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What do Lincoln and Zelenskyy have in common? The answer can be found in the 1864 election [1]
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Date: 2022-11-06
On November 8, 1864, Abraham Lincoln won re-election in perhaps the most important presidential election in U.S. history in the midst of the Civil War. Lincoln’s victory meant a continuation of the war to end slavery and save the Union.
Only a few months earlier, Lincoln had feared that he would lose the election to the Democrats, who favored peace negotiations with the Confederacy, even if the outcome meant the continuation of slavery.
Lincoln rejected diplomacy with Jefferson Davis who insisted on recognition of the Confederacy. Instead, Lincoln believed that victory on the battlefield must come first.
And that’s what Lincoln and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have in common. Zelenskyy has rejected diplomacy with Vladimir Putin as long as Russia occupies and claims parts of southern and eastern Ukraine.
Foreign Policy contributor James Traub, in an analysis titled “Progressives Should Give War a Chance,” referenced a letter sent last month to President Joe Biden by the Congressional Progressive Caucus advocating a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. The letter met with considerable blow back from many Democrats and was quickly withdrawn.
Traub wrote that it was a “pernicious fantasy” to believe that a diplomatic solution is possible because Putin’s ambitions have rendered it impossible. Kyiv could not accept a surrender of territory in exchange for security guarantees that could prove worthless. He argued that the time had not come “to replace force with diplomacy.”
“In the face of a ruthless aggressor, diplomacy can only begin to work after the tide of battle has decisively turned. Then-U.S. Civil War Gen. George McClellan ran against then-incumbent Abraham Lincoln in 1864 on a platform of diplomacy with the South; Lincoln insisted that the republic must first be saved. That’s Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s position.”
In 1864, the question was do you engage in diplomacy with Jefferson Davis? And today, the question is do you engage in diplomacy with Vladimir Putin? As was the case back then, the answer is “no.”
And there are lessons that modern-day Democrats can learn from the 1864 election. I’m not going to suggest that MAGA Republicans can learn the same lesson given their proclivity for the Confederacy and Russia.
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For much of 1864, Lincoln was concerned that he might lose the election. No incumbent president had won re-election since Andrew Jackson in 1832.
Despite decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, the war showed no signs of ending anytime soon. There were bloody draft riots in New York City in July 1863 in which a mob of mostly Irish-American workers rioted to protest new military conscription laws and targeted African-Americans. Many Northerners felt Lincoln’s Jan. 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation went too far.
Union forces had suffered some of their heaviest losses of the war in the May-June Overland Campaign (also know as the Wilderness Campaign) in northern Virginia, earning Gen. Ulysses S. Grant the sobriquet of “The Butcher.”
The campaign did result in a strategic victory for Grant who pressed forward rather than retreat, eventually besieging Petersburg, a key position for the defense of the Confederate capital, Richmond, And the campaign bottled up Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army, preventing him from sending reinforcements to Georgia where the Battle of Atlanta was about to begin.
In July, Lee dispatched Gen. Jubal Early with a force of 14,000 troops to mount a daring raid on Washington, D.C. Early was stopped at Fort Stevens, about six miles north of the U.S. Capitol building. Lincoln watched the fighting from the fort’s parapet and briefly came under fire from Confederate sharpshooters, making him the first and only U.S. president to come under hostile fire during combat.
So by the summer of 1864 many Northerners had become war weary and simply wanted to end the conflict.
Realizing the national mood, the Republican Party changed its name to the National Union Party in order to draw support from War Democrats who supported the war. Lincoln chose as his running mate the military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat who was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who did not resign his seat.
Lincoln felt the choice of Johnson would be a gesture of national unity that would bolster his re-election chances. But in retrospect it proved to be a divisive choice once Johnson became president following Lincoln’s assassination.
At their June convention in Baltimore, Lincoln’s party adopted a platform that called for the complete eradication of the Confederacy and a constitutional amendment banning slavery. It also specified that the United States should not compromise with the rebels, or “offer them any terms of peace except such as may be based upon an unconditional surrender of their hostility and a return to their just allegiance to the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
At the end of August, a deeply divided Democratic Party held their convention in Chicago and nominated Gen. George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln had removed from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862 for failing to aggressively pursue Lee’s army after the Battle of Antietam.
President Lincoln and Gen. McClellan at Antietam in 1862
McClellan was a War Democrat who supported continuation of the war and preservation of the Union, but not the abolition of slavery. He opposed his party’s platform that called for immediate peace.
McClellan was a white supremacist who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, which allowed the recruitment of freed slaves into the Union army. He described it as a call for “a servile insurrection.”
McClellan’s running mate, Rep George H. Pendleton of Ohio, was a leader of the extreme Peace Democrat faction known as the Copperheads who considered the war a failure and supported an immediate end to the fighting without securing a Union victory. They advocated either re-admitting the Confederate states with slavery intact or formally recognizing the Confederacy as a sovereign nation and holding negotiations to establish peaceful relations.
It’s hard to believe that Just a week before the Democratic convention, Lincoln said he expected to lose to a candidate who would seek a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.
On Aug. 23, Lincoln wrote a memo expressing grave doubts about his chances of winning the Nov. 8 election. He folded the memo into an envelope, and asked his Cabinet members to sign the envelope without reading the note.
It read:
Executive Mansion
Washington, Aug. 23, 1864.
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 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.
LINCOLN.
But just 10 days later, Lincoln’s dire forecast was rendered moot. On Sept. 2, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and his troops captured Atlanta, the industrial hub of the South, dealing a devastating blow to the Confederacy. That reassured war-weary Northerners that the war could be won
The election marked the first time that there was widespread absentee voting, enabling hundreds of thousands of troops in the field to cast ballots. At the time only males could vote.
McClellan had hoped that the soldiers would vote for him so the war would end quickly and they could return home. But instead most of the soldiers felt that voting for the Democrat would invalidate all the sacrifices that they had made to preserve the Union. One soldier wrote: "I do not see how any soldier can vote for such a man, nominated on a platform which acknowledges that we are whipped."
In the end, Lincoln ended up winning the military vote by a nearly 3 to 1 margin.
Still, the election campaign was particularly vitriolic, as reflected in the political cartoons of the day.
Republicans accused the Democrats of being essentially traitorous, while Democrats played on the racial fears of white voters. The New York World — the Fox News of its day — put out a print titled The Miscegenation Ball which showed Lincoln supporters cavorting with black women at a scandalous “negro ball.”
On November 8, Lincoln won a landslide victory. In the popular vote, Lincoln received 55% (2.2 million votes) to 45% (1.8 million votes) for McClellan. Lincoln carried 22 of 25 states, receiving 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21.
Lincoln had won a clear mandate to continue the war without negotiations with the Confederacy, which collapsed in April 1865 when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. Tragically, Lincoln was assassinated just a few days later.
Lincoln and Grant together ended slavery and saved the union. Lincoln could easily have called off the election due to the Civil War, but did not.
“The election having passed off quietly, no bloodshed or riot throughout the land, is a victory worth more to the country than a battle won,” Grant wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
On Nov. 10. Lincoln said: “We cannot have free government without elections; 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.”
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So now Zelenskyy and his military commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi find themselves in a similar position to Lincoln and Grant in 1864.
Zelenskyy cannot negotiate with Russia as long as Putin insists that a fifth of Ukrainian territory is irrevocably part of Russia, and has indicated he wants to spread anti-democratic, authoritarian rule beyond Ukraine. And it’s up to Zaluzhnyi to secure victory on the battlefield and force Russian troops out of Ukraine.
Oddly enough, on the first season of Servant of the People — in which Zelenskyy plays a history teacher who becomes president of Ukraine -- there is a fantasy sequence that features Abraham Lincoln.
Zelenskyy’s character, Vasily Goloborodko. realizes that the inaugural address prepared for him by his handlers has been plagiarized from the Gettysburg Address,
“We have much in common, Lincoln tells the Ukrainian president-elect. “You could also free your people.”
[END]
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