"Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible." These determined words of advice were given to General Grant as reassurance and approval of his costly plans for defeat of the Confederate army from a war- wreary President Lincoln, just months before the 1864 presidential election that seemed unwinnable at the time.
	The last year of the Civil War brings to mind a turn in fortunes for the Union and for the retreating Confederate army - of Lincoln planning for reconstruction as General Grant finishes the war by crushing Lee's rag-tag force. What adds an even more fascinating twist to the chain of events is that a national presidential election was held in the midst of Civil War.
	A work of fiction couldn't be written to match the events of the American Civil War. Especially when one considers the way Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant came together from obscurity to end the nation's bloodiest conflict. This essay will take a closer look at the events that brought these two leaders to prominence and how they worked and thought in concert to achieve their goals - victory in the 1864 election and victory in the war.
	Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election to the presidency was the result of the nation's turmoil. Lincoln was outraged at the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas championed this law as a way to end the ongoing debate in Congress on whether to admit states as free states or slave states.
	According to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the people living in the Kansas and Nebraska territories could decide whether Kansas and Nebraska entered the Union as slave states or free states. This was also known as popular sovreignty. Lincoln opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act because he believed that Congress had already prohibited slavery from these territories. Lincoln saw this, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, as steps toward the nationalism of slavery.
	In an autobiographical statement, Lincoln wrote in the third person of his reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, "In 1854, his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before." His law partner, William Herndon, described Lincoln as being "astounded," "thunderstruck," and "stunned" when he heard of the Act.
	Throughout 1855-57, Lincoln traveled extensively giving political speeches. On June 16, 1858, he accepted the Republican nomination to run against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas for the U.S. Senate, and delivered his famous "House Divided Speech" in the Illinois state house: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South."
	With that speech, the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates commenced. They included stops at seven communities across the State of Illinois. In November, Lincoln lost the senate race to Douglas, but he later wrote: "I am glad that I made the last race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of liberty long after I am gone."
	Building on the national popularity that he gained in the debates, Lincoln spent the next two years giving speeches throughout the country. Gradually, he began to have the prominence of a presidential candidate. But, Lincoln was not entirely convinced of his presidential potential, although he did admit, "the taste is in my mouth a little."
	On May 18, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was chosen by the Republican Party to be its presidential nominee. With the Democratic Party split among two presidential candidates and an additional candidate running, Lincoln's presidential election was all but assured.
	While Lincoln was observing events from his home in Springfield, Illinois during the 1860 campaign, Ulysses S. Grant was clerking at his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.

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Author: Tim Townsend