III
Lincoln's renomination and re-election were by no means assured, despite folk wisdom about the danger of swapping horses in midstream. No incumbent president had been renominated since 1840, and none had been re-elected since 1832. Even the war did not necessarily change the rules of this game. If matters were going badly at the front, voters would punish the man in charge. And if the man in charge was not conducting affairs to the satisfaction of his party, he might fail of re-nomination. The Republican party contained several men who in 1860 had considered themselves better qualified for the presidency than the man who won it. In 1864 at least one of them had not changed his opinion: Salmon P. Chase.
43. CWL, VII, 433.
44. New York Tribune, Aug. 5, 1864.
"I think a man of different qualities from those the President has will be needed for the next four years," wrote Chase at the end of 1863. "I am not anxious to be that man; and I am quite willing to leave that question to the decision of those who agree in thinking that some such man should be chosen." This was the usual double-talk of a politician declaring his candidacy. Chase was an ambitious as well as an able man. The republic rewarded him with many high offices: governor, senator, secretary of the treasury, chief justice. But the highest office eluded him despite a most assiduous pursuit of it. Chase had no doubts about his qualifications for the job; as his friend Benjamin Wade said of him, "Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity."45
Chase used Treasury Department patronage to build a political machine for his nomination in 1864. The emergence of dissatisfaction with Lincoln's reconstruction policy strengthened his cause. In December 1863 a Chase committee took shape in Washington headed by Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas. Misreading congressional grumbling for an anti-Lincoln groundswell, the committee decided to bring its movement into the open in February 1864. Pomeroy issued a "circular" declaring that Lincoln's "manifest tendency toward temporary expedients" made "the 'one-term principle' absolutely essential" to ensure a victorious war and a just peace. Chase was the man to achieve these goals.46
This attempt to promote a Chase boom backfired. Once again, as in the cabinet crisis of December 1862, the secretary proved no match for the president in the game of politics. While Chase had filled the Treasury Department with his partisans, Lincoln had not neglected the patronage. Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair did yeoman service for the president in this respect. And his brother Frank Blair, on leave from corps command in Sherman's army to take a seat in Congress, functioned in a capacity that a later generation would describe as "hatchet man" for the administration. A week after the Pomeroy Circular appeared, Frank Blair caused an uproar with a blistering anti-Chase speech in the House that among other things charged widespread Treasury corruption in the issuance of cotton-trading permits. Many radical Republicans
45. Chase to William Sprague, Nov. 26, 1863, in J. W. Schuckers, Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase (New York, 1874), 494; Wade quoted in Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 53.
46. James G. Randall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York, 1955), 99.
never forgave the Blair family for this climactic event in a series of intraparty dogfights which found the Blairs leading the conservative faction. Meanwhile Republican state committees, legislatures, newspapers, and Union Leagues throughout the North—including Chase's home state of Ohio—passed resolutions endorsing Lincoln's renomination. Embarrassed by this boomerang destruction of his aspirations, Chase disingenuously disavowed any connection with the Pomeroy Circular, withdrew his name from consideration for the presidency, and offered to resign from the cabinet. For his part the president—perhaps with equal disingenuousness—disavowed any connection with Blair's attack and refused to accept Chase's resignation. Describing Chase's ambition for the presidency as a form of "mild insanity," Lincoln considered him less dangerous inside the government than out of it.47
Although most Republicans climbed aboard the Lincoln bandwagon, some of them did so with reluctance. As the reconstruction issue drove its wedge deeper into party unity, several radicals continued to hope that the bandwagon could be stopped. Horace Greeley futilely urged postponement of the national convention from June until September in a Micawber-like hope that something might turn up. Others launched trial balloons for an unlikely series of candidates including Grant, Butler, and Frémont. Of these only Frémont's balloon became airborne, carrying as strange a group of passengers as American politics ever produced.
Bitter toward a president who did not assign him to an important military command, Frémont like McClellan had been "awaiting orders" since 1862. Indeed, these two disgruntled generals represented the foremost political dangers to Lincoln. Of the two, McClellan posed the greater threat because he seemed likely to become the Democratic nominee later in the summer. In the meantime Frémont attracted a coalition of abolitionists and radical German-Americans into a third party. A few Republicans lent behind-the-scenes support to this movement, hoping to use it as a cat's-paw to scratch Lincoln from the main party ticket and bring Chase back to life. But the sparsely attended convention that met in Cleveland on May 31 to nominate Frémont contained not a single influential Republican. The most prominent supporter of this
47. Chase to Lincoln, Feb. 22, 1864, Lincoln to Chase, Feb. 29, 1864, in CWL, VII, 200–201, 212–13; Thomas Graham Belden, So Fell the Angels (Boston, 1956), 108–17; Randall and Current, Lincoln the President, 95–110; William Frank Zor-now, Lincoln & the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 231–56.
nomination was Wendell Phillips, whose letter to the convention proclaimed that Lincoln's reconstruction policy "makes the freedom of the negro a sham, and perpetuates slavery under a softer name." The convention adopted an apparently radical platform that called for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery and "secure to all men absolute equality before the law." The platform also asserted that Congress rather than the president must control reconstruction, and urged confiscation of land owned by "rebels" for redistribution "among the soldiers and actual settlers." At the same time, however, the platform denounced Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and suppression of free speech. This of course was the main Democratic indictment of the administration. The convention also nominated a Democrat for vice president, and the new party called itself the Radical Democratic party.48
Thereby hung a tale—and a tail that soon began to wag the dog. Shrewd Democrats had not overlooked this opportunity to stir up trouble among the opposition. They infiltrated the convention and held out to the naive Frémont the prospect of a coalition with Democrats to beat Lincoln. The unemployed general took the bait. His acceptance letter repudiated the confiscation plank, ignored the "equality before the law" plank, but dwelt at length on Lincoln's misconduct of the war and violation of civil liberties. As the Democratic game of using Frémont to divert a few thousand Republican votes to a third party in close states became evident, most radicals (but not Phillips) renounced the venture and concluded that they had no alternative but Lincoln.
The Republican convention in Baltimore during the second week of June exhibited the usual hoopla and love-feast unity of a party renominating an incumbent. The assemblage called itself the National Union convention to attract War Democrats and southern unionists who might flinch at the name Republican. But it nevertheless adopted a down-the-line Republican platform, including endorsement of unremitting war to force the "unconditional surrender" of Confederate armies and the passage of a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. When this latter plank was presented, "the whole body of delegates sprang to their feet . . . in prolonged cheering," according to William Lloyd Garrison, who was present as a reporter for his newspaper The Liberator. "Was not a spectacle like that rich compensation for more than thirty years of personal opprobrium?"49
48. New York Tribune, June 1, 1864; Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided, 72–86; McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 267–78.
49. Liberator, June 24, 1864.
The platform dealt with the divisive reconstruction issue by ignoring it. Delegations from the Lincoln-reconstructed states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee were admitted, while with the president's covert sanction the convention made a gesture of conciliation to radicals by seating an anti-Blair delegation from Missouri which cast a token ballot for Grant before changing its vote to make Lincoln's nomination unanimous. The only real contest at the convention was generated by the vice-presidential nomination. The colorless incumbent Hannibal Hamlin would add no strength to the ticket. The attempt to project a Union party image seemed to require the nomination of a War Democrat from a southern state. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee best fitted this bill. After backstairs maneuvers whose details still remain obscure, Johnson received the nomination on the first ballot.50 This nomination had a mixed impact on radical-moderate tensions in the party. On the one hand, Johnson had dealt severely with "rebels" in Tennessee. On the other, he embodied Lincoln's executive approach to reconstruction.
The unanimity at Baltimore only temporarily papered over cracks in the party. By the time of Benjamin Wade's and Henry Winter Davis's angry manifesto against the president's reconstruction policy two months later, those cracks had become so wide that a serious move was on foot to replace Lincoln with another candidate. But the pressures that produced this astounding development arose less from controversy over what to do with the South when the war was won than from despair about whether it could be won at all. A Confederacy that had seemed on the ropes at the end of 1863 had come back fighting and appeared likely to survive after a season of slaughter whose toll eclipsed even that of the terrible summers of '62 and '63.
50. A postwar controversy arose over whether Lincoln remained neutral in this matter or played a role in engineering Johnson's nomination. Two of the most thorough students of this matter concluded that Lincoln's role was decisive: see Randall and Current, Lincoln the President, 15–34; and Zornow, Lincoln & the Party Divided, 99–103.