Since the season’s campaigns began in May, the Federal military had sustained a horrific number of casualties with little to show for it. This along with recent failed peace talks made this the most demoralizing month of the war for the North. While the Radical Republicans condemned President Abraham Lincoln for not waging harsher war on the South, conservative Republicans and pro-war Democrats urged Lincoln to try negotiating peace once more.
War Democrats argued that the Confederates would be willing to discuss restoring the Union if Lincoln would only drop his insistence on slave emancipation, even though Jefferson Davis had clearly insisted on Confederate independence. An editorial in a Democratic newspaper declared, “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President.” A Connecticut soldier voiced the sentiment of many comrades by writing, “Is there any man that wants to be shot down for a niger? That is what we are fighting for now and nothing else.”
Even conservative Republicans called making emancipation “a fundamental article” for peace a “blunder” because it “has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief.” Knowing that he needed conservatives and War Democrats for reelection, Lincoln wrote a letter stating, “If Jefferson Davis… wishes to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.” However, Lincoln ultimately decided not to publish this letter.
Horace Greeley, influential editor of the New York Tribune who had pushed so hard for Lincoln to negotiate a peace in July, continued to press the president. Greeley wrote Lincoln on August 9, “I beg you to inaugurate or invite proposals for peace forthwith. And in case peace cannot now be made consent to an armistice for one year.” Greeley did not get a commitment to this proposal, but he did get permission from Lincoln to publish the correspondence regarding the recent peace talks. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary that “the President expressed a willingness that all should be published” regarding the failed talks at Niagara Falls.
Republican boss Thurlow Weed wrote his good friend Secretary of State William H. Seward from New York, “Nobody here doubts it; nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope for success… The people are wild for peace.” Even Lincoln’s campaign manager at the 1860 Republican convention, David Davis, had to confess: “There is no disguising the fact that people are getting tired of the war. Some of them can’t see a ray of light. I am speaking of good men.” When some advisors urged Lincoln to resign to avoid defeat, Lincoln said, “No. Unless the people have a chance to express their will, the purpose for which the war is being waged will be forfeited.”
Just nine days after urging Lincoln to talk peace, Greeley announced, “Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be re-elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.” He urged that Lincoln be replaced as a candidate by Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, or Benjamin F. Butler, “some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.” This came up the next day at the president’s cabinet meeting. According to Welles:
“Concerning Greeley, to whom the President has clung too long and confidingly, he said today that Greeley is an old shoe,–good for nothing now, whatever he has been. ‘In early life, and with few mechanics and but little means in the West, we used,’ said he, ‘to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out.”
Hitting closer to home was the National Union Executive Committee, which had nominated Lincoln for reelection. Members met in New York City and issued a statement to Lincoln through Chairman Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times. Raymond wrote, “I feel compelled to drop you a line concerning the political condition of the country as it strikes me. I am in active correspondence with your staunchest friends in every state, and from them all I hear but one report. The tide is setting strongly against us…”
Raymond told Lincoln that Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Oliver Morton of Indiana, and Elihu Washburne of Illinois all reported that their states would vote against him, and Raymond’s home state of New York “would go 50,000 against us tomorrow… Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment, –the want of military success, and… fear and suspicion… that we are not, to have peace in any event under this Administration until Slavery is abandoned.”
“Nothing but the most resolute and decided action on the part of the Government and its friends can save the country from falling into hostile hands,” wrote Raymond. As such, he urged Lincoln to send a commissioner “to make distinct proffers of peace to Davis as the head of the Rebel armies, on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution–all the other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States.”
Raymond argued that this offer would not mean abandoning emancipation because “if it should be rejected, (as it would be,) it would plant seeds of disaffection in the south, dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North… reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable necessities.”
Lincoln read the letter and then authorized Raymond himself to go to Richmond and “propose, on behalf (of) this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.”
Raymond read Lincoln’s message and finally realized that such an effort would be futile. He told Lincoln that “to follow his plan of sending a commission to Richmond would be worse than losing the Presidential contest–it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” Consequently, Lincoln withdrew both the letter and his authorization for Raymond to go to Richmond. From this point forward, Lincoln would insist on both reunion and emancipation as conditions of peace, even if they cost him the election.
Bibliography
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