IV
In the end the POW issue played a minor role in the presidential election. The principal issue was the war itself, and how it should be ended. In this matter the Republicans managed to get a patent on the policy of peace through victory. Even McClellan could not escape the copper taint of peace without victory. Most Confederates saw McClellan's candidacy that way, after some initial hesitation caused by the general's warlike letter of acceptance. Southern agent Clement C. Clay in Canada expressed disappointment with that letter. Yet "the platform means peace, unconditionally," Clay reasoned. "McClellan will be under the control of the true peace men. . . . At all events, he is committed by the platform to cease hostilities and to try negotiations. . . . An armistice will inevitably result in peace. The war cannot be renewed if once stopped, even for a short time." If McClellan was elected, predicted a War Department clerk in Richmond, "we shall have peace and independence."64
War-weary rebel soldiers hoped fervently for McClellan and peace. "The enemy are exceedingly anxious to hold out until after the Presidential election," reported Grant from the Petersburg front. "Deserters come into our lines daily who tell us that the men are nearly universally tired of the war, and that desertions would be much more frequent, but they believe peace will be negotiated after the fall elections."65 Such sentiments provoked opposite feelings among Union soldiers. Although "many leading officers" in the Army of the Potomac were still "Mc-Clellanized," according to a general in another Union army, most men in the ranks no longer favored their former commander. "Not that the soldiers dislike the man so much as the company he keeps," wrote one enlisted man. "There are a good many soldiers who would vote for McClellan but they cannot go Vallandigham." A Democratic triumph would mean "inglorious peace and shame, the old truckling subserviency to Southern domination," declared an officer in the Iron Brigade. "I had rather stay out here a lifetime (much as I dislike it)," wrote
64. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Sept. 12, 1864, in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 637-38; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 285.
65. Grant to Elihu Washburne, Aug. 16, 1864, quoted in Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969), 355; Grant to Stanton, Sept. 13, 1864, in O.R., Ser.III, Vol. 4, p. 713.
another soldier, a former Democrat, "than consent to a division of our country. . . . We all want peace, but none any but an honorable one."66
Many Union soldiers had a chance to register their opinions at the ballot box. Here was a bold experiment in democracy: allowing fighting men to vote in what amounted to a referendum on whether they should continue fighting. But as Grant put it, "they are American citizens, [and] they have as much right to [vote] as those citizens who remain at home. Nay, more, for they have sacrificed more for their country."67 By 1864 nineteen states had enacted provisions for soldiers to vote in the field. Of the states that had not, the three most important were Indiana, Illinois, and New Jersey where Democratic legislatures had blocked the measure. Although much rhetoric about "proconsular rule" and "Caesarism" had accompanied this opposition, the true reason was the recognition by Democrats that the army had become overwhelmingly Republican—or at least "Union," as the Republican party styled itself in 1864.
Twelve of the states allowing absentee voting provided for the separate tabulation of soldier ballots. Lincoln received 119,754 of them to McClellan's 34,291, a majority of 78 percent for the president compared with 53 percent of the civilian vote in those states. The absentee soldier-vote majority for Republicans in the other seven states was probably at least as great. Of the states that did not permit absentee voting, the contest was particularly close and important in Indiana. As commander in chief, the president could help along his cause there and did not shrink from doing so. "The loss of [Indiana] to the friends of the Government," Lincoln wrote to General Sherman in Atlanta, "would go far towards losing the whole Union cause," so the president would be pleased if the general could furlough as many Indiana soldiers as possible to go home and vote.68Several thousand soldiers did get to Indiana to vote; the War Department also combed military hospitals for convalescent Indiana soldiers well enough to travel. Some members of a Massachusetts regiment temporarily stationed in Indiana may have added their votes to the Republican total there.69
In none of the states with separately tabulated soldier ballots did this
66. Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, 303, 324, 323; John Berry to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Aug. 24, 1864, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library.
67. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 42, pt. 2, pp. 1045–46.
68. CWL, VIII, 11.
69. Democrats charged fraud and intimidation in connection with the soldier vote in several places. Although there were undoubtedly some irregularities, their partisan benefits tended to cancel each other out. Indeed, the worst frauds were committed by Democratic commissioners sent to receive the vote of New York soldiers. Two of the commissioners were subsequently convicted (one of them having confessed) of forging McClellan votes. The voting of soldiers in 1864 was about as fair and honest as 19th-century elections generally were, and Lincoln's majority was probably an accurate reflection of soldier sentiment. The War Department did all it could to expedite the furloughing of soldiers likely to vote Republican, however, and in other ways lent its considerable weight to the Republican side in the gathering of the soldier vote. The best studies of this matter are Oscar O. Winther, "The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864," New York History, 25 (1944), 440–58, and Josiah Henry Benton, Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War (Boston, 1915).
vote change the outcome of the presidential contest—Lincoln would have carried all of them except Kentucky in any case. But in two close states where soldier votes were lumped with the rest, New York and Connecticut, these votes may have provided the margin of Lincoln's victory. The men in blue also decided the outcome in several congressional districts, and the votes of Maryland soldiers for a state constitutional amendment abolishing slavery more than offset the slight majority of the home vote against it.
Lincoln's popular-vote majority of half a million translated into an electoral count of 212 to 21. The president won all the states but Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey; his party also captured control of the governorships and legislatures of all but those states. The next Congress would have a Republican majority of three-fourths. The similarity between the "Union" vote of 1864 and the Republican vote of 1860 in the northern states was remarkable. Lincoln received virtually the same 55 percent from the same regions and constituencies within these states that he had received four years earlier. Republicans continued to draw their greatest support from native-born and British Protestant farmers, skilled workers, and white-collar voters especially in New England and the greater New England of the upper North. Democrats remained strongest among unskilled workers, immigrant Catholics, and Butternuts in the southern Midwest. As the "Union" party, Republicans expanded their base beyond 1860 in the border states (including West Virginia) where they won 54 percent of the vote (compared with about 9 percent in 1860) and drew most of their support from the urban middle class and prosperous non-slaveholding farmers. Democrats retained the slaveholders, immigrants, and poorer farmers.
Contemporaries interpreted the election of 1864 as a triumph for Lincoln's policy of compelling the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. "I am astonished," wrote the American correspondent of the London Daily News, at "the extent and depth of [this] determination . . . to fight to the last. . . . [The northern people] are in earnest in a way the like of which the world never saw before, silently, calmly, but desperately in earnest."70
But Jefferson Davis was also in earnest. He had never shared southern hopes for the election of McClellan and a negotiated peace. "We are fighting for existence; and by fighting alone can independence be gained," Davis had told audiences during a morale-building tour of the lower South after the fall of Atlanta. The Confederacy remained "as erect and defiant as ever," he informed Congress in November. "Nothing has changed in the purpose of its Government, in the indomitable valor of its troops, or in the unquenchable spirit of its people."71 It was to quench this spirit that Sherman set forth on his march from Atlanta to the sea.
70. London Daily News, Sept. 27, 1864, quoted in Nevins, War, IV, 141.
71. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 132; Rowland, Davis, VI, 386.