The election of 1864

One way to get out of a blue funk, at least for me, is to go to a great lecture on the Civil War.

As a member of the James Turrill Civil War Roundtable in Lapeer I always look forward to our monthly programs. Tonight was a really good one.

Bob, a history teacher in Flint, gave a fascinating talk about the politics leading up to the 1864 re-election of Abraham Lincoln. I wish I had the memory to recreate the entire talk, but for those of us who are history buffs, the intricate details of the political machinations were very interesting.

One fact I do remember is that Lincoln, by consensus one of, if not the, greatest President in our country's history only won re-election, during an unpopular war, by a relatively narrow 2.2 million to 1.8 million vote.

So that means that in his time, Lincoln was pretty much opposed by half the people he represented. History has been good to him, even if fate wasn't.

Although he was often viewed in his day as a country bumpkin, he had a shrewd political mind and navigated the political waters with great skill. Attempts to get him to declare an armistice in the months leading up to the election failed.

Bob wondered aloud that if an armistice was declared so a peace could be negotiated leading up to the election whether the Civil War could ever have actually been won by the north. Would anyone in the north be willing to start up the war again after it had stopped for awhile? Would Lincoln have been re-elected, or would Gen. George McClellan, a peace candidate, beaten Lincoln?

Of course, the questions are completely unanswerable, but still fun to discuss.

So as you can see, I'm pretty much a history nerd. Everything was going pretty well until after the end of the lecture and then everyone at the lecture turned to me and wanted to know what I thought of the events at the Flint Journal this week.

I told them I pretty much felt like General Lee must have felt after Gettysburg. They could relate to that.