By 1864 , the Union Army ’s victories in Vicksburg and Gettysburg were overshadowed by mature criticism of the president ’s leading and the failure to captivate Richmond . Lincoln dread he would n’t be re - elect , unless he could produce tangible evidence that the end of the Civil War was in passel .
As the laurels - acquire historian Susan Schultennoteson her web log , Mapping the Nation , Lincoln believe that a renunciation of his presidency would be a repudiation of the warfare itself . With a third - party candidate , John Frémont , threatening to steal votes away from dissatisfied Republicans , it was not unthinkable that the Democrats — who prefer an armistice with no preconditions — would gain ground the White House . The Democrats prefer George McClellan as their candidate ; the superior general whom Lincoln had fired two class previously .
fortuitously for Lincoln , just two months before the election , Confederate force surrendered Atlanta to Union forces under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman . Though this was not the only broker in the election , it certainly manifest strong territorial gain for the Union . Frémont chose not to continue his effort and the Democrats were handily vote out in November .
Schulten writes that :
Had McClellan won , General Sherman ’s march through Georgia would surely have come to an ending . But instead , just daytime after the election , Sherman took his men on one of the ambitious and bad campaigns of the state of war , cutting loose from his supply line to cut a sixty - mile belt through to the ocean . He reached Savannah on December 10 , presenting the city to the Chief Executive as an other Christmas natural endowment .
It was at this moment , just after the election , that Lincoln ’s top engineers delivered a serial of function to the Senate to demonstrate the substantive victories made by Sherman and the larger promise that victory was near … .To exhibit these gains the Chief Engineer of the Corps took a commercially published mapping of the U.S. and colored those areas under Union and rebel control in 1861 and 1864 . Notice that in the 1861 single-valued function even the formally patriotic slave states of Missouri and Kentucky are partially colored in rebel color , as if to acknowledge the very genuine Confederate sentiment in those states .
This made the contrast to the 2d map represent November 1864 all the more apparent and tangible . If Virginia remained stubbornly Confederate , there were still huge and undeniable territorial victory … . The conquest of the Mississippi had completely bisected the Confederacy . But it was the gains in Georgia that incite the Corps to make the single-valued function , for they showed an penetration into the center of the Confederacy , and correspondingly signaled the war ’s terminal phase .
Sherman ’s conquest is call up as one of the most controversial campaign of the warfare . But the outcome mattered not just for the war but for politics . The double victories on the field of battle and at the ballot loge gave Lincoln the authorisation not just to go on the warfare , but to press the House to pass on a organic amendment permanently end slaveholding in the U.S.
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