Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/375

 '* />>/////f>ort from them at any (hue during his adminis- tration. ' '

Dr. Holland's Life, etc., shows (page 476, etseq.), that when Lin- coln killed, by "pocketing" it, a bill for the reconstruction of the Union, which Congress had passed, Ben Wade and Winter Davis, aided by Greeley, published in Greeley's Tribune of August 5th "a bitter manifesto." It charged that the President, by this action, " holds the electoral vote of the rebel States at the discretion of his personal ambition," and that " a more studied outrage on the author- ity of the people has never been perpetrated." An examination to-day of the official record of the electoral vote by which Lincoln got his second term, fully verifies the above charge. Nicolay and Hay's Abraham Lincoln, and General Benjamin F. Butler's autobi- ography (the title is Butler 1 s Book), alike concede the fictitious pre- tense of a State that was counted as casting the vote of the State of Virginia in the electoral college, and similar farces were played in the case of others of the " rebel States," just as foreseen by Wade and Henry Winter Davis. This accounts for the much boasted ma- jority recorded by the electoral college in Lincoln's favor, and the small majority, as officially recorded, of votes of the people. Mc- Clellan, on a platform that said the war must stop, got eighty-one per cent of the votes that were cast for Lincoln. This was the vote of the people of the "loyal" States, in spite of the fact that criticism of the Administration was, by order of the War Department, treason, triable by court martial, and that a man so enormously popular in his State (Ohio) as Vallandigham lay under sentence of banishment, a punishment new to this country and imposed for a new offense, "not for deeds done but for words spoken," to use the words in which it was denounced by John Sherman, and these words spoken in public debate and received with wild applause by thousands. Soldiers ruled at the polls Butler 1 s Book (pages 754 to 773) gives full particulars of the large force with which he occupied New York city and shows how completely he controlled its vote and its oppo- sition to the war and to emancipation that had lately been demon- strated in its great anti-draft riot. This "riot" had countenance from the Governor (Seymour) and the Arch-Bishop (Hughs), as Nicolay and Hay elaborately describe in their Abraham Lincoln; and Gorham, in his lately published Life of Stanton, says that if the battle of Gettysburg, then raging, had been of opposite result, New York would not have submitted.

Lincoln refused to listen at all to the Southern commissioners,