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twisted corpses, left where they had fallen in Saturday’s failed attack. Southern men and boys recovered the remains under white flags of truce as the Northerners cast their ballots in kettles and ammunition crates.
    Early in the war, the Democratic challenger, General George B. McClellan, had trained and inspired these same Union men. They had loved him then for his reluctance to spend their lives. In 1862, Lincoln had relieved him for spending them too cautiously. Now the Democrats promised them peace while Lincoln promised them victory. They were voting for Lincoln by a margin of three to one, as the Tribune reported with no pretense of objectivity: “It is unnecessary to say that an overwhelming majority of the vote cast was for the present Administration and its no compromise with traitors and vigorous prosecution of the war policy.”
    Just a few weeks earlier, when the Democrats had convened on August 29, the Tribune was pleading for compromise, the administration’s policy was in flapping disarray, and almost no one thought that Lincoln could win, least of all Lincoln. Editors, politicians, and preachers who were notdemanding peace were demanding vengeance, and the president favored neither.
    No one rejected peace without reunion more firmly than he. The very name of the Richmond government was unutterable to him. He would speak of “the Rebels” or “the other fellow,” never of the Confederacy, but he spoke of the war in sadness, not in anger. He called it “this great trouble.” For Jefferson Davis, the Yankees were “brutes in human form.” True Southerners, he said, would prefer to combine with hyenas. For Lincoln, the people of the South were “lost sheep.” He had issued a proclamation asking God not to crush them but to soften their hearts, enlighten their minds, and quicken their consciences, “that they may not be utterly destroyed.” We are fighting for the Union, he would say, and reunion would entitle the Southern people to all of their rights and privileges as soon as they came home. Supported by fellow moderates in the fractious Republican Party, he had already offered amnesty to every returning Rebel who would take an oath of allegiance, excepting their senior leaders. In private he said he would look the other way if even the worst of them fled the country.
    But the Radical Republican wing—the Jacobins, they were sometimes called, after the French Revolution’s executioners—objected almost violently to Lincoln’s magnanimity, looking forward as they were to cartloads of traitors being hauled to the scaffold on coffins. Fond of bloody rhetoric, they declared that the seceded states had committed suicide. Far from welcoming their leaders back to Congress, the Jacobins meant to hang them, subdue their beaten people like so many broken tribes, and govern their conquered territory “as England governs India.”
    They despised their Republican president, expected to consign him to a single term, and vetted potential successors in 1864 who would crush the beaten South in 1865. Descended from two presidents, Congressman Charles Francis Adams had been mentioned. Allowing in 1860 that Lincoln seemed “tolerably capable,” Adams had lowered his grade after reading his rustic speeches as president-elect. “I am very much afraid in this lottery we have drawn a blank.” When they met face-to-face, the rail splitter impressed the Bostonian as “a vulgar man, ill-fitted both by education and nature for the post of President.” Lincoln’s aide John Hay,a handsome young poet and a graduate of Brown, said the people understood Lincoln well, but the “patent leather kid glove set” knew “no more of him than an owl does of a comet. . . .”
    Lincoln’s brother moderates prevailed. Swallowing their misgivings and renaming themselves the National Union Party, the Republicans renominated him