State: Lincoln must be de facto President in Georgia and in South Carolina, just as he was in Massachusetts and in New York, and there should be no peace and quiet until he was President of the whole United States." The result of the elections showed that the people were ready to support the administration even in its vigorous war measures, but on condition that the Federal armies should win battles. During the next year there was a very close connection between events in the field and the political turmoil in the North. Grant was made lieutenant-general in March, 1864. He came to Washington and undertook a formidable campaign against Richmond. Sherman was placed at the head of the three armies that had done such hard fighting, especially in Mississippi and Tennessee. He too began, in this spring, his task of cutting the eastern part of the Confederacy in two by sweeping through Georgia from Chattanooga to Savannah. He advanced with wonderful regularity and without serious reverses. It was not so with Grant. He believed that, with a force almost twice as great as Lee's, his forward movement could not be resisted. The loss of thirty-six thousand men in the Wilderness and about Spottsylvania during a fortnight, in May, 1864, made it plain that ultimate success was not merely a question of numbers, momentum, and courage. Almost every adult in the East counted a friend or relative among the dead or the wounded in Virginia. Such terrible destruction of human life led to popular discontent, which the politicians undertook to make use of. The radical Republicans did not cease their attacks upon the administration as its antislavery policy became more pronounced, for they kept far ahead, demanding extreme measures. Chase had endeavored to make himself the beneficiary of this hypercritical discontent

1 3 Seward, 195.

a

fact that greatly strengthens the circumstantial evidence that he had been an important factor in the anti-Seward movement in the latter part of 1862; but he succeeded merely in getting himself out of the Cabinet. The radical faction tried to organize a distinct party at Cleveland, on a platform that favored electing the President by popular vote and making him ineligible for a second term, the reconstruction of the states under direction of Congress rather than of the President, and "the confiscation of the lands of rebels and their distribution among the soldiers and actual settlers." Frémont was appropriately chosen as their candidate.

But there was no room for an anti-administration movement outside of the Democratic party. Lincoln and Seward stood for the restoration of the Union without retracing any steps, and they were willing to aid in any new measures beneficial to this main purpose. The regular Republican convention, which met at Baltimore early in June, represented what was best and most practical in the character of Northerners. Its platform was a sober appeal for help, as well as an expression of determination to finish the solemn task that had been forced upon the Federal government. Lincoln was renominated, and Andrew Johnson was named for the second place because the party desired to win the support of Democrats and southern Unionists. In a public letter written a little later, Seward said everybody knew that he himself was "committed in detail to all that the convention has now done, long before a delegate was chosen, and even long before the convention itself was called." And then he added: "For the present, let the people send men and supplies to the nation's armies in the field, and thus enable them ‘to fight it out on the same line if it takes all summer.'

13 Seward, 226.

The best element in the Democratic party was supporting the administration either by service in the field or by giving it confidence and cheer at home. The partisan Democrats of 1864 were a miscellaneous horde of men, whose narrow minds were less influenced by sentiments of reasonable patriotism than by personal grievances or unworthy ambitions. They agreed among themselves in hardly anything except opposition to existing conditions and a desire to profit by every national misfortune, past, present, and future. So they postponed their convention until the end of August. Meantime, Sherman drove Johnston before him toward Atlanta; but Grant and his soldiers, like faithful oxen drawing a too heavy load in the mire, struggled on slowly, doggedly, painfully. In less than two months from the beginning of his campaign he had lost more than half of all his original troops-about sixty-two thousand out of one hundred and twenty-two thousand. By midsummer he had moved around Richmond and begun the siege of Petersburg; but the Confederate capital seemed to be as inaccessible as ever. Moreover, Washington had escaped capture, and probably flames, chiefly on account of a misapprehension. Early had rushed out of the Shenandoah Valley and down to the ill-manned forts on Washington's northern suburbs before proper defence could be made. But mistaking local recruits for a detachment of Grant's army, he delayed his advance another day, when the veterans actually appeared and blocked the way. When the Democrats met in national convention at Chicago, August 29th, they pronounced the war a failure and called for a cessation of hostilities with a view to an ultimate convention of the states. McClellan was chosen as their candidate, but he repudiated the platform. The Democrats had barely formulated their unpatriotic and impracticable policy when Atlanta fell, September 2d; it was as unwelcome as an earthquake to them.

On the following day Seward took advantage of the change in affairs to sound the key-note of the campaign in a speech at Auburn. No man not blinded by parti sanship or prejudice could fail to see the force of such arguments as these:

By such

"In voting for a President of the United States, can we wisely or safely vote out the identical person whom, with force and arms, we are fighting into the presidency? You justly say, No. It would be nothing else than to give up the very object of the war at the ballot-box. . a proceeding we shall have agreed with the enemy, and shall have given him the victory. But in that agreement the Constitution and the Union will have perished, because, when it shall have once been proved that a minority can by force or circumvention defeat the full accession of a constitutionally chosen President, no President thereafter, though elected by ever so large a majority, can hope to exercise the executive powers unopposed throughout the whole country. .. I therefore regard the pending presidential election as involving the question whether, hereafter, we shall have our Constitution and our country left us. .. Upon these grounds entirely, irrespective of platform and candidate, I consider the recommendations of the convention at Chicago as tending to subvert the republic.

"And now," he said, near the end of his speech, "has all the treasure that has been spent, and all the precious blood that has been poured forth, gone for nothing else but to secure an ignominious retreat, and return, at the end of four years, to the hopeless imbecility and rapid process of national dissolution which existed when Abraham Lincoln took into his hands the reins of government?"

The only possibility of victory for the Democrats depended upon continual defeats for the Federal army; but there was no hope for them in the face of an energetic political campaign in which the Republicans were cheered on by Sheridan's successes in the Shenandoah valley and by Sherman's in Georgia. Lincoln won in all the loyal states except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky.

15 Works, 496, 501.

1

"It is a truism," Seward wrote in one of his despatches early in 1865, "that in times of peace there are always instigators of war. So soon as war begins, there are citizens who impatiently demand negotiations for peace." As the exhaustion of Confederate resources increased, Southerners tried harder to accomplish indirectly what could not be brought about by force of arms. Many Northerners, too, that were opposed to Lincoln's administration, believed that a voluntary peace would be the surest road to reunion. There was rarely a month, and never a season, when some Democratic leader was not overflowing with illusory schemes for a cessation of hostilities. The great mortality in the Federal army in Virginia in the spring and early summer of 1864 strengthened the anti-war sentiment. Three prominent Confederates, who had found their way to Canada, convinced Horace Greeley that they were authorized to carry on negotiations for peace. Greeley appealed to Lincoln with so much zeal that the President requested him to bring the alleged commissioners to Washington in case he should find that they were more than pretenders. It turned out that Greeley was merely the victim of men scheming to embarrass the administration and to defeat Lincoln's re-election.

About the same time a clerical soldier in an Illinois regiment, James F. Jaquess, and a journalist and author, J. R. Gilmore, went on an unofficial mission to Richmond. Jaquess represented that he had assurances that many prominent members of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the South were opposed to Confederate aims and favored a return to the Union. The President merely gave the two dreamers permission to pass the Federal lines. They had a long interview with Davis and Benjamin, but they learned only what Lincoln felt confident of already that Davis insisted upon independence as a precedent condition of peace.