1864 Presidential
Election
from rebuff
to robust victory
By Norman Hill
O
the bloody battle of Antietam/
Sharpsburg in 1862, McClellan won
a technical victory against Lee in his
Maryland invasion. But McClellan did
not follow up in a pursuit of Lee into
Virginia. Later, the Confederate
general, Longstreet, admitted that
his forces were thoroughly beaten
and could have been vanquished by
a McClellan advance.
In September, in despair and
expecting defeat, the President
wrote a secret memo of intent,
stating that between November and
the new President’s inauguration in
March,1865, he would w ork with the
new President elect and continue his
utmost efforts to save the Union.
By August, 1864, incumbent Abraham
Lincoln was extremely unpopular
nationwide. Although 1863 Union
victories at Vicksburg and
Gettysburg had lifted the North’s
morale, it slid backward sharply in
1864. The Vicksburg hero, Grant,
was now sharply attacked for
appalling casualties in his stalemated
Eastern campaign against Lee.
General Sherman had driven the
Confederates southward out of
Tennessee. But, at Atlanta, his siege
and attempted occupation of the
city had been repulsed time after
time. Confederate President,
Jefferson Davis, had rebuffed Union
peace offers with “The war will
continue until the last of this
generation dies in its tracks—until
you acknowledge our right to self
-government.” With Davis’
characteristic dishonesty, this
meant that the Confederacy
would never give up slavery.
For its convention, the Party
platform called for an immediate
end to hostilities against the South.
Basically, this would have recognized
the Confederacy as an independent
nation. All slaves newly freed by the
Emancipation Proclamation, many of
whom had followed advancing Union
troops, would be subject again to
slave status.
Democratic Party hopes were very
high for a Presidential victory. They
claimed that, under Lincoln, every
Constitutional right of the people
had been violated. This referred
partly to the military draft, started
in 1863, and also to Lincoln’s
suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus, when he deemed that local
riots and insurrections called for it.
George McClellan was chosen as
the 1864 Democratic Presidential
nominee. He was quite young, only
37, popular with the troops, and
enjoyed some degree of nationwide
popularity. Originally, when Lincoln
was about to offer him total Army
command, he went out of his way
on several occasions to show his
contempt for the President. At
98
On August 31, with hopes sky high,
McClellan was nominated. He
partially repudiated the anti-war
plank of the Democratic platform,
but everyone believed the War would
end soon after his electoral victory.
Desperate Republicans toyed with
the idea of dumping Lincoln himself
as the candidate. But, instead, they
dumped his Vice Presidential partner,
Hannibal Hamlin, and nominated a
pro-Union Southerner, Democrat and
slave owner, Andrew Johnson. They
even changed the party name from
Republican to Union.
But on August 31, almost coincident
with McClellan’s nomination, events
started to go against his candidacy
and for the Union cause. Three
events played a crucial role:
Under the command of Admiral
Farragut, the Union navy fought its
way into Mobile Bay and seized the
IMAGES: SXC.HU
n election night, November 8,
1864, as the day’s ballots
were being tallied, President
Abraham Lincoln anxiously
stayed by a telegraph at the
War Office. Believing in certain
defeat the previous August, his
hopes were raised a little by
September military victories, but
by election time, he was still quite
apprehensive.