Reaching the Public the Agency of Party

had been chronically weak. The most powerful and extensive networks in the nation were voluntary associations. Preeminently these were twofold:
the political parties—their voluntarism supplemented and compromised by the rewards of government patronage—and the churches, with their associated philanthropic agencies. Through these networks, energetically exploited, a President tied to the White House was able to project himself and his cause into the heartland of the Union and beyond. The historian
David Donald has emphasized Lincoln’s essential passivity in the face of events, but there is little evidence of this in the President’s efforts to mobilize opinion behind the war effort.
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Lincoln needed no lessons in how the power of party might promote a cause.
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His presidential victory in 1860 had depended far lesson his personal appeal than on the skill with which Republican organizers had projected him as the embodiment of the party’s philosophy and platform despite limited funds and a still developing organization, they yet managed to sustain a stunningly effective hurrah campaign, marked by swarms of speakers,
enthusiastic meetings,“Wide Awake marching clubs, high expectations, and crusading energy. But Lincoln’s election to the presidency and nominal leadership of the party did not mean that the organization, whatever its potential for war mobilization, would effortlessly fall into line behind him.
The Republicans were a fragile, decentralized coalition with no experience in national office. There were few established Lincoln loyalists in Congress.
Organizationally the party was in practice little more than an agglomeration of local and state bodies. Philosophically, too, it was divided, as internal conflicts over emancipation, the conduct of the war, and reconstruction would show. Many of the President’s most querulous and vociferous critics throughout the war were Republicans. Lincoln’s essential task, if it were to become a truly effective rallying force for the administration, was to bind it together and impose his authority on it.
For these purposes he had at hand a potent weapon presidential patronage. There was nothing new in a President fusing his roles as party leader and chief executive by distributing government jobs to the party faithful.
But Lincoln had the added bonus of controlling appointments to the thousands of new offices occasioned by the wartime expansion of the army and government departments. An experienced and skillful party manager,
who possessed a potent combination of tenacity, patience, and command of detail, he devoted an enormous slice of his time to disposing of these posts.
It was a wearisome and even draining exercise, as he sought to avoid gratuitously upsetting the competitors for office while yet remaining evenhanded towards the various party factions, including his critics. But his attentiveness and refusal to be bullied undoubtedly paid off. He built up a bank of congressional indebtedness, by meeting the patronage requests of interceding Congressmen, and created such highly effective cadres of
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supporters at state level that he easily outmaneuvered those who had hoped to prevent his running fora second term. Lincoln’s complete mastery of the party’s nominating convention at Baltimore in June, 1864, was a measure of the skill and diligence with which he had attended to the minutiae of internal party affairs.
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The spontaneous demonstrations of Union patriotism that immediately followed hostilities at Fort Sumter meant Lincoln’s call to arms scarcely needed reechoing by grassroots Republicans, though in fact local party leaders leapt to beat the martial drum, and mobilize men and resources,
in unyielding response to secessionist defiance.
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However, as the early enthusiasm gave way first to frustration and then to war-weariness, it grew increasingly urgent to remind people of the Union’s meaning. Lincoln looked to his Congressmen, governors and local leaders to spread within their constituencies the themes of his formal addresses, and to sell each new development of policy as it was defined the Emancipation Proclamation,
the use of black troops, the unacceptability of peace on the terms of “the
Union as it was It was an expectation by no means realized in every case,
as Republican conservatives jibbed at emancipation, while radicals, criticizing Lincoln’s caution, articulated more ambitious objectives in less emollient language. But an influential core of party loyalists, notably among the Republican governors, persistently proved their worth to Lincoln as interpreters of the administration’s purpose.
All Northern governors in 1861 were loyal party men. They owed their office to the party they had been energetic and essential agents of national victory in 1860. As the war progressed they encouraged the President to take more power into federal hands, and became themselves increasingly dependent on Washington without War Department funds Governor
Morton of Indiana would have had to recall a Democratic legislature which,
bitterly opposed to an emancipationist war, had refused appropriations;
in the critical state elections of 1863, especially in Connecticut, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania, Lincoln’s interventionism included dispensing patronage,
getting troops furloughed home to vote, and ensuring that government clerks were given leave (and free railroad passes) to reach the polls. Thus the demands and protectiveness of party increasingly bound state and national governments together, and their mutual dependence had huge implications for Washington’s communication of the Union’s purpose. For one thing, it made possible political stage management in cultivating public confidence. After McClellan’s retreat from Richmond in the summer of, Lincoln feared that a call fora further 100,000 men, though badly needed, would provoke a general panic and stampede . . . so hard it is to have a thing understood as it really is Instead, in a scheme involving Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Republican governors Edwin Morgan of New
York and Curtin of Pennsylvania, Lincoln got the loyal governors to sign a
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memorial ostensibly emanating from them but in reality drawn up by the administration.
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The interdependence of state and national administrations, as Eric
McKitrick has shrewdly argued, became even more salient after the midterm electoral setbacks of 1862: Democratic gains led state Republican organizations into energetic defense of national policy—notably in justifying emancipation as essential and consistent with the original purpose of the war—and into lambasting their opponents, now encouraged to bolder calls for peace, as traitors. In this context, Republicans read their victories in the state elections of 1863 not simply as local successes but as a triumph for
Lincoln’s administration. Candidates for even the lowest local offices, in asking people to vote Republican, were urging an endorsement of the war,
its purposes, and its leaders. Wartime elections provided the arena, and the
Republican Party the means, for continual affirmation and reaffirmation of national purpose.”
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One of the most powerful ligaments of party, and its most ubiquitous instrument of political persuasion, was the newspaper press. Lincoln’s experience in Illinois had taught him its value in developing among subscribers a common understanding and intent. He had written occasional articles, provided financial subsidies, and indeed bought one paper—the

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