Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Despite his offer to resign, Blair was surprised to find the dismissal letter on his desk. Later that morning, he encountered Welles and Bates coming out of the White House. “I suppose you are both aware that my head is decapitated,” he told them. “I am no longer a member of the Cabinet.” Welles was so stunned that he asked Blair to repeat himself, at which point Blair took the letter from his pocket and read it aloud to his two colleagues. Blair said “he had no doubt he was a peace-offering to Frémont and his friends.” Welles was uncertain, telling Blair that while “pacifying the partisans of Frémont might have been brought into consideration…the President would never have yielded to that.” Welles thought it more likely that Blair had been sacrificed to restore balance to the cabinet after Chase’s resignation. Chase’s partisans clearly “felt wounded” that their man was gone while his assailant remained. The removal of Blair would allow Lincoln to “reconcile all parties, and rid the Administration of irritating bickerings.” Lincoln chose the former governor of Ohio, William Dennison, to succeed Blair.
Welles was saddened by Blair’s departure. “In parting with Blair,” Welles recorded in his diary, “the President parts with a true friend, and he leaves no adviser so able sagacious. Honest, truthful and sincere, he has been wise, discriminating and correct.” In the days that followed, Welles came to view “the removal of Montgomery from our counsels as the greatest misfortune that had befallen the Cabinet.” Bates was equally distressed. Though he did not consider himself so intimate with Blair, he respected his straight-speaking colleague and believed Lincoln had erred in making a bargain for Wade and Davis. “I think Mr. Lincoln could have been elected without them and in spite of them. In that event, the Country might have been governed, free from their
malign influences.”
Although Blair was hurt by a dismissal that he felt was “an unnecessary mortification,” he remained certain, he told his wife, that Lincoln had acted “from the best motives” and that “it is for the best all around.” His father wholeheartedly agreed. “In my opinion it is all for the best,” he told Frank, no doubt worried that his fiery son would make some regrettable public remark. The patriarch suggested that Monty himself had “pressed this matter” by intimating to Frémont’s friends that he would resign if Frémont withdrew. In the end, the senior Blair concluded, “if it tends to give a greater certainty of the defeat of McClellan, which I look upon as the salvation of the Republic, it is well…. I hope you will concur with the views I have taken. The true interests of the Country require the reelection of Lincoln.”
Frank eventually did concur with his father, though, like his brother, he at first found it “somewhat mortifying to reflect that this triumph has been given to those who are equally the enemies of the President & ‘the Blairs.’” On the other hand, he was certain that “a failure to re-elect Mr. Lincoln would be the greatest disaster that could befall the country and the sacrifice made by [Monty] to avert this is so incomparably small that I felt it would not cost him a penny to make.”
Elizabeth Blair, hearing the noble sentiments of the men, believed that she and Monty’s wife, Minna, were “more hurt than anybody else.” As far as Monty’s loyal sister was concerned, Lincoln should have stuck with his “first view—of the poor policy of sacrificing his friends to his enemies.” She was impressed, however, by her brother’s “fine manly bearing,” which he illustrated repeatedly in the days ahead as he took to the stump on behalf of Abraham Lincoln. Speaking to large conservative gatherings, Monty insisted that the request for his resignation had not proceeded from any unkindness on Lincoln’s part. On the contrary, the president “has at least the support of those who are nearer to me than all other people on this earth. I retired by the recommendation of my own father to the President.”
John Hay returned from Illinois just at the time of Blair’s resignation. He noted that Blair was behaving “very handsomely and is doing his utmost” to reelect Lincoln. Monty would never forget that Lincoln had stood by him after the mortifying publication of his private letter to Frémont three years earlier, which contained passages demeaning the president. He knew that his father had never been turned away when he requested a private audience with Lincoln, and that his sister, Elizabeth, was always welcome at the White House. His entire family would forever appreciate Lincoln’s support for Frank during his continuing battle with the radicals in Congress. Indeed, Lincoln’s countless acts of generosity and kindness had cemented a powerful connection with the close-knit Blair family that even Monty’s forced resignation could not break. In the end, Lincoln gained the withdrawal of Frémont and the backing of the radicals without losing the affection and support of the conservative and powerful Blairs.
B
OTH
R
EPUBLICANS AND
D
EMOCRATS
considered the state elections in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana on October 11 harbingers of the presidential election in November. Not only would the results reveal public sentiment, but the party that gained the governor’s offices in those states would have “a grand central rallying point” for its partisans. That evening, Lincoln made his customary visit to the telegraph office in the War Department to read the dispatches as they came over the wire. Stanton was there, as was his assistant secretary, Charles Dana, and Thomas Eckert, chief of the telegraph office. Early reports from Cincinnati and Philadelphia looked hopeful, but reliable figures were unbearably slow in coming.
To defuse the tension, Dana recalled, Lincoln took from his pocket “a thin yellow-covered pamphlet” containing the latest writings of the humorist Petroleum V. Nasby. “He would read a page or a story, pause to con[sider] a new election telegram, and then open the book again and go ahead with a new passage.” John Hay, who had accompanied Lincoln, found the selections “immensely amusing” and mistakenly thought Stanton felt the same way. During a break in the readings, however, the solemn war secretary signaled Dana to follow him into the adjoining room. “I shall never forget,” Dana later recalled, “the fire of his indignation at what seemed to him to be mere nonsense.” Stanton found it incomprehensible that “when the safety of the Republic was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests.” Stanton never would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining Lincoln’s spirits in difficult times.
As the night wore on, the news from Ohio and Indiana proved better than anyone expected. The Republicans in Ohio gained twelve congressional seats, and the state provided a fifty-thousand-vote Republican majority. In Indiana, the Republican candidate for governor, Oliver Morton, won by a large margin, and Republicans captured eight of the eleven congressional seats.
The results in Pennsylvania were less decisive. Sometime after midnight, Lincoln sent a telegram to Simon Cameron. “Am leaving office to go home,” he wrote. “How does it stand now?” No answer was received from Cameron, which seemed “ominous” to Hay. It turned out that the margin was so close that neither party could declare victory. Only when the absentee soldier vote was tallied in the days ahead could the Republicans claim a slight margin.
Welles observed that “Seward was quite exultant over the elections—feels strong and self gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic, faithful and able beyond any of its predecessors. That it has gone through trials which none of them has ever known.” Lincoln, characteristically, reacted with more caution than his debonair colleague. Though delighted by Ohio and Indiana, he found the close vote in Pennsylvania sobering.
Two nights after the state elections, appearing “unusually weary,” Lincoln returned to the telegraph office in the War Department to calculate the probability of his election in November. Taking a blank sheet of telegraph paper, he made two neat columns. The one on the left represented his estimate of the electoral votes McClellan would win; the one on the right tabulated the states he thought would be his. The cipher operator David Homer Bates noted that he wrote “slowly and deliberately, stopping at times in thoughtful mood to look out of the window for a moment or two, and then resuming his writing.” The president guessed he would lose both New York and Pennsylvania, which meant his best hope was to squeak through by a total of only 3 electoral votes: 117 to 114. If these calculations were correct, he lamented, “the moral effect of his triumph would be broken and his power to prosecute the war and make peace would be greatly impaired.”
During the anxious four-week period that stretched between the state and presidential elections, Lincoln received the heartening news that voters in Maryland had ratified a new constitution officially terminating slavery in their state. The margin had been perilously close, with the absentee soldier vote making the difference. “Most heartily do I congratulate you, and Maryland, and the nation, and the world, upon the event,” Lincoln told a group of serenaders. Speaking that same day with Noah Brooks, he said: “I had rather have Maryland upon that issue than have a State twice its size upon the Presidential issue; it cleans up a piece of ground.” Brooks admired the “frank homeliness” of Lincoln’s choice of words: “Any one who has ever had to do with ‘cleaning up’ a piece of ground, digging out vicious roots and demolishing old stumps, can appreciate the homely simile applied to Maryland, where slavery has just been cleaned up effectually.”
It was clear to both parties that the absentee vote could prove critical in the presidential election. Democrats, remembering the fanatical devotion McClellan had inspired among his men, believed their man would receive an overwhelming majority of the soldier vote. “We are as certain of two-thirds of that vote for General McClellan as that the sun shines,” the Democratic publisher Manton Marble jauntily predicted.
Lincoln thought differently. He trusted the bond he had developed with his soldiers during his many trips to the front. After every defeat, he had joined them, riding slowly along their lines, boosting their spirits. He had wandered companionably through their encampments, fascinated by the smallest details of camp life. Sitting with the wounded in hospital tents, he had taken their hands and wished them well. The humorous stories he had told clusters of soldiers had been retold to hundreds more. The historian William Davis estimates that “a quarter-million or more had had some glimpse of him on their own.” In addition, word of his pardons to soldiers who had fallen asleep on picket duty or exhibited fear in the midst of battle had spread through the ranks. Most important of all, through his eloquent speeches and public letters he had given profound meaning to the struggle for which they were risking their lives.
Provisions for soldiers to cast absentee ballots in the field had recently been introduced in thirteen states. Four other states allowed soldiers to vote by proxy, placing their ballots in a sealed envelope to be sent or carried for deposit in their hometowns. In several crucial states, however, soldiers still had to be in their hometowns on Election Day to cast their ballots. In an attempt to remedy this situation before the October state elections, Lincoln had wired General Sherman about Indiana, “whose soldiers cannot vote in the field. Any thing you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home and vote at the State election, will be greatly in point.” He emphasized that “this is, in no sense, an order,” but merely a request.
Stanton followed up, making certain that furloughs were liberally granted wherever possible. “All the power and influence of the War Department…was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln,” Charles Dana later asserted. When Thurlow Weed alerted the White House that among the sailors “on Gun Boats along the Mississippi,” there were “several thousand” New Yorkers ready to vote if the government could provide a steamer to reach them and gather their ballots, Lincoln asked Welles to put a navy boat “at the disposal of the New York commission to gather votes.”
As the election drew close, Lincoln told a visitor: “I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.” It is likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment. The election would tell which man had won the hearts and minds of the more than 850,000 men who were fighting for the Union.
O
N
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LECTION
D
AY,
November 8, 1864, the
New York Times
editorialized that “before this morning’s sun sets, the destinies of this republic, so far as depends on human agency, are to be settled for weal or for woe.” To elect Lincoln was to choose “war, tremendous and terrible, yet ushering in at the end every national security and glory.” To choose McClellan was to choose “the mocking shadow of a peace…sure to rob us of our birthright, and to entail upon our children a dissevered Union and ceaseless strife.”
In Washington, it was “dark and rainy.” Arriving at the White House about noon, Noah Brooks was surprised to find the president “entirely alone.” Seward and Usher had gone home to vote, as had William Dennison, Blair’s replacement as postmaster general. This would be the tenth time Seward had cast a presidential ballot in Auburn; he had voted in more than half of the nineteen presidential elections since the beginning of the country. Fessenden was in New York working out the details of a new government loan, while Stanton was at home with a fever. Lincoln could not vote that day, for Illinois required voters to be present in the state.
Lincoln felt no need to conceal his anxiety from Brooks. “I am just enough of a politician to know that there was not much doubt about the result of the Baltimore convention; but about this thing I am very far from being certain. I wish I were certain.” Brooks remained with Lincoln through most of the afternoon, noting that the president “found it difficult to put his mind on any of the routine work of his office.” The only respite he found was in telling a humorous story about Tad, whose pet turkey apparently roamed at will among the Pennsylvania soldiers quartered at the White House. When the day had come for the Bucktail soldiers to cast their absentee ballots before their state’s commission, Tad had excitedly rushed into his father’s office so they could watch the voting from the window. Teasing his son, Lincoln had asked if the turkey, too, intended to vote. Tad’s clever reply delighted his father. “No,” he said. “He is not of age.” Brooks noted that Lincoln so “dearly loved the boy” that “for days thereafter he took pride in relating this anecdote illustrative of Tad’s quick-wittedness.”