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Most impressive, the soldier vote had swung overwhelmingly in his favor. In the armies of the West, he won eight out of ten votes, and even in McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, Lincoln earned the votes of seven out of every ten soldiers. Many of these soldiers still admired McClellan but could not countenance the defeatist Democratic platform or the fact that the Confederacy was obviously hoping the young Napoleon would win. But there was something else, something Democrats had failed to understand. Over the years, Lincoln had inspired an almost mystical devotion among his troops. “The men had come to regard Mr. Lincoln with sentiments of veneration and love,” noted an Illinois corporal. “To them he really was ‘Father Abraham,’ with all that the term implied.” By supporting Lincoln, the soldiers understood that they were voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president they loved and the cause that he embodied.

CHAPTER 25

“A SACRED EFFORT”

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, November 10, 1864, an immense crowd, “gay with banners and resplendent with lanterns,” gathered on the White House lawn to congratulate the president on his reelection. “Martial music, the cheers of people, and the roar of cannon, shook the sky.” When the joyful throng demanded his appearance, Lincoln spoke to the crowd from a second-floor window. Acknowledging that the recent canvass had been marred by “undesirable strife,” he nonetheless felt it had “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”

When Lincoln drew his little speech to a close, the revelers moved on to Seward’s Lafayette Square home. They found the secretary of state, who had just returned from Auburn, “in an exceedingly jocose frame of mind.” He predicted that the time was near when “we will all come together again…when the stars and stripes wave over Richmond,” and “you will have to look mighty sharp to find a man who was a secessionist, or an aider of the rebellion.” He recollected that when he was a boy in the early 1800s, his parents had told of “the vast number of tories” who opposed the government during the American revolution; yet, thirty years later, “there was not a tory to be found in the whole United States.”

Seward’s good humor infected the crowd, who responded with cheers and laughter. In closing, he observed that the night was young. “I advise you to go and see Mr. Fessenden, for if he gets discouraged we shall all come to grief; also be good enough to poke up Mr. Stanton; he needs poking up, for he has been seriously sick, I hear, for several days past. You cannot do better also than to call upon my excellent friend Gideon Welles, and ask him if he cannot make the blockade off Wilmington more stringent, so that I shall not need to have so much trouble with my foreign relations.”

Seward’s playful remarks about his colleagues reflected the improved atmosphere in the cabinet now that Chase and Blair were gone. Both men had symbolized the animosity between radicals and conservatives in the country at large; their clashing emotions had long reverberated through the cabinet. The periodic jealousy Welles felt over the superior access Seward and Stanton enjoyed with the president had been intensified a hundredfold so long as Blair was there to fuel the flames. Likewise, when Stanton was angry with Lincoln over pardons or appointments, Chase had eagerly lent an approving ear to his complaints. Never initiated into this contentious drama, Fessenden and Dennison brought cooperation and amity to the cabinet. Strife abated, and Welles even acknowledged that his relations with Seward had grown more “amicable” and that Stanton was sounding more reasonable and less radical regarding Reconstruction.

Rumormongers had speculated that Lincoln would now want to replace his entire cabinet. It was positively asserted that Seward would give way to Charles