This is part of the reason OP’s historical analysis is so poor, frankly. By summer of 1864 Lincoln had little real chance of losing the election, given the political state of play and the unpopularity of the Democratic opposition. Lincoln’s opposition wasn’t even the full northern Democratic party, a good portion of them had split away and merged with Lincoln to run under the National Union Party, given the way political campaigns and allegiances operated this likely meant Lincoln was always going to win reelection once this alliance had been formed.
This alliance was already formalized by early May 1864 (taking OP literally, Summer runes June to September), if Lincoln was still caterwauling about his inevitable loss at that point (and I don’t even know if that is true–I do know he believed he would lose reelection at one point), it was likely just a function of Lincoln’s innate melancholy and pessimism which was a major facet of his personality his entire life, it wouldn’t have been rooted in political reality.
I think it’s pretty damn unusual in a Civil War, those are typically fought to the bitter end, even if it takes decades. “Overseas Adventurism” like Vietnam are a lot different. Most Americans only care about the broader strategic objectives in Vietnam because a political class had worked hard to sell them on it in the mid-1960s. As things got ugly there and people applied more scrutiny to the situation, the sentiment of “why the fuck do we care about Vietnam?” was a more common sentiment. Most Americans eventually concluded we had no real skin in the game there strategically, so why are we losing blood and treasure? A Civil War you would never see calculations like that because it’s a much more intimate affair.
Keep in mind too that it’s very tricky to know what public sentiment was in 1864, the very premise that most of the North wanted to end the fighting at any cost (which is essentially what would be required to really support peace) would be difficult to prove one way or another. Scientific opinion polling did not exist in that era. Primary sources from the era are almost all incredibly politically biased. If you’re reading opinions in Copperhead newspapers they will all paint a picture that Lincoln was terrible and going to lose. If you’re reading opinions in Radical Republican newspapers they will all paint a picture that Lincoln was terrible and going to lose (the RRs wanted Lincoln off the ticket in 1864, but were unable to achieve this.)
What we know for certain is the actual election results, the formation of a party in May 1864 that incorporated prominent Democrats (including former Democrat Senator from Tennessee Andrew Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate) was able to win in a landslide over a divided Democratic opposition. Given how strong political party allegiance was in the mid-19th century and given what we know about how few people really change their minds over the course of an election, I’m not at all convinced Lincoln had any path to losing other than Washington D.C. falling to the enemy, by May 1864.
Which I directly addressed in my post. Lincoln was a pessimist and to some degree would be considered a whiner if you were being undiplomatic. Lincoln said all kinds of crazy shit in his decades in public life, just because Lincoln said something doesn’t mean it reflected factual, objective reality. Donald Trump vehemently believed he was going to win in 2020 regardless of what evidence to the contrary was presented, and he still claims he won months after his term ended and he ceased being President. What a President says is not inherently proof of objective reality.
Another one of Grant’s key insights were that the conquered Southerners would not accede to any sort of military occupation unless he crushed them completely by using total war tactics.
He learned this in Northern Alabama, wherein Union forces attempted a benevolent occupation that treated Southerners as estranged countrymen reunited. That restraint was rewarded by a vicious Confederate terrorist guerilla campaign in which Confederates viciously harassed and terrorized Union troops and collaborators.
That was when he realized Georgia had to be utterly destroyed to achieve victory.
The 1864 election has, of course, been discussed in most general histories of the war or Lincoln’s administration. But if you’re looking for a good work on that specific topic, I’d recommend Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency by John Waugh.
Do you mean Sherman here? Grant’s plans following Atlanta allowed for Sherman to go on a directed battle against Hood. And even the destruction against the state thereafter wasn’t remotely as bad as it could have been. It was done to make a point, not to inflict destruction for its own sake. (It also got stretched in the telling.)
Now, the later destruction against South Carolina - that was much more heated.
Here’s the text of the “Blind Memorandum” - Lincoln wrote it on August 23, 1864, sealed it, and then asked all of his Cabinet to sign the outside, without knowing what was in it:
He didn’t actually let the Cabinet know the contents of the envelope until after the election:
As for the argument that there were no polls, sure, but as long as there have been elections, there have been the political operatives whose job it is to assess public opinion and sense where the people were going. And the experts at the time were telling Lincoln in the summer of 1864 that he was going to lose:
It wasn’t until the fall of Atlanta that Lincoln and his advisors began to have hopes of winning the election. That was on September 2, 1864, just two months before the election.
I would add while that was the major factor, Farragut capturing Mobile Bay (the “Damn the Torpedoes” battle) on August 5th and Sheridan winning the Battle of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley (fairly close to Washington) on September 19th also showed voters a trend that the North was winning the war.
Thanks for actually posting some citation, I was not actually in doubt that Lincoln thought he would lose since it was entirely in his character to think that, and I had apocryphally heard the same many times, but to evaluate specifically the idea that Lincoln’s electoral defeat was likely and he “knew it” it helped to have the specific context of the specific quote/claim available.
I would just repeat that I think the political realities of the parties at the time and the support that was “locked up for Lincoln” suggests he was never terribly likely to lose. It’s impossible to have a meaningful objective debate about “was Lincoln on a trajectory to lose reelection in the summer of 1864”, modern research has shown time and time again the “popular political wisdom” is frequently hilariously wrong when confronted with political reality, and punditry style analyses of political fortunes is frequently far off the mark, and that is about all we have to support the claim Lincoln was on path to lose. I tend to think there were a lot of people prone to worrying about this matter, Lincoln generated frustration from many quarters–Radical Republicans, War Democrats, obviously the Copperheads who actually voted against him and he faced immense criticism for his conduct over the entire course of the war. I think he was in a narrative environment that was always very critical of him until the war had been all but won, and that can create an effect where troubles are always exaggerated and positives ignored. But these won’t always represent the real political reality.
Keep in mind that a number of states going back years were very loyal to the antislavery factions and were very pro-Unionist in 1864, and it would be very difficult for McClellan to ever win them. There were 4 states in 1864 with relatively close outcomes: New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware–if Lincoln had lost all of them he still is President by a 26 EV margin in states that he won by 5% or better.
I will say that if we want to move past the plausibility debate, I find it difficult to surmise what sort of negotiated peace would be possible. “Peace at any Cost” did not appear to be a serious political ideology in the North, the man who would be negotiating this peace–McClellan, absolutely did not hold that view.
So the South would have to make some concessions that would be materially worse than their best case scenario from 1861–which was that they had just been allowed to secede with everything intact including all their assets and holdings etc. It is unlikely any emancipated slaves would ever be returned. It is highly unlikely a former General like McClellan ever cedes control of the Mississippi River or New Orleans, which creates an almost Israel/Palestine situation where the proposed borders create a very difficult “defeated country” to maintain properly, with non-contiguous borders that hurt their ability to conduct free trade.
The issue too is the Civil War largely exposed massive flaws in the state’s right’s oriented philosophy of the South, particularly at dealing with serious crises, which the Confederacy was in for its entire existence. It would have been difficult for Jefferson Davis to get approval from the more recalcitrant parts of the CSA for a peace on baseline terms I mentioned above, I suspect simply too many Confederates would still be willing to fight over the lost territory and maybe even the emancipated slaves. To even continue the Confederacy as they dreamed of it in 1861, they honestly need more than just leaving with “no ill will”, they need some level of USA agreement to return escaped slaves, or you have a huge problem with them fleeing across the giant land border between the states.
Even if a peace had been hammered out, under such terms you almost definitely have renegade Southern militias raiding the Union to try to seize lost territory and slaves, and the Union would not take that in stride, they would demand the CSA’s leaders control that, which they would lack the power to do, which would result in retaliation from the Union militarily. The reality is by 1864 there was no way to end the Civil War without one side being fully defeated, for the Union that might have meant such large scale losses militarily that they’d have been willing to give all the CSA’s original territory back + sign a treaty agreeing to help return fugitive slaves. That would require a drubbing far outside the history. On the Confederate side we know what them being fully defeated looked like, because that’s what happened.
On January 1st, 1864, the Confederacy has lost just about any shot of foreign intervention, somehow occupying Washington DC, or stopping the Union from snowballing into far greater numbers than themselves. The collapse of political will to wage the war is the Confederacy’s only hope to ‘win’.
The Confederates have a lot to ‘lose’. The Union had executed deserters and draft dodgers and though Lincoln himself would never countenance it, it was far from a done deal that the Union would simply allow a restored South to enjoy its full rights. I posit that the Confederacy could productively work out a negotiated surrender. Lincoln was prepared to offer compensation for emancipated slaves and the terms of historical peace were of course lenient; a negotiated peace, perhaps with an ahistorical 13th amendment forswearing secession or seizure of federal property in exchange for a general amnesty and a formal means to end slavery.
That said, it’s hard to imagine the Confederacy being so sober as to decide that they were beaten at this juncture. It’s a lot more romantic to imagine a President Vallandigham deciding to recognize an independent Confederacy than to admit that the many thousands of dead are a sunk cost and fighting onward serves no one.
