Richard Carwardine

He's aware that by insisting on making emancipation a condition of peace negotiations with the Confederacy, he's giving political ammunition to the Democrats.

The Democrats, the opposition, are saying, you're deliberately protracting the war to secure abolition.

You could get peace if only you were prepared to think about reuniting the country on the Constitution as it once was, not on what you want it to be.

So there was a lot at stake here.

The election of 1864 is, in my view, the most significant election in American history, the most significant for democracy in American history.

The war begins, I mean, secession is met by Lincoln's determination to hold the Union together to resolve the question of whether, as he put it, a constitutional republic, a democracy, a government of the people can or cannot maintain its integrity against its own internal foes.

I'm Richard Carwoodine.

I taught for a number of years in Oxford University.

I'm the Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History.

He thinks of abandoning emancipation as a basis for peace.

But, but, he decides it would be an ignominious surrender.

He can't

possibly yield on that.

He said, and I quote, it would be worse than losing the presidential contest.

On the one side, you've got the democratic opposition considering Lincoln and the administration and the federal army to be a tyrannical force willing to crush individual freedom in a pursuit of reunion and an unnatural emancipationist racial order.

On the other hand, you've got Lincoln and the National Union Party pledging themselves to seeing the war right through to its conclusion.

They're offering a vision of a reunified nation no longer stained by slavery.

The country would be, I suppose, true to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It would emerge from the war with a richer democracy,

Things are looking so bleak, in fact, Lincoln's party chairman comes to Lincoln and he says, you know, you're going to lose Illinois.