Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (55 page)

However, Lincoln’s reelection depended far less on his satisfying public curiosity about his private standing with God than on the depth of popular commitment to the Union and on convincing people that the Union-Republican candidate was the nation’s only realistic guarantor. An evangelical banker, Joseph B. Maxfield of Brooklyn, wrote to the president as polling day approached to ask urgently if the Lincoln who publicly acknowledged God in his proclamations was also “rejoicing in hope of eternal life through the precious blood of Christ.” But the president’s answer would not affect his vote: Maxfield had “learned to love [Lincoln] as a man” and looked to him “as being under God—the nation’s hope.”
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The great achievement of the Union party’s campaigning was to harness this deep-rooted nationalism through an appeal to both high purpose and political realism.

Familiar secular and religious themes were sharpened, heightened, and interwoven in the rhetoric of the campaign, as political and church presses, often indistinguishable, and embracing Lincoln’s own vision, gave meaning to the struggle for national existence. The battle to preserve popular self-government against “the pretentious rule of an aristocratic class” set Christian civilization against barbarism; the war to suppress an unholy rebellion against “the best, most equitable, most righteous, most benevolent government” had, through sacrifice, given birth to a more devout, elevated, unselfish, and God-fearing patriotism. The nation’s past was the history of the providential handing down of a priceless heritage from the revolutionary Fathers to the current generation. The nation’s present showed the continuing marks of God’s favor: burgeoning philanthropy, religious revivals, the yoking of “wives, daughters and sweethearts” in the common pursuit of the Union cause, and the leading of the Union’s Christian soldiers out of the wilderness. The purified nation of the future would pursue an “onward march to material prosperity and empire,” battling “the leagued foes of Freedom and Republicanism all round the world.”
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By 1864 most Republicans were committed to a restored Union, shorn of slavery and economically transformed. They soft-pedaled the emancipation theme during the campaign, alarmed as Democrats seized on Lincoln’s “Niagara manifesto” as evidence that antislavery bigotry alone prevented peace. But the issue of the slaves’ freedom was hardly absent. Given the broad-based racial antipathies and stereotyping amongst the Union electorate, Republicans tended to emphasize the pragmatic before the principled benefits of the administration’s policy. Emancipation provided the means of victory: only the “black warriors” whom his proclamation had secured for the Union armies now stood between the rebels and Confederate independence, Lincoln insisted, in a widely circulated interview. Emancipation also promised economic benefits to ordinary workingmen, “the bone and sinew” of the country, since the death of a socially hidebound, aristocratic South would open the way for general education, skilled wage labor, freedom to help oneself, technological and industrial progress, social mobility, class harmony, and nationwide prosperity. And if Lincoln was right that slavery had caused the war, then only emancipation would bring permanent peace to a reunited country.

This broadside contrasts Lincoln, the guarantor of free labor and equal educational opportunity, with McClellan, client of the Confederacy. Lincoln shakes the hand of a laboring man, while black and white children run out of a schoolhouse which flies the Union flag; McClellan shakes the hand of the Confederate president, blind to the slave auction going on behind.

Yet more often than not, even in the moderate heartlands of Republicanism, these pragmatic considerations were framed by a Protestant language that signaled a deeper meaning. This cast emancipation as atonement for sin, a means of national redemption, an honoring of God’s purposes, and a working out of the principle of the equal brotherhood of man under the universal fatherhood of God. Few would have quarreled with the
Chicago
Tribune
’s verdict that “this is in its profoundest aspect, a religious contest . . . a war for Christian civilization, for God’s pure truth.” What, following national redemption, “shall prevent the American Union from being, henceforth the crowning national work of the Almighty, the wonder of the world?”
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An election which promised to inaugurate “the second birth of our Nation” could not, National Union leaders insisted, be a conventional party struggle. “Remember,” urged the national executive committee, “that the contest is not one for party ascendancy” but for the government’s survival.
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With lifelong “genuine” Democrats prominent at local and national levels, gracing public platforms and chairing meetings, the Union party proved brilliantly successful in presenting itself as a unique cross-party vehicle of nationalism and in characterizing its opponents as “pseudo,” “humbug,” or “bastard” Democrats, a factious coalition of disunionist traitors, peace-plotters, foreign financiers, and naive McClellanites.

This lithographed souvenir printing of the Emancipation Proclamation, of value to Union party campaigners in 1864, gives particular prominence
to
Lincoln’s
invoking—as Chase suggested—“the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

The Democrats’ Chicago platform, with its call for an armistice and a convention of states, provided an easy target for “patriot” opponents: a cease-fire for negotiation, quite apart from implicitly conceding the Confederacy’s separate nationality, would give the rebels time to regroup and rebuild, demoralize the North, and bring a dishonorable peace that would see “the Potomac and the Ohio washing our southern shores.” After recent successes the Union stood “just on the eve of victory,” facing an exhausted foe and leaving Jeff Davis desperate to win through the ballot box what he had failed to achieve on the battlefield. War, dreadful though it was, insisted Unionists, offered the sole honorable course, for only by crushing the South’s capacity to resist would American nationality be established “on a basis as unyielding and eternal as the Rock of Ages.” The impious treason of the Chicago men mocked the legitimate tradition of Christian pacifism. As one Lincolnite put it, “while nearly every pulpit in the land gives its utterances in favor of war, the cry from the dram-shops and all the purlieus of vice is peace! peace!”
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Lincoln’s party managers made exhaustive use of this striking Thomas Nast cartoon, which capitalized on the Union victories in Atlanta, the Shenandoah Valley, and Mobile Bay to present the Democrats’ Chicago platform as a shameful betrayal of the Union’s fighting men. A disabled federal soldier, his face averted, extends a hand in surrender to Jefferson Davis, whose foot rests on a grave whose headstone is inscribed “In Memory of the Union Heroes in a Useless War.” Columbia weeps and the American flag flies upside down.

Unionists had a no more effective emblem of the moral legitimacy of war than the nation’s soldiers—martial Christianity personified—who became a ubiquitous campaign presence. McClellan had been nominated to scoop the soldiers’ vote, but whatever loyalty fighting men might feel for their old commander generally could not outweigh their trust in Lincoln’s steadfastness and their contempt for what one called “the corruption, concession, and damnation policy of the Democracy.” Officers addressed National Union rallies. Ex–prisoners of war told of Confederate inhumanities. Wounded men and amputees provided graphic reminders of the nation’s debt to past and present heroes. Scores of ordinary soldiers graced political platforms. Military bands and escorts accompanied snaking processions of Wide Awakes. Regiments marched by the White House to deliver a salute and occasionally prompt a reply from the president. Collectively they offered an unequivocal message: the “true road to peace” lay through hard fighting till the rebellion was put down. Only a Union vote would honor the bloody sacrifices of “Father Abraham’s boys in blue.”
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Ever-present troops did as much as anything to reinforce the overall thrust of the Union party’s rhetoric, that voters faced a simple, life-and-death choice in a crisis of unique historical significance. In the crossroads of history they must choose between good and evil, between legitimate authority and anarchy, between “the life or degradation of the nation.” Defeat for Lincoln on “the day of national judgment” would mean “the hands on the dial of Civilization will be set a century backward.” Worse, “failure now is failure forever”: “We may write ‘Ichabod’ on the wall of its Temple of Liberty—‘The glory is departed.’ ”
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Democrats ridiculed such apocalyptic rhetoric as a smoke screen to hide Lincoln’s tragic blend of incompetence and revolutionary dogmatism. They lambasted emancipation, racial revolution, national “consolidationism,” and the threat to individual liberties (underscored by a September draft) as malign Puritanical meddling, and promised instead “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is, and the nigger where he was.” It was a message which might have worked before Atlanta changed the country’s mood. In the party’s strongholds of the lower North, Midwest, and upper South, an antiwar, lily-white, anti-Yankee message played well amongst some agrarian groups, the mass of small producers, and urban immigrants. But the improving military situation exposed a party divided between the minority Copperhead element and those who rejected any hint of compromise with the rebels. Unable to articulate a consistent message, in danger of appearing unpatriotic, and failing to make most voters see race and not nationality as the key issue, Democrats remained in the eyes of political centrists more of a protest movement than a viable alternative administration.

Rhetorical strategy, organizational effort, and the judicious furloughing of troops brought Lincoln’s party stunning success in the state elections in October. The victory in Pennsylvania, which Lincoln awaited anxiously “because of her enormous weight and influence,” and even more in Indiana, where a Copperhead administration would have provided “a grand central rallying point for . . . lurking treason,” removed any real doubt about a National Union victory a month later and demoralized the opposition.
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On November 8 Lincoln and Johnson took the electoral votes of all but three of the twenty-five states in which the contest was fought.