On November 8, 1864, Abraham Lincoln defeated his former general George B. McClellan to win reelection, carrying 212 of 233 electoral votes despite widespread war-weariness. The result, buoyed by Union military successes including Sherman's capture of Atlanta, signaled that Northern voters supported continuing the war until the Confederacy's defeat and slavery's abolition, rather than pursuing a negotiated peace.
By the summer of 1864, Lincoln himself doubted he could win. The war had dragged on for over three years, casualty lists grew each week, and the Democratic Party nominated General George McClellan on a platform that flirted with a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Lincoln was so pessimistic that in August he wrote a secret memorandum committing his cabinet to cooperate with the incoming administration to save the Union before inauguration, since he expected to lose.
The military tide turned his fortunes. General William Tecumseh Sherman's capture of Atlanta on September 2 and Philip Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah Valley convinced Northern voters that victory was achievable and worth the continued cost. Soldiers themselves voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln, with several states allowing absentee ballots from the front for the first time, a remarkable innovation permitting men fighting the war to vote on its continuation.
Lincoln won the popular vote by roughly 55 to 45 percent but crushed McClellan in the Electoral College, 212 to 21. The result validated the Emancipation Proclamation and paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln pushed through Congress in the following months. He would not live to see the war's end; he was assassinated five months later, in April 1865.
Key people: Abraham Lincoln, George B. McClellan