A Lesson for Our Time
By Peter J. Wallison : 09 Oct 2007
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In August 1864, less than three months before the election, Republican leaders visited President Lincoln at the White House and told him that he had no hope of re-election. Their canvassing indicated that the country was so weary of the war that the Democratic candidate would triumph easily. Some Republicans were urging the President, for the sake of the party, to give up the party's nomination?which had been conferred only two months earlier?so a stronger candidate could be nominated. "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten," wrote Horace Greeley, the famous Republican editor of the New York Tribune. "He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow. If we had a ticket as could be made by naming Grant, Butler, or Sherman for President, we could make a fight yet."
In those fraught days, Lincoln himself wrote a memorandum, which he asked his cabinet to sign (on the back so they could not read its contents). "This morning, as for some days past," he wrote, "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured the election on such grounds that he cannot possibly save it afterward."
But the fledgling Republican Party stayed with Lincoln, rejecting the counsels of the timid and fearful. As Alan Nevins wrote in his four volume account of the Civil War: "The American Party system ever pitches and sways like a wagon traversing rough ground. It gives forth ominous cracks and groans, and threatens to crash on the rocky hillside. Nevertheless, as the generations struggle forward, it endures...a battalion of shortsighted dissenters might clamor for a new chieftain, but the main army marched forward unperturbed behind Lincoln."
The Democrats, meanwhile, held a convention in late August, nominating without serious controversy George B. McClellan, the general whom Lincoln had dismissed as head of the Union forces in Virginia because he would not fight. The Democratic platform denounced "four years of failure" in the war effort and the destruction of "public liberty and private right." It called for the restoration of the rights of the states unimpaired, and a settlement of the issues central to the war?primarily slavery?at a post-war "convention." It was a platform for peace at any price, which Nevins called a document of "submission."
But then the dawn broke. On September 1, the news reached Washington that Atlanta had fallen. Other victories came on as Grant approached closer to Richmond and held on against ferocious counterattacks by Lee. Despite these hints of impending change in the direction of the war, McClellan refused to repudiate the Democratic platform, declaring in his acceptance of the nomination that if "any one State is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of all its constitutional rights." The results of four years of calamitous war and bloody sacrifice would thus be thrown away.
Nevins writes: "[T]he damage done to the Democratic Party by the platform could not be undone. Its silly and evil stigmatization of the heroic war effort as worthless gave the Northern millions an image of the Democratic Party they could never forget. That phrase upon the failure of the war was to echo down the coming decades...and would cost the party votes for a generation."
Peter J. Wallison is the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at AEI. He was White Counsel during the Reagan Administration
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=100407B
