The decisive test of a popular vote accepting the amended constitution as a whole, remained, however, yet to be undergone. President Lincoln willingly complied with a request to throw his official voice and influence in favor of the measure, and wrote, on October 10, 1864:
"A convention of Maryland has framed a new constitution for the State; a public meeting is called for this evening at Baltimore to aid in securing its ratification by the people; and you ask a word from me for the occasion. I presume the only feature of the instrument about which there is serious controversy is that which provides for the extinction of slavery. It needs not to be a secret, and I presume it is no secret, that I wish success to this provision. I desire it on every consideration. I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free, which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring. I wish to see in process of disappearing that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war. I attempt no argument. Argument upon the question is already exhausted by the abler, better informed, and more immediately interested sons of Maryland herself. I only add that I shall be gratified exceedingly if the good people of the State shall, by their votes, ratify the new constitution."
At the election which was held on October 12 and 13, stubborn Maryland conservatism, whose roots reached far back to the colonial days, made its last desperate stand, and the constitution was ratified by a majority of only three hundred and seventy-five votes out of a total of nearly sixty thousand. But the result was accepted as decisive, and in due time the governor issued his proclamation, declaring the new constitution legally adopted.
XXXI
Shaping of the Presidential Campaign—Criticisms of Mr. Lincoln—Chase's Presidential Ambitions—The Pomeroy Circular—Cleveland Convention—Attempt to Nominate Grant—Meeting of Baltimore Convention—Lincoln's Letter to Schurz—Platform of Republican Convention—Lincoln Renominated—Refuses to Indicate Preference for Vice-President—Johnson Nominated for Vice-President—Lincoln's Speech to Committee of Notification—Reference to Mexico in his Letter of Acceptance—The French in Mexico
The final shaping of the campaign, the definition of the issues, the wording of the platforms, and selection of the candidates, had grown much more out of national politics than out of mere party combination or personal intrigues. The success of the war, and fate of the Union, of course dominated every other consideration; and next to this the treatment of the slavery question became in a hundred forms almost a direct personal interest. Mere party feeling, which had utterly vanished for a few months in the first grand uprising of the North, had been once more awakened by the first Bull Run defeat, and from that time onward was heard in loud and constant criticism of Mr. Lincoln and the acts of his supporters wherever they touched the institution of slavery. The Democratic party, which had been allied with the Southern politicians in the interests of that institution through so many decades, quite naturally took up its habitual rôle of protest that slavery should receive no hurt or damage from the incidents of war, where, in the border States, it still had constitutional existence among loyal Union men.
On the other hand, among Republicans who had elected Mr. Lincoln, and who, as a partizan duty, indorsed and sustained his measures, Frémont's proclamation of military emancipation in the first year of the war excited the over-hasty zeal of antislavery extremists, and developed a small but very active faction which harshly denounced the President when Mr. Lincoln revoked that premature and ill-considered measure. No matter what the President subsequently did about slavery, the Democratic press and partizans always assailed him for doing too much, while the Frémont press and partizans accused him of doing too little.
Meanwhile, personal considerations were playing their minor, but not unimportant parts. When McClellan was called to Washington, and during all the hopeful promise of the great victories he was expected to win, a few shrewd New York Democratic politicians grouped themselves about him, and put him in training as the future Democratic candidate for President; and the general fell easily into their plans and ambitions. Even after he had demonstrated his military incapacity, when he had reaped defeat instead of victory, and earned humiliation instead of triumph, his partizan adherents clung to the desperate hope that though they could not win applause for him as a conqueror, they might yet create public sympathy in his behalf as a neglected and persecuted genius.