrain herself from replying to his insults with “harsh and cruel words” of her own. When sober, Sprague would vow reform, pledging “to fill & occupy his place, in the home circle he has created…as well as the position he has secured for himself in the world.” These resolves were short-lived, and Kate began to fear that he did not seriously contemplate a worthy future, that his only thought was “to slip through these obligations in life” with the least effort possible. “God forgive me,” she later confessed, “that I had so often wished that I had found in my husband a man of more intellectual resources, even with far less material wealth.”

Though she acknowledged occasionally loathing her husband, she also believed that “few men were loved” as much as she loved him. Perhaps she, too, was at fault. “My hopes were too high,” she confessed. “Proud, passionate and intolerant, I had never learned to submit.” Chase witnessed a fight between the young couple at Narragansett but mistakenly interpreted the problem as a simple “misunderstanding” that time and patience would make right. His hopes seemed justified a few weeks later when he learned that Kate was pregnant with her first child.

THE GOODWILL ENGENDERED among congressional radicals by Lincoln’s appointment of Fessenden was swiftly eroded by his refusal to sign the punitive Reconstruction bill that passed the Congress in the final hours of July 2, 1864, before it adjourned for the summer. Sponsored by Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis, the bill laid down a rigid formula for bringing the seceded states back into the Union. The process differed in significant ways from the more lenient plan Lincoln had announced the previous December. Lincoln had proposed to rehabilitate individual states as quickly as possible, hoping their return would deflate Southern morale and thereby shorten the war. The Wade-Davis bill, in contrast, postponed any attempts at Reconstruction until all fighting had ceased. It required that a majority of a state’s citizens, not simply 10 percent, take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution before the process could begin. In addition, suffrage would be denied to all those who had held civil or military office in the Confederacy and who could not prove they had borne arms involuntarily. Finally, the bill imposed emancipation by congressional fiat where Lincoln believed that such a step overstepped constitutional authority and instead proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure that slavery could never return.

Rather than veto the bill outright, Lincoln exercised a little-known provision called the pocket veto, according to which unsigned bills still on the president’s desk when Congress adjourns do not become law. In a written proclamation, he explained that while he would not protest if any individual state adopted the plan outlined in the bill, he did not think it wise to require every state to adhere to a single, inflexible system. Talking with Noah Brooks, he likened the Wade-Davis bill to the infamous bed designed by the tyrant Procrustes. “If the captive was too short to fill the bedstead, he was stretched by main force until he was long enough; and if he was too long, he was chopped off to fit the bedstead.”

Lincoln understood that he would be politically damaged if the radicals “choose to make a point upon this.” Nevertheless, he told John Hay, “I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.” He would rely on this conviction in the days ahead when Wade and Davis published a bitter manifesto against him. He was not surprised by their anger at the suppression of their bill, but he was stung by their vitriolic tone and their suggestion that his veto had been prompted by crass electoral concerns. “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends,” he told Brooks, “is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man,” the same sentiment he had expressed when he lost his first Senate race in 1855. Now personal sorrow was compounded by the realization that radical opposition might divide the Republican Party, undoing the unity he had struggled to maintain through the turbulent years of his presidency.

During the first week of July, rumors spread that a rebel force of undetermined strength was moving north through the Shenandoah Valley toward Washington. The rumors alarmed Elizabeth Blair, who feared that the Confederate troops would come through Silver Spring, Maryland, exposing both her parents’ home and that of her brother Monty to direct danger. She cautioned her father, but his mind was elsewhere. For weeks he and Monty had been planning a hunting and fishing trip to the Pennsylvania mountains, and he was eager to get started. In a letter to Frank on July 4, the seventy-three-year-old Blair happily anticipated the two-week vacation. Two grandsons were coming along; their grandfather hoped “to give them a taste for woodcraft and to amuse & invigorate them.” Meanwhile, the womenfolk were heading to Cape May. “Your mother & I enjoy our young progeny’s happiness as our own,” Blair told his son, “& look on it as a prolongation of our enjoyment of the earth, through a remote future.”

Elizabeth’s admonitions concerned Monty at first, but after the War Department erroneously told him that the Confederate force had been stopped at Harpers Ferry, he and his father set off for the Pennsylvania countryside. Unable to prevent their departure, Elizabeth tried to convince her mother to remove the silver and other valuables to their city home before leaving for Cape May. Eliza Blair refused, telling her daughter “she would not have the house pulled to pieces.”

Elizabeth Blair’s fears proved justified. Grant’s decision to move south of Richmond and attack Petersburg from the rear had inspired Lee to send General Jubal Early and fifteen thousand troops north, hoping to catch Washington unawares. If a panic like that which prevailed at the time of Bull Run could be induced, Grant might have to withdraw some of his troops from Virginia. For several weeks, Early’s movements remained undetected, and on July 5 he crossed the Potomac into Maryland. At this point, only miscellaneous troops under the command of General Lew Wallace, later to become famous as the author of Ben Hur, barred the path to the nation’s capital. Wallace understood that with only half as many men as Early, he could not push the enemy back, but hoped he might hinder Early’s progress while Washington prepared itself for attack.

The two sides met at Monocacy River on July 9. Young Will Seward, a colonel now, participated in the fierce engagement. “The battle lasted most of the day,” he proudly recalled years later, “and every inch of the ground was hotly contested, until our men were finally overwhelmed by superior numbers.” During the fighting, Will’s horse was shot from under him, hurling the young colonel to the ground and breaking his leg. Encircled by rebels when he fell, Will was assumed to have been captured.

Secretary Seward spent a tense night at the War Department waiting for news of his son. He had just returned home after midnight when Stanton appeared with a discouraging report from General Wallace that Will had been wounded and taken prisoner. “None of us slept much the rest of the night,” Fred Seward recalled, and in the morning, “it was arranged that Augustus should go over in the first train to Baltimore to make inquiries.” At 3 p.m., Augustus telegraphed more hopeful news. Though Will’s injury was confirmed, he had not been captured. “God be praised for the safety of our boy,” Frances exclaimed. “With the help of one of his men,” Will somehow “reached a piece of woods; where mounting a mule, and using his pocket-handkerchief for a bridle, he succeeded, after a painful ride of many miles during the night, in rejoining the forces.”

The routing of the Federals at Monocacy gave Early an unobstructed path to Washington. As the rebel troops ranged through the countryside, they destroyed railroad tracks, stores, mills, and houses, much as the Union men under David Hunter had done in Virginia. Reaching Silver Spring, they came upon Monty’s Falkland mansion. Blair’s carpenter reported that the troops had immediately “commenced the work of wholesale destruction, battering the doors, robbing all the bookcases, breaking or carrying off all the chinaware, and ransacking the house from top to bottom.” The next night, they torched the house, leaving only a “blackened ruin.”

At the nearby home of Monty’s father, the patriarch, the soldiers scattered papers, documents, and books. They rummaged through the wine cellar and the bedrooms, littering the lawn with furniture and clothing. Elizabeth Blair was told that “one man dressed in Betty’s riding habit, pants & all—another in Fathers red velvet wrapper.” Still others donned assorted coats and uniforms, dancing with “great frolic” on the lawn.

The “perfect saturnalia” that Elizabeth decried was brought to an immediate halt when Generals Jubal Early and John Breckinridge arrived. Cursing the marauding soldiers, Breckinridge made them return stolen items. He retrieved the scattered papers and documents and sent them away for safekeeping. He asked Early to station a guard on the grounds to preserve the trees, grapery, shrubs, horses, and crops.

When Early inquired why he would “fret about one house when we have lost so much by this proceeding,” Breckinridge replied that “this place is the only one I felt was a home to me on this side of the Mts.” He explained that some years earlier, during a difficult period in his life, the old gentleman had taken him in, providing a “place of refuge & of rest.” A neighbor told Blair Senior that Breckinridge “made more fuss” about preserving the house and its possessions “than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.”

When the older Blairs eventually returned home, they found a note on the mantel: “a confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house…. Especially we regret that Ladies property has been disturbed.” In this manner, Elizabeth marveled, “bread cast upon the waters came back to us.”

The time the Confederates lost during the Battle of Monocacy and the frolic at Silver Spring allowed Washington to mobilize its defenses. In his initial panic, Stanton had sent his secretary to take his bonds and gold from a War Department safe and place them under his mattress at home. He took heart from Lincoln’s calm demeanor, however, and thereafter, the two worked together as one during the crisis. They telegraphed Grant, who put his highly respected Sixth Corps on a fast route to the capital. They called up the militia, supplied government clerks with muskets, and ordered “all convalescents capable of defending the forts and rifle-pits” to report for duty.

Throughout the tense days, Lincoln remained “in a pleasant and confident humor,” observed John Hay, not seeming to be “in the least concerned about the safety of Washington. With him the only concern seems to be whether we can bag or destroy this force in our front.” Welles noted approvingly that Stanton “exhibits none of the alarm and fright I have seen in him on former occasions.” As nervous farmers with homes in the Confederate path poured into Washington, the president and the war secretary drove together through the streets in a open carriage, “toshow the people,” one resident thought, “that they were not frightened.” Such calm evinced by the administration had a salutary effect, allowing the residents of Washington, who had despaired in the wake of Bull Run, a measure of solace. Some “could even appreciate,” as Fred Seward noted, “the grim humour of their predicament, in being thus suddenly attacked from the north, after having sent their available troops to the south.”

By the time the Capitol dome was visible to the rebel force, the opportunity for a successful attack had receded. “Before even the first brigade of the leading division was brought into line,” General Early later acknowledged, “a cloud of dust from the direction of Washington” revealed that Grant’s reinforcements had arrived. Furthermore, inspection of the Union fortifications revealed them “to be exceedingly strong…with a tier of lower works in front of each pierced for an immense number of guns.” Stretching “as far as the eye could reach,” the earthworks appeared in many places to be “impregnable.”

Still, Early refused to withdraw. He was determined to show the North how close he had come and sent a small force to engage the Union troops at Fort Stevens, about five miles from the White House. The skirmishing continued for several days, during which time Lincoln witnessed the action from a parapet, accompanied by Mary on one occasion, by Seward and Welles on another. The tall president’s presence in the line of fire made a vivid impression upon those who were there. “The President evinced a remarkable coolness and disregard of danger,” recalled General Horatio G. Wright. Even after a surgeon standing by his side was shot, “he still maintained his ground till I told him I should have to remove him forcibly. The absurdity of the idea of sending off the President under guard seemed to amuse Lincoln, but in consideration of my earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.”

Still, Lincoln would periodically stand, provoking concern on the part of a young captain who shouted, “Get down, you fool!” Years later, the captain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., son of the poet whom Lincoln greatly admired and himself to become a distinguished Supreme Court justice, would recall this unusual incident. For the normally sedentary Gideon Welles, to witness live action “was exciting and wild,” until the sight of dead soldiers carried away on stretchers instantly sobered his mind. “In times gone by I had passed over these roads little anticipating scenes like this, and a few years hence they will scarcely be believed to have occurred.”

Having made his point, Early retired as swiftly and mysteriously as he had come, leaving behind a spate of recriminations. The misguided command signals in Washington that allowed him to escape constituted “an egregious blunder,” acknowledged Stanton’s aide, Charles Dana. Blame was generally attributed to General Halleck, though Welles knew that in the eyes of the public, the entire administration appeared “contemptible.”

Mary Lincoln, sensing her husband’s profound disappointment that the rebels had escaped, turned on Stanton during a conversation at the Soldiers’ Home. “Mrs. Lincoln,” Stanton remarked with rare levity, “I intend to have a full-length portrait of you painted, standing on the ramparts at Fort Stevens overlooking the fight!”

“That is very well,” Mary replied, “and I can assure you of one thing, Mr. Secretary, if I had had a few ladies with me the Rebels would not have been permitted to get away as they did!”

Mary was not alone in her indignation. The sight of his ruined home provoked Monty Blair into openly defiant rants against the command structure in Washington directed by Halleck. His diatribes were reported to Halleck, who immediately wrote a furious letter to Stanton. “I am informed by an officer of rank,” he began, “that the Hon. M. Blair, Post Master Genl, in speaking of the burning of his house in Maryland, this morning said, in effect, that ‘the officers in command about Washington are poltroons; that there were not more than five hundred rebels on the Silver Spring road and we had a million of men in arms; that it was a disgrace.’” On behalf of those officers “who have devoted their time and energies night and day, and have periled their lives,” Halleck demanded to know whether “such wholesale denouncement & accusation by a member of the cabinet receives the sanction and approbation of the President of the United States. If so the names of the officers accused should be stricken from the rolls of the Army; if not, it is due to the honor of the accused that the slanderer should be dismissed from the cabinet.”

Stanton sent the letter to Lincoln, who replied the same day. “Whether the remarks were really made I do not know; nor do I suppose such knowledge is necessary to a correct response. If they were made I do not approve them; and yet, under the circumstances, I would not dismiss a member of the Cabinet thereof. I do not consider what may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss, is sufficient ground for so grave a step.” Moreover, he concluded, “I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed.” Then, to further underscore his authority in the matter, Lincoln composed a note to his cabinet colleagues, stating categorically that only he would decide when the time had come to let one of them go. “It would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country. My wish is that on this subject, no remark be made, nor question asked, by any of you, here or elsewhere, now or hereafter.”

Lincoln’s restrained reaction was validated by Blair’s conduct once the shock of seeing his gutted homestead wore off. Learning that Ben Butler had torched a Confederate officer’s house in retaliation for the burning of Falkland, Monty implored the general to avoid any more like actions. “If we allow the military to invade the rights of private property on any other grounds than those recognized by civilized warfare,” he cautioned, “there will soon cease to be any security whatever for the rights of civilians on either side.” When friends offered to raise funds for him to rebuild, he graciously declined their help. “The loss is a very great one to me it is true,” but it did not compare “to the losses suffered by the unknown millions in this great struggle for the life of the nation. Could I consent to have my house rebuilt by friends, whilst my neighbor a poor old blacksmith is unrelieved[?]” Monty Blair had confirmed Lincoln’s faith in him as a man and as a responsible public figure. The postmaster general would retain his post until Lincoln himself decided it was time for him to go.

“THE MONTH OF AUGUST does not open cheerfully,” Noah Brooks reported. The steady progression of unfavorable events—the shocking slaughter at Petersburg, the raid on Washington, and the failure to capture Jubal Early’s troops—had created a mood of widespread despondency throughout the North. In addition, the president’s mid-July call for five hundred thousand additional volunteers had disturbed many Republicans, who feared negative repercussions on the fall elections. Lincoln himself acknowledged the “dissatisfaction” with his new recruiting effort but emphasized that “the men were needed, and must be had, and that should he fall in consequence, he would at least have the satisfaction of going down with the colors flying.”

Meanwhile, dispatches from Grant revealed a continuing stalemate in the siege against Petersburg. An ingenious attempt by a regiment of former coal miners to mine under the Confederate earthworks and blow a hole in the enemy lines had resulted in a spectacular tragedy instead. In the confusion after the explosion, Union soldiers advanced into the 32-foot-deep crater itself, rather than circle around it, and had become trapped. “Piled on top of each other like frightened sheep,” they were easy targets for slaughter. By day’s end, Grant had lost nearly four thousand men. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” Grant wired Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

The appalling event left Gideon Welles in a depressed state, “less however from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him…. A blight and sadness comes over me like a dark shadow when I dwell on the subject, a melancholy feeling of the past, a foreboding of the future.” Edward Bates shared his colleague’s despair. In his diary he admitted feeling heartsick when he contemplated “the obstinate errors and persistent blunders of certain of our generals.”

Unlike Welles or Bates, Lincoln refused to let the incident shake his faith in Grant. The day after the Battle of the Crater, he met with Grant at Fort Monroe, where the two men looked resolutely toward the future. Grant had received intelligence that the hard-riding Early had once again crossed the Potomac, spreading fear and devastation in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He dispatched General Philip Sheridan, one of his best commanders, to the Shenandoah Valley with instructions to find Early “and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.” Lincoln, as determined as Grant to take the battle directly to the enemy without respite, replied: “This, I think, is exactly right.”

A few days later, Commissioner French enjoyed “a long and very pleasant talk” with Lincoln. “He said we must be patient, all would come out right—that he did not expect Sherman to take Atlanta in a day, nor that Grant could walk right into Richmond,—but that we should have them both in time.” Lincoln’s confidence was not now shared by the country. The ongoing disasters had combined to create “much wretchedness and great humiliation in the land,” a doleful Welles noted. “The People are wild for Peace,” Thurlow Weed cautioned Seward.

Even before this train of events, Horace Greeley had taken it upon himself to counsel Lincoln. Greeley had received word that “two Ambassadors” representing Jefferson Davis had come to Niagara Falls in Canada “with full & complete powers for a peace.” Urging the president to meet with them immediately, he reminded Lincoln that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood. And a wide-spread conviction that the Government…[is] not anxious for Peace, and do not improve proffered opportunities to achieve it, is doing great harm.”

Though fairly certain that the so-called “ambassadors” had not been authorized by Jefferson Davis, Lincoln nonetheless discussed the matter with Seward and commissioned Horace Greeley to go to Niagara Falls. If the Confederate envoys were genuinely carrying legitimate propositions for peace, Greeley should offer them “safe conduct” and escort them to Washington. In addition, Lincoln dispatched John Hay to join Greeley at Niagara Falls and deliver a handwritten, confidential note to the envoys. “To Whom it may concern,” the note read. “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery…will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.”

As Lincoln suspected, the two envoys had “no credentials whatever” and could offer no assurances that Jefferson Davis was ready to stop the war. He hoped the failed mission would demonstrate to Greeley and others the absurdity of the claims that he was the one preventing peace. Unfortunately, his intention backfired when the Confederate envoys sent Lincoln’s confidential letter to the newspapers, falsely proclaiming that Lincoln’s inadmissible demand for abolition had torpedoed the negotiations. Democratic newspapers embellished the story, accusing Lincoln of continuing the war for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves.

Leading Republicans were also upset by the president’s “To Whom it may concern” letter. Looking simply for restoration of the Union, Thurlow Weed complained, the people “are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’” Deeply disheartened, Weed and other leading Republicans became convinced that their party would be defeated in November. Weed journeyed to Washington during the first week in August and told Lincoln “that his re-election was an impossibility.” Leonard Swett felt compelled to inform his friend of a growing movement to “call a convention and supplant him.” A date for the new convention had been set for September 22 in Cincinnati, three weeks after the Democratic Convention. Swett warned Lincoln that a “most alarming depression” had overtaken his erstwhile supporters, and that unless something were done “to stem the tide,” the situation was hopeless.

Dissatisfaction was rife inside the cabinet as well. Both Gideon Welles and Montgomery Blair were mystified by Lincoln’s decision to “impose conditions” that were “inadmissible” by their very nature. Knowing that only Seward and Fessenden had been privy to his plan, Welles questioned the president’s right “to assume this unfortunate attitude without consulting his Cabinet.”

Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican National Party, added to Lincoln’s woes. “I am in active correspondence with your staunchest friends in every state and from them all I hear but one report,” wrote Raymond in late August. “The tide is setting strongly against us.” Raymond went on to predict that if the election were held immediately, Lincoln would be beaten in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Raymond ascribed two causes for “this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military successes, and the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion in others” that the Confederates were ready for reunion and peace, but for the absolute demand that slavery be abandoned. He recognized the inaccuracy of this perception but argued that it could “only be expelled by some authoritative act, at once bold enough to fix attention.” He recommended sending a commissioner to meet with Jefferson Davis “to make distinct proffers of peace…on the sole Condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,” leaving all remaining issues to be settled later.

Lincoln’s response to these extraordinary pressures reveals much about his character. “I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” he told Thaddeus Stevens and Simon Cameron that August. “I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years administration endorsed; and besides I honestly believe that I can better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do. I want to finish this job of putting down the rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country.”

Yet he forthrightly faced the likelihood of defeat and resolved to do his utmost in the remaining months both to win the war on the North’s terms and to bring as many slaves as possible into Union lines before newly elected Democratic leaders could shut the door forever. In the third week of August, Lincoln asked all cabinet members to sign—without having read—a memorandum committing the administration to devote all its powers and energies to help bring the war to a successful conclusion. The presumption was that no Democrat would be able to resist the immense pressure for an immediate compromise peace. Slavery would thus be allowed to remain in the South, and even independence might be sanctioned.

“This morning, as for some days past,” the blind memo began, “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.”

In these same weeks, Colonel John Eaton recalled, Lincoln “was considering every possible means by which the Negro could be secured in his freedom.” He knew that Eaton had come into contact with thousands of slaves who had escaped as the Union troops advanced. Tens of thousands more remained in the South. Lincoln asked Eaton if he thought Frederick Douglass “could be induced to come to see him” and discuss how these slaves could be brought into freedom. Eaton was aware that Douglass had recently criticized the president vehemently, denouncing the administration’s insufficient retaliatory measures against the Confederacy for its blatant refusal to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war. He also knew, however, that Douglass respected Lincoln and was certain that he would lend his hand.

Douglass met with the president on August 19. In an open conversation that Douglass later recounted, Lincoln candidly acknowledged his fear that the “mad cry” for peace might bring a premature end to the war, “which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines.” He had thought the publication of his Emancipation Proclamation would stimulate an exodus from the South, but, he lamented, “the slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped.” Douglass suggested that “the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation.” Hearing this, Lincoln proposed that the federal government might underwrite an organized “band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our Armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.” Douglass promised to confer with leaders in the black community on the possibility of such a plan.

There was yet another subject Lincoln wanted to discuss with Douglass. Three days earlier, Wisconsin’s former governor Alexander Randall had hand-delivered a heartfelt letter from Charles Robinson, the editor of a Democratic paper in Wisconsin. “I am a War Democrat,” Robinson began. “I have sustained your Administration…. It was alleged that because I and my friends sustained the Emancipation measure, we had become abolitionized. We replied that we regarded the freeing of the negroes as sound war policy, in that the depriving the South of its laborers weakened the strength of the Rebellion. That was a good argument, and was accepted by a great many men who would have listened to no other. It was solid ground on which we could stand, and still maintain our position as Democrats.” Now the Niagara Falls declaration that “no steps can be taken towards peace, from any quarter, unless accompanied with an abandonment of slavery,” left him with “no ground to stand upon.” He was not writing “for the purpose of finding fault…but with the hope that you may suggest some interpretation of it, as well as make it tenable ground on which we War Democrats may stand.”

Lincoln shared a draft of his reply with Douglass and requested his advice on whether or not to send it. “To me it seems plain,” the draft began, “that saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered.” Having written these evasive words, however, he at once emphasized that as a “matter of morals” and a “matter of policy,” it would be ruinous to recant the promise of freedom contained in his proclamation “as it seems you would have me to do…. For such a work, another would have to be found.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that if the rebels agreed to “cease fighting & consent to reunion” so long as they could keep their slaves, he would be powerless to continue the war for the sole purpose of abolition. The people would not support such a war; their congressional representatives would cut off supplies. All such figuring was irrelevant, in any case, for “no one who can control the rebel armies has made the offer supposed.”

Douglass saw clearly that Lincoln was trying “to make manifest his want of power to do the thing which his enemies and pretended friends professed to be afraid he would do.” Regardless of his personal convictions, he seemed to be saying, he “could not carry on the war for the abolition of slavery. The country would not sustain such a war, and [he] could do nothing without the support of Congress.” Douglass emphatically urged Lincoln not to send the letter. “It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey; it would be taken as a complete surrender of your anti-slavery policy, and do you serious damage.”

After listening carefully to the impassioned advice of Douglass, Lincoln turned the conversation to other topics. While they were talking, a messenger informed Lincoln that the governor of Connecticut wished for an audience. “Tell Governor Buckingham to wait, I want to have a long talk with my friend Douglass,” Lincoln instructed. Douglass could barely “suppress his excitement” when he encountered John Eaton later that day. “He treated me as a man; he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins! The President is a most remarkable man. I am satisfied now that he is doing all that circumstances will permit him to do.” Eaton believed that Douglass “had seen the situation for the first time as it appeared to Mr. Lincoln’s eyes.” For his part, Lincoln told Eaton that “considering the conditions from which Douglass rose, and the position to which he had attained, he was…one of the most meritorious men in America.”

That same night, perhaps buoyed by his conversation with Douglass, Lincoln invited Governor Randall and Judge Joseph Mills to the Soldiers’ Home for a further discussion of the Robinson letter. “The President was free & animated in conversation,” Mills recorded in his diary. “I was astonished at his elasticity of spirits.” Lincoln admitted from the outset that he could not help “but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in the approaching canvas.” This was not “personal vanity, or ambition,” but rather a firm belief that the Democrats’ strategy of mollifying the South with a promise to renounce abolition as a condition for peace would “result in the dismemberment of the Union.” He pointed out that there were “between 1 & 200 thousand black men now in the service of the Union.” If the promise of freedom were rescinded, these men would rightly give up their arms. “Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.”

Lincoln’s tone grew more fervent as he continued, as if he were arguing with himself against sending the reply to Robinson. “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing.” Those who accused him of “carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition” must understand that “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever…. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it.”

Mills, who had been initially skeptical of Lincoln, was overwhelmed by “his transparent honesty” and the depth of his convictions. “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.” His confidence in the justice of the Union cause “could not but inspire me with confidence.” The visitors stood to leave, but Lincoln entreated them to stay so that he might entertain them with a mix of stories, jokes, and “reminiscences of the past.”

His momentary ambivalence over a peace compromise put to rest by his own logic, Lincoln permanently shelved the draft of his letter to Robinson. Nor did he accede to Raymond’s suggestion that he dispatch a commissioner to Richmond and sound out Jefferson Davis’s conditions for peace. He played with the idea for a few days, even drafting a letter allowing Raymond to proceed to Richmond with authority to say that “upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions [including slavery] to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.” But he soon discarded the idea. The Raymond letter, like the reply to Robinson, was placed in an envelope and “slept undisturbed” for over two decades until unearthed by Nicolay and Hay when writing their biography of Lincoln.

Through these difficult days that Nicolay deemed “a sort of political Bull Run,” Lincoln was sustained most of all by his “ever present and companionable” secretary of state. Mary and Tad had once again escaped the summer heat, spending August and early September in Manchester, Vermont. Seward had hoped to get away but did not feel he should leave Lincoln in this trying period, when “one difficulty no sooner passes away than another arises.” His presence buoyed Lincoln, for he never lost faith that all would be well. While Seward agreed that “the signs of discontent and faction are very numerous and very painful,” he refused to panic, believing that “any considerable success would cause them all to disappear.” So long as ordinary people retained their faith in the cause, a faith evidenced by new enlistments in the army, Seward remained “firm and hopeful,” convinced that Lincoln would see the country through.

Stanton provided additional reassurance to the beleaguered president. The relationship among Lincoln, Seward, and Stanton had strengthened over the years. Welles observed that “the two S’s” had developed “an understanding” enabling them to act in concert supporting the president. Though Stanton lacked the genial temperament that won both Lincoln and Seward countless friends, he believed passionately in both the Union and the soldiers who were risking their lives to support it. Though he regularly argued with Lincoln over minor matters and peremptorily dismissed favor seekers from his office, the sight of a disabled soldier would command his immediate attention. In the mind of this brilliant, irascible man, there could be no peace without submission by the South.

On August 25, Lincoln invited Raymond to the White House and explained why, after careful consideration, he had decided that sending a commissioner to Richmond “would be utter ruination.” Raymond was already in Washington, chairing a meeting of the Republican National Committee. The committee members charged with organizing support for Lincoln in the upcoming election had been so dubious about his chances that, as yet, they had done nothing to mobilize the party.

John Nicolay believed the president’s meeting with Raymond and his colleagues could prove “the turning-point in our crisis.” As the group gathered that morning, Nicolay wrote to John Hay, who was visiting his family in Illinois, “If the President can infect R. and his committee with some of his own patience and pluck, we are saved.” If the committee members were unmoved after talking with Lincoln, however, hope for the election would fade.

Nicolay was relieved to see that Lincoln had invited Seward, Stanton, and Fessenden, “the stronger half of the Cabinet,” to join the meeting. The results exceeded Nicolay’s fondest hopes. In a memo written that same day, Nicolay delightedly noted that the president and his cabinet colleagues had managed to convince Raymond “that to follow his plan of sending a commission to Richmond would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” Nicolay was convinced that the meeting had done “great good.” The president’s iron will impressed the committee members. They returned home “encouraged and cheered,” with renewed belief that the election could be salvaged.

Two days later, a revealing item appeared in Raymond’s New York Times. Noting that the members of the Republican National Committee would remain in Washington for another day to complete their plans for the presidential canvass, the Times declared: “Every member is deeply impressed with the belief that Mr. Lincoln will be reelected; and regards the political situation as most hopeful and satisfactory for the Union party.”

Even before the approaching military success in Atlanta, which would transform the public mood, Lincoln had alleviated his own discouragement by refocusing his intense commitment to the twin goals of Union and freedom. He gave voice to these ideals in late August with an emotional address to the men of an Ohio regiment returning home to their families. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” he said. “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright…. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

THE PRESIDENT’S REELECTION CAMPAIGN received a significant boost when the long-delayed Democratic Convention finally met on August 29,1864. Until this moment, when a candidate would be chosen and a platform written, Nicolay wrote, anxious Republicans had imagined “giants in the airy and unsubstantial shadows of the opposition.” Brooks, who had traveled to Chicago to cover the convention, agreed. He attributed the despondent mood that had overtaken Republicans in July and August to the fact that “we have had nothing to solidify and compact us; a platform and candidate from here will materially change all this.”

Although Democrats had cheerfully capitalized all summer long on dissensions within the Republican camp, their own party was rent by the anger between War Democrats who supported a continuation of the war until reunion (though not abolition) was assured and Peace Democrats, who called for an immediate armistice at any cost. “They have a peace leg and a war leg,” New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett noted, “but, like a stork by a frog pond, they are as yet undecided which to rest upon.” When the convention opened, Noah Brooks reported, it seemed as if the Peace Democrats had the upper hand. “It was noticeable that peace men and measures and sentiments were applauded to the echo, while patriotic utterances, what few there were, recieved no response from the crowd.” The playing of “Dixie” was cheered, while Union tunes were met with virtual silence.

Though the peace wing commanded the emotions at the convention hall, it was generally assumed that War Democrat George McClellan would be the nominee. “His partisans are united and have plenty of money,” Brooks observed, “while his opponents are divided as to their own choice.” The peace wing, led by New York governor Horatio Seymour, Congressman Fernando Wood, and former congressman Clement Vallandigham, who had returned from his exile in Canada, floated several possible names but with no consensus. As a result, when the balloting began, McClellan easily won.

If McClellan’s victory “was expected,” George Templeton Strong confided to his diary, “the baseness of the platform on which he is to run was unexpected. Jefferson Davis might have drawn it. The word ‘rebel’ does not occur in it. It contemplates surrender and abasement.” Pressed upon the party by the peace contingent, the platform declared that “after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war,” the time had come to “demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” Strong predicted that if McClellan agreed to represent this dishonorable platform, “he condemns his name to infamy.” Indeed, it was rumored that he would “decline a nomination on such terms.” For Democrats, the capitulation called for in their platform proved to be exceedingly ill timed.

Three days later came the stunning news that Atlanta had fallen. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman wired Washington on September 3. This joyous news, which followed on the heels of Admiral David Farragut’s capture of Mobile Bay, Alabama, prompted Lincoln to order that one hundred guns be fired in Washington and a dozen other cities to celebrate the victories. Jubilant headlines filled Northern newspapers. “Atlanta is ours,” the New York Times repeated. “The foundries, furnaces, rolling-mills, machine-shops, laboratories and railroad repair-shops; the factories of cannon and small arms; of powder, cartridges and percussion caps; of gun carriages, wagons, ambulances, harnesses, shoes and clothing, which have been accumulated at Atlanta, are ours now”—although, unbeknownst to the Times, the departing Confederates had set fire to nearly “everything of military value.” Still, George Templeton Strong instantly understood the importance of Atlanta’s fall. “Glorious news this morning,” he exulted, “it is (coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war.”

Seward received the news from the War Department while seated in his library in Auburn, where he had finally escaped for a few days to see his family. He had barely finished reading Stanton’s telegram before a crowd gathered at his house to celebrate. As the news spread, the crowd swelled until it spilled over to the park adjoining his residence. “Flags were hoisted in all parts of the city,” a local correspondent reported, “all the bells commenced ringing, and a salvo of one hundred guns was fired.” At the request of the spirited assemblage, which included “several hundred volunteers, who were waiting to be mustered in,” Seward delivered a spontaneous talk that lasted more than an hour.

Seward’s extemporaneous words were considered by one reporter present to be “one of his most impressive and effective speeches.” He remarked that the twin victories should help inspire the three hundred thousand more men—“volunteers, if you will, drafted men if we must”—necessary “to end the war.” He paid homage not only to the sailors and soldiers but to “the wisdom and the energy of the war Administration,” pointing out that “Farragut’s fleet did not make itself, nor did he make it. It was prepared by the Secretary of the Navy. And he that shall record the history of this war impartially will write that, since the days of Carnot [the military organizer of the French Revolution], no man has organized war with ability equal to that of Stanton.” Seward ended with a moving tribute to his friend and president, telling the crowd that nothing was more important than Lincoln’s reelection. “If we do this, the rebellion will perish and leave no root.” The crowd roared its approval.

When Gideon Welles read Seward’s speech, with its generous praise for the Navy Department, he professed himself delighted. “For a man of not very compact thought…often loose in the expressions of his ideas,” Seward had set forth an argument, Welles believed, that would serve as “the keynote” of the upcoming campaign. Welles understood that Atlanta’s fall would wreak havoc on the plans of his old party, the Democrats. “This intelligence will not be gratifying to the zealous partisans who have just sent out a peace platform, and declared the war a failure…. There is a fatuity in nominating a general and warrior in time of war on a peace platform.”

McClellan, meanwhile, remained secluded at his home in Orange, New Jersey. He found himself under tremendous pressure from both factions of his divided party as he tried to draft his letter of acceptance. War Democrats warned that unless he repudiated the peace platform, his candidacy would be stillborn. Peace Democrats threatened that if he wavered on the proposed armistice, they might “withdraw their support.” He went through six drafts before he finally delivered his letter to the Democratic Nominating Committee at midnight on September 8.

He began with a nod to the peace wing. Had the war been conducted for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, McClellan argued, “the work of reconciliation would have been easy, and we might have reaped the benefits of our many victories on land and sea.” Were he in power, he would “exhaust all the resources of statesmanship” to yield peace. This said, he went on to disavow aspects of the strident demand for peace at any cost, insisting that hostilities would not end without the restoration of the Union. “I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army and Navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors, and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain.” The peace men were furious but had no alternative candidate. The stage was set for the fall election.

The fall of Atlanta produced a remarkable transformation in the mood of Republicans. “We are going to win the Presidential election,” Lincoln’s longtime critic Theodore Tilton wrote Nicolay. “All divisions are going to be healed. I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta. This great event, following the Chicago platform—a most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.” Even he, “never having been a partisan for Mr. Lincoln’s re-election, but the reverse,” was intending to advise everyone he knew “to unite on Mr. Lincoln.”

Leonard Swett, who only weeks before had warned Lincoln that his reelection looked doubtful, believed that God had given the Union its glorious victory to make the floundering ship of state “right itself, as a ship in a storm does after a great wave has nearly capsized it.” Relieved, Thurlow Weed informed Seward that with military success, the “conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln collapsed.”

The changed public mood took Salmon Chase by surprise. He had spent the summer traveling through New England, meeting with abolitionist friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Massachusetts governor John Andrew, the writer Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Congressman Samuel Hooper. He had maintained contact with organizers of the secret meetings being held to pursue the possibility of a new convention to draft an alternative to Lincoln. He had done his best, according to Gideon Welles, “to weaken the President and impair confidence in him…expressing his discontent, not in public speeches but in social intercourse down East.” Now that support for Lincoln had revived, Welles observed, Chase “is beginning to realize that the issue is made up, and no new leaders are to be brought forward, and he will now support Lincoln.”

Deciding to return to Washington to offer his services to Lincoln, Chase stopped en route in New York. There, he had an unsettling conversation with a “gentleman who thought Lincoln very wise—if more radical would have offended conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Would this, Chase asked himself, be the “judgment of history?”

When he reached the capital, Chase called on Fessenden, who told him the president would like to see him. News of their meeting spread quickly. “Mr. Chase had a long confab in his visit to the President yesterday after abusing him every where at the north,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband. Two days later, Chase accompanied Stanton to the Soldiers’ Home, where he once again spoke with Lincoln. “I have seen the President twice since I have been here,” Chase told Kate. “Both times third persons were present & there was nothing like private conversation. His manner was evidently intended to be cordial & so were his words: and I hear of nothing but good will from him.”

Graciousness did not satisfy Chase, however. He wanted the president to be more “demonstrative” toward him after an absence of two months. Chase still acknowledged no responsibility for sundering their relationship, believing it was he who had been “wronged and hurt” by the events surrounding his resignation. “I never desired any thing else than his complete success,” Chase insisted, “and never indulged a personal feeling incompatible with absolute fidelity to his Administration.”

Proud of his own magnanimity, Chase professed a “conviction that the cause I love & the general public interests will be best promoted by his election, and I have resolved to join my efforts to those of almost the whole body of my friends in securing it.”

In the weeks that followed, Chase remained true to his word. He traveled by train, boat, and horseback to Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri, delivering dozens of speeches in support of Lincoln’s reelection before overflowing crowds. Meanwhile, the state elections in Vermont and Maine revealed larger Union majorities than the previous year. After the Vermont election, Nicolay wrote a cheery letter to Therena: “Three weeks ago, our friends everywhere were despondent, almost to the point of giving up the contest in despair. Now they are hopeful, jubilant, hard at work and confident of success.”

More good news greeted Republicans on September 19, when Philip Sheridan, having finally caught up with Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, fought a brutal but successful battle that destroyed more than a quarter of Early’s army. The “shouting of Clerks” could be heard in every government department when the news became known. “This will do much to encourage and stimulate all Union loving men,” Welles recorded in his diary.

MILITARY SUCCESS MAY have substantially cleared Lincoln’s road to victory, but a serious obstacle remained in the form of John Frémont’s candidacy. Time and again, a divided party had lost elections when a third-party candidate swayed the final result. To ensure party unity, Lincoln needed the support of the radicals. His task was made difficult by the dissatisfaction of men like Wade and Davis over his conciliatory policy on Reconstruction. In addition, the radicals objected to the continuing presence of Montgomery Blair in the cabinet while Chase had been allowed to resign.

Blair was aware that he had become the target of the radicals’ wrath. When the Baltimore convention passed its resolution essentially calling for his dismissal, he had offered his resignation to Lincoln. Later that summer, his father had repeated Monty’s offer during a visit with Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home. He assured Lincoln that to heal the party, Monty “would very willingly be a martyr to the Radical phrenzy or jealousy, that would feed on the Blairs, if that would help.” At the time, Lincoln had declined to take action, saying that “he did not think it good policy to sacrifice a true friend to a false one or an avowed enemy.” But the pressure to remove Blair continued to build. Henry Wilson warned Lincoln in early September that “tens of thousands of men will be lost to you or will give a reluctant vote on account of the Blairs.”

The feud between the Blairs and the radicals had rendered cabinet life increasingly unbearable. Monty Blair detested Stanton. He believed the war secretary was in league with Wade and Davis against both the Blair family and the president. He spoke publicly of Stanton with what John Hay considered “unbecoming harshness,” calling him “a liar” and “a thief.” When these intemperate words reached Stanton, he refused to sit in cabinet meetings if Blair was present. In mid-August, Welles observed that the two embittered colleagues had not “interchanged words for weeks.”

Lincoln had no patience for such personal contention. He had warned his cabinet members in July to refrain from criticizing one another in public. He decided that when the opportunity arose, he would take Monty Blair up on his offer to resign. That moment arose when Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler informed him that Blair’s resignation would elicit the support of Wade and Davis for Lincoln’s reelection. Chandler later asserted that the radical senator and congressman were only part of a larger bargain that included Frémont’s agreement to withdraw his candidacy if Blair were removed. Historians have debated the extent of Chandler’s influence on Frémont. By September, the Pathfinder had no hope of winning in any case and realized that his reputation would be sullied if he stayed in the race.

Two facts are clear: On September 22, Frémont announced his withdrawal from the race. Then, on the morning of September 23, Lincoln sent a letter to Monty’s office asking for his resignation. “You have generously said to me more than once,” he began, “that whenever your resignation could be a relief to me, it was at my disposal. The time has come. 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.” Moreover, “in the three years and a half during which you have administered the General Post-Office, I remember no single complaint against you in connection therewith.”

Despite his offer to resign, Blair was surprised to find the dismissal letter on his desk. Later that morning, he encountered Welles and Bates coming out of the White House. “I suppose you are both aware that my head is decapitated,” he told them. “I am no longer a member of the Cabinet.” Welles was so stunned that he asked Blair to repeat himself, at which point Blair took the letter from his pocket and read it aloud to his two colleagues. Blair said “he had no doubt he was a peace-offering to Frémont and his friends.” Welles was uncertain, telling Blair that while “pacifying the partisans of Frémont might have been brought into consideration…the President would never have yielded to that.” Welles thought it more likely that Blair had been sacrificed to restore balance to the cabinet after Chase’s resignation. Chase’s partisans clearly “felt wounded” that their man was gone while his assailant remained. The removal of Blair would allow Lincoln to “reconcile all parties, and rid the Administration of irritating bickerings.” Lincoln chose the former governor of Ohio, William Dennison, to succeed Blair.

Welles was saddened by Blair’s departure. “In parting with Blair,” Welles recorded in his diary, “the President parts with a true friend, and he leaves no adviser so able sagacious. Honest, truthful and sincere, he has been wise, discriminating and correct.” In the days that followed, Welles came to view “the removal of Montgomery from our counsels as the greatest misfortune that had befallen the Cabinet.” Bates was equally distressed. Though he did not consider himself so intimate with Blair, he respected his straight-speaking colleague and believed Lincoln had erred in making a bargain for Wade and Davis. “I think Mr. Lincoln could have been elected without them and in spite of them. In that event, the Country might have been governed, free from their malign influences.”

Although Blair was hurt by a dismissal that he felt was “an unnecessary mortification,” he remained certain, he told his wife, that Lincoln had acted “from the best motives” and that “it is for the best all around.” His father wholeheartedly agreed. “In my opinion it is all for the best,” he told Frank, no doubt worried that his fiery son would make some regrettable public remark. The patriarch suggested that Monty himself had “pressed this matter” by intimating to Frémont’s friends that he would resign if Frémont withdrew. In the end, the senior Blair concluded, “if it tends to give a greater certainty of the defeat of McClellan, which I look upon as the salvation of the Republic, it is well…. I hope you will concur with the views I have taken. The true interests of the Country require the reelection of Lincoln.”

Frank eventually did concur with his father, though, like his brother, he at first found it “somewhat mortifying to reflect that this triumph has been given to those who are equally the enemies of the President & ‘the Blairs.’” On the other hand, he was certain that “a failure to re-elect Mr. Lincoln would be the greatest disaster that could befall the country and the sacrifice made by [Monty] to avert this is so incomparably small that I felt it would not cost him a penny to make.”

Elizabeth Blair, hearing the noble sentiments of the men, believed that she and Monty’s wife, Minna, were “more hurt than anybody else.” As far as Monty’s loyal sister was concerned, Lincoln should have stuck with his “first view—of the poor policy of sacrificing his friends to his enemies.” She was impressed, however, by her brother’s “fine manly bearing,” which he illustrated repeatedly in the days ahead as he took to the stump on behalf of Abraham Lincoln. Speaking to large conservative gatherings, Monty insisted that the request for his resignation had not proceeded from any unkindness on Lincoln’s part. On the contrary, the president “has at least the support of those who are nearer to me than all other people on this earth. I retired by the recommendation of my own father to the President.”

John Hay returned from Illinois just at the time of Blair’s resignation. He noted that Blair was behaving “very handsomely and is doing his utmost” to reelect Lincoln. Monty would never forget that Lincoln had stood by him after the mortifying publication of his private letter to Frémont three years earlier, which contained passages demeaning the president. He knew that his father had never been turned away when he requested a private audience with Lincoln, and that his sister, Elizabeth, was always welcome at the White House. His entire family would forever appreciate Lincoln’s support for Frank during his continuing battle with the radicals in Congress. Indeed, Lincoln’s countless acts of generosity and kindness had cemented a powerful connection with the close-knit Blair family that even Monty’s forced resignation could not break. In the end, Lincoln gained the withdrawal of Frémont and the backing of the radicals without losing the affection and support of the conservative and powerful Blairs.

BOTH REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS considered the state elections in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana on October 11 harbingers of the presidential election in November. Not only would the results reveal public sentiment, but the party that gained the governor’s offices in those states would have “a grand central rallying point” for its partisans. That evening, Lincoln made his customary visit to the telegraph office in the War Department to read the dispatches as they came over the wire. Stanton was there, as was his assistant secretary, Charles Dana, and Thomas Eckert, chief of the telegraph office. Early reports from Cincinnati and Philadelphia looked hopeful, but reliable figures were unbearably slow in coming.

To defuse the tension, Dana recalled, Lincoln took from his pocket “a thin yellow-covered pamphlet” containing the latest writings of the humorist Petroleum V. Nasby. “He would read a page or a story, pause to con[sider] a new election telegram, and then open the book again and go ahead with a new passage.” John Hay, who had accompanied Lincoln, found the selections “immensely amusing” and mistakenly thought Stanton felt the same way. During a break in the readings, however, the solemn war secretary signaled Dana to follow him into the adjoining room. “I shall never forget,” Dana later recalled, “the fire of his indignation at what seemed to him to be mere nonsense.” Stanton found it incomprehensible that “when the safety of the Republic was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests.” Stanton never would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining Lincoln’s spirits in difficult times.

As the night wore on, the news from Ohio and Indiana proved better than anyone expected. The Republicans in Ohio gained twelve congressional seats, and the state provided a fifty-thousand-vote Republican majority. In Indiana, the Republican candidate for governor, Oliver Morton, won by a large margin, and Republicans captured eight of the eleven congressional seats.

The results in Pennsylvania were less decisive. Sometime after midnight, Lincoln sent a telegram to Simon Cameron. “Am leaving office to go home,” he wrote. “How does it stand now?” No answer was received from Cameron, which seemed “ominous” to Hay. It turned out that the margin was so close that neither party could declare victory. Only when the absentee soldier vote was tallied in the days ahead could the Republicans claim a slight margin.

Welles observed that “Seward was quite exultant over the elections—feels strong and self gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic, faithful and able beyond any of its predecessors. That it has gone through trials which none of them has ever known.” Lincoln, characteristically, reacted with more caution than his debonair colleague. Though delighted by Ohio and Indiana, he found the close vote in Pennsylvania sobering.

Two nights after the state elections, appearing “unusually weary,” Lincoln returned to the telegraph office in the War Department to calculate the probability of his election in November. Taking a blank sheet of telegraph paper, he made two neat columns. The one on the left represented his estimate of the electoral votes McClellan would win; the one on the right tabulated the states he thought would be his. The cipher operator David Homer Bates noted that he wrote “slowly and deliberately, stopping at times in thoughtful mood to look out of the window for a moment or two, and then resuming his writing.” The president guessed he would lose both New York and Pennsylvania, which meant his best hope was to squeak through by a total of only 3 electoral votes: 117 to 114. If these calculations were correct, he lamented, “the moral effect of his triumph would be broken and his power to prosecute the war and make peace would be greatly impaired.”

During the anxious four-week period that stretched between the state and presidential elections, Lincoln received the heartening news that voters in Maryland had ratified a new constitution officially terminating slavery in their state. The margin had been perilously close, with the absentee soldier vote making the difference. “Most heartily do I congratulate you, and Maryland, and the nation, and the world, upon the event,” Lincoln told a group of serenaders. Speaking that same day with Noah Brooks, he said: “I had rather have Maryland upon that issue than have a State twice its size upon the Presidential issue; it cleans up a piece of ground.” Brooks admired the “frank homeliness” of Lincoln’s choice of words: “Any one who has ever had to do with ‘cleaning up’ a piece of ground, digging out vicious roots and demolishing old stumps, can appreciate the homely simile applied to Maryland, where slavery has just been cleaned up effectually.”

It was clear to both parties that the absentee vote could prove critical in the presidential election. Democrats, remembering the fanatical devotion McClellan had inspired among his men, believed their man would receive an overwhelming majority of the soldier vote. “We are as certain of two-thirds of that vote for General McClellan as that the sun shines,” the Democratic publisher Manton Marble jauntily predicted.

Lincoln thought differently. He trusted the bond he had developed with his soldiers during his many trips to the front. After every defeat, he had joined them, riding slowly along their lines, boosting their spirits. He had wandered companionably through their encampments, fascinated by the smallest details of camp life. Sitting with the wounded in hospital tents, he had taken their hands and wished them well. The humorous stories he had told clusters of soldiers had been retold to hundreds more. The historian William Davis estimates that “a quarter-million or more had had some glimpse of him on their own.” In addition, word of his pardons to soldiers who had fallen asleep on picket duty or exhibited fear in the midst of battle had spread through the ranks. Most important of all, through his eloquent speeches and public letters he had given profound meaning to the struggle for which they were risking their lives.

Provisions for soldiers to cast absentee ballots in the field had recently been introduced in thirteen states. Four other states allowed soldiers to vote by proxy, placing their ballots in a sealed envelope to be sent or carried for deposit in their hometowns. In several crucial states, however, soldiers still had to be in their hometowns on Election Day to cast their ballots. In an attempt to remedy this situation before the October state elections, Lincoln had wired General Sherman about Indiana, “whose soldiers cannot vote in the field. Any thing you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home and vote at the State election, will be greatly in point.” He emphasized that “this is, in no sense, an order,” but merely a request.

Stanton followed up, making certain that furloughs were liberally granted wherever possible. “All the power and influence of the War Department…was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln,” Charles Dana later asserted. When Thurlow Weed alerted the White House that among the sailors “on Gun Boats along the Mississippi,” there were “several thousand” New Yorkers ready to vote if the government could provide a steamer to reach them and gather their ballots, Lincoln asked Welles to put a navy boat “at the disposal of the New York commission to gather votes.”

As the election drew close, Lincoln told a visitor: “I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.” It is likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment. The election would tell which man had won the hearts and minds of the more than 850,000 men who were fighting for the Union.

ON ELECTION DAY, November 8, 1864, the New York Times editorialized that “before this morning’s sun sets, the destinies of this republic, so far as depends on human agency, are to be settled for weal or for woe.” To elect Lincoln was to choose “war, tremendous and terrible, yet ushering in at the end every national security and glory.” To choose McClellan was to choose “the mocking shadow of a peace…sure to rob us of our birthright, and to entail upon our children a dissevered Union and ceaseless strife.”

In Washington, it was “dark and rainy.” Arriving at the White House about noon, Noah Brooks was surprised to find the president “entirely alone.” Seward and Usher had gone home to vote, as had William Dennison, Blair’s replacement as postmaster general. This would be the tenth time Seward had cast a presidential ballot in Auburn; he had voted in more than half of the nineteen presidential elections since the beginning of the country. Fessenden was in New York working out the details of a new government loan, while Stanton was at home with a fever. Lincoln could not vote that day, for Illinois required voters to be present in the state.

Lincoln felt no need to conceal his anxiety from Brooks. “I am just enough of a politician to know that there was not much doubt about the result of the Baltimore convention; but about this thing I am very far from being certain. I wish I were certain.” Brooks remained with Lincoln through most of the afternoon, noting that the president “found it difficult to put his mind on any of the routine work of his office.” The only respite he found was in telling a humorous story about Tad, whose pet turkey apparently roamed at will among the Pennsylvania soldiers quartered at the White House. When the day had come for the Bucktail soldiers to cast their absentee ballots before their state’s commission, Tad had excitedly rushed into his father’s office so they could watch the voting from the window. Teasing his son, Lincoln had asked if the turkey, too, intended to vote. Tad’s clever reply delighted his father. “No,” he said. “He is not of age.” Brooks noted that Lincoln so “dearly loved the boy” that “for days thereafter he took pride in relating this anecdote illustrative of Tad’s quick-wittedness.”

As the clock struck seven, the president, accompanied by John Hay, walked over to the telegraph office to begin the long vigil. “It is a little singular,” Lincoln remarked to Hay, “that I who am not a vindictive man, should have always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their bitterness.” The lights of the War Department, bursting with dozens of orderlies and clerks, provided a welcome contrast to the murky night.

The muddy grounds had caused Thomas Eckert to fall on his face, which, “of course,” Hay noted, “reminded the Tycoon” of a story. “For such an awkward fellow,” Lincoln began, “I am pretty sure-footed. It used to take a pretty dextrous man to throw me. I remember, the evening of the day in 1858, that decided the contest for the Senate between Mr. Douglas and myself, was something like this, dark, rainy & gloomy. I had been reading the returns, and had ascertained that we had lost the Legislature and started to go home. The path had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’” Even at the time Lincoln had understood that his defeat for the Senate was “a slip and not a fall.” Little could he then have imagined, however, that on another dreary night six years later, he would be waiting to hear if he had been elected to a second presidential term.

The early returns were positive, revealing larger Republican majorities than in the state elections. Lincoln asked to have the good news carried to Mary at the White House. “She is more anxious than I,” he commented. Shortly afterward, Welles and Fox arrived. Fox was thrilled to hear that Winter Davis had been defeated in Maryland. “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I,” Lincoln said. “A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”

The returns, including those from Pennsylvania, continued to be promising, though New York, with its large number of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants, remained in doubt. By the hour of midnight, however, when a supper of fried oysters was served, Lincoln’s victory was assured, though his lopsided electoral college win would not be known for several days. In the end, he would win all but three states—New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky—giving him 212 electoral votes against McClellan’s 21. The popular vote was closer; the two candidates were separated by about 400,000 votes. Nonetheless, the results were far better than Lincoln had predicted. The Republican/Union Party had gained thirty-seven seats in Congress and placed twelve governors in office. It had also seized control of most of the state legislatures with the power to name the next round of U.S. senators.

It was after 2 a.m. when Lincoln left the telegraph office. The rain had stopped, and along Pennsylvania Avenue, an impromptu crowd had gathered, “singing ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’ at the tops of their voices.” As he went to sleep that night, Lincoln carried with him the knowledge, as Brooks put it, that “the verdict of the people was likely to be so full, clear, and unmistakable that there could be no dispute,” thereby affording him the chance to continue the war until both liberty and Union were secured.

Most impressive, the soldier vote had swung overwhelmingly in his favor. In the armies of the West, he won eight out of ten votes, and even in McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Lincoln earned the votes of seven out of every ten soldiers. Many of these soldiers still admired McClellan but could not countenance the defeatist Democratic platform or the fact that the Confederacy was obviously hoping the young Napoleon would win. But there was something else, something Democrats had failed to understand. Over the years, Lincoln had inspired an almost mystical devotion among his troops. “The men had come to regard Mr. Lincoln with sentiments of veneration and love,” noted an Illinois corporal. “To them he really was ‘Father Abraham,’ with all that the term implied.” By supporting Lincoln, the soldiers understood that they were voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president they loved and the cause that he embodied.