1864 presidential election poster for the Republican ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson (Library of Congress)
No presidential election in American history carried stakes as high as the contest in November 1864. Three years into the Civil War, the conflict had already left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead on battlefields from Mississippi to Virginia. Northern voters would head to the polls to cast a ballot to determine not just the nation’s highest office but its very future. Lincoln’s failed Democractic challenger, former Union Gen. George B. McClellan, had promised to end the war with an honorable peace if elected—an idea that suggested recognition of the Confederacy’s independence in some form.
There was no precedent for a democracy holding a general election during a national crisis, and some Republicans urged Lincoln to consider postponing the vote. But he persevered in his belief that “We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”
Christopher Hamner, associate professor of history at George Mason University, examines the months leading up to November 1864, drawing on primary source material from the people who witnessed the turmoil engendered by the election—and for whom its ultimate outcome was a frightening unknown.
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