This was Lincolnâ??s great worry now: that the American people still were not braced to the scope and scale of the war. Not even Antietam and emancipation had brought the reality home. In early November, as he watched McClellanâ??s inadequate movements and studied the discouraging election returns that had continued to roll in over the past few weeks, the president became convinced that these were two symptoms of the same disease. Both the army and the voters labored under the delusion that there was an easy way to restore the Union. In the ranks, this false hope showed itself in the multitude of soldiers on furlough from the front. Even while standing face-to-face with the enemy, troops by the tens of thousands blithely asked to go home, and their elected officers lacked the backbone to say no. The number of troops away on leave had grown so large that Lincoln could not find precise figures. â??At this very moment,â? he wrote in an undated November memo, â??there are between seventy [thousand] and one hundred thousand men absent on furlough from the Army of the Potomac.â?
Wishful thinking about the war also prevailed among many in the general public, and wherever it did it produced support for Democratic candidates who promised a quick peace and the restoration of the Union â??as it wasâ?â?? the Union with all the old compromises over slavery intact. In a note to himself, the president lamented: â??The army, like the nation, has become demoralized by the idea that the war is to be ended, the nation united, and peace restored, by strategy, and not by hard desperate fighting.â?
Lincoln used some of the same words when a delegation of women from the U.S. Sanitary Commission paid him a visit one evening in early November. No civilian organization was more important to the war effort than the Sanitary Commission, which organized volunteers and raised money to meet the medical and morale needs of the troops. The delegation called on the president in hopes of hearing a few words of good news to take home with them, but Lincoln had none to offer. â??A deeper gloom rested on his face than on that of any person I had ever seen,â? the writer and activist Mary Livermore recalledâ?? though, she reported, he did cheer up slightly when he heard that she was from Chicago. Chicagoâ??s mud, he joked, was even worse than Washingtonâ??s.
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