Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [426]
McClellan, meanwhile, remained secluded at his home in Orange, New Jersey. He found himself under tremendous pressure from both factions of his divided party as he tried to draft his letter of acceptance. War Democrats warned that unless he repudiated the peace platform, his candidacy would be stillborn. Peace Democrats threatened that if he wavered on the proposed armistice, they might “withdraw their support.” He went through six drafts before he finally delivered his letter to the Democratic Nominating Committee at midnight on September 8.
He began with a nod to the peace wing. Had the war been conducted for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, McClellan argued, “the work of reconciliation would have been easy, and we might have reaped the benefits of our many victories on land and sea.” Were he in power, he would “exhaust all the resources of statesmanship” to yield peace. This said, he went on to disavow aspects of the strident demand for peace at any cost, insisting that hostilities would not end without the restoration of the Union. “I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army and Navy, who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors, and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain.” The peace men were furious but had no alternative candidate. The stage was set for the fall election.
The fall of Atlanta produced a remarkable transformation in the mood of Republicans. “We are going to win the Presidential election,” Lincoln’s longtime critic Theodore Tilton wrote Nicolay. “All divisions are going to be healed. I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta. This great event, following the Chicago platform—a most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.” Even he, “never having been a partisan for Mr. Lincoln’s re-election, but the reverse,” was intending to advise everyone he knew “to unite on Mr. Lincoln.”
Leonard Swett, who only weeks before had warned Lincoln that his reelection looked doubtful, believed that God had given the Union its glorious victory to make the floundering ship of state “right itself, as a ship in a storm does after a great wave has nearly capsized it.” Relieved, Thurlow Weed informed Seward that with military success, the “conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln collapsed.”
The changed public mood took Salmon Chase by surprise. He had spent the summer traveling through New England, meeting with abolitionist friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Massachusetts governor John Andrew, the writer Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Congressman Samuel Hooper. He had maintained contact with organizers of the secret meetings being held to pursue the possibility of a new convention to draft an alternative to Lincoln. He had done his best, according to Gideon Welles, “to weaken the President and impair confidence in him…expressing his discontent, not in public speeches but in social intercourse down East.” Now that support for Lincoln had revived, Welles observed, Chase “is beginning to realize that the issue is made up, and no new leaders are to be brought forward, and he will now support Lincoln.”
Deciding to return to Washington to offer his services to Lincoln, Chase stopped en route in New York. There, he had an unsettling conversation with a “gentleman who thought Lincoln very wise—if more radical would have offended conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Would this, Chase asked himself, be the “judgment of history?”
When he reached the capital, Chase called on Fessenden, who told him