62 e lusive v ictories
He had wrested the presidential nomination in 1860 from more
prominent party leaders, such as William Seward and Salmon Chase.
Despite his eff orts to mend fences and neutralize them by bringing
them into his cabinet, they remained potential (and, in the case of
Chase, actual) political competitors. Key Republicans in Congress
refused to recognize the president as their leader and took his fl exibility
as a sign of weakness. Lincoln realized, too, that his renomination by
his party was problematic. No president had been elected to a second
term since Andrew Jackson. Further, as the lineal descendant of the
Whig Party, the Republican Party had inherited the Whig skepticism
toward executive authority. During the Civil War, this skepticism
assumed concrete form when congressional Republicans established
the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The committee
annoyed and irritated the president; though it could not compel him
to change course, he could not aff ord to ignore it. Th e Whig tradition
also stressed the merits of rotation in offi ce, which Lincoln had experi-
enced when he was replaced after a single term in the House of Repre-
sentatives in the 1840s.
He was reminded of this when bad news from the battlefi eld shook
Republican support for the president and his war policy. In the bleak
summer of 1864, Lincoln faced calls from fellow Republicans to con-
sider abandoning emancipation as an objective to make possible nego-
tiations for restoring the Union on prewar terms, an idea he briefl y
entertained before reaffi rming there could be no turning back on the
decision to destroy slavery. Some Republicans, convinced that Lincoln
at the top of the ticket meant disaster at the polls in the fall, cast about
for another candidate in 1864. Although the president had been renom-
inated by party convention in May 1864, the following two months saw
eff orts to call a new convention that would pick another candidate.
Only Sherman’s victory at Atlanta and Sheridan’s in the Shenandoah
Valley put an end to talk of a diff erent party standard bearer.
Abraham Lincoln’s best resource for infl uencing popular opinion
may well have been Abraham Lincoln. He possessed almost unparal-
leled rhetorical talents that he used to good effect, especially in
published letters. (Th e president gave few speeches during the war and
never addressed Congress.) His words could soar, reaching for the
higher aspirations that might ennoble sacrifi ce—“so that government of