"Illinois is Rotten with Traitors!" The Republican Defeat in the 1862 State Election

Abstract

As 1860 election returns slowly trickled into party headquarters, Chicago's Republicans began to celebrate. Their candidate for president, fellow fllinoisan Abraham Lincoln swept North and Electoral College in a landslide. Even Illinois, heretofore staunchly Democratic, succumbed to appeal of man newspapers dubbed rail splitter, with Republicans claiming governorship and state legislature. In streets outside Chicago Tribune offices, crowds of men and women abroad in streets, and eagerly asking and exchanging latest, unwilling to go home there was any good news yet to be received. The next day the streets were thronged with Republicans, eager to hear confirmation and swelling of previous days' triumph. The vast Republican rally that evening featured speeches, bonfires, rockets and Roman candles, and a two-hundred-gun grand salute. More prosaic Republicans pocketed thousands of dollars their downcast Democratic friends wagered on election results.1 Yet only years later, and in midst of a war, Illinois reversed itself and voted Democratic. This article will examine how and why Illinois' Republican majority of 1860 and proUnion consensus of 1861 disappeared by November 1862 elections. The article will also examine whether Republican defeat in 1862 was caused by Emancipation Proclamation (as many scholars assert), or by Republican voters unable to vote because they had volunteered for army (as some contemporaries believed). When Civil War erupted in April of 1861, nation's leading Democrat, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, promptly called upon his fellow-IUinoisan and long-time political foe, President Abraham Lincoln, to pledge his support. Lincoln appreciated both pledge and potential support from Douglas's many followers in North. A few days later, Douglas returned home to Illinois to rally Democrats to support war to save Union. There are only sides to question, he proclaimed. There be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors. All Americans, but especially Democrats, should support war, even if they longed for peace, becausethe shortest way to peace is most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war.2 In 1861 citizens of Illinois, heeding Douglas's patriotic appeal, enthusiastically sustained Union cause. Democrats vied with Republicans in endorsing President Lincoln's decision to use force to preserve Union. Almost everyone (except professional soldiers) thought war would be short, sweet, and successful. The Chicago Tribune, leading Republican Party newspaper in Chicago, predicted that Union victory would take two or three months at furthest. Illinois alone, Tribune boasted, can whip South by herself.3 However, that initial burst of boastful newspaper optimism and bipartisan enthusiasm soon subsided. The war did not end in three months or six months. Casualties mounted. Taxes rose. And as Lincoln administration undertook war measures that interfered with traditional civil liberties, political divisions re-emerged. The commitment of Douglas and of those Democrats who looked to Douglas as their leader to war effort, while sincere, did not mean that normal operations of party politics would somehow disappear. Democrats had every right to think of themselves as natural governing party of nation and of Illinois. Until 1860 Illinois had always voted for Democratic Party's presidential candidate. As late as 1858, Democrats had controlled state legislature and re-elected Douglas to U.S. Senate. Many Illinois Democrats looked upon new, upstart Republican Party, born as a third-party coalition of disparate elements, as a flash-in-the-pan, which, like Know-Nothing movement of a few years earlier, would founder on its own internal contradictions, with Democratic Party retaking control of state. …