Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

a frenzy, shot an Irish fireman, and they immediately strung up the unhappy African. … A person who called at our house this afternoon saw three of them hanging together.92

Eventually Federal troops fresh from Gettysburg were brought into New York City. They calmly shot the rioters down, and the riots collapsed. But riots popped up elsewhere—in Boston, in Milwaukee, in the marble quarries of Vermont, and across the upper Midwest—and they were often linked, like the New York City riots, to labor disputes. In the Pennsylvania coalfields, bitter labor disputes between the miners and mine owners were dragged into the operation of the draft when appointments as provost marshals and enrollment officers went to mine officials and the families of mine owners, ensuring that the draft would be used, and perceived, as a weapon in labor disputes. “Now is the time for the operators… to get rid of the ringleaders engaged in threatenings, beatings, and shooting bosses at the collieries and put better men in their places,” argued one Pennsylvania coal mine owner. “It is far better to send them into the army and put them in the front ranks, even if they are killed by the enemy, than that they should live to perpetuate such a cowardly race.” Miners took their cues from such lines, evading the draft and waylaying enrollment officers as just one more aspect of their struggle against the mine bosses. Unfortunately for the miners, the mine owners had the authority of the Federal government behind them: in Luzerne County, a hundred miners were arrested, and seventy of them were imprisoned in the dungeons at old Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia.93

Aggravating all of these problems for Lincoln behind the lines was the uniformly bad news from the lines in the summer of 1864. As he feared, that May a Radical Republican splinter group called a convention in Cleveland to dump Lincoln and nominate John Charles Frémont for the presidency instead. In late August, the Democratic National Convention adopted a “peace and union” platform for the 1864 presidential campaign, and it was obvious that they would nominate as their candidate Lincoln’s former general, George Brinton McClellan.

The little general had become the darling of Lincoln’s Democratic critics, endorsing Democratic candidates for governorships and allowing himself to be discussed for the presidential nomination for more than a year. “I think that the original object of the war… the preservation of the Union, its Constitution & its laws, has been lost sight of, or very widely departed from,” McClellan wrote in July 1864, when the Republican Francis Blair attempted to elicit from him an assurance for the newspapers that he would not be interested in the Democratic presidential nomination: “I think the war has been permitted to take a course which unnecessarily embitters the inimical feeling between the two sections, &… I deprecate a policy which far from tending to that end tends in the contrary direction.” 94

This was as much as begging for the Democratic nomination, and when the Democratic convention met in Chicago a month later, McClellan won the nomination easily. He was also confident that, at least this time, he would easily win a national campaign. In his acceptance letter on September 4, 1864, McClellan declared that “I believe that a vast majority of our people, whether in the Army & Navy or at home, would, with me hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace on the basis of the Federal Union of the States without the effusion of another drop of blood.”95

Abraham Lincoln was not sure that McClellan was wrong. On August 22, Henry J. Raymond, the chair of the Republican National Committee, warned Lincoln that “the tide is setting strongly against us.” Pennsylvania “is against us”; Indiana “would go 50,000 against us to-morrow. And so of the rest.” On the same day, William H. Seward’s longtime political manager, Thurlow Weed, warned Lincoln “that his re-election was an impossibility. … The People are wild for Peace.” Lincoln was not even sure he could rely on Grant to rally around, and he told Alexander McClure that, as far as he knew, “I have no reason to believe that Grant prefers my election to that of McClellan.” Weighed down with grief, a morose Lincoln wrote out a memorandum that he folded and had all the members of his cabinet endorse without reading. Inside its folds, the memorandum read:

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.96

Lincoln later explained the memorandum as a last-ditch war plan, a challenge to McClellan to use the lame-duck period between the election and the next president’s inauguration to rally all the nation’s energies for a “final trial.” Seward poured scorn on any idea that presumed action on the part of George McClellan: “And the General would answer you ‘Yes, Yes;’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, Yes;’ & so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.” At least in that case, Lincoln said, “I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.” Looking back, McClure had been certain that “there was no period from January, 1864, until the 3rd of September of the same year when McClellan would not have defeated Lincoln.”97

In fact, the election was not going to turn out that way. On the day Lincoln drafted his letter, Farragut shot his way into Mobile Bay; a week later, Atlanta fell to Sherman. The Alabama went to the bottom of Cherbourg harbor in June, and in October, Grant’s cavalry commander, an aggressive knock-down brawler named Philip Sheridan, cleared Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of Jubal Early’s Confederates in a spectacular miniature campaign.