Lincoln Part 53

But the Postmaster General had become a controversial figure, more hated by the Radicals than even Seward. His blunt denunciations of abolitionists, his continuing advocacy of the colonization of African-Americans, his fierce opposition to Radical schemes for reconstruction, his zealous advocacy of Lincoln's renomination and reelection-all aroused hostility. So did his bitter, and often unwarranted, personal enmities. He carried on a bitter feud with Fremont, he hated Chase, he despised Halleck, and he could hardly bear to be in the same room as Stanton. Lincoln was distressed by the vindictiveness Blair demonstrated in his frequent quarrels, but as he told the senior Blair, he "could not believe there was any profit to be expected on the sacrifice of a good and true friend from first to last for false ones."

Chandler offered to sweeten the pot by suggesting that, in return for Blair's resignation, the President might secure not only the support of Wade and Davis but the withdrawal of Fremont from the race. Though Fremont's campaign had been slipping, he retained a fiercely loyal following, especially among German-Americans in the West, and the President feared he might siphon off enough votes to cost the Republicans Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri and thus the election. "The President," according to Chandler, "was most reluctant to come to terms but came." The senator then hotfooted it to New York to see Fremont.

Establishing headquarters at the Astor House, Chandler met several times with Fremont, urging him, in the name of the President, the Union Congressional Committee, and the National Union Executive Committee, to consider withdrawing from a race in which his candidacy could only help elect McClellan. If Fremont agreed, Chandler promised that he would receive a new command as major general in the Union army and that his old enemy, Blair, would be dismissed from the cabinet.

Fremont took Chandler's offer under advis.e.m.e.nt and asked the opinion of his friends. He heard dissonant voices. Wendell Phillips urged him to continue his candidacy. A supporter in Pittsburgh begged him to come out "as soon as practicable in favor of Lincoln and Johnson" after receiving "a.s.surance of Mr. Blair's immediate removal and also Mr. Stanton's and the a.s.surance that Mr. Seward will not be reappointed." On September 17, Gustave Paul Cluseret, the editor of Fremont's campaign newspaper, the New Nation, published an editorial supporting Lincoln and warning readers that the general listened to "any man who causes imaginary popular enthusiasm to glitter before his eyes, spends his money, profits by his natural indolence to cradle him in an illusion from which he will only awaken ruined in pocket and in reputation." That same day Fremont decided to drop out of the race. Chandler wanted his withdrawal to be "a conditional one to get Blair out," but Fremont honorably refused. "I will make no conditions-my letter is written and will appear tomorrow," he said. In a public letter he announced that he was leaving the race not because he had changed his opinion of Lincoln, whose "administration has been politically, militarily, and financially a failure," but because McClellan would restore the Union with slavery.

When the news of Fremont's withdrawal reached Washington, Lincoln, according to Davis, grew "excited at the form of it, and showed symptoms of flying from the bargain." But Chandler reminded him that, "offensive as it was," Fremont's letter was "a substantial advice to support Lincoln." Reluctantly the President agreed to live up to the terms he had agreed on, and on September 23 asked for Blair's resignation. To take his place he named former Governor William Dennison of Ohio, who was, as David Davis said, "honorable, highminded, pure, and dignified." While Blair's resignation was pending, both Wade and Henry Winter Davis took the stump in Lincoln's behalf.

That left Salmon P. Chase and his followers as the final group of disgruntled Republicans who were still unwilling to endorse the reelection of the President. Nursing an ego bruised by his forced resignation from the cabinet, Chase had quietly encouraged moves to replace Lincoln on the Republican ticket, but in public he a.s.sumed an air of disinterested statesmanship. He advised those who wrote him to accept Lincoln's renomination "as decisive and to give him their support dutifully and manfully"-but he told his correspondents not to publish his views. With the collapse of the anti-Lincoln movement in September, he warmed a little and recognized Lincoln and Johnson as "nominees of the Party whose principles and measures ... I fully accept." But he could not help adding wistfully, "We can't have everything as we would wish."

In late September, Chase began giving different political signals. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was ailing (he was, after all, eighty-seven years old), and his antic.i.p.ated death raised a possibility that Chase had more than once considered. Returning to Washington to consult with Fessenden on Treasury problems, he made a point of calling on Lincoln and was quite cordially received. "But he is not at all demonstrative, either in speech or manner," Chase reported to his diary, adding the telling observation, "I feel that I do not know him." Shortly after this visit he began to say positive things about Lincoln: "The best interests of the country require his reelection and I shall give him my active support."

Taney's death on October 12 made the naming of the next Chief Justice a public question. Sumner immediately urged Lincoln to appoint Chase, reminding the President that he had several times spoken of his former Treasury Secretary for this position. Chase's friends sent a barrage of letters to the White House backing his appointment. But there were other candidates. Attorney General Bates asked Lincoln for the appointment "as the crowning, retiring honor of my life." Mrs. Stanton wanted her husband, exhausted by his demanding labors in the War Department, to be Chief Justice, and she enlisted Browning to urge his case with Lincoln. Dozens of letters recommended elevating Noah Swayne, the antislavery corporate lawyer whom Lincoln had named an a.s.sociate justice in 1862. William M. Evarts, the careful New York lawyer, had his supporters. Francis P. Blair, Sr., earnestly implored Lincoln to appoint his son Montgomery, "to remove the cloud which his ostracism from your Cabinet" had caused.

Lincoln listened and read but took no action. He had probably decided to name Chase, but, as he told Nicolay, he was resolved to be "very 'shut pan' about this matter." Eager for the appointment, Chase wrote the President a friendly letter about Republican prospects in Ohio. Without reading it, Lincoln directed: "File it with his other recommendations." As the President failed to act, Sumner's urgency grew greater, and he persuaded Chase to write a letter that he could show Lincoln: "It is perhaps not exactly en regle to say what one will do in regard to an appointment not tendered to him; but it is certainly not wrong to say to you that I should accept." Chase went on to add words that must have choked him: "Happily it is now certain that the next Administration will be in the hands of Mr Lincoln from whom the world will expect great things." Still Lincoln did not name a Chief Justice. Finally getting the cue, Chase took to the stump, urging rallies at Louisville, Lexington, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago to vote for Lincoln's reelection.

It was all just as the New York Herald had wickedly antic.i.p.ated in August. Now the "sorehead republicans"-as the paper called the dissident Radicals-were "all skedaddling for the Lincoln train and selling out at the best terms they can." The Herald had predicted that the "ultra radical, ultra shoddy, and ultra n.i.g.g.e.r soreheads... will all make tracks for Old Abe's plantation, and will soon be found crowing, and blowing, and vowing, and writing, and swearing and stumping the States on his side, declaring that he, and he alone, is the hope of the nation."

As Chase canva.s.sed the West, he reflected on a conversation he had had some weeks earlier with a New Yorker "who thought Lincoln very wise," observing that if he were "more radical he would have offended conservatives-if more conservative the radicals." Wonderingly, Chase asked himself: "Will this be [the] judgment of history?"

VIII

"I cannot run the political machine," Lincoln was quoted as saying during the campaign; "I have enough on my hands without that. It is the people's business." He did not take part in any of the hundreds of campaign marches and torchlight processions staged by the National Union (Republican) party throughout the North. He was not involved in the work of the Loyal Publication Societies, headed by Francis Lieber in New York and by John Murray Forbes in Boston, which distributed more than half a million Union pamphlets bearing t.i.tles like "No Party Now but All for Our Country." He did nothing to encourage partisan newspapers that attacked the Democrats as Copperheads or charged that they were engaged in a "Peace Party Plot!" (Indeed, he discounted tales of Copperhead conspiracies as puerile.)

Nor did Lincoln take public notice of the attacks Democrats made on him during the campaign. He did not comment on Democratic rallies where partisans carried banners reading TIME TO SWAP HORSES, NOVEMBER 8TH or NO MORE VULGAR JOKES. He probably never saw scurrilous Democratic pamphlets, like The Lincoln Catechism, Wherein the Eccentricities & Beauties of Despotism Are Fully Set Forth, which called him "Abraham Africa.n.u.s the First" and quoted the first of the President's own Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt have no other G.o.d but the negro." The repeated Democratic charge that he and the Republicans favored intermarriage of blacks and whites Lincoln acknowledged only indirectly, joking that miscegenation was "a democratic mode of producing good Union men, and I dont propose to infringe on the patent." He did not respond to Democratic charges, raised in as respectable a journal as the New York World, that his administration was characterized by "ignorance, incompetency, and corruption." Though he was, as Mrs. Lincoln said, "almost a monomaniac on the subject of honesty," he did not refute the charge that he had helped a relative defraud the Quartermaster's Department in St. Louis.

Only once was he tempted to reply to a personal attack. Democratic newspapers now revived the canard that while touring the Antietam battlefield in September 1862 he had asked Ward Lamon to sing "a comic negro song"; they claimed that such behavior demonstrated that he was not "fit for any office of trust, or even for decent society." Belligerently Lamon attempted to refute the slander, but Lincoln, thinking it would be better simply to state the facts, wrote out his own account of how he had indeed-days after the battle and far from the soldiers' cemetery-asked Lamon to sing "a little sad song." Then he told Lamon not to publish his reply, saying, "I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right."

Lincoln's public appearances during the campaign were rare. In June he did attend the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia to raise money for the Sanitary Commission and other groups providing for the needs of the soldiers, but he said little. "I do not really think it is proper in my position for me to make a political speech," he told a group at the Hotel Continental, "and ... being more of a politician than anything else,... I am without anything to say." When volunteer regiments, on their way home as their terms of enlistment expired, came by the White House, he thanked them for their service and said nothing more partisan than that they should "rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government."

But if Lincoln did not take a public role in the campaign, he was intimately involved in all the details of behind-the-scenes management. Indeed, as Fessenden remarked, "The President is too busy looking after the election to think of any thing else." Repeatedly he intervened to end party squabbling. In Pennsylvania, for example, antagonism between the Cameron and Curtin factions was so great that, as Lincoln was told, it produced "distraction and indifference, which may, possibly, be fatal." Cameron seemed to be conducting the campaign primarily with a view to his own election to the Senate, while Governor Curtin was so disaffected that he predicted "the reelection of this admin[istration] is [going] to send us to h.e.l.l." Lincoln summoned the Pennsylvania governor, with his aide, Alexander K. McClure, to the White House and used all his personal powers of persuasion to get his people to work with the Cameron forces until after the election.

The President intervened in congressional contests when local feuds among Republicans threatened to affect the outcome of the election. In New York, a group of Conservative Republicans was working to defeat the election of Roscoe Conkling, the party's nominee for Congress. When Conkling's friends asked Lincoln's a.s.sistance, he replied with a strong letter: "I am for the regular nominee in all cases; and... no one could be more satisfactory to me as the nominee in that District, than Mr. Conkling." Again, when he learned that the postmaster of Philadelphia was using his influence to defeat Representative William D. Kelley, he summoned the official to Washington and told him bluntly: "I am well satisfied with Judge Kelly as an M.C. and I do not know that the man who might supplant him would be as satisfactory." The postmaster could vote for whom he chose, but he must "not constrain any of [his] subordinates to do other than as he thinks fit."

Lincoln recognized the influence that newspapers had on public opinion, and he tried to enlist the support of prominent editors. He even went so far as to approach the notorious James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald had yet to take a public position on the election. Because the circulation and influence of the Herald were so great, Lincoln's New York friends suggested that it might be worthwhile to woo the editor with flattery. They knew that Bennett, whose reputation for immorality was as well deserved as his paper's reputation for scandal, longed for respectability. When they approached him, the canny editor asked bluntly, "Will I be a welcome visitor at the White House if I support Mr. Lincoln?" The President may have shared John Hay's conviction that Bennett was "too pitchy to touch," and he initially offered only a vague promise that "whoever aids the right, will be appreciated and remembered" after the election. Bennett responded that the offer "did not amount to much." When intermediaries began to explore the possibility that Lincoln might offer Bennett an appointment as American minister to France, the tone of the Herald toward the administration became notably kinder. Bennett did not endorse Lincoln, telling a go-between to say to the President "that puffs did no good, and he could accomplish most for you by not mentioning your name." But the bitterness of his attacks on Lincoln diminished. Though he continued to call Lincoln a failure, he termed McClellan "no less a failure... though a failure perhaps in a less repulsive way," and in the end the Herald endorsed neither candidate. After the election Lincoln paid the price for Bennett's neutrality by offering the editor the French ministry, which he knew he would decline.

But there were limits to what Lincoln would do to secure a second term. He did not even consider canceling or postponing the election. Even had that been const.i.tutionally possible, "the election was a necessity." "We can not have free government without elections," he explained; "and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us." He did not postpone the September draft call, even though Republican politicians from all across the North entreated him to do so. Because Indiana failed to permit its soldiers to vote in the field, he was entirely willing to furlough Sherman's regiments so that they could go home and vote in the October state elections-but he made a point of telling Sherman, "They need not remain for the Presidential election, but may return to you at once."

Though it was clear that the election was going to be a very close one, Lincoln did not try to increase the Republican electoral vote by rushing the admission of new states like Colorado and Nebraska, both of which would surely have voted for his reelection. On October 31, in accordance with an act of Congress, he did proclaim Nevada a state, but he showed little interest in the legislation admitting the new state. Despite the suspicion of both Democrats and Radicals, he made no effort to force the readmission of Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Southern states, partially reconstructed but still under military control, so that they could cast their electoral votes for him. He reminded a delegation from Tennessee that it was the Congress, not the Chief Executive, that had the power to decide whether a state's electoral votes were to be counted and announced firmly, "Except it be to give protection against violence, I decline to interfere in any way with any presidential election."

IX

Both what Lincoln did in the campaign of 1864 and what he refrained from doing reflected his sense of the importance of this election. In part, as he admitted, he sought a second term out of "personal vanity, or ambition." "I confess that I desire to be re-elected," he said frankly. "G.o.d knows I do not want the labor and responsibility of the office for another four years. But I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years Administration endorsed." Honestly believing that he could "better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do," he wanted the opportunity "to finish this job of putting down the rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country."

His wife wanted a second term at least as much as he did. To Mary Lincoln, reelection meant not merely vindication of her husband but escape from her own personal difficulties. After Willie's death she had largely given up on refurbishing the White House and had turned to decorating and ornamenting herself. She went deeply into debt, purchasing clothing and jewelry from New York and Philadelphia merchants such as a white point lace shawl valued at $2,000, a pearl-and-diamond ring, an onyx breast pin with earrings, and two diamond-and-pearl bracelets. David Davis heard a rumor that she purchased three hundred pairs of kid gloves from a Washington merchant. "I must dress in costly materials," she explained to Elizabeth Keckley, her dressmaker. "The people scrutinize every article that I wear with critical curiosity. The very fact of having grown up in the West, subjects me to more searching observation." Convinced that her appearance was helping her husband's bid for reelection, she also saw victory in November as a means of postponing a reckoning of her debts, which Lincoln did not know about. "If he is re-elected," she told Mrs. Keckley, "I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs; but if he is defeated, then the bills will be sent in, and he will know all."

Lincoln believed that there was more than personal satisfaction at stake in the 1864 election. He saw it as a test of the feasibility of democratic government. The will of the people was "the ultimate law for all." If the people supported the Union cause, he said, they would act "for the best interests of their country and the world, not only for the present, but for all future ages." If, on the other hand, "they should deliberately resolve to have immediate peace even at the loss of their country, and their liberty, I know not the power or the right to resist them. It is their own business, and they must do as they please with their own." The decision they made would determine "the weal or woe of this great nation."

This view of the 1864 election was shared by many Americans, including some who had not hitherto been notably warm toward the Lincoln administration. Most African-Americans hoped and prayed for Lincoln's reelection, even though few of them were allowed to vote. A few black spokesmen were reluctant to support this "fickle-minded man" who had been reluctant to announce emanc.i.p.ation, slow to enroll Negro troops, unwilling to fight for equal pay for blacks who did enlist, and publicly silent on Negro voting, and some, like Frederick Dougla.s.s, initially favored Fremont. But when the election narrowed to a choice between Lincoln and McClellan, African-Americans saw their duty clearly. At the National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse in October, the black Ma.s.sachusetts lawyer John S. Rock put the choice concisely: "There are but two parties in the country today. The one headed by Lincoln is for Freedom and the Republic; and the other, by McClellan, is for Despotism and Slavery."

Impressive as were the endors.e.m.e.nts of such black leaders, Lincoln may have gained more solace from individual African-Americans who spoke only for themselves. Early in 1864 his old acquaintance William de Fleurville (Billy the Barber) wrote from Springfield, hoping that Lincoln would be reelected because then "the oppressed will shout the name of their deliverer, and generations to come will rise up and call you blessed." Late in October the President had a visit from Sojourner Truth, the elderly black woman who, after having been sold three times on the auction block, escaped to freedom and afterward brought out other fugitives on the Underground Railroad. She declared that she "never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality," and she was proud that the President wrote in her autograph book "with the same hand that signed the death-warrant of slavery." "I felt that I was in the presence of a friend," the old woman said, "and I now thank G.o.d from the bottom of my heart that I always advocated his cause."

Though abolitionists had often been sharply critical of Lincoln, a majority of the reformers now favored his reelection. Earlier in the year the Ma.s.sachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was shattered after a debate between its two most notable leaders-Wendell Phillips, who announced that Lincoln had no commitment to liberty and was "knowingly preparing for a peace in disregard for the negro," and William Lloyd Garrison, who countered that the President had shown great capacity for growth and had moved as fast as public opinion allowed. In the months that followed, Phillips became one of the most conspicuous supporters of Fremont's candidacy and vowed that he would "cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election," while Garrison insisted that if Lincoln had made mistakes "a thousand incidental errors and blunders are easily to be borne with on the part of him who, at one blow, severed the chains of three millions three hundred thousand slaves."

The quarrel splintered the abolitionist movement, but Garrison and his followers retained control of the two most important periodicals, the Liberator and the Anti-Slavery Standard, both of which gave consistent support to Lincoln's campaign. Garrison himself attended the National Union Convention in Baltimore, and afterward he had two long interviews with the President. Much pleased "with his spirit, and the familiar and candid way in which he unbosomed himself," the veteran abolitionist was more confident than ever of Lincoln's desire "to uproot slavery, and give fair-play to the emanc.i.p.ated."

The support the President received from Protestant religious groups was overwhelming. He had made a point of consulting religious leaders and of praising their contribution to the war effort. In May when a delegation from the Methodist Episcopal Church pointed out the denomination's record for loyalty and support of the administration, he replied, "G.o.d bless the Methodist Church-bless all the churches-and blessed be G.o.d, Who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches." The same month he offered thanks to the American Baptist Home Mission Society for "the effective and almost unanimous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country, and to liberty." Now they returned the compliment. Methodist Bishop Gilbert Haven announced the church's duty of the hour was to "march to the ballot-box, an army of Christ, with the banners of the Cross, and deposit, as she can, a million of votes for her true representative, and she will give the last blow to the reeling fiend." As the Christian Advocate and Journal observed, "There probably never was an election in all our history into which the religion element entered so largely, and nearly all on one side."

Northern men and women of letters also endorsed Lincoln's reelection with unprecedented unanimity. Mostly from the Northeast, these writers initially viewed Lincoln with skepticism, thinking him an uncouth, uneducated frontiersman who was certainly not a gentleman, and his hesitant course on slavery had reinforced their suspicions. But their appreciation of the difficulties the President faced and of the skill with which he handled them had grown, and now, faced with a choice between McClellan and Lincoln, virtually all supported the Union candidate. Ralph Waldo Emerson was not active in politics, but he shared Lincoln's view of the significance of the election. "Seldom in history," he said, "was so much staked on a popular vote.-I suppose never in history." "We breathe freer," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote when he felt confident that the President would have a second term. "The country will be saved." Harriet Beecher Stowe was a firm supporter of Lincoln. She remembered how kindly the President had received her in the White House back in 1862, when, according to a family story, he exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?" She defended Lincoln from irresponsible attacks, remarking, "Even the a.s.s can kick safely and joyfully at a lion in a net." Though John Greenleaf Whittier preferred Fremont, he was happy enough to see "all loyal men rallying in favor of Lincoln" and exclaimed, "Between him and that traitor platform [of the Democrats] who could hesitate!" With great pleasure Edward Everett agreed to be one of the Ma.s.sachusetts Republican electors, pledged to vote for Lincoln as an "entirely conscientious" and "eminently kind-hearted" man, who had "administered the Government with the deepest sense of responsibility to his country and his G.o.d."

None of Lincoln's literary supporters was more loyal or more influential than James Russell Lowell, one of the editors of the North American Review. The four long articles he published in 1864 amounted to an extended argument in favor of Lincoln's reelection. The final one, "The Next General Election," which appeared on the eve of the election, ridiculed Democratic talk of conciliating the Confederates and praised Lincoln as "a long-headed and long-purposed man," who had "shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman."

X

Even with such a strong party organization and so many influential backers, Lincoln could not be sure of reelection. The October elections for state officials in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania suggested how close the race still was. Lincoln spent the evening of October 11 at the War Department, where he, Stanton, a.s.sistant Secretary of War Dana, and Hay eagerly scrutinized the telegraphic returns as they trickled in. Between dispatches the President read aloud several chapters from the recently published Nasby Papers by David Ross Locke. Lincoln found these comic sketches about Petroleum V. Nasby, a dissolute, semiliterate Copperhead who lived at Confederate X Roads, vastly amusing, and he once told Charles Sumner, "For the genius to write these things I would gladly give up my office." Usually Stanton found Lincoln's humor irritating, but this time he was in a good mood and enjoyed Nasby's adventures almost as much as the President did.

From the beginning the news from Ohio and Indiana was good. But the Pennsylvania reports, as Hay remarked, began to be "streaked with lean." Lincoln grew anxious because, he said, Pennsylvania's "enormous weight and influence which, [if] cast definitely into the scale, w[oul]d close the campaign." The final totals were not in for several days, when it became evident that the continuing Cameron-Curtin feud had hurt the ticket and the antic.i.p.ated huge Republican majority had been whittled down to about 400 home votes in the entire state. Only the soldiers' vote, overwhelmingly Republican, a.s.sured victory.

Two days after the October elections Lincoln tried to predict the national vote in November. Jotting down an estimate of the electoral vote, he calculated that McClellan would carry New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, all of the border states, and Illinois, with a total of 114 electoral votes, while he would get 117 from all the rest of the states. (Someone else added the three electoral votes of Nevada to his column.) It was too close for comfort.

But in the next few days he became more optimistic. Republican strength in Indiana and Ohio proved greater than antic.i.p.ated. Maryland adopted a const.i.tution outlawing slavery. The soldier vote was overwhelmingly Republican. And Republicans could take heart from the vigorous campaign that Sheridan was waging to clear Early's Confederates out of the Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln revised his thinking. "It does look as if the people wanted me to stay here a little longer," he told a visitor, "and I suppose I shall have to, if they do."

During the remaining weeks of the campaign he did his best to make the outcome certain. He continued to try to consolidate his party by sending his private secretary out to Missouri with a view to mediating between the Charcoal and Claybank factions. Nicolay found that the endless party feud in that state "hinged, not on either principle or policy, but upon personal spite and greed for spoils," and he tried to persuade both factions that it was in their best interests to support Lincoln's reelection. Lincoln encouraged soldier voting in the field so enthusiastically that E. B. Washburne said, "If it could be done in no other way, the president would take a carpet bag and go around and collect those votes himself." He even went so far as to permit Republican agents to use a government steamer on the Mississippi River to collect the ballots of sailors on the federal gunboats. On election day hundreds of federal employees in Washington were furloughed in order to return to their homes and vote. "Even the camps and hospitals are depleted," reported the banker Henry D. Cooke; "the streets wear a quiet Sunday air-in the Department building[s], the empty corridors respond with hollow echoes to the foot fall of the solitary visitor; the hotels are almost tenantless, and the street cars drone lazily along the half-filled seats."

The election went off smoothly. From the earliest returns it was clear that the Republicans had won a huge victory; they carried every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky. The Democrats had waged a vigorous campaign with a united party, and Democratic candidates made a strong showing in the cities and in those counties where there were large numbers of Irish-American and German-American voters. The 45 percent of the popular vote that McClellan received was more than respectable, especially in view of the fact that all the Southern states were still out of the Union and, of course, not voting. Republican success was due largely to the same groups of voters who had supported the party in 1860-native-born farmers in the countryside, better-off skilled workers and professional men in the city, and voters of New England descent everywhere. As in 1860, younger voters were especially attracted to the Republican party, and the soldier vote went overwhelmingly for Lincoln.