While many Americans savor the three-day weekend that Presidents’ Day brings each February in tribute to the birthdays of the nation’s two great presidents, George Washington on Feb. 22, 1732 and Abraham
Lincoln on Feb. 12, 1809, fewer know that Lincoln’s towering legacy in preserving the United States and ending slavery likely would not have been achieved if not for the wartime election of 1864.

Amid the horrific mounting casualties and shifting fortunes in battle of the Union and Confederate armies, Lincoln campaigned as the one-term incumbent against Gen. George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln had twice demoted for his overly cautious conduct and tactical blunders as a commanding general. McClellan was the nominee of a Democratic Party itself divided over whether to continue the war or to negotiate a peace settlement that might have resulted in the continuation of slavery in the federal Union or permanent secession of the Southern states.

Republicans, meanwhile, were gloomy at the prospect of national history repeating itself: no incumbent president had won reelection to the White House since Andrew Jackson in 1832. About two months before the November 1864 vote, Lincoln in a sealed message acknowledged that both
his presidency and the Union were imperiled by its outcome, writing that “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.” It would be his duty, Lincoln wrote, to cooperate with the victorious McClellan “so as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”

In the end, Union soldiers, casting their ballots in the field camps of combat in the first national election that made widespread use of absentee voting, swung victory to their Commander-in-Chief in the White House. While Lincoln received 53 percent of the overall vote of citizens, almost 80 percent, four out of every five, U.S. soldiers voted to return him to office amid the most deadly war in our nation’s history. That electoral victory was secured despite efforts by a group of New York Democrats, alarmed at the prospect of absentee voters in blue uniforms determining the election in Lincoln’s favor, to alter or cast
fraudulent votes of Union soldiers for McClellan. Their conspiracy was discovered before the election and the perpetrators arrested and convicted, though innocent parties too were ensnared in the highly publicized scandal and allegations of partisan fraud.

Among the innocent associates of the political fraudsters was Lewis County Sheriff Peter Kirley, an Irish immigrant to the town of Watson and longtime Democratic Party official at the state and county levels. Kirley in the 1864 election narrowly lost his bid for reelection to the sheriff’s office. The damage to his reputation among Lewis County voters apparently was short-lived: in 1867, Sheriff Kirley was reelected to the office he had lost in the momentous election of 1864.

The intriguing details of that greatly consequential election for our nation and the advent and impact of absentee voting in the midst of the Civil War are the subject of Andrew Reid’s longform article, “The Election of 1864: Soldiers’ Votes, Party Fraud, and Sheriff Kirley’s Misadventure.” The well- researched article by Andrew, an English and social studies teacher at South Lewis Middle School, was published in the November 2024 issue of the Lewis County Historical Society Journal. It makes for timely reading
now: Soldiers’ Votes, Party Fraud, and Sheriff Kirley’s Misadventure