Lincoln: 1864

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See website for details. High five casino! And we return to our American stories. Up next, a story about a consequential year and a consequential man. Here's the late historian Charles Braslin Flood to tell the story of 1864 and Abraham Lincoln. On that New Year's Day of 1864, the Civil War had been going on for 33 months on its way to being what is the bloodiest war in American history to date. In November of 1864, there would be a presidential election that was going to be a referendum on the war. In hindsight, it's easy to say that, of course, Lincoln was reelected and the North won the war, but there were an endless number of times during 1864 when it did not look that way. Please remember that military success or failure was inextricably linked with what would be Lincoln's political success or failure. Four days before the Baltimore political convention in early June that nominated Lincoln to run for a second term, Ulysses S. Grant presided over a military disaster. His forces had been taking terrible casualties as they moved south against Robert E. Lee through the battles of the wilderness and Spotsylvania.

Now he started one of the largest attacks of the war at a place in Virginia called Cold Harbor. Grant had 108,000 men and threw them straight at Lee, whose 59,000 men were well entrenched. In the first hour, and some say even within the first 20 minutes, 7,000 of Grant's men were killed or wounded with the Union attack repulsed and nothing gained.

But the bad news went on for many more weeks. At one point, Grant had lost more than 40,000 men in 30 days. And that figure grew to as having lost 60,000 men in 45 days, 60,000 men dead and wounded to advance 60 miles.

Also during that time, Jubal Early once again erupted from the Shenandoah Valley. He led a massive raid that brought a force of 12,000 men right to the edge of Washington's fortifications, five miles from the White House. Lincoln and Mary went out to Fort Stevens, the focal point of the attack. At one moment, the Confederate advance came to within 110 yards of the fort. Foolishly, Lincoln, wearing a stovepipe hat that made him a target seven feet high, climbed right up on the parapet in the open. Some Confederate snipers positioned a few hundred yards away started firing at him, missing him, but wounding with a ricochet, an officer was standing just below the parapet.

It's worth mentioning that this is the only time that an American president has been under enemy fire while serving in office. All of this news, frightful union casualties throughout northern Virginia and Confederate striking at the Capitol was coupled with bad news from Georgia. As William Tecumseh Sherman slowly struggled towards Atlanta on the southern front, that coincided with half-true rumors of peace feelers going back and forth between north and south. The northern public was increasingly confused and disappointed in Lincoln and his administration. Much of the press was coming out against Lincoln.

Even his own advisors were warning him that the tide is turning against us. The union's economy was intertwined with all this. Speculation in gold in New York City indicated fears that the north's financial structure might collapse. The national debt was at its highest, the public credit was at its lowest, and the treasury was running out of money paying for a war that appeared to be at a stalemate.

In foreign business dealings involving valuations of the dollar, it dropped to a new wartime low of 37 cents. Prosperous Republicans who wanted Lincoln to be re-elected were nonetheless getting rid of greenbacks by buying land. They were doing that on the theory that land would still have value even if the Democrats were elected and decided to repudiate federal government securities right down to leaving the dollar worthless. On August 23rd, Lincoln involved himself in an extraordinary act that demonstrated his belief that he would lose the election. When the members of his cabinet assembled for one of their Tuesday afternoon meetings, they found Lincoln asking each of them to sign, without knowing what it said, the back of a folded over and sealed document. What Lincoln had written that morning, what they could not see, and what he was asking them to endorse sight unseen by placing their signatures on it, was this statement.

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this administration will be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the president-elect as to save the union between the election and the inauguration. He was pledging himself and his cabinet to make an orderly transition to what he thought was going to be McClellan and a Democratic administration. So if anybody tells you that by 1864 Union victory or Lincoln's re-election was in the bag, I would respectfully refer them to Lincoln's own estimate of the situation.

He remained determined to do everything he could. He backed Grant and his other generals to the hilt. But speaking to a Radical Republican, he told the man, you think I don't know I am going to be beaten, but I do. And unless some great change takes place, badly beaten. A week after Lincoln said that, Sherman sent a telegram north that read, Atlanta is ours and fairly won. Everything changed. There it was, the news bringing the hope that so many in the north had lost. Even the most ardent Confederates saw this as the enormous strategic victory that the union had won.

Atlanta, the South's second most important city after Richmond, dead center in what had been Confederate territory, had fallen. There were still nine weeks until the election, but everything began to go Lincoln's way. He was re-elected in an electoral college landslide, not so decisive in the popular vote, which came in with Lincoln winning by 400,000 out of four million cast.

There was yet another exceedingly important factor in play, and I have to say that a number of studies I think have not given this quite enough attention. That was the military vote. Here you had close to a million young men from families of different political persuasions. Many of these soldiers were being shot at every day. No one could be sure that they would vote to continue a war in which so many of their comrades were being killed and maimed.

It's worth noting that in the military vote, ballots cast by soldiers who knew they were continuing, they were voting to continue risking their lives, he triumphed by three to one. And on Christmas Day of 1864, Lincoln read another telegram from Sherman, which said, I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also about 25,000 bales of cotton. So, as 1864 ended, the war was at last winding down. In 13 more weeks, Robert E. Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Seventeen days after that, Lee's West Point classmate Joseph E. Johnston would surrender the Confederacy's other sizable forces to Sherman in North Carolina. Between those two surrenders, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in Washington on April 14, 1865. At the end of my book, I look ahead to those events of 1865, but my detailed treatment ends where it began with the White House New Year's Day reception of 1865.

And here again is the essential Lincoln, the ultimate politician who nevertheless transcended the political strife, the indispensable man who appeared in our nation's convulsive hour, the resolute figure who proves that character is destiny. At this reception, a nurse who served with the Union Army, Ada Smith, had come by herself to the White House to pass through the long receiving line and wish the president well. As she came through the door, she recognized a crippled lieutenant named Gosper who had lost a leg and was hobbling forward on clutches as he made his way to the East Room.

In the fighting around Petersburg earlier in the year, Ada had been his nurse when he was brought in with his right leg shot off and they became friends during the time she cared for him. They greeted each other and joined the line of hundreds that wound around the East Room waiting to shake hands with Lincoln who had Mary beside him. From where he stood, Lincoln saw Gosper. He broke away from his place and came striding from the other side of the big East Room to greet him. He took Gosper's hand in what Ada remembered as, and I quote, a voice unforgettable, said, God bless you my boy.

As they left, Gosper said to her, I'd lose another leg for a man like that. And a special thanks to Charles Brassell and Flood. This audio is from the U.S. National Archives and we thank them for it. The story of 1864, a consequential time for our nation when we were perhaps never more divided and how Abraham Lincoln rose to the occasion.

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