President Abraham Lincoln Expects His Reelection Will Result in a “Glorious” Victory in the Civil War

The “loyal people of the United States” he says, exhibited “faithfulness and constancy” and “labored to bring about a result which, as we hope, will be as valuable and glorious to the future of this nation as it was truly gratifying and flattering to my own feelings.”

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 presumption 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.

William Dixon was from 1861-1866 the Collector of Taxes of the City of Washington. He was an outspoken Lincoln supporter, and is known to have met the President at least once, as on May 3, 1862, Lincoln wrote, “Today Mr. Senator Wright introduces a Committee of Citizens of this District consisting of William Dixon, William Wise, Henry Lee, Reuben Bacon, Henry D. Grinnell, W.J. Murtaugh, James H. Lusby, who asks the appointment of George W. Garrett as Warden of Penitentiary.” In 1864, Dixon was president of the Lincoln-Johnson Club of Washington and spoke up for Lincoln on a number of occasions. As a pro-Union newspaper reported approvingly on September 19, 1864 – on Thursday evening the 16th a Union meeting was held in Washington, and that at that meeting “Mr. William Dixon, president of a Lincoln and Johnson club, spoke.” Dixon “said that some maintain that by the election of McClellan a speedy termination of the war would ensue. But he believed no such thing. He believed that if Mr. Lincoln was re-elected, the war would be brought to a speedy and successful termination. If McClellan was elected the Rebels would exert themselves to the utmost in order to prolong the war and thereby induce the Government to treat with them, and he believed that McClellan would favor and concede more to them than any Union man would wish to be conceded. He asked if-‘it did not seem singular when our army or navy meets with a reverse that not a word of sympathy is expressed by those who are associated together to defeat the Government. If our soldiers are starving or freezing there is not one word said. Who has heard a word of rejoicing from them over the fall of Atlanta, or the successes of Farragut in Mobile Bay? Mr. Dixon closed by urging unity of action.”

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. In mid-November, Dixon wrote Lincoln to congratulate him on the victory.

Letter signed, on Executive Mansion letterhead, Washington, December 9, 1864, to Dixon, thanking the loyal citizens for their help, expressing his belief that his reelection will win the war, and, uniquely in our experience, mentioning his own personal reactions to his reelection. “Permit me to acknowledge the reception of your favor of the 18th ult., congratulating me on behalf of one of the Lincoln and Johnson Clubs of this city upon my reelection; and allow me to thank you for the kind expressions you have been pleased to employ therein. Much credit is due, from the loyal people of the United States, to such patriotic associations as that over which you presided, during the late presidential campaign, for the faithfulness and constancy with which they severally labored to bring about a result which, as we hope, will be as valuable and glorious to the future of this nation as it was truly gratifying and flattering to my own feelings.” The body of the letter is in the hand of Lincoln secretary John Nicolay.

It is important to note the incredible rarity and significance of the expressions used by Lincoln in this letter. Searches of the “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln” show no other letters of Lincoln with the term “reelection” referring to his own in November 1864. Moreover, as for Lincoln, a notoriously reserved man, referring to his “own feelings”; our search shows this to be his only use of that term in his entire presidency. It is a unique peek into the personal satisfaction his reelection brought Abraham Lincoln.

We obtained this directly from the Dixon descendants, and it has never before been offered for sale. In fact, it is unpublished, and its existence is only now being made known to the public.