This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [227]
The Republicans had renominated Abraham Lincoln, largely because they could not help themselves. More and more, control of the party was passing into the hands of bitter men who hated and wanted to destroy. To them it seemed that the President was not tough enough. He had moved slowly on the matter of emancipation, he was openly trying now to arrange things so that the states lately in a condition of secession could quietly be restored to the Union, and he had grave doubts about the status of the Negro once slavery had died. Like everyone else, these men could see an almost insoluble problem arising after the war, and — like some of the leaders in the South — the only answer they could see was the brutal one of extermination1; yet where certain Southerners assumed that it was the colored race that must be exterminated, these men believed that it was the Southerner himself. Let the terrible pounding of the war (they argued) continue until everything that had supported slavery and secession had been ground down to dust; the wreckage might provide a suitable foundation for the building of a new society.
They were busy this summer trying to shelve Lincoln. Such men as Roscoe Conkling, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Horace Greeley, erratic editor of the New York Tribune, and David Dudley Field and Henry Winter Davis were meeting quietly and were arranging for an extraordinary convention in Cincinnati late in September to concentrate Union strength “on some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.”2
Meanwhile there were the northern Democrats. They were looking more and more like a peace party, even if the price of peace might be acceptance of a division in the nation. The Vallandigham who had been exiled from Ohio and sent south had crept back into the country by way of Canada, and when the Democratic convention met in Chicago late in August his voice seemed to be dominant. The delegates met (in an atmosphere rendered slightly murky by the presence of numerous ineffective but busy Confederate agents) and nailed this plank into the party’s platform: “This convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war … justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an immedate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal union of the states.”3
If an armistice and a general convention could restore the Union, that might be all to the good; as a practical matter, the war, once dropped, could never be picked up again, and everybody knew it. This plank supported Lincoln’s contention that the Democratic nominee, if elected, would have won the election on grounds that would make victory impossible. The bitter-end Republicans were not in the least surprised when the Democratic convention which had adopted this declaration went on from there to nominate as its candidate none other than the one-time hero of the Army of the Potomac, General George B. McClellan. Had he not always been a soft-war man?
By the end of August, then, that was the situation. Fighting men on both sides appraised it in the same way. Someone sounded Grant out on the matter of Lincoln’s possible replacement, and Grant exploded angrily: “I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.” On the Confederate side, valiant General Stephen D. Ramseur of North Carolina wrote to his wife that men just back from the North were saying that McClellan would be elected and that the election would bring peace, “provided always that we continue to hold our own against the Yankee armies.