III

The months of July and August 1864 brought a greater crisis of northern morale than the same months in 1862. The theme of homefront war songs (which enjoyed an extraordinary popularity during the conflict, with sheet music selling millions of copies) took a sudden turn from ebullient patriotism to a longing for peace. When This Cruel War Is Over, with its haunting refrain "Weeping, sad and lonely" became the best-seller of 1864, while the chorus of Tenting on the Old Camp Ground seemed more than ever to echo northern sentiment: "Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, Wishing for the war to cease." From the presses poured new songs whose titles hardly encouraged martial enthusiasm:

19. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 1, p. 17.

Bear This Gently to My Mother; Yes, I Would the War Were Over; Brother, Will You Come Back? Tell Me, Is My Father Coming Back?

Even the spectacular achievement of David Farragut's fleet in Mobile Bay did little at first to dispel northern depression. As the fog lifted on the morning of August 5, Farragut took his fourteen wooden ships and four Monitors past the largest of the three forts guarding the entrance to Mobile Bay. During a terrific duel between fort and fleet, Farragut climbed the mainmast to see what was going on above the smoke from the guns of his flagship U.S.S. Hartford. A quartermaster lashed the admiral to the mast and thereby created an unforgettable image in the rich traditions of the U.S. Navy. Farragut soon added a memorable phrase as well. The rebels had scattered mines across the channel. One of them blew up the leading Monitor and sent her to the bottom with more than ninety of her crew. This halted the whole fleet under the punishing guns of the fort. Refusing to countenance retreat, Farragut shouted "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead." He took his flagship through the minefield safely, followed by the rest of the fleet. When they reached the bay they pounded into submission a rebel flotilla led by the giant ironclad C.S.S. Tennessee, the most redoubtable but also one of the most unwieldly ships afloat. During the next three weeks, combined operations by the navy and one army division captured the three forts. Though the city of Mobile thirty miles to the north at the head of the bay remained in Confederate hands, this last blockade-running port in the Gulf east of Texas was out of business.

The dimensions of Farragut's victory were more apparent to the North in retrospect than in August, when so much dismal attention was focused on the apparent lack of progress in Virginia and Georgia. Defeatism and a desire for peace spread from the copperheads like widening rings from a stone thrown in the water. "Stop the War!" declared editorials in Democratic newspapers. "If nothing else would impress upon the people the absolute necessity of stopping this war, its utter failure to accomplish any results would be sufficient." By the beginning of August the veteran Republican leader Thurlow Weed was convinced that "Lincoln's reelection [is] an impossibility. . . . The people are wild for peace."²⁰

Clement L. Vallandigham had returned from his Canadian exile in

20. Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), 174; Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (New York, 1927), 108.

June to attend an Ohio Democratic convention which denounced this "unnecessary war" and adopted resolutions calling for an "immediate cessation of hostilities" to negotiate "a just and lasting peace." Not wishing to revive Vallandigham's martyrdom, Lincoln decided to leave him alone. Aware that the Ohio copperhead had been elected "Grand Commander" of a shadowy organization known as the Sons of Liberty—which Republican propaganda pumped up to a vast pro-Confederate conspiracy—the administration probably hoped that if given enough rope he would hang himself. Instead, Vallandigham's return seemed to kindle a forest fire of peace resolutions in Democratic district conventions throughout the North. It appeared that the peace faction would control the party's national convention beginning in Chicago on August 29.²¹

Believing that all was lost, the mercurial Horace Greeley wrote to the president in July. "Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country," he declaimed, "longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood." Greeley had learned that two Confederate envoys were at Niagara Falls, Canada, supposedly bearing peace proposals from Jefferson Davis. "I entreat you," Greeley wrote Lincoln, "to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents." The president responded immediately, authorizing Greeley to bring to Washington under safe conduct "any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery."²²

Lincoln knew perfectly well that Davis had not authorized negotiations on such conditions. He also knew that the rebel agents had come to Canada not to negotiate peace but to stir up antiwar opposition in the North. Union detectives had infiltrated copperhead groups that were in contact with these agents in Canada. The detectives had uncovered a series of bizarre plots linked to the Richmond government. Confederate leaders shared with Republicans the conviction that a potent fifth column of southern sympathizers in the Midwest stood poised for an uprising to take their states out of the Union and establish a separate peace with the Confederacy. That this "Northwest Conspiracy" existed only in the dreams of fringe elements among the Peace Democrats did

21. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 262–78; Gray, Hidden Civil War, 172–74.

22. Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, Lincoln to Greeley, July 9, 1864, CWL, VII, 435.

not prevent it from becoming a crucial factor in the calculations of both governments in 1864.

To the War and State departments in Richmond came reports from Confederate spies of "a perfect organisation . . . of formidable character" in the lower Midwest variously known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, or the Sons of Liberty and containing half a million members "for the purpose of revolution and the expulsion or death of the abolitionists and free negroes."²³ Perhaps the most influential such report came from Captain Thomas C. Hines, a Kentuckian and a scout with John Hunt Morgan's cavalry division which had done so much damage behind Union lines in Kentucky during 1862–63. In July 1863 Morgan had led a raid across the Ohio River into the North. After a long chase through southern Indiana and Ohio, Union cavalry had finally captured Morgan and most of his men, including Hines. Imprisoned in the Ohio penitentiary, Morgan and Hines along with several other officers made a spectacular tunnel escape in November 1863. They returned to the Confederacy after thrilling adventures of derring-do. These credentials helped Hines persuade southern leaders of the potential for Canadian-based sabotage operations against the North. In a secret session on February 15, 1864, the Confederate Congress appropriated $5 million for this purpose. Jefferson Davis dispatched Hines to Canada with instructions to take charge of other escaped rebel prisoners there and to carry out "appropriate enterprises of war against our enemies." On his way through the North, Hines was to "confer with the leading persons friendly or attached to the cause of the Confederacy, or who may be advocates of peace, and do all in your power to induce our friends to organize and prepare themselves to render such aid as circumstances may allow."²⁴

The Confederate government also sent a number of civilian agents by blockade-runner to Canada. Leaders of this group were Jacob Thompson, a former U.S. secretary of the interior in the Buchanan administration, and Clement C. Clay, former U.S. senator from Alabama. Both men had many friends among northern Democrats. During

23. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), 29–30; Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 19–20; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 155.

24. Journal of the Confederate Congress (Washington, 1905), VI, 845; Secretary of War James A. Seddon to Hines, March 16, 1864, in James D. Horan, Confederate Agent: A Discovery in History (New York, 1954), 72–73.

the summer of 1864 these rebel agents conferred with dozens of Peace Democrats (including Vallandigham before he returned to the United States) at various cities in Canada, especially St. Catherines near Niagara Falls. They plotted a fantastic variety of activities ranging from Confederate subsidies of Democratic newspapers and of peace candidates for state offices to the capture of a Union gunboat on Lake Erie and the liberation of Confederate prisoners at Johnson's Island on that lake and at Camp Douglas near Chicago. Some of these operations actually occurred. Thompson channelled funds to newspapers, to organizers of peace rallies, and to the Democratic candidate for governor in Illinois. Rebel agents distributed weapons and canisters of "Greek fire" to copperheads. Hines's arson squad of southern soldiers who had escaped from Union prisons filtered back into the states and managed to destroy or damage a half-dozen military steamboats at St. Louis, an army warehouse at Mattoon, Illinois, and several hotels in New York City. They also carried out a daring raid across the border to rob the banks of St. Albans, Vermont. In an official report on his mission, Jacob Thompson claimed that subsidized copperheads had burned "a great amount of property" in northern cities. "[We must continue] to burn whenever it is practicable, and thus make the men of property feel their insecurity and tire them out with the war."²⁵

The success of Canadian-based rebel operations, however, was inhibited by two contradictions. First, Hines and his colleagues were trying to prod peace Democrats into war against their own government. A few bellicose copperheads did hide caches of arms in anticipation of the glorious day of insurrection against Union arsenals and POW camps. But that day never came, for these "leaders" could not mobilize their followers. The vast army of Sons of Liberty ready to rise and overthrow

25. Thompson to Judah P. Benjamin, Dec. 3, 1864, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 43, pt. 2, pp. 930–36. Much of the information in this paragraph is drawn from Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, and Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, which are scholarly studies based on captured Confederate documents and on the papers of Confederate officials; and from Horan, Confederate Agent, a somewhat sensationalized account heavily dependent on the memoirs of Hines and other Confederate agents. Even Frank Klement, the leading historian of the copperheads who considers most evidence of their conniving with rebels to be a tissue of "rumors, conjecture, and fancy" woven by Republicans for political purposes, admits that Confederate agents turned over money and arms to several Peace Democrats in 1864. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), 33, 154–77.

Lincoln's tyranny turned out to be a phantom. No fewer than five planned "uprisings" died a-borning.

The first was intended to coincide with Vallandigham's return to Ohio in June. His expected arrest was to be the signal. But the administration left Vallandigham alone. Hopes next turned to the Democratic convention scheduled to open in Chicago on July 4. Anticipating an attempt by the government or by Republican vigilantes to interfere with the gathering, the Canadian plotters intended to fan the ensuing riot into a rebellion. But the uncertain military situation caused the Democratic National Committee to postpone the convention until August 29. Impatient Confederate agents now demanded action on July 20, after Lincoln announced his expected draft call. Hines and his ex-soldiers would "start the ball" and the legions of copperheads would take their arms out of hiding to "join in the play." Thompson was confident of success; a Chicago Democrat had promised two regiments "eager, ready, organized, and armed"; Indiana Sons of Liberty were prepared "to seize and hold Indianapolis and release the prisoners there." Lincoln did issue a draft call on July 18, but copperhead leaders were getting cold feet. One of them confessed himself "overwhelmed with the responsibility of speedy action on so momentous a subject."²⁶ Others echoed this sentiment; with a groan of exasperation, the rebel agents called off the operation and summoned a half-dozen Sons of Liberty to St. Catherines for a meeting.

The southerners insisted on an irrevocable date of August 16 for an uprising. Again the copperheads demurred, fearing that Federal troops would easily crush them unless a Confederate invasion of Kentucky or Missouri took place at the same time. Unable to promise such an undertaking, the agents agreed to a final postponement until August 29, when the throngs at the Democratic convention would provide a cover for Hines's commandos and Sons of Liberty to gather for an attack on Camp Douglas to release the prisoners. Hines brought seventy men armed with revolvers to Chicago, where they mixed with the crowds and hunted in vain for their allies. They found only a few, who explained that infiltration by Union agents had led to the arrest of several leaders and the strengthening of the guard at Camp Douglas. The plot collapsed. One disappointed copperhead declared angrily that there were "too many political soldiers in the Sons of Liberty. It is as hard to make a real

26. Thompson to Benjamin, July 7, 1864, James P. Holcombe to Clement C. Clay, July 10, 1864, quoted in Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, 55.

soldier out of a politician as it is to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."²⁷

In truth, the mainstream Peace Democrats shrank from violent counterrevolution in part because their chances of overthrowing Lincoln by legitimate political means seemed ever brighter as the weeks passed. The civilian Confederate agents in Canada recognized this and encouraged the process with rebel gold. But here a second contradiction arose. For Confederates the goal of peace was independence. But most northern Democrats viewed an armistice as the first step toward negotiations for reunion. Thompson and his fellow agents tried to resolve this contradiction with vague doubletalk. They focused on the need for an armistice now, to be followed by a cooling-off period which, they assured Peace Democrats, could lead to "a treaty of amity and commerce . . . and possibly to an alliance defensive, or even, for some purposes, both defensive and offensive." If Peace Democrats wanted to believe that such a process would eventually produce reunion, the Confederates were careful not to dispel this "fond delusion." They well understood that any cessation of the fighting, in the context of midsummer 1864, would be tantamount to a Confederate victory.²⁸

Lincoln understood this too; that was why he insisted in his letter to Greeley on reunion and emancipation as prior conditions of peace negotiations. Knowing full well that Jefferson Davis insisted on independence and slavery as prior conditions, Lincoln hoped to provoke the southern agents into saying so and thereby demonstrate to the northern people that peace with Union was possible only through military victory. But on this occasion the rebels outmaneuvered Lincoln.

On July 18, Greeley and John Hay, the president's private secretary, met in Niagara Falls, Canada, with Confederate agents Clement Clay and James Holcombe. Hay handed them a letter from Lincoln offering them safe conduct to Washington to discuss "any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery." Clay and Holcombe had no authority to negotiate any peace terms—that was not their purpose in Canada—much less these terms, which amounted to Confederate surrender. So the Niagara Falls conference came to nothing. But the southerners saw a chance to score a propaganda triumph by "throw[ing] upon the Federal

27. Quoted in ibid., 72.

28. Clement C. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, p. 585; Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 82–85.

Government the odium of putting an end to all negotiation." They sent a report of the conference to the Associated Press. Saying nothing of southern conditions for peace, they accused Lincoln of deliberately sabotaging the negotiations by prescribing conditions he knew to be unacceptable. "If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible," wrote Clay and Holcombe, Lincoln's terms "will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusion." And if there were "any patriots or Christians" in the North "who shrink appalled from the illimitable vistas of private misery and public calamity" presented by Lincoln's policy of perpetual war, let them "recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of their country."²⁹

The response was all the Confederates could have hoped for. Zebulon Vance exploited the affair in his gubernatorial campaign against peace candidate William Holden in North Carolina. Southern newspapers used it to paint lurid new strokes in their portrait of Lincoln the monster. In the North, reported Clay with delight, "all the Democratic presses denounce Mr. Lincoln's manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses (among them the New York Tribune) admit it was a blunder. . . . From all that I can see or hear, I am satisfied that this correspondence has tended strongly toward consolidating the Democracy and dividing the Republicans." Greeley did indeed scold Lincoln for giving "to the general eye" the impression that the rebels were "anxious to negotiate, and that we repulse their advances." If nothing was done to correct this impression, "we shall be beaten out of sight next November."³⁰

Jefferson Davis did something to neutralize the southern propaganda victory by his response to a simultaneous but less publicized peace overture. This one was borne to Richmond by two northerners: James R. Gilmore, a free-lance journalist, and James Jaquess, colonel of an Illinois regiment and a Methodist clergyman who carried a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Although conferring on them no official status, Lincoln permitted them to pass through the lines with the renewed hope that they could smoke out Davis's intransigent peace terms. This time it worked. The Confederate president agreed reluctantly

29. CWL, VII, 451; Clay and Holcombe to Jefferson Davis, July 25, 1864, in Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 67; New York Tribune, July 22, 1864.

30. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 585–86; Greeley to Lincoln, Aug. 9, 1864, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

to meet with the Yankees; he expected no substantive results, but he had his own peace movement to contend with and could not appear to spurn an opportunity for negotiations. Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin talked with Gilmore and Jaquess on July 17. The northerners informally reiterated the same terms Lincoln had stated in his reconstruction proclamation the previous December: reunion, abolition, and amnesty. Davis scorned these terms. "Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals," he declared. "We have committed no crime. . . . At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. . . . We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that, or extermination, we will have. . . . You may 'emancipate' every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames."³¹

With Lincoln's agreement, Gilmore published a brief report of this meeting in northern newspapers. His account appeared at the same time as the story of Greeley's meeting with rebel agents at Niagara Falls. After all the publicity, no one could doubt that Davis's irreducible condition of peace was disunion while Lincoln's was Union. This served Lincoln's purpose of discrediting copperhead notions of peace and reunion through negotiations. As the president later put it in a message to Congress, Davis "does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory."³²

But in the dejected state of northern morale during August, Democratic newspapers were able to slide around the awkward problem of Davis's conditions by pointing to Lincoln's second condition—emancipation—as the real stumbling block to peace. "Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,"

31. Several versions of Davis's exact words appeared subsequently in print—three of them by Gilmore in the Boston Transcript, July 22, 1864, in the Atlantic Monthly, 14 (Sept. 1864), 378–83, and in James R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (Boston, 1898), 261–73; and one by Judah P. Benjamin in a circular to James M. Mason, "Commissioner to the Continent," Aug. 25, 1864, in O. R. Navy, Ser. II, vol. 3, pp. 1190–95. Although these versions varied in wording, they agreed in substance. The quotations here are mainly from the version accepted by Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, Tragic Hero: 1864–1889 (New York, 1964), 76–81. See also Kirkland, Peacemakers of 1864, 85–96.

32. CWL, VIII, 151.

according to a typical Democratic editorial. "Is there any man that wants to be shot down for a niger?" asked a Connecticut soldier. "That is what we are fighting for now and nothing else." Even staunch Republicans condemned Lincoln's "blunder" of making emancipation "a fundamental article," for it "has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief."³³ Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Lincoln on August 22 that "the tide is setting strongly against us." If the election were held now, party leaders in crucial states believed they would lose. "Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success, and the impression . . . that we can have peace with Union if we would . . . [but that you are] fighting not for Union but for the abolition of slavery."³⁴

These reports filled Lincoln with dismay. He denied that he was "now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done." Lincoln pointed out to War Democrats that some 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union: "If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept." To abandon emancipation "would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men now in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them? . . . 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." Besides, there was the moral question: "There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee [a battle in Florida in which black soldiers fought]. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will."³⁵

33. Columbus Crisis, Aug. 3, 1864; Henry Thompson to his wife, Aug. 17, 1864, quoted in Randall C. Jimerson, "A People Divided: The Civil War Interpreted by Participants," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, p. 131; Strong, Diary, 474.

34. Raymond to Lincoln, Aug. 22, 1864, in CWL, VII, 517–18.

35. These quotations are from the draft of a letter to a Wisconsin War Democrat dated August 17 and from notes taken by one of two Wisconsin Republicans who talked with Lincoln on August 19. A modified version of these notes was published in the New York Tribune, Sept. 10, 1864. CWL, VII, 499–501, 506–7.

This seemed clear enough. But the pressure to back away from a public commitment to abolition as a condition for negotiations grew almost irresistible. At the same time Lincoln was well aware of a move among some Republicans to call a new convention and nominate another candidate. The motive force of this drive was a belief that Lincoln was a sure loser; but many of its participants were radicals who considered his reconstruction and amnesty policy too soft toward rebels. These crosscutting pressures during August made Lincoln's life a hell; no wonder his photographs from this time show an increasing sadness of countenance; no wonder he could never escape that "tired spot" at the center of his being.

Lincoln almost succumbed to demands for the sacrifice of abolition as a stated condition of peace. To a War Democrat on August 17 he drafted a letter which concluded: "If Jefferson Davis . . . wishes to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me." While he pondered whether to send this letter, the Republican National Committee met in New York on August 22. Speaking through Henry Raymond, they urged Lincoln to send a commissioner "to make distinct proffers of peace of Davis . . . on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the constitution,—all the other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States." This would be a public relations gesture, said Raymond, not a real abandonment of emancipation. For "if it should be rejected, (as it would be,) it would plant seeds of disaffection in the south, dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North . . . reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable necessities." Lincoln authorized Raymond himself to go to Richmond and "propose, on behalf [of] this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes."³⁶

Having gone this far, Lincoln pulled back. On August 25 he met with Raymond and convinced him 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." Whatever the purport of this ambiguous statement, recorded by one of Lincoln's private secretaries, Raymond did not go to Richmond nor did

36. CWL, VII, 501, 518n., 517.

Lincoln send his "let Jefferson Davis try me" letter. His peace terms remained Union and emancipation. The president fully anticipated defeat in November on this platform. "I am going to be beaten," he told an army officer, "and unless some great change takes place badly beaten." On August 23 he wrote his famous "blind memorandum" and asked cabinet members to endorse it sight unseen: "This morning, as for some days past, 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."³⁷

Lincoln expected George B. McClellan to be the next president. McClellan was the most popular Democrat and the most powerful symbol of opposition to Lincoln's war policies. The only uncertainty concerned his position on the peace plank to be submitted by Vallandig-ham, chairman of the resolutions subcommittee of the platform committee. Although McClellan had endorsed a copperhead candidate for governor of Pennsylvania the previous year, he was widely known as a War Democrat and in a recent address at West Point he had seemed to sanction the cause of Union through military victory. This caused the Peace Democrats to look elsewhere, though they could apparently find no one except Thomas Seymour of Connecticut, who had lost the gubernatorial election in 1863, or Governor Horatio Seymour of New York—who refused to be a candidate. Nevertheless, the peace faction would command close to half of the delegates and might jeopardize McClellan's chances by bolting the party if the convention nominated him. Behind the scenes, McClellan's principal adviser assured doubters that "the General is for peace, not war. . . . If he is nominated, he would prefer to restore the Union by peaceful means, rather than by war." McClellan himself reportedly told a St. Louis businessman on August 24: "If I am elected, I will recommend an immediate armistice and a call for a convention of all the states and insist upon exhausting all and every means to secure peace without further bloodshed."³⁸

37. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), IX, 221; William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954), 112; CWL, VII, 514.

38. Samuel L. M. Barlow to Manton Marble, Aug. 24, 1864, S. L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; James Harrison to Louis V. Bogy, Aug. 24, 1864,37. Clement C. Clay Papers, National Archives, quoted in Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada, 93. If McClellan really did say this, it represented a reversal of his position from two weeks earlier, when he rejected advice that he should write a letter suggesting an armistice, and commented: "These fools will ruin the country." McClellan to W. C. Prime, Aug. 10, 1864, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

Doubts about McClellan's peace credentials persisted, however, so the party "bridged the crack" between its peace and war factions by nominating the general on a peace platform and giving him as a running mate Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, a close ally of Val-landigham. Scion of an old Virginia family, Pendleton had opposed the war from the start, had voted against supplies, and expressed sympathy with the South. The platform condemned the government's "arbitrary military arrests" and "suppression of freedom of speech and of the press." It pledged to preserve "the rights of the States unimpaired" (a code phrase for slavery). On these matters all Democrats could agree. More divisive (but adopted almost unanimously) was the plank drafted by Vallandig-ham: "After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war. . . [we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union."³⁹

This crucial resolution made peace the first priority and Union a distant second. Republicans and Confederates alike interpreted it thus, and responded accordingly. "It contemplates surrender and abasement," wrote a New York Republican. "Jefferson Davis might have drawn it." Alexander Stephens declared joyfully that "it presents . . . the first ray of real light I have seen since the war began." The Charleston Mercury proclaimed that McClellan's election on this platform "must lead to peace and our independence . . . [provided] that for the next two months we hold our own and prevent military success by our foes."⁴⁰

BUT . . . From the diary of George Templeton Strong, September 3, 1864:

39. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the GreatRebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 419–20.

40. Strong, Diary, 479; Stephens to Herschel V. Johnson, Sept. 5, 1864, and Charleston Mercury, Sept. 5, 1864, both quoted in Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 115, 113. Neither Stephens nor the editor of the Mercury had learned of the fall of Atlanta when they penned these remarks.

"Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! . . . It is (coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war."

Or as a Republican newspaper headlined the news:

VICTORY
Is the War a Failure?
Old Abe's Reply to the Chicago Convention
Consternation and Despair Among the Copperheads⁴¹

41. Strong, Diary, 480—81; St. Paul Press, Sept. 4, 1864, quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 189.