The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [195]
On August 29, four days after Lincoln decided not to dispatch the peace mission to Richmond, the Democratic National Convention gathered in Chicago. The nomination of General George B. McClellan was already assured but the “ultra peace men,” led by Clement Vallandigham, who had returned to the United States from exile in Canada, controlled the platform committee. They drafted a document that called the war a failure and demanded a “cessation of hostilities” and a convention of all the states to restore peace and “the Federal Union of the States.” Republicans immediately characterized this as a recipe for surrender. McClellan’s letter of acceptance repudiated the “peace plank.” While implying that he was willing to abandon emancipation (the war, he said, should be conducted for the “sole object” of national unity), McClellan affirmed that there could be no armistice until the South agreed to the restoration of the Union.44
On August 31, a New York Republican reported Lincoln as declaring, “I am a beaten man, unless we can have some great victory.” Two days later, William T. Sherman’s army finally occupied Atlanta, a key railroad hub and the communications and transportation center for the entire Southeast. Sherman’s triumph made him a Union hero and dispelled the northern public’s sense of futility about the war. The combination of the Democratic convention and Sherman’s victory reinvigorated Republican optimism and “had a magical effect towards uniting our friends,” as one politician reported. “We are going to win the Presidential election,” exulted Theodore Tilton, the editor of the Independent, who had been among those hoping to have Lincoln replaced at the head of the ticket. “I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of the public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta. This great event, following the Chicago platform—the most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.” Now it was the Democrats’ turn to worry. One party leader reported from Albany, “The Republicans gather heart, resume the aggressive, and are confident enough to bet on the result.”45
Leaving nothing to chance, Lincoln moved to shore up his support from Radicals. On September 23, he asked Montgomery Blair, whose racist tirades had made him “odious” to Radical voters, to resign from the cabinet. This was part of an agreement, brokered by Senator Zachariah Chandler, by which John C. Frémont abandoned the race (but not before denouncing the administration as a “failure”). The Republican party was now united behind Lincoln’s candidacy.46
In the fall campaign, McClellan’s supporters continued to harp on the To Whom It May Concern letter to demonstrate that Lincoln’s “abolition policy” was needlessly prolonging the war. In the event of McClellan’s election, declared party leader August Belmont at a rally at Cooper Institute, “you will see State after State leave the Confederacy.” But along with promising to restore peace, Democrats in 1864 conducted what one historian has called “the most explicitly and virulent racist campaign by a major party in American history.” At the convention that nominated McClellan, speaker after speaker referred to blacks in the most derogatory terms. One spoke of the “flat-nosed, long-heeled, cursed of God and damned of men descendants of Africa.” Democratic speakers and newspapers warned of the danger of “miscegenation,” a term two journalists for the New York World had coined to describe the