Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [372]
A week before the election, Chase called on Lincoln with a suggestion. If the president granted him a leave of absence from the Treasury, he, like his clerks, would go home to vote the Union ticket. Lincoln had no doubt that Chase would use the campaign trip to bolster his own drive for the presidency. Nevertheless, Chase’s presence in Ohio might well help the Union ticket.
To ensure publicity, Chase invited the journalist Whitelaw Reid to accompany him on the train to Columbus and write regular dispatches for the Cincinnati Gazette and the Associated Press as they traveled around the state. Advance word of the train’s arrival was circulated, and an enormous crowd greeted Chase in Columbus at 2 a.m. The delighted secretary was met with “prolonged cheering, and shouts of ‘Hurrah for our old Governor,’ ‘How are you, old Greenbacks?’ ‘Glad to see you home again.’” Chase indicated his gratitude for this “most unexpected welcome,” and proceeded to give a speech that ostensibly praised the president as a man who “is honestly and earnestly doing his best,” even though the war was not being prosecuted “so fast as it ought.” With a different leader, he hinted, “some mistakes might have been avoided—some misfortunes averted.”
At each stop in his swing through Ohio, Chase encountered huge crowds of supporters. “I come not to speak, but to vote,” he insisted, before launching into a series of self-promoting speeches laced with subtle denigration of Lincoln. Military bands followed him through the streets, creating a festival-like atmosphere. In Cincinnati, a long procession and a military escort accompanied Chase, seated in a carriage drawn by six white horses, to the Burnet House, the site of Lincoln’s unpleasant encounter with Stanton during the Reaper trial. From the balcony of the elegant hotel, he delivered a few words, followed by a lengthy address that evening before a packed audience at Mozart Hall. With slavery and Reconstruction as his themes, he once again covertly criticized the president. He acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation was “the great feature of the war,” without which “we could not achieve success,” but hastened to add that “it would have been even more right, had it been earlier, and without exceptions.”
Lincoln had calculated correctly by giving Chase permission for the trip. His tour helped draw record numbers of pro-Union supporters to the polls. In public squares lit by bonfires and torchlights, the former governor called upon his fellow Ohioans to regard the election as “the day of trial for our Country. All eyes turn to Ohio.” On the Monday before the voting, he begged his audiences “to remember that to-morrow is the most important of all the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.”
On Election Day, Lincoln took up his usual post in the crowded telegraph office. By midnight, everything indicated good results in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. Still, the president refused to retire until he was certain. At 1:20 a.m., a welcome telegram arrived from Chase: “The victory is complete, beyond all hopes.” Chase predicted that Brough’s margin over Vallandigham would be at least 50,000, and would rise higher still when the soldiers’ vote was counted. By 5 a.m., Brough’s margin had widened to 100,000. “Glory to God in the highest,” Lincoln wired to the victorious governor-elect. “Ohio has saved the Nation.” The results from Pennsylvania, where Governor Curtin defeated his antiwar challenger, produced another jubilant outburst in the telegraph office. “All honor to the Keystone State!” Stanton wired to John Forney. In July, he wrote, the state “drove rebel invaders from her soil; and, now, in October, she has again rallied for the Union, and overwhelmed the foe at the ballot-box.”
When Welles called on the president to congratulate him, he found him “in good spirits.” Republicans had crushed Copperheads in the two bellwether states, boding well for the congressional elections the following month. Chase had been instrumental in achieving these signal victories. If his journey home to