I don’t mean the Confederate presidency, I mean the one that Abraham Lincoln ran in.
IIUC people in confederate states were still considered legally US citizens by the north, right? Was there any kind of underground voting going on?
Then, like now, voting was done locally. So I don’t see how it would have been possible. The local legislatures had broken all ties with the Federal govt so there was no mechanism in place for it to happen. Not to mention that any North-leaning Southerners would be putting themselves in danger trying to vote in the Union election. Could be considered treason.
Eastern Tennessee was Union territory. (One of my ancestors was killed by Confederate soldiers because his son crossed over to Kentucky to join a Union unit.) The Confederacy came in and took over the local governments because they were pro-Union. I don’t know if there were any US Presidential elections in 1864 in that part of the state, though.
Hm. A look at 1864 United States presidential election - Wikipedia shows that Lincoln got electoral votes from Louisiana and Tennessee. I don’t know how that happened.
From the wikipedia page you linked:
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice-President elected in 1864, was a citizen of Tennessee born in North Carolina, so he was definitely a Southerner. I don’t know if he voted in the 1864 election, though if Tennessee voted he probably did (being the Military Governor at the time).
I think in his book “Battle Cry of Freedom” James McPherson says pretty much ever Southern State had some kind of unit fight for the Union. Not everyone in those 11 states was in favor of secession. I don’t know if they voted in the Presidential election but Lincoln and his supporters did encourage voting by military personnel.
And there’s the western part of Virginia, which split off from Virginia and became it’s own state (WV) so that they could stay in the Union. Presumably they voted the whole time.
Voting isn’t something you do “underground”. You need someone to legitimize the election and count the votes, and in 1864, before the advent of state-printed ballots, you needed political parties to nominate candidates and electors and distribute voting tickets.
Union forces were in control of much of Louisiana in 1864, and had even organized an election of a loyalist state governor and legislature. The legislature appointed a slate of Republican electors (bypassing a popular vote, as is their constitutional power) and sent electoral votes for Lincoln and Johnson to Washington. Congress however had never recognized the loyalist government as legitimate, preferring to wait until a more comprehensive scheme of Reconstruction could be implemented after the war. So Congress declined to accept the Republican electoral votes.
The Union army also controlled about two thirds of Tennessee, but Unionists in Tennessee had not yet elected a state government. Instead Andrew Johnson ran the state as Military Governor. Johnson was of course also Lincoln’s running mate, so there was a certain conflict of interest here. Johnson nonetheless ordered a presidential popular election in Tennessee in November 1864, and then required would-be voters to swear an oath of “unconditional support for all federal war policies” in order to register. Needless to say, McClellan supporters weren’t wild about this oath, since the whole point of the McClellan candidacy was to oppose “federal war policies”. They withdrew their electoral ticket and boycotted the election. Johnson certified the Republican electoral votes and sent them to Washington anyway. Congress did not count them.
There was no attempt to organize a presidential election in any portion of the other nine seceded states.
What about individuals who where originally from the South and who had moved to a Northern state before the Civil War started (or maybe even after)? Would they have been regarded with suspicion (like an enemy alien in WWII)?