George McClellan on His Defeat by Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 Presidential Election: “I am only sorry for the defeat when I think of my country and my friends”

With the dawn of the new year 1864, President Lincoln had to face reelection and his prospects seemed bleak. There were two principle causes for this, and they weighed on Lincoln and his colleagues within the Republican Party. The first was war weariness, and the conflict, which many had thought would be brief, now seemed interminable. Second, Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation the year before shifted the purpose of the war from purely to preserve the Union to include emancipation. This was troubling for many Northern voters, and quite a few vocally objected to this change. As early as February 1864 newspapers printed a letter by Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy in which he argued that Lincoln could not win reelection and advocated nominating Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase for president. The ambitious Chase did little to squelch the talk of his candidacy.

In March 1864 Lincoln appointed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to command the Union armies and conclude the war victoriously. Grant commenced the Overland Campaign into Virginia in early May, but by the end of the first week in June had little to show for it besides enormous casualties that literally staggered the North. As spring ended and the summer of 1864 wore on, his armies continued to be stymied, with the Army of the Potomac stuck besieging Petersburg, and defeats at the Crater and Kennesaw Mountain.

Despite the stress and strain of the office, Lincoln wanted to retain the presidency for another term. When asked about his intentions, Lincoln had written to Illinois Congressman Elihu Washburne in the fall of 1863: “A second term would be a great honor and a great labor, which together, perhaps I would not decline, if tendered.” He was indeed renominated on June 8, 1864, but that renomination had to share attention with the debacle at Cold Harbor, which occurred just days earlier. At that convention, Republicans loyal to Lincoln created a new name for their party – the National Union Party – in order to accommodate those Democrats who supported the war and might vote with them rather than with their own party (many of whose members wanted peace at any price). The convention also dropped Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket and chose Gov. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as Lincoln’s running mate, as the southerner Johnson, who was a fierce opponent of secession and had remained loyal to the United States, was the living embodiment that the Union was unbroken, which was just the message that they wanted to send.

Opposing them was Democratic nominee George B. McClellan, who by 1863 was making public political statements and endorsements of candidates. He agreed with Lincoln about the need to preserve the Union, but did not feel that the slavery issue needed to be addressed. McClellan was courted by the Democratic Party for the 1864 presidential contest, and though he officially became their candidate the last week in August, by June he was already the presumptive nominee. McClellan found himself in the unique position of being a candidate who felt that the war should be fought to preserve the Union, while running on a Democratic platform that advocated peace, and concluded that the war was a failure. His own platform read, in part, “That this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war…the public welfare demands that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States.”

But even before McClellan received the formal nomination, in early August Lincoln’s own political insiders advised him that his reelection was in jeopardy. Republican leader Thurlow Weed, a Lincoln loyalist, wrote to Secretary of State William Seward, “I have told Mr. Lincoln that his re-election was an impossibility.” Lincoln seemed to agree that his administration was not going to be re-elected. On August 23 he called his Cabinet together and asked them to sign the back of a sealed document. The document was a memorandum that stated: “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 thus essentially saw his reelection as the only real hope to save the Union. And although unspoken, it meant a great deal to him personally also.

Then the plates shifted and Lincoln’s prospects changed. On September 1 Gen. William T. Sherman maneuvered Confederate Gen. John B. Hood into evacuating Atlanta, and on September 2 Union forces entered the city. Gen. Philip B. Sheridan began his successful advance through the Shenandoah Valley that would culminate in his resounding Union victory at Cedar Creek in mid-October. The severe internal strife within the Democratic Party burst into view, with one portion wanting to continue the war and another not. And with the election drawing near, the National Union Party mobilized the full strength of both the Republicans and the War Democrats with the slogan “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream.” There were meetings in support of the Lincoln-Johnson ticket that contained speeches to persuade wavering voters.

When all the votes were tallied in November, Lincoln won the election in a landslide, defeating McClellan by more than 500,000 popular votes and 191 electoral votes. An estimated 78 percent of Union soldiers cast their ballots in favor of Lincoln. McClellan took just three states: Kentucky, Delaware and his home state of New Jersey.

Colonel Charles B. Norton was a Union officer who fought at Vicksburg and who evidently supported McClellan. During the war he had served under Gen. Fitz John Porter.

Autograph letter signed, November 25, 1864, to Charles B. Norton. “Your very welcome letter of the 21st arrived here in due season but between absence and Thanksgiving I have been unable to acknowledge it at an earlier day. I assure you that I derive real satisfaction from the knowledge that my many friends remain as staunch and true to me than I could have done from any political process. I am only sorry for the defeat when I think of my country and my friends, especially when I reflect that it will not be in my power to redress the wrongs of such a man as Fitz John Porter. That we have now only to acquiesce in the result and await the returning sanity of the people. I assure you I appreciate the kindness of my busy friend. Whenever I am in the city for a few days it will afford me much pleasure to pass an evening with you. Mrs. McClelan writes with me in wishing regards to Mrs. Norton and yourself and with many thanks for your kind letter. p.s. I am very sorry that I missed seeing Dr. Evans.”

This is the only contemporary letter of McClellan concerning his defeat by Lincoln that we have ever seen. It has been in a notable private collection for over half a century.