Lincoln's loss in 1864

[David Lockmiller]

(06-17-2019 08:04 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  

(06-16-2019 10:18 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  I came across the letter that in 1864 Lincoln had his cabinet sign sight unseen concerning what would happen if he lost the election of 1864. To refresh your memory, here it is:

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 cooperate with the Government 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 cannot possibly save it afterwards.

Doris Kearns Goodwin brilliantly addressed this issue in her book Team of Rivals at pages 648-53.

In these same weeks, Colonel John Eaton recalled, Lincoln "was considering every possible means by which the Negro could be secured in his freedom." He knew that Eaton had come into contact with thousands of slaves who had escaped as the Union troops advanced. Tens of thousands more remained in the South. Lincoln asked Eaton if he thought Frederick Douglass "could be induced to come to see him" and discuss how these slaves could be brought into freedom. Eaton was aware that Douglass had recently criticized the president vehemently, denouncing the administration's insufficient retaliatory measures against the Confederacy for its blatant refusal to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war. He also knew, however, that Douglass respected Lincoln and was certain that he would lend his hand.

Douglass met with the president on August 19. In an open conversation that Douglass later recounted, Lincoln candidly acknowledged his fear that the "mad cry" for peace might bring a premature end to the war, "which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines." He had thought the publication of his Emancipation Proclamation would stimulate an exodus from the South, but, he lamented, "the slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped." Douglass suggested that "the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his proclamation." Hearing this, Lincoln proposed that the federal government might underwrite an organized "band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our Armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries." Douglass promised to confer with leaders in the black community on the possibility of such a plan.

(Source: Team of Rivals at pages 648-49.)

What would have happened had hundreds of thousands of slaves come within the Union boundaries as a result of the fruition of this plan proposed by President Lincoln? The South may well have been forced to capitulate in a matter of months, or even weeks, as a result of these lost labor resources.

As Lincoln wrote in his blind memo signed by the members of his cabinet: "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."