next, author jonathan white discusses the role of the union army in lincoln's 1864 re-election. the republican challenged the democratic party's pro slavery candidate. ultimately president lincoln earned 80% of the soldiers' votes. the historical society hosted this hour-long event. >> it's really a pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker and

to partner with the bryant park coordination so it's always great to come out and see our members and sometime wes have members from the museum as well as members in our chairman's council to come out and support us. jonathan white is a fellow at the -- where he also serves as the university's pre -- and treason in the civil war. he is currently at work on three books, including lincoln's advice for lawyers, the final voyage of the uss monitor during the civil war. please join me in welcoming jonathan w. white. >> thank you so much for having me. can you all hear me okay in the bleacher seats back there?

okay. i love having an opportunity to come to new york city. this is actually only my third trip here. i spent two weeks here, though, about eight years ago, i had a fellowship and i spent two weeks at the new york historical society. i love going there to do research, in fact i stopped by there this afternoon with my daughter, she's 14 months old and we had to get a picture of her next to lincoln's statue out front. my poor daughter has actually been to more civil war sites than most people see in a lifetime. pardon me on this, so when she was born i didn't have a name for her, so i announced her on facebook as mary todd white. i'm here to talk about the elect shichb of 1864. i think the election of 1864 is really the most important election in american history. it sealed the doom of the

confederacy and it set the stage for the elimination of slavery. many doubted that the election would be held at all. francis lieber e who was a professor at columbia university wrote in august 1864. he said this, if we come triumphant si out of this war with a presidential election in the midst of it, i shall call it the greatest miracle in all the historic course of events. the greatest miracle. americans, body civilians and soldiers voted for president for president. it was the first time in our history that there had been a popular election like that. two days later president lincoln addressed a gathering of well wishers at the white house. he said to them, we cannot have free government without elections and if the rebellion

could force us to postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. lincoln had reason to feel confident. he had just won two days earlier by a landslide. he carried the electoral 12-21. he won 51% of the popular vote in that election, and most amazably, he won 80% of the soldier vote. many in the north were celebrating this victory, they knew the war would soon be over, he would fight to win. the organizations of a celebration sent a letter to william cullen bryant. i figured that his statue is right around the corner, i had to bring bryant into the middle of this. bryant was too busy to attend, he said i already have a prior

commitment. but he said to the organizers of this event i will be present with you in spirit and i will be inspired by the glorious result of the latest election. and he concluded this short note by claiming that ling ccoln's re-election will do more to hastal the close of the war than 20 battles. from lieber's perspective and from william cullen bryant's perspective, the election of 1864, it appears like a providencial event. i think it's important when we look back at it 150 years later, that we not lose a sense of contingency. for much of the campaign, lincoln's re-election was far from certain.

on august 23, he penned this little note, this little memorandum to himself. it's now known as the blind memorandum. and he essentially said for some days past it's become clear to me that i'm going to lose this election. and the candidate who beats me, the democrat who beats me, he doesn't name names. the democrats hadn't yet picked their candidate. but the person who beats me will have secured his election on a basis by which he will not be able to restore the union. i'm paraphrasing, but lincoln said i've got to do what i can between election day and the inauguration day. i will work with the president electri elect. he put this in an envelope and sealed it. he had all his cabinet members to sign it. they didn't know what they were signing. but they were signing -- lincoln ended up winning and at a later

cabinet meeting, he opened this thing up and showed all the cabinet members what they had signed on to and they had a little bit of a laugh about it. but it gives you a sense that the election was unsure. so i want to capture a sense of what the election looked like for americans and particularly for new yorkers in the months leading up to the election. today is july 30th 2013. i almost said 1864. i want to go back to what new yorkers were thinking about on jew july 30th, 1864. i looked a at the newspapers from this day 150 years ago to see what new yorkers were reading about in the papers. here's a little bit of a sense. if you opened up a new york newspaper 150 years ago today, you would have read a smattering of war nose, you would have read

about union troop movements around petersberg, virginia which is very close to where i live now. the reports seemed positive. u.s. grants seemed to be moving forward. you would have read about guerrilla warfare and you would have read about the northwest conspiracy. i don't know how many of you are familiar with. but union military authorities had just uncovered, or so they claimed, this massive plot in the old northwest. today that's the midwest. back then it was the northwest. they uncovered this massive plot where there were secret societies being run all over by democratic leaders and these secret societies were organizing with confederate agents in canada. they were getting money and they were getting guns and the plan these secret societies had was we're going to take all these guns and we're going to go to

union p.o.w. camps in the north. we're going give these guns to the inge mates and arm them. and we're going to overthrow the government from within. this was breaking news on july 30th, 1964. if you were a new yorker 150 years ago, this is a story you would have been reading about. if you opened up "new york times," you would have found a recipe for blackberry brandy for soldiers. and i wanted to try to make it before i came so i could tell you how it was, but i didn't have time. you could have read about a baseball match between the philadelphia athletics and the brooklyn resolute. the philadelphia team won 29-12. i'm a philadelphiian, and if any of you follow baseball, you know that i will never see a score like that in the near future from my hometown boys.

you could have heard excerpts from college graduations fromaround new york and new england. and you would have read about the arrest of an irish immigrant named john keane. his offense was having two wives and his trial was set for september. if you turn to the pages of the new york herald, you could have come across a list of things to do on the evening of july 30th, 1864, you could have gone to a concert at 4:30 at central park, weather permitting, you could have seen a list of all the musicals and plays going on on broadway. if music and theater is not your thing, you could have gone to ba barnam's museum where you could see two dwarfs, and would have read about a massive jewelry heist that took place not too far from here. if you look at horace greeley's new york tribune, women could

have purchased for .50 cents, a secret that every woman should know. divorces legally procured in another state, without publicity or change of residence. i gave this talk as a trial run to my wife two nights ago and she was genuinely paying attention, but when i got to line her ears perked up, what's the secret that every american woman should know? i said i don't know, but if i did, i would charge a lot more than 50 cents for it. the news that the people in new york were reading in the newspaper was positive. but new yorkers did not yet know what was taking place on july 30th, 1964. the raid on maryland, it kept going and it got into pennsylvania. and the federalists demanded

money from the residents and the they turned it over. the confederates just kept demanding more money until finally there was none left and the confederates burned down the city of chambersberg, if memory serves, i think only two buildings survived. closer south, near st. petersburg, there's the battle of the crater which some of you may be familiar with it. for weeks leading up to july 30th, there were pennsylvania coal miners who were in ulysses s. grant's army. they said we can dig under the confederate lines around st. pete r petersberg and we can explode it. at 4:00 a.m. on july 30th, 1864, they lit the fuse. so some guy goes into this

tunnel, lights the fuse, comes out and they wait. nothing happens and some poor guy had to crawl back in there and see what the matter was, saw that the fuse had gone out, relights it, comes back out, there's a massive explosion, it creates a huge crater. in fact the crater is still there today, you can still go see it. the confederate troops could have gone around the crater, instead they went into it. when they got to the other end, they found they could not scale the wall and they were stuck there. and the confederates were shocked at first, and many were killed. but by the time the confederates found they gained their berings, they found they could just shoot. even further south, union general william sherman was stuck outside of atlanta, unable to capture that confederate stronghold.

so july 30th, 1864, actually was a pretty awful day for the union. and in the following days, new yorkers would open up their newspapers and read about the terrible news. there's a very famous new york lawyer named george templeton strong. he recorded in his diary on jewel 31st, he said it's the hottest day of this burning summer, according to my sensations if not the thermometer. i have stayed indoors until tonight steaming with perspiration, and at 2:00 in that afternoon, strong got the afternoon edition of the newspaper and it described a debacle that took place at st. peter'sberg. he concluded his diary with this glum note, we have no right to expect speedy victory in this war. or to ask that rebellion be s suppressed until we have

suffered more than we yet have done. well the news of july 30th, captured, i think, how the summer of 1864 felt to many people in the north, it was a long, hot, awful summer. in may and june of 1864, ulysses s. grant and robert e lee had pummelled each other, outside of richmond, near rich p monday in virginia, grant lost 60,000 men in that period, in the midst of all that carnage, abraham lincoln was renominated by the republican party for president. and he was put on a platform pledging a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. if any of you have seen the wonderful spielberg movie "lincoln," you know how that turned out. although his nomination was unanimous, he wasn't really well

liked by every member of his party. the radicals were trying to get rid of him. before lincoln's renomination, the treasury department secretary used patronage, putting people into helpful positions that may have been able to help get rid of lincoln. john charles freemont refused to drop out of the race. he actually was the first republican candidate in 1856 and freemont was threatening to divide the republican party if lincoln didn't drop out of the race. what better patriotic day to hold a convention, and the democrats saw how badly the war was going and they thought, maybe we should wait and see how

much worse it gets before we choose our nominee and also write our platform. so they waited until the last three days of august, when they convened on august 29th in chicago, they chose to nominate george b. mcclellan for president and george h. pendleton for vice president. george mcclellan was a very popular officer during the first part of the watr. the soldiers absolutely loved mckellan. he was a fairly moderate candidate, he was pro union and pro war, but he was also pro slavery. the vice presidential nominee was the more controversial one. george h. pendalton, who's also depicted in the spielburg movie, pendal pon is one of them. and pendleton was a congressman from ohio.

he was ardently pro slavery and also anti-war. and what the democrats hoped they could do, was balance their ticket, we're going to have a pro war candidate for president, and an anti-war known as a copper head as a vice president and that way we can have a broad appeal to a lot of democratic voters. they made one huge miscalculation in their platform. if you read the platform, it's a huge indictment of the lincoln administration. in the fourth plank, they called the war a failure. now keep in mind again, the summer has been going very badly. lincoln thinks he's going to lose, so they call the war a failure. well, the timing could not have been worse for the democrats. the very day after they adjourned, william succumbs to a capture of atlanta.

that capture of atlanta made it clear to most observers that lincoln was going to win. that's a general overview of the election. what i want to do is tell you a little bit about the research in my book and this is research no one has really done before. my research focuses on lincoln and emancipation and his re-election in 1864. 19 northern states actually passed legislation authorizing soldiers to vote away from home. and this legislation took different forms. in some states soldiers were allowed to vote in the field and they actually set up polls and people would vote along their company streets. other states did it through absentee balloting. the president had vetoed a law authorizing soldiers to vote. because he said the state constitution requires people to vote only if they live in new york. we'll let soldiers fill out

their ballots in the field then they'll mail them home and someone at home will cast the ballot for the soldier, and that way the ballot is actually being passed in new york and that's how new york soldiers voted in 1864. i actually began in research when i was an undergrad so there are parts of my book that i wrote when i was around 21 years old, if any of you buy it afterwards, i hope you don't realize which parts i wrote when i was younger. mark neely is one of the most important historians of the american civil war. he's written more than a dozen books. i was taking a civil war class with mark during my senior year and i wanted to do a project with him during the spring of my senior year. this was during the bush versus gore election fiasco. i went to mark and said i want to do an independent study and

he said great, what do you want to write about. i told him and he said that's not a very good idea. he said come back and we'll talk about good ideas. so i came back and he gave me a few topics that i could do as an undergrad and one of them was the soldier vote. i never knew that soldiers voted. and so this seemed like an interesting topic to me. i didn't know at the time that mark had been planning to write about the soldier vote in a book he was writing then. but instead, he very graciously gave the topic to me and as a masters and phd student i published three articles out of it and now finally my book and i was thrilled to be able to dedicate the book to mark neely. sorry for the little tangent.

80% of the soldiers who voted voted for lincoln. and historians have looked at this statistic and said it's pretty obvious, the soldiers supported emancipation and the soldiers supported li eed linco. but i argue in my book that historians have been getting it wrong for the last 150 years. the main thrust of my book is to show how democrats in the army or intimidated and coerced into silence through much of the war when they opposed emancipation. and the -- try to teach the soldiers that they needed to fight in a war for emancipation. keep in mind, when the war begins, lincoln's argument, and it's his argument throughout the world is that this is a war for a union. and soldiers who enlisted in

1861 and 1862 say i'm enlisting for a union. so lincoln convinced them that they needed to fight for emancipation. and in this period of the election of 1864. there's a lot of soldiers speaking out against emancipation is the war department used a lot of energy to try to force them to not oppose emancipation. i'll give you some examples. the assistant secretary of war was a man named charles dana and he was actually a new york newspaper editor before the war. he recalled in his memoir, all the power and the influence of the war department was deployed to secure the election of mr. lincoln. dana's recollection is supported -- the secretary of war at the time was a man named edward stanton and stanton used immense power to bring soldiers

into line. stanton dismissed dozens of officers during the summer and fall of 1864 when they spoke out against lincoln. on one occasion, stanton dismissed almost two dozen at one time. one of the senators, one of the u.s. senators from new york was the man named edwin morgan, he also served as governor of new york and morgan went to stanton and said there's some water master clerks who are out there hurrahing for lincoln. and when he heard about this, he outright fired 20 of them. when they said how can you fire me. and stanton said when a young man receives his pay from an administration and spends his evenings denouncing it, he cannot be surprised if the administration prefers a friend on the job. now stanton made very little effort to hide this sort of partisanship.

he learned about one officer who was wagering bets against the republican governor of indiana, which was illegal, still is, i think, and the soldiers betting against the republican, and when stanton learned he boasted to a republican gathering at the white house. he said i reduced him to a captain and ordered him self the other day. in other words i'm sending him to the front. now i found that quote two weeks ago. this is the thing, you know, being an author is a wonderful thing, being an author is a wonderful job. one of the hardest things is you always find great things after the book is out. democrats noticed what was going on. and they came to believe that stanton was taking these sort of vindictive actions so that he could control the officers in a way that would not only influence their votes, but also influence the votes of the enlisted men serving under them and democrats learned that they needed to keep quiet if they

opposed lincoln in the field. i found a letter from a colonel from ohio, his name is durbin ward, and i found a later he wrote in 1864 where he said i am driven to be cautious because publicly speaking my political conditions might cost me my commission. i found a massachusetts artilleryist, who said he couldn't voice his political conditions during the election campaign because i might be called a copper head, which was an epithet for democrats, and perhaps a poor cuss like me might get shot. other forms of intimidation took place as well. i found a newspaper article about something that took place around west point. there were a bunch of soldiers or cadets around west point and the democrats wanted to go to a democrat campaign rally. you do that in election season,

you want to hear a rousing speech. the previous superintendent had been dismissed in july of 1864 because stanton found out he was a democrat. so the new superintendent finds out that these soldiers are going to hear a democratic meeting and when the soldiers came back, they were put into the guard house, and then the next morning they were made to dig the drainage ditch for the superintendent's water closet. so they were going to dig his toilet. and republicans who went to republican campaign rallies near west point, faced no such intimidation. one of the things that is at the heart of my research are courts-martial records, these are records that really have not been mined well enough by historians, there are 75,000 court-martial records. i found a number of soldier es

who were court-martialed if they spoke out against lincoln during the election. here are some of the things that people were court-martialed for during the election. there was a lieutenant from the 50th new york engineers named edward b. austin. he was court-martialed and dismissed from the army in 1864 that if by giving my vote to abe lincoln would save the government, i will be damned if i will get it. henry bo henry -- there's a lot of these in the book, but my favorite quote comes from an illinois captain named john gibson and he was the captain of the 114th illinois. and he was court-martialed and dismised from the army for saying he would rather sink to hell than free the negros and

that old abe lincoln is a god damned old shit. you always think of things later, i think that would have been a great title for my book, i probably would have sold a lot more copies. these guys and many more like them were court-martialed -- some of them deserved it for some of the things they said, i think, some of them went beyond the ones i -- wanted to teach the soldiers to not criticize emancipation, to not criticize the war policy of the government, the official military policy of the government and it was effective. it taught people to keep their opinions to themselves. now some of the most egregious political favoritism involves furlows. not all soldiers, as i said, voted in the field. some states didn't permit soldiers to vote in the field, so republican governors in those

states wrote letters to secretary of war stanton, and these letters are still at the library of congress. saying will you please furlow republican voters to come home and vote, we're going to loses the election in our state if you don't do that. and stanton was more than happy to oblige. the doctor was taking care of wounded soldiers and he wrote a letter about one wounded soldier from indiana. he said this, you should give him a furlow to go home and vote because his vote will be as much or more value in the presidential election in this state than his service might otherwise render the government. in other words his bullets will be more important than his ballots. officers throughout the union armies granted furlows to republican soldiers and they were allowed to go home to vote. while democrats were kept in the field. i want you to think about this for a moment. some of these soldiers had not

been home for many months, if not several years. getting a furlough to go home to vote was a huge thing, because it meant you got to see your parents or your siblings, or your wife or your children, people you hadn't seen for a long time. now some people -- and so democrats are going to rightly complain about this. i found a pennsylvania election commissioner who reported that democrats were threatened to be sent to the front if they voted. while an illinois soldier noted that his regiment was polled to see who would vote for lincoln if they got a chance to go home. a lot of democrats are going to take this chance. i found one soldier from new hampshire and he was a sharp shooter and he wrote a letter to his brother. he said i will be as black as the darkie to get a furlough home to vote. what he was referring to was an help thet that the democrats referred to the republican

party. he was using code words, in fact he actually didn't write out the word, he wrote out d and then a long hyphen, saying i'm willing to bloke the black republican ticket if it means i get to come home. but not all soldiers were willing to sacrifice their principles. i found a new jersey soldier who wrote angrily to his father, i suppose i might have gotten home if i said i would vote for old abe. but never, i would sooner stay here for another year than come home and vote for him. for those soldier who is did vote in the field, they found it was not necessarily easy to vote the democratic ticket. many democrats complained they couldn't find ballots in the field, others complain they weren't allow to read democratic campaign literature, and you all know u how important it is in an election to be able to read both

sides. when rufus miller found out there were no democratic ball lots in his camp, heed ed he -- court-martialed for saying that in camp. another new york soldier quote, such mean contemptible favoritism or partisanship is shown to lincoln by many officers and they have been obliged to find mcclellan ballots from other sources. historians often say that lincoln got 80% of the -- certainly many union soldiers

supported emancipation and voted for him. but i don't think the support of lincoln was as -- the 80% statistic is deceiving. clearly i think i show in the book that many democratic soldiers were intimidated or coerced into voting for lincoln and i think of even greater importance is looking at the soldiers who didn't vote. i believe that many democratic soldiers chose not to vote in 1864 because they saw lincoln as an abboll igsist. august 1864, the democratic national convention in their platform calls the war a failure. if you are a soldier who's been fighting for two or three years, are you going to fight for a party that says what you're doing in the field is a failure? many chose not to. voter turnout among the soldiers

is something that no historian has ever considered before when they have look at the election. but i think it can reveal a lot about what was going on. i found a wonderful letter from a corporal named george buck, and george buck served -- two days after the election, he sent an election to george b. mcclellan, the democratic candidate who had just lost. this is what he had to tell mcclellan. he said the power of the military was used without stichbt to keep soldiers from voting democratic. some soldiers were offered promotion if they would vote for lincoln and he said the democrats were reduced to the ranks or a place at the front in every engagement if they chose to vote for you. but he said he knew of hundreds of soldiers who voted for lincoln under protests, and hundreds more of your most

ardent admirers. there are over 300 men in my regiment who are eligible to vote, but only 188 ballots were cast. that was the evidence that buck could show that people were feeling pressure to not vote for mcclellan. he's a democrat, of course he will say that, i have fouchbtd republicans who have admitted as much. i found one supporter who supported lincoln in the election, but he was upset at the way secretary of war stanton. and this guy noted the petty tierny and persecution that stanton practiced against subordinate officers. he said anyone who don't agree with the administration must be got rid of, no matter how honorably that soldier had served. in his letter he gave examples. he said you would scarcely credit the number of such cases as this, cases of petty spite, fitting a rather bad-tempered

child than a great and dignified cabinet member. unlike democrats, it was actually quite easy for republican soldiers of to vote. i found an account by a confederate and this was a confederate from maryland and he and his men captured some union soldiers just prior to the election and they forced the you knowon soldiers to take off their blue uniforms and the confederates put on the blue yuan storms and they got lincoln ballots and these rebels marched into the union camp. they didn't support lincoln, but they wanted to prove a point. and the one wrote, after having done this, he said, for of course, no one could object to us after voting for lincoln. now, all this sort of evidence suggests, i think that there was a great amount of pressure and even coercion to tow the republican party line. i found one democratic

artilleryist, he said if i was -- at present i keep i better keep silent. so what does this all mean? first, i have to say, i love abraham lincoln, i think he's our greatest president, i have written several books about him, and i have got about seven more that i plan to write, i wouldn't devote all of this time to lincoln if i didn't think he was worthy of the study. and certainly, i think hiss reelection was the best thing that could have happened. it led to the death of the confederacy and the ultimate extinction of slavery. i also understand the mechanisms of how the election took place. it was mostly a free election u but not an entirely free vote. having this broader understanding helps us better

understand how politics and also questions related to civil liberties in war town. he r -- effect that war has on civilians, but we can also learn a lot when we look at the affect that war has on soldiers. all that said, lincoln would have been re-elected even if stanton hadn't gone to these great measures in the months leading up to the election. second, i think that the pattern that emerged in the summer and fall of 1864 had actually also taken place earlier in the election. and i didn't get into this in my talk, i have two chapters on it in my book, but what i found in my research, is that in the period that lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, the state department and the war department were taking the same kind of measures, it shows us

just how ernest -- he knew there were a lot of soldiers that opposed emancipation and he was going to try to go to great letti lengths to teach them that emancipation was a cause worth fighting for. in case i'm coming on -- let me just close with two positive observations about the significance of the soldier vote of 1864. the first is this, permitting soldiers to vote was an incredible innovation. we take absentee balloting for granted today, in fact there's one state, oregon requires all voters to vote by absentee ballot and if any of you aren't around in november when they have their congressional elections, you can ask for a ballot and go vote. absentee balloting was not

common in the 19th scentury. during the war of 1812, two states passed legislation enfranchising soldiers, pennsylvania and new jersey. new jersey repealed it's law, in i think 1815 and so when the civil war began, pennsylvania was the only state with a law on the books permitting soldiers to vote, well, soldiers voted in pennsylvania in 1861 and there was a tremendous amount of fraud, there was one regiment from philadelphia that cast more than 500 ballots and the state supreme court struck that law down. and what republican politicians began to realize in 1861, '62 and '63 is we have got hundreds of thousands of men making the

ultimate sacrifice on the battle field for their nation, they of all people deserve the right to vote, anyone who makes that sacrifice. so beginning in 1861 and all the way up through the election of 1864, states in the north began passing legislation enabling soldiers to vote. this was a remarkable expansion of democracy in america and sets the presence for absentee bal t balloting today. and finally, i'll just close with this. i think that the republican policy for permitting soldiers to sloet during the civil war had wide ranging implications. if voting is based on service to one's country, and you have 200,000 african american men serving in the union armies during the civil war, then surely they too deserve the right to vote. i think there's a direct connection between these 19 northern states passing laws allowing soldiers to vote and

the 14th and 15th amendments being ratified into the constitution. the republican policy of granting soldiers the franchise is tremendously important. thank you so much for coming out tonight on this beautiful evening. i think there will be a microphone, will it be in the middle there? if you would go to the mike. >> thank you, that was an excellent book. hancock and meade were democrats, howard was an abolitioni abolitionist. how did this election and the question of emancipation, how

did it affect the union high command in the army. >> the question is how did the election affect the union high command. secretary of war stanton got a letter, i want to say in september where he got word that there were several democratsste officers who were going to try to affect the election, and the letter asked stanton to use his remedy to deal with them, essentially dismissing them. i have only found one brigadier general who was dismissed for opposing emancipation. it was a guy named james spears, at first he tried to commission someone to write an op-ed about emancipation and lincoln hand wrote on his file at the national archives now dismissed. but other than that, lincoln was very fair minded and lincoln believed -- lincoln wanted a

fair vote and he said as much. i mean we have his words to that effect. so he, as far as i know, he didn't get rid of any of those democrats like winfield scott hancock. you mentioned butler, let me say one thing about butler. butler was a war democrat who moves into the radical republican camp by the end of the war. he's from ma. and butler actually got about 5,000 soldiers who he brought to manhatt manhattan. he was worried there was going to be upheaval here. he worried that he couldn't put people in the zpi city, but there were boats around the coast of manhattan, ready to come into the city should there be upheaval on election day. butler was an arredent guy and was going to go -- they had already sent in their absentee ballots and their stipulation

was if they came to new york, their ballot would be void, so he was very strategic in that. >> i have two questions, number one, steven pendleton, the democratic candidate for vice president. >> george pendleton. >> right, george pendleton. he of all should have been aware of that pressure that was exerted on democrats in the army. did this have any -- when he came into -- with civil service reform. and my second question, you mentioned william lieber -- >> francis lieber. >> francis lieber at the very beginning of the talk. is he the same francis lieber who wrote the whole code.

>> the number 100. >> so the first question, and i don't -- so the first question is about george h. pendleton, he's known as the father of civil service reform. he was the prime mover behind that, i don't know if the shenanigans of the elections of 1864 influenced him. politicians were certainly aware of some of these things that were going on, because soldiers would write to politicians after they had been dismissed saying look at what happened to me. one was an ohio congressman who was actually kicked out of union camps for trying to peddle democratic tickets. it very well might have, but i don't know definitively. and francis lieber is perhaps best known for having written general order 100. this was basically a code of

war, a code of law that would guide union war policy when waging war. so, yeah, same man. >> thank you. >> of course the question that comes up, is that lincoln wanted a fair election. he was probably the strongest we have ever had, most intimately involved in the conduct of the war. so he knows stanton quite well, but with all the court-martials going on, what does lincoln know, and to paraphrase a late senator, what did the president know and when did he know it? >> yeah. >> and following that, do you have any evidence of what lincoln thought about all these court-martials. >> it's a great question. i don't know, lincoln didn't keep a diary, unfortunately. so i don't his most intimate thoughts on this issue.

what you can tell our -- he ended up having to approve a lot of these. any time a soldier was sentenced to be executed, lincoln would have to approve it before the election would be carried out. they did have one soldier who was sentenced to be executed and lincoln appears to have allowed the execution to go forward, although i haven't -- the soldier's not listed in the list of men who were executed during the war. lincoln approved a lot of dismiss dismissals. there was a major named john j. key and he served on general hallack's staff. and he was overherd to have said, you know, we don't really want to hurt the south that badly, we just want to bring them to a point where they'll surrender and come back and we can protect slavery, and when lincoln heard about this, he

called key into the white house office, into his office and he talked to him about this. and key said yeah, i said that and i stand by it. and key thought that was okay. but lincoln said, you seem like a competent like a competent officer, but i can't allow you to be talking like that because it will demoralize the men and make them think the war is not worth fighting for. so lincoln not only dismissed key from the army, he had his private secretary, john hay anonymously write a newspaper editorial talking about how this was the right thing to do and that was published throughout the nation. i think that lincoln understood public sentiment. he understood you had to get the people on to your side, on to what you were doing, and he knew how to use the newspapers to get his point across. so, i think in a lot of cases -- many of the wins i found, lincoln upheld the punishments because he thought it was essential to -- now, lincoln was not vin ticktive. some of these dismissals were

not done by court-martial, so they may never have come across lincoln's desk and he was managing so many things that he may not have known about a lot of them. i just don't know. thank you. >> thank you for an excellent lecture. what, if any, significance do you attach with respect to lincoln's presidency the fact that was a practicing lawyer for many years? and how do you reconcile that or view that in light of the position that was taken with respect to the su pension of habs you corpus. >> i have to thank you for that introduction. i have a book coming out in april called "lincoln's advice for lawyers" it's a wonderful little gift that i high lly recommend for all your lawyer

friends. it will only be 12.99. lincoln was a brilliant lawyer and he began practicing law arnold 1836/1837 and one of lincoln's major approaches to the law was trying to bring peace to neighborhoods. lincoln believed that it was important, if at all possible, to settle out of court. he thought litigation was a bad thing. if it could be avoided, that was the best twie go. i found one letter that i include in this book where lincoln are wrote to -- there was one guy suing another one. and he said to one guy -- he said to his client, you know, if you can settle with this other person, i won't charge you anything. and that's how much lincoln wanted to settle out of court. and i think lincoln brought that sort of approach, wanting to be able to work with people and wanting to be able to resolve issues. and ultimately, i mean, he was

trying to resolve issues between two big neighbors during the civil war, the union and the confederacy. the writ of habs you corpus and whether his practice as a lawyer influenced that decision -- [ inaudible question ] >> right. sure. i don't know if lincoln's practice as a lawyer prepared him necessarily for that specific issue. and i'll just very briefly summarize. i wrote a book about this called "abraham lincoln and treason during the civil war." in april, 1861, the upper south succeeded, four upper south states and maryland was on the

verge of succession, so lincoln thought. lincoln looked at that situation and he thought, i can't allow maryland to succeed, because if they do, the national capital will be surrounded by an enemy nation. lincoln sent a private letter to his commanding general authorizing scott to suspend the writ of habs you corpus into philadelphia and washington, d.c. he eventually expanded it up to new york and beyond. what this meant was that the military could arrest civilians and detain them indefinitely without charges as long as public safety required it. now, lincoln based this decision on article 1 section 9 of the constitution which says kwch the privilege of the writ of habs you corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety shall require it. and lincoln looked at the situation and he said, well, i've got a rebellion on my hands. i think public safety requires

it. and -- now, most legal theorists looked at that clause of the constitution and said clear tla is a legislative pow memp that's article 1 of the constitution and that clause has to do with congress. lincoln looked at the situation and he said, the constitution is silent. he doesn't say who can suspend it, just says it can be suspended. not only that congress was out of session in april of 1861 and wasn't supposed to come back to december. lincoln thought, do i just wait until, you know, they come back in december? by then the rebellion might be over with the confederacy being its own nation. and so lincoln claimed that constitutional authority to be able to act as an executive with great authority. i don't -- now, i wanted to give background for those who might not be familiar with the case. i don't know if lincoln's practice as a lawyer -- he just never would have dealt with a case quite like that but i do

agree with you that he was -- i think he was a very deep constitutional thinker. you read lincoln's speeches from his 1838 lie see yum address. his dread scott speech, lincoln is thinking about the meaning of the words of the constitution and i think he gave them a plausible reading in that instance. a lot of people disagreed with him and still think he got it wrong, but he was in a pretty tough spot and i think he managed it fairly well. >> hi. i have a "what if" question. >> okay. >> what if atlanta had not fallen on september 1st? what if johnston had stayed in office and not been removed by davis? and atlanta stays up until the election, do you think that that would have resulted in lincoln losing the election, number one. and if lincoln does lose the election, what would that have resulted in? would mcclelen administration related in, a, a lost war for

the snonorth? >> that's a great question. the "what-ifs" are always the hardest because we don't know. i'll give my best shot. i should say there were a few other union victories in that period that buoyed him. and those also buoyed the spirits of the north. but let's assume that mcclelen wins. mcclellan was ardently pledged to winning the war and restoring the union. for generations historians thought that mcclellan was not pledged to that. there was a famous article in the 1930s that was based on bad research and sid that mcclellan wavered and that myth has been debunked. so mcclellan i think would have done what he could have done to restore the union, but mcclellan

would not have probably kept the emancipation proclamation in place. he would have been fine to win the war and let the south keep slavery. mcclellan would have had a lot of peace democrats who voted for him who said, wait a second the platform says this war is a failure. the platform says that we want to have a convention of the states and negotiate with the south. you owe that to us. now, how mcclellan would have handled that is impossible to know. but i can tell you i have read several letters by democrats -- these are soldiers who say i want to vote for mcclellan but what if he wins and then dies? then you get a peace democrat. and there were people who thought mcclellan might get knocked off and a peace democrat would come in and say to the south, you know what, we wronged you. you should go in peace and keep your slaves. my answer is all over the place, but it's a "what-if."

i hope that helps. >> actually my question has been answered as i stood in line. the question is this, what was abe lincoln's attitude for the coalition of mcclellan and other members of his administration for coercing the soldiers and, you know, demoting them and court-martialing them, however the answer seems to be, he was -- he didn't exactly reject this practice but he didn't condone it either. old benevolent, loved abe really was a politician. he knew how to handle any controversial situation. however, i'm satisfied with the fact that he never condoned it and did not reject it. and by the way, speaking of you, professor, i always thought that

i was new york's premier civil war historian. now i see that i'm number two. >> ah. thank you so much. [ applause ]. >> thank you, for an excellent, excellent lecture. just one practical question, one observation. >> sure. >> you said they're trying to -- who votes where. if it was a secret ballot, they could have promised, how were they going to vote? >> wonderful question. so, the secret ballot is known as the australian ballot and we don't get the australian ballot in america until much after the civil war. during the civil war, the local governments did not make the ballots the way they do today. the political parties would print their own ballots and they were often printed on distinctively colored paper. so when you voted, you walked to the poll with a yellow ballot or a pink ballot and everyone knew

how you were voting. and not only that, when you got to the poll booth, you voted into a glass bowl. so there was really no secrecy and that's the thing -- you couldn't say i'm going to vote one way and vote the other. there was no secrecy in the balloting and that's why the intimidation is so powerful because the soldiers will be seen to be voting in a particular way. >> and just one observation -- >> sure. >> we know that president obama dismissed general crystal for his criticism. if somebody is in the military, even today, can he express any opinion that's in contradiction to war policy to his officers? >> i don't know what the rules are for soldiers today. i know that there are prescriptions on criticizing political and criticizing. in the civil war in the articles of war which have been adopted by congress many years before

the war, there was the 5th article of war and that prohibited criticizing the president or the congress or the governor of your state. that's what a lot of these guys were charged under. the question is, if you oppose a policy like emancipation which was very controversial and if you consider yourself a citizen first, these were guys who saw themselves as citizen soldiers and they were going off to fight for a period and then they would go home, they weren't professionals, they never believed that they lost their right to free speech. and they -- when they're court-martialed, they make this claim. they say, i never thought i lost the right to speak freely on political issues. i'm an american citizen and the army held otherwise in most the cases i looked at. >> i'm just saying, in contemporary context, i think officers certainly and maybe even listmen can't say whatever they want, criticize their commanders. >> no, i think you're right about that, yeah. >> so coming back to our beloved

abraham lincoln, it's not so -- it's inappropriate in the minds of the army and the moral. >> right. that's how he took it. sure. absolutely. >> hi. thanks for illuminating this little known dimension of the 1864. question, you mentioned that lincoln during the summer was very pessimistic about his chances in the war. i assume the election only took place in the northern states? >> great question. >> so question is -- >> sure. >> obviously the republicans swept the north in the first election. so what happened between the first election and the second one that caused lincoln, who is generally a very astute observer of conditions, to think that he had a very bad chance of winning? thanks. >> that's a great question. and i'll answer both parts of it, too, because you asked about if the election only took place

in the north. there were elections held in confederate states that were undergoing lincoln's reconstruction plan. so if memory serves correct, voters voted in tennessee and louisiana and maybe in arkansas. in tennessee, the military governor of tennessee was andrew johnson. and andrew johnson was also the republican candidate for vice president. and andrew johnson issued an oath that voters had to take and the oath was very long. i list it all in the book, but part of the oath required voters to pledge that they opposed an arm cyst to negotiate with the south. and the democratic platform said we stand for an armistist in the south. so andrew's johnson that was required to vote essentially made it impossible for democrats to vote in tennessee. sorry. that was the first part. can you repeat the second part of your question?

>> simply why was lincoln so pessimistic? >> i think he was pessimistic because of how badly the war was going. i mean, imagine 60,000 casualties in about a 30-day span. that's a lot of families who are going to be disheartened and that was the sentiment in the summer of 1864. people did not see the war going well and it's really not until the fall of atlanta and then mobile bay and the shen nan doe wa valley. it's after that point that lincoln became confident. in october of 1864 there were state elections in indiana and pennsylvania and ohio. and those elections all went republican. and those were sort of bell weather elections. everyone knew that however those three states went, that's how the election would go in november. the presidential election, so by october, lincoln was confident he would win. it was really only the summer that he thought he would lose. >> thank you. [ cheers and applause ]. >>