LINCOLN AND JOHNSON NOT NOMINATED AS REPUBLICANS.
Mr. Lincoln had been elected President in 1860, distinctively as a
Republican. In 1864, however, the conditions had changed. The war had
been in progress some three years, during which the insurgents had
illustrated a measure of courage, endurance, and a command of the
engineries of successful warfare that had not been anticipated by the
people of the North. It was seen that to insure the success of the
Union cause it was imperative that there should be thorough unity and
cooperation of the loyal people of all parties--that it was no time
for partisan division among those who hoped ever to see a restored
Republic--that it was necessary to lay aside, as far as possible, mere
partisan issues, and to unite, in the then approaching campaign, upon a
non-partisan, distinctively Union ticket and platform.
Mr. Lincoln had given so satisfactory an administration so wisely,
efficiently, and patriotically had he conducted his great office, that
he was on all sides conceded to be the proper person for nomination
and election. The Convention of 1861 was not called as a Republican
Convention, but distinctively as a Union Convention.
"The undersigned," so ran the call, "who by original appointment,
or subsequent delegation to fill vacancies, constitute the Executive
Committee created by the National Convention held at Chicago on the 10th
day of May, 1860, do hereby call upon all QUALIFIED VOTERS WHO DESIRE
THE UNCONDITIONAL MAINTENANCE OF THE UNION, THE SUPREMACY OF THE
CONSTITUTION, AND THE COMPLETE SUPPRESSION OF THE EXISTING REBELLION,
WITH THE CAUSE THEREOF, by vigorous war, and all apt and effective
means; to send delegates to a convention to assemble at Baltimore, on
Tuesday, the 7th day of June, 1864, at 12 o'clock noon, for the purpose
of presenting candidates for the offices of President and Vice President
of the United States."
The delegates met pursuant to this call. Hon. Edwin D. Morgan, of New
York, Chairman of the Union National Committee, called the Convention
to order, and Robert J. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, was chosen temporary
Chairman. In the course of his introductory address, Mr. Breckinridge
said:
Passing over many things which it would be right for me to say, did the
time serve, and were this the occasion--let me add,--you are a Union
party. Your origin has been referred to as having occurred eight years
ago. In one sense it is true. But you are far older than that. I see
before me not only primitive Republicans and primitive Abolitionists,
but I see also primitive Democrats and primitive Whigs. * * * As a Union
party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates
of death. But as an Abolition party--as a Republican party--as a Whig
party--as a Democratic party--as an American party, I will not follow
you one foot.
Mr. William Dennison, of Ohio, was chosen President of the Convention.
On taking the chair he said:
'In no sense do we meet as members or representatives of either of the
old political parties which bound the people, or as the champions of any
principle or doctrine peculiar to either. The extraordinary condition
of the country since the outbreak of the rebellion has, from necessity,
taken from the issues of these parties their practical significance, and
compelled the formation of substantially new political organizations;
hence the organization of the Union Party--if party it can be called--of
which this Convention is for the purpose of its assembling, the
accredited representative, and the only test of membership in which is
an unreserved, unconditional loyalty to the Government and the Union.'
After perfecting its organization the Convention proceeded to ballot
for a nominee for the Presidency, and Mr. Lincoln was unanimously
nominated--the Missouri delegation at first casting its 22 votes for
Gen. Grant, but afterwards changing them to Mr. Lincoln, giving him the
total vote of the Convention--506--on the first and only ballot.
Nominations for the Vice Presidency being next in order, Mr. Lyman
Tremaine, of New York, an old time Democrat, nominated Daniel S.
Dickinson, another old time Democrat and a very distinguished citizen of
that State. In his nominating speech Mr. Tremaine again emphasized that
this Convention was a Union, and not a partisan body, in these words:
'It was well said by the temporary and by the permanent Chairman, that
we meet not here as Republicans. If we do, I have no place in this
Convention; but, like Daniel S. Dickinson, when the first gun was fired
on Sumter, I felt that I should prove false to my revolutionary ancestry
if I could have hesitated to cast partisan ties to the breeze, and rally
around the flag of the Union for the preservation of the Government.'
The Indiana delegation nominated Andrew Johnson, also a Democrat,
and the nomination was seconded by Mr. Stone, speaking for the Iowa
delegation.
In the earlier proceedings of the Convention there had seemed a
disposition to exclude the Tennessee delegation, and Parson Brownlow, an
old line Whig, being called on for a speech, evidenced in the course of
his remarks the small part which partisan considerations were permitted
to play in the purposes and proceedings of the Convention. He said:
'There need be no detaining this Convention for two days in discussions
of various kinds, and the idea I suggest to you as an inducement not to
exclude our delegation is, that we may take it into our heads, before
the thing is over, to present a candidate from that State in rebellion,
for the second office in the gift of the people. We have a man down
there whom it has been my good luck and bad fortune to fight untiringly
and perseveringly for the past twenty-five years--Andrew Johnson.
For the first time, in the Providence of God, three years ago we got
together on the same platform, and we are fighting the devil, Tom
Walker, and Jeff. Davis, side by side.'
Mr. Horace Maynard, a conspicuous Republican of Tennessee, said:
'Mr. President, we but represent the sentiment of those who sent here
the delegation from Tennessee, when we announce that if no one else
had made the nomination of Andrew Johnson, which is now before the
Convention, it would have been our duty to make it by one of our own
delegation. That citizen, known, honored, distinguished, has been
presented to this Convention for the second place in the gift of the
American people. It needs not that I should add words of commendation
of him here. From the time he rose in the Senate of the United States,
where he then was, on the 17th day of December, 1860, and met the
leaders of treason face to face, and denounced them there, and declared
that the laws of the country must and should be enforced, for which he
was hanged in a effigy in the City of Memphis, in his own State, by the
hands of a negro slave, and burned in effigy, I know not in how many
places throughout that portion of the country--from that time, on during
the residue of that session of the Senate until he returned to Tennessee
after the firing upon Fort Sumter, when he was mobbed in the City of
Lynchburg, Virginia--on through the memorable canvass that followed in
Tennessee, till he passed through Cumberland Gap on his way North
to invoke the aid of the Government for his people--his position of
determined and undying hostility to this rebellion that now ravages
the land, has been so well known that it is a part of the household
knowledge of many loyal families in the country. * * * When he sees your
resolutions that you have adopted here by acclamation, he will respond
to them as his sentiments, and I pledge myself by all that I have to
pledge before such an assemblage as this, that whether he be elected to
this high place, or whether he retire to private life, he will adhere to
those sentiments, and to the doctrine of those resolutions, as long as
his reason remains unimpaired, and as long as breath is given him by his
God.
Two ballots were taken on the nomination for Vice President. Mr.
Johnson, whose nomination was known to be desired by Mr. Lincoln and
his friends because of his prominence as a Southern Democrat and an
influential supporter of the Union cause in his State, received 200
votes on the first ballot, and 404 on the second--the delegations
of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri,
Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon,
West Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Nevada, voting solidly
for him--Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
only, being divided.
Thus a Republican and a Democrat were made the nominees of the
Convention, and its non-partisan character found further expression
in the first three Resolutions of the Platform adopted, which were as
follows:
Resolved, 1st. That it is the highest duty of every American citizen to
maintain against all their enemies the integrity of the Union and the
paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the United States;
and that laying aside ALL DIFFERENCES OF POLITICAL OPINION, we pledge
ourselves as Union men, animated by a common sentiment and aiming at a
common object, to do everything in our power to aid the Government
in quelling by force of arms the rebellion now raging against its
authority, and in bringing to the punishment due to their crimes the
rebels and traitors arrayed against it.
2nd. That we approve the determination of the Government of the United
States not to compromise with Rebels, or to offer them any terms of
peace, except such as may be based upon an unconditional surrender
of their hostility and a return to their just allegiance to the
Constitution and laws of the United States, and that we call upon the
Government to maintain their position, and to prosecute the war with the
utmost possible vigor to the complete suppression of the Rebellion, in
full reliance upon the self-sacrificing patriotism, the heroic valor
and the undying devotion of the American people to their country and its
free institutions.
3rd. That as slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength, of
this Rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to
the principles of Republican Government, justice and the National safety
demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic;
and that, while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamation by
which the Government in its own defense, has aimed a death blow at this
gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to
the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its
provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of
slavery within the limits or jurisdiction of the United States.
So there seems to be good ground for saying that this was in no sense a
partisan Convention, but, on the contrary, that it was a Convention of
the loyal people of the Northern and Border States, of all parties, who
were ready to lay aside party creeds and partisan considerations, the
better to make common cause for the preservation of the Union.
Before the war, Mr. Johnson had been a Democratic Senator from
Tennessee, and during the war, a gentleman of great influence in support
of the Union cause. So pronounced and effective had been his loyalty
that Mr. Lincoln appointed him a Brigadier General and Military Governor
of Tennessee, to accept which he resigned his seat in the Senate, and so
judicious and successful had been his administration of that office in
behalf of the Union cause and of Union men, that Tennessee was the first
of the revolted States to be readmitted to representation in Congress
after the close of the war.
So it may be said of Mr. Johnson that he was a persistent and consistent
Union Democrat of the old school--for war so long as war might be
necessary to the preservation of the Union--for peace when the war was
ended by the abandonment of the struggle by the insurgents--and for
the restoration of the Union on terms consistent with then existing
conditions--without slavery, which was dead--and the return of the
people of the South to their loyalty to and support of the Government
without debasing exactions--after they had laid down their arms.
Aggressively radical so long as the people of the South continued in
rebellion, he was considerate and merciful so soon as they yielded
themselves to the authority of law and of the Union.
Like Mr. Lincoln, he opposed the idea strenuously advanced by Sumner,
and Stevens, and that wing of the Republican party which they led, that
the States in rebellion had committed suicide and were therefore
dead and without rights, or entitled to consideration, even, in any
proposition that might be adopted for their rehabilitation.
This record very effectually disposes of the criticisms of Mr. Johnson's
course, so common after he came to the Presidency and growing out of his
disagreements with the extremists of Congress, that he had deserted
and betrayed the Republican party after it had elected him to the Vice
Presidency and thus made him Mr. Lincoln's immediate successor--the
facts of history showing that neither Mr. Lincoln nor Mr. Johnson were
elected by the Republican party as Republicans, nor by the Democratic
party as Democrats, but by a union of all parties of the North
distinctively as a Union party and on a Union ticket and platform for
the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery--and when
those purposes were accomplished, the war ended and the Union party
disbanded and was never heard of again. Mr. Lincoln, had he lived,
would doubtless have still been a Republican, as Mr. Johnson was still
a Democrat, as before the war--the purpose of that war and of the
Convention that nominated him having been accomplished--and under no
obligations, especially of a partisan character, to adopt or promote the
partisan purposes relative to reconstruction or otherwise, that came to
actuate the Republican party.
As stated. Mr..Johnson had, during the later years of the war, been
acting as Military Governor of Tennessee, of which State he had been a
citizen nearly all his life. His administration had been so efficient
that Tennessee was practically restored to the Union at the close of the
War, and so satisfactory to the loyal people of the country, that though
an old line Democrat and a Southern man, Mr. Johnson's nomination by the
National Convention for Vice President on the ticket with Mr. Lincoln
for President, was, as has been shown, logical and consistent. Though
a pronounced State Rights Democrat and a citizen of a Southern State
in rebellion, he regarded himself as a citizen of the United States,
to which he owed his first allegiance. State Rights meant to him, the
rights of the States IN the Union, and not OUT of the Union.
In evidence of the confidence and esteem in which Mr. Johnson was
generally held by those who knew him and knew of the valuable services
he had rendered the cause of the Union, the following letter from Mr.
Stanton, then secretary of War under Mr. Lincoln, is here reproduced.
It was written to Mr. Johnson on his tender to the War Office of his
resignation of the Military Governorship of Tennessee to accept the
office of Vice President of the United States:
War Department, Washington, March 3, 1865.
Sir:--This Department has accepted your resignation as Brigadier General
and Military Governor of Tennessee. Permit me on this occasion to tender
to you the sincere thanks of this Department for your patriotic and able
services during the eventful period through which you have exercised the
highest trust committed to your charge. In one of the darkest hours of
the great struggle for National existence, against rebellious foes, the
Government called you from the comparatively safe and easy duties of
civil life to place you in front of the enemy and in a position of
personal toil and danger, perhaps more hazardous than was encountered
by any citizen or military officer of the United States. With patriotic
promptness you assumed the post, and maintained it under circumstances
of unparalleled trial, until recent events have brought safety and
deliverance to your State and to the integrity of the Constitutional
Union, for which you so long and so gallantly periled all that is dear
to man on earth. That you may be spared to enjoy the new honors and
perform the high duties to which you have been called by the people of
the United States, is the sincere wish of one who in every official
and personal relation has found you worthy of the confidence of the
Government and the honor and esteem of your fellow citizens.
Your obedient servant,
Edwin M. Stanton.
His Excellency, Andrew Johnson, Vice-President elect.