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By Root 1825 0

among the Republican rank and file. “The people desire the reelection of Mr. Lincoln,” wrote James A. Garfield, now serving as a member of Congress from Ohio. The New York Times castigated the president’s critics as “monomaniacs” who thought patriotism meant “devotion to the negro.” Some Radicals strongly defended Lincoln’s antislavery credentials. In a long address in January 1864, Isaac N. Arnold cited the House Divided speech to demonstrate that one of the “great objects” of Lincoln’s life had always been to “eradicate slavery.” “He is a radical,” Arnold insisted, claiming that Lincoln had “exerted a greater influence…in forming public opinion” than any other person: “His speeches and writings, plain, homely, and unpolished as they sometimes are, have become the household words of the people, and crystallized into the overwhelming public sentiment which demands the extinction of slavery.” Owen Lovejoy also spoke up on Lincoln’s behalf. When Lovejoy died in March 1864, Lincoln remarked, “I have lost the best friend I had in the House.”16

Lincoln’s critics found it difficult to settle on an alternative candidate. For at least a year, Salmon P. Chase had been using Treasury Department patronage appointments to build support for an effort to replace Lincoln as the Republican nominee. Chase was notorious for ambition and self-regard, but these qualities had not led him to compromise his commitment to black suffrage, and some Radicals saw him as more likely to implement a racially egalitarian Reconstruction policy than Lincoln. Chase’s candidacy, however, collapsed in February when Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas circulated an intemperate manifesto calling for Lincoln to be replaced at the head of the ticket. Lincoln’s renomination, Pomeroy wrote, would undermine “the cause of human liberty, and the dignity and honor of the nation.” Republican reaction was so negative that Chase announced that he would not seek the presidency.17

As always, Lincoln sought to keep the party united behind him. In an effort to explain the evolution of his policy toward slavery and burnish his antislavery credentials while retaining support from conservatives, Lincoln in April 1864 issued another of his influential public letters. This one was addressed to Albert G. Hodges, a Kentucky newspaper editor and delegate to the upcoming Republican National Convention. Lincoln, in essence, reiterated the position he had taken in his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley about the primacy of preserving the Union and the distinction between his public responsibilities and his personal hatred of slavery:

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling…. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery…. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government—that nation—of which that constitution was the organic law…. When, in March, and May, and July 1862 I made earnest, and successive appeals to the border states to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition; and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter.18

The Hodges letter helped to solidify Lincoln’s support. Some Radicals, however, continued to hope for a new nominee. At the end of May 1864, an aggregation of Radicals, War Democrats, and others estranged from the administration gathered at Cleveland and nominated John C. Frémont for president. Their platform called for a constitutional amendment not