7.8.2012 LINCOLN ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

(approaching the election of 1864) 'i cannot run the political machine, lincoln was quoted as saying during the campaign; i have enough on my hands without THAT. it is the PEOPLE'S business'. he did not take part in any of the hundreds of campaign marches and torchlight processions staged by the national union (republican) party throughout the north. he was not involved in the work of the loyal publication societies, headed by francis lieber in new york and by john murray forbes in boston, which distributed more than half a million union pamphlets bearing titles like 'no party now but all for our country'. he did nothing to encourage partisan newspapers that attacked the democrats as copperheads or charged that they were engaged in a 'peace party plot!' (indeed, he discounted tales of copperhead conspiracies as puerile (childishly foolish)

nor did l take public notice of the attacks democrats made on him during the campaign. he did not comment on democratic rallies where partisans carried banners reading TIME TO SWAP HORSES, NOVEMBER 8TH or NO MORE VULGAR JOKES. he probably never saw scurrilous democratic pamphlets, like the Lincoln catechism, wherein the eccentricities & beauties of despotism are fully set forth, which called him 'abraham africanus the first' and quoted the first of the president's own ten commandments:
'thou shalt have no other God but the negro'. the repeated democratic charge that he and the republicans favored intermarriage of blacks and whites l acknowledged only indirectly, joking that miscegenation was 'a democratic mode of producing good union men, and i dont propose to infringe on the patent'. he did not respond to democratic charges, raised in as respectable a journal as the new york world, that his administration was characterized by 'ignorance, incompetency, and corruption'. though he was, as mrs. l said, 'almost monomaniac on the subject of honesty', he did not refute the charge that he had helped a relative defraud the quartermaster's department in st. louis.

only once was he tempted to reply to a personal attack. democratic newspapers now revived the canard  (a false or baseless, usually derogatory report, rumor etc.) that while touring the antietam battlefield in september 1862 he had asked ward lamon to sing 'a comic negro song'; they claimed that such behavior demonstrated that he was not 'fit for any office of trust, or even for decent society'. belligerently lamon attempted to refute the slander, but l, thinking it would be better simply to state the facts, wrote out his own account of how he had indeed-days after the battle and far from the soldiers' cemetery-asked lamon to sing 'a little sad song'. then he told lamon not to publish his reply, saying, 'i dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which i know was right'.

l's public appearances during the campaign were rare. in june he did attend the great central sanitary fair, held in philadelphia to raise money for the sanitary commission and other groups providing for the needs of the soldiers, but he said little. 'i do not really think it is proper in my position for me to make a political speech, he told a group at the hotel continental, and...being more a politician than anything else, i am without anything to say'. when volunteer regiments, on their way home as their terms of enlistment expired, came by the white house, he thanked them for their service and said nothing more partisan than that they should 'rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free government'.