Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Francis Lieber, the famed German-born Columbia University professor, was amazed that America would hold a presidential election during the Civil War. “If we come triumphantly out of this war, with a presidential election in the midst of it,” he wrote in August 1864, “I shall call it the greatest miracle in all the historic course of events.”
The miracle happened. On Nov. 8, 1864, Lincoln stood for re-election, and a majority of voters endorsed him for a second term.
The presidential election of 1864 stands out as one of the most remarkable events in American history. Never before or since had the nation held a popular, national referendum in the midst of a vast war at home. But Lincoln believed that holding the election was a “necessity.” After all, he was fighting to prove to the world that ordinary citizens could govern themselves as a free people under a system of laws. A year before his re-election, he had famously proclaimed at Gettysburg that the war was being waged so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Two days after his re-election — on Nov. 10, 1864 — Lincoln addressed a group of well-wishers outside the White House. “We can not have free government without elections,” he told them, “and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”
Lincoln’s victory in 1864 ensured the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy and set the stage for the final destruction of slavery. The New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant noted that it would “be chronicled among the signal favors shown by Providence to our republic,” and that it “will do more to hasten the close of the war than twenty battles.”
One of the most notable aspects of the election was the participation of Union soldiers. Nineteen Northern states enacted legislation permitting soldiers to vote away from home. Unfortunately, taking the ballot to the battlefield opened up the door to fraud, intimidation and coercion. Several Democratic operatives in Baltimore, for example, were caught stuffing Democratic ballots into New York soldiers’ absentee voting envelopes.
The Republicans were no less intent on manipulating the soldier vote, and were far more successful in using their control of the government to ensure Lincoln’s victory. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana remembered years later that “all the power and influence of the War Department … was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln.” This was no overstatement. Dana’s recollections align with historical evidence from the campaign itself. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton used immense power to bring military voters into line, making sure that they voted for Lincoln — or kept their Democratic opinions to themselves. Stanton dismissed dozens of officers from the Union army in the months leading up to the election, with at least one dismissal targeting multiple Democrats at once: When Republican Senator Edwin D. Morgan of New York informed Stanton that a number of quartermaster clerks had endorsed Gen. George B. McClellan for president, Stanton dismissed 20 of them. When one of the clerks protested his dismissal, an unsympathetic Stanton replied, “When a young man receives his pay from an administration and spends his evenings denouncing it in offensive terms, he cannot be surprised if the administration prefers a friend on the job.”
Stanton made very little effort to hide the partisanship behind his decisions. When he learned that one of his quartermasters was “betting against” the Republican candidate for governor in Indiana, he boasted to a White House gathering, “I reduced [him] to a Captain and ordered him South the other day.”
Democrats came to believe that Stanton was taking these sorts of steps in order to “influence” the army vote, and many Democratic officers learned to keep quiet during the campaign so that they would not receive Stanton’s wrath. Col. Durbin Ward of the 17th Ohio Infantry, for example, claimed that he was “driven to be cautious” because “publicly” speaking his political opinions “might cost me my commission.” A Massachusetts artillerist similarly worried that if he voiced his political opinions he would be called “a Copperhead and perhaps a poor cuss like me might get shot.”
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Other forms of intimidation took place as well. Soldiers who attended a Democratic meeting near West Point, for example, were “confined in the guard house on their return” and were subsequently made to dig the drain for the superintendent’s “water closet.” Soldiers who attended pro-Lincoln meetings, however, received no such punishment. In a few instances, soldiers were even court-martialed for expressing anti-Lincoln or anti-emancipation sentiments during the campaign.
Perhaps the most egregious political favoritism involved furloughs. Officers throughout the Union armies granted furloughs for Republican soldiers to go home to vote, while Democrats were kept in the field. A Pennsylvania election commissioner reported that “Democrats were threatened to be sent to the front if they voted,” while an Illinois soldier noted that his regiment was polled “to see how many would vote for Lincoln if they got a chance to go home.” Some soldiers were willing to sacrifice their principles in order to attain a ticket home for the election. One New Hampshire sharpshooter said that “I shall be [as] black as the D——” (either “Darkey” or “Devil”) to get a furlough home to vote. But not all soldiers could be bought off. One New Jersey soldier wrote angrily, “I suppose I might have gotten home if I would have said I should vote for A[be]. But never. I would sooner stay here for another year than to come home and vote for him.”
A few days after the election, Cpl. George M. Buck of the 20th Michigan Volunteers reported to General McClellan some of the incidents he had witnessed during the campaign. The power of the military, he wrote, had been used “without stint” to keep soldiers from voting Democratic. Soldiers were “offered promotion if they would vote for Lincoln,” while Democrats were reduced “to the ranks or a ‘place in the front during every engagement’ if they chose to vote for you.” Buck knew of “hundreds” of soldiers “who voted for Lincoln under protest and hundreds more of your most ardent admirers who did not vote at all.” As evidence, he pointed out that his regiment cast only 188 votes in the election even though more than 300 men were qualified to vote.
Historians often point out that Lincoln won 78 percent of the soldier vote in 1864, but they rarely scratch beneath the surface of that statistic. Clearly, some soldiers were intimidated or coerced into voting for Lincoln. Other Democrats in the army most likely crossed party lines because they believed Lincoln was the best candidate to restore the Union — but they did not necessarily endorse his positions on other political issues, like emancipation. And many others, like those in George Buck’s regiment, simply did not vote. Indeed, many Democratic soldiers abstained from voting in 1864 because they saw Lincoln as an “abolitionist,” while they viewed their own party as “disloyal” for calling the war a “failure” in its national platform.
There is no doubt that a significant number of Union soldiers supported Lincoln’s candidacy and platform (which called for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery), but the army’s support was not nearly as universal as most historians have assumed.
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Jonathan W. White teaches American studies at Christopher Newport University and is the author of “Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman” and “Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln.” He is writing a history of sleep and dreams during the Civil War. His web site is jonathanwhite.org.