Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

These triumphs buoyed Northern morale higher than it had been since Vicksburg, and made talk of peace seem like a giveback of victory.

To make matters worse for the Democrats, McClellan alienated the peace faction of the party (including his vice presidential nominee, George Pendleton, who was “an avowed peacemonger,” according to George Templeton Strong) by insisting that reunion rather than peace be made the first priority of the platform. While Pendleton announced that he was “in favor of exacting no conditions, and… opposed to any course of policy which will defeat the reestablishment of the Government upon its old foundations,” McClellan had no intention of espousing any peace platform that simply allowed the Confederacy to go its own way as an independent nation. He would make whatever concessions the Confederates asked so long as those concessions led the Confederacy back into the Union, but if the Confederate government was not interested in reunion, then “we must continue the resort to the dread arbitrament of war.”98

McClellan was aware that this would cost him the support of the hard-core Peace Democrats, but he could not reconcile the battles he had fought and the lives that had been lost with a settlement that permitted the North and South simply to walk away from each other like strangers. “I intend to destroy any and all pretense for any possible association of my name to the Peace Party,” McClellan wrote two weeks before the election, “I, for one, could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army & Navy who have survived so many bloody battles, & tell them that their labors and the sacrifices of such numbers of their slain & crippled brethren had been in vain.”99 The result was to divide Democratic loyalties at just the moment when only united effort could hope to upset the incumbent Republicans.

So, almost when it was past expectation, Lincoln was handed hope again for the war—or rather, for both of his wars. On September 22, 1864, Frémont, the Radical splinter candidate, withdrew his competing nomination, and Lincoln was allowed to go on bearing the party banner alone. And not only the banner of the Republicans—in a last appeal to the War Democrats, the Republican nominating convention had chosen as Lincoln’s vice presidential candidate the Tennessee Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, and announced they would not run under the banner of the Republican Party only, but as the “National Union Ticket.” On election day, November 8, 1864, Lincoln and Johnson carried 55.1 percent of the popular vote (2.2 million to McClellan’s 1.8 million), and 212 out of 233 electoral votes, while the Republicans/ Unionists in Congress won 145 out of 185 seats in the House and 40 out of 52 in the Senate. Most surprising of all, Lincoln garnered 78 percent of the votes of the soldiers, including the Army of the Potomac, thus destroying forever the mystique of McClellan as the hero of the armies. 100 At last, Lincoln had the political mandate that had eluded him for the four years of his first term. He had, at least for the time being, won his political war. It now remained to be seen how he would win the war that still waited for him down below Petersburg.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A DIM SHORE AHEAD

For a man who believed in the “cold, calculating” power of “reason” to order his life, Abraham Lincoln retained a peculiar interest in the folk religion of dreams, portents, and signs. Herndon thought Lincoln was “superstitious,” and claimed that Lincoln had consulted a fortune-teller “to give him his history, his end, and his fate,” and once tried to cure his son Robert of a dog’s bite with “a supposed mad stone.” Lincoln once described to John Hay and Francis Carpenter a portent he had seen just after his nomination for the presidency in 1860. Exhausted from the celebrations, Lincoln was resting “on a lounge in my chamber” when he saw a reflection of himself in the “swinging glass” that sat on top of a bureau opposite the couch. “My face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images. … I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished.” He lay down, the “illusion” returned, “and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler—say, five shades—than the other.” He was troubled by the strange double image, and a few days later he tried to conjure it up before a mirror at his home. He did, and it worried Mary, who was sure he was playing with something occult. “She thought it was a sign that I was to be elected to a second term of office and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life throughout the last term.”1

More than omens in mirrors, it was his dreams that haunted Lincoln. Sad-eyed Willie, who died in 1862, often visited his dreams, and in June 1863, when Mary and his youngest son, Tad Lincoln, were visiting in Philadelphia, Lincoln wired her to put the boy’s small gift pistol away: “I had an ugly dream about him.” But it was the recurring dreams about assassination that increasingly preyed on Lincoln’s mind. In more untroubled moments, Lincoln dismissed people’s fears about assassins. “I have received quite a number of threatening letters since I have been president, and nobody has killed me yet,” he assured a Missouri congressman; “the truth is, I give very little consideration to such things.” But the threats paced more and more around the edges of his consciousness. He alarmed both Mary and his self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, by describing a dream in which he saw himself awakened in the White House by the sound of weeping and sobbing. His dream-self moved from room to room in search of the sound until he came to the East Room of the White House, where he found a “throng of mourners,” a