Two against Lincoln by William C. Harris

Author:William C. Harris [Harris, William C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Political Science, History & Theory, American Government, National
ISBN: 9780700624126
Google: wzIJMQAACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2017-01-15T00:27:22+00:00

In Washington and elsewhere during the fall, Lincoln and the Republicans viewed with increasing alarm the Democratic surge in New York and the lower North. In states from New York to Pennsylvania and westward, the Democratic Party, which included a vocal peace or Copperhead wing of the party, threatened to win control of the state legislatures and other offices, imperiling Republican policies and the war effort. Fortunately for the Republicans, no gubernatorial elections were scheduled in 1862 for the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, where opposition to emancipation and concern for civil liberties were strong.

The contest in New York attracted the most attention, and rightly so because of the state’s political importance in the war. On October 22, William Cullen Bryant, the prominent New York Republican editor and literary icon, excitedly wrote Lincoln and predicted that a Seymour victory “would be a public calamity,” not only for his state but also the Union. He told the president that New York Republicans desperately needed successes on the battlefield in order to retain control of the state. Without mentioning the president’s emancipation and habeas corpus proclamations, which Bryant supported, he informed Lincoln that “the inactivity of our armies in putting down the rebellion . . . will have a most unhappy effect upon the elections here, as we fear they have had in other states” where voting had already occurred. “I have been pained to hear lately from persons zealously loyal,” Bryant reported to Lincoln, “the expression of a doubt as to whether the administration sincerely desires the speedy annihilation of the rebel forces. . . . This strange sluggishness in military operations seems to us little short of absolute madness.”35

Although he did not mention General McClellan in his letter to Lincoln, Bryant as well as other Republicans, including members of Lincoln’s cabinet, wanted the “Young Napoleon” removed immediately from command of the army in Virginia. An observer in Washington wrote a New York friend that the Republican assault upon McClellan threatened a rebellion against the president unless he replaced the general. Finally, on November 5, Lincoln ordered McClellan’s removal from command. However, it proved too late to influence the elections.36

The Republican campaign against Seymour intensified in October as it became clear that the election would be close. Republicans like Bryant feared that not only would the Democrats win the governorship but their candidates, riding on Seymour’s coattails, would gain control of the New York legislature. General Wadsworth, the Republican or Union Party candidate for governor, did not campaign in the state until October 30, when he made a politically ill-advised antislavery speech in New York City. He wrote letters from the field reminding New Yorkers of his military record, which indeed was impressive. Wadsworth’s New York speech damaged the Republicans by reinforcing Seymour’s argument, especially among conservative ex-Whigs, that the state Union Party had become the party of “radical fanatics.” To make matters worse for the Republicans, Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune went overboard and engaged “in an orgy of vilification” against Seymour, as one historian has put it.

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