[For this last
week before the most painful, frustrating, and potentially disastrous election
season in my lifetime—and perhaps American history—concludes, I’ll
AmericanStudy the histories, stories, and stakes of five prior exemplary elections.
Would love to hear your ElectionStudying thoughts—or your recipes for staying
sane for one more week—in comments!]
On one very good
and one very bad thing about the crucial wartime election.
I’ve blogged
before about the moment in which I’d argue (hyperbolically to be sure, but
not, I believe, without cause) that the Civil War and thus the fate of the
American experiment and future most clearly hung in the balance: the second day
of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, and specifically Joshua Chamberlain and the
20th Maine’s stand and charge on Little Round Top. Even if I’m
being too extreme about that particular moment and figure (and if so I blame
Michael Shaara and Jeff Daniels!), it’s certainly fair to say that after Gettysburg the
Confederacy stood very little chance of winning the war militarily. But on
the other hand, much remained uncertain and undetermined about the war’s final
stages, outcome, and aftermath, and no single moment more decisively impacted
those futures than the presidential
election of 1864.
For a number of
reasons, President Lincoln’s ultimately decisive victory over Democratic
challenger (and former terrible Union general) George
McClellan was a very positive result. For one thing, despite the eventual,
historically large margins of that victory (212 to 21 electoral votes, and a
popular vote margin of more than 400,000), it was hardly a foregone conclusion:
for much of 1864 the war, now into its fourth year and bloodier
and more destructive than ever, was going poorly enough that Lincoln’s
chances, particularly when coupled with John C.
Frémont’s initial presence in the race as a third-party
candidate, seemed gloomy at best. And for another, related thing, had
McClellan triumphed he almost certainly would have negotiated
a peace with the Confederacy (that was his stated platform and plan) that
would have made such outcomes as the
1865 passage of the 13th-15th Amendments far more
difficult, if not indeed impossible.
So it’s a very
good thing that Lincoln won reelection. But in order to strengthen his chances
of doing so, Lincoln and the Republican Party did a very bad thing: nominating Andrew Johnson,
Tennessee’s Military Governor and a lifelong Southern Democrat, to be Lincoln’s
second Vice President (replacing his first, former Maine Governor and longtime
Republican Hannibal
Hamlin). Perhaps Johnson helped assure that victory, although by election
day, with Frémont and his third party out of the race and the war going much
better, it’s doubtful that his contribution was required in any case. Far more
certain is that, after Lincoln’s tragic assassination, the presidency of Andrew Johnson
was one of the worst and most destructive in our nation’s history, culminating
both in his near-impeachment (the
first in American history) and, much worse, in a very different vision of
Reconstruction than what
Lincoln had begun. It can be easy to overlook VP nominations, but Johnson’s
proves just how significant that element of an election can become.
Next exemplary
election tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on this or any prior election?
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