If You Think 2024 Is a High-Stakes Election Year, Consider 1864

America, we are being told by pundits and experts, has never been more divided. We're also being told that this election year is the most important in living memory. But a look back at the year 1864 reveals a nation more divided than it ever was before—or afterward. And it was over an issue, slavery, that could no longer be left to resolve itself through further political compromises. The Civil War had been raging for 33 months and was on its way to being the worst man-made disaster in our nation's history, with over 600,000 deaths in a nation of 31 million.

It was also a crucial year, one that would decide the fate of the nation. "More than 1776, which is in my view its only competition, 1864 was the most crucial year in American history," the late historian Charles Bracelen Flood, author of 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History, told an audience gathered at the National Archives in 2009. Flood went on to prove his claim.

His talk, like his book, began with the evening of January 1, 1864, with Abraham Lincoln and his wife greeting over 6,000 well-wishers and fans to the East Wing of the White House. The good cheer quickly dissolved when Lincoln learned that Confederate General Jubal Early had moved 6,000 of his forces into an area of Virginia and West Virginia only 60 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.

"Here you have both reality and symbolism," Flood explained. "After three years of fighting, Lincoln's massive Union army could not capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, 95 miles to the south, while the Confederate army was still a threat to places northwest of Washington."

Flood then described the grim military realities Lincoln faced as the year began. "In 1863, the Union Army had won great victories at Vicksburg, Gettysburg and Chattanooga. But as 1864 began, the Confederates still had the strength and leadership that gave them big wins in Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, Lincoln had not yet promoted Ulysses S. Grant to be his general in chief, and virtually every man of General Robert E. Lee's still powerful Army of Northern Virginia was volunteering to reenlist for the duration of the war and fight no matter how long that might take."

The Confederacy was holding its own. It was functioning as an independent nation, slavery was still alive, and it had to do only two things to prevail in the war: hold on to the ground it held and keep inflicting horrendous casualties on the Union Army until Northern voters were worn down. In short, the Confederacy was hoping the election of 1864 would be a referendum on the war. And Lincoln.

Things were looking bleak for Lincoln heading into the Republican Party's convention in Baltimore in early July. Just weeks before the gathering, Grant's forces suffered terrible losses as they tried to move south against Lee's troops in the bloody Battle of the Wilderness and the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House.

As the convention commenced, Grant began one of the largest attacks of the war, in Cold Harbor, Virginia. He amassed 108,000 men and threw them straight at Lee, whose 62,000 men were firmly entrenched and knew the land. "In the first hour, 7,000 of Grant's men were killed or wounded, the Union attack repulsed and nothing gained," Flood said.

He continued: "The bad news went on for many more weeks. At one point, Grant lost more than 40,000 men in 30 days. That figure grew to 60,000 men dead and wounded in 45 days, and all while advancing a mere 60 miles. By August, the Union losses for 1864 alone had reached a staggering 90,000 men.

Meanwhile, Early led a massive Confederate raid with a force of 12,000 men right to the edge of Washington's fortifications, just 5 miles from the White House. And in Georgia, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman suffered a serious setback at Kennesaw Mountain at the onset of his Atlanta campaign. Union casualties numbered 3,000 to the Confederates' 1,000.

Add to that the economic impact caused by prosecuting the war. "The national debt was at its highest, public credit at its lowest, and the Treasury was running out of money paying for a war that appeared to be at a stalemate," Flood said. "The dollar dropped to a new wartime low of .37 cents, and some prosperous Republicans who wanted Lincoln to be reelected were getting rid of greenbacks and buying land, worried the dollar might become worthless."

The political news for Lincoln was bleak too. Republican insider Thurlow Reed told Lincoln in mid-August of 1864 that his prospects for reelection were nearly impossible. Even Lincoln's private secretary, John Nicolay, understood the depths of the Union Army's plight—and Lincoln's. "Everything is darkness and doubt and discouragement," he wrote that same month. "Our men see giants in the airy and unsubstantial shadows of the opposition, and are about to surrender without a fight."

No one understood this better than Lincoln himself, who wrote a memorandum on August 23, 1864, that he asked his Cabinet members to sign, sight unseen.

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, 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.

Historians refer to this as the "Blind Memorandum," and it's proof of the folly of political forecasting, even by those closest to the political action.

Not long after the memo was signed, Lincoln's fortunes changed. The Democrats nominated General George B. McClellan for president on August 30, and his party's platform declared the war a failure and called for immediate efforts to end it, something even McClellan couldn't fully support.

Days later, on September 3, Lincoln received a telegram from Sherman consisting of only six words: "Atlanta is ours and fairly won."

"Even the most ardent Confederates saw this as an enormous strategic victory for the Union. Atlanta, the South's second most important city after Richmond, dead center in what had been Confederate territory, had fallen," Flood said. "There were still nine weeks until the election, but everything began to go Lincoln's way."

Luckily for America, and because of events almost entirely out of his control, he was reelected in an Electoral College landslide in November 1864. Not long after, on Christmas Day, Lincoln received another telegram from Sherman: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns, and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton."

And thus came to an end one of the most difficult and fractious years in American history, one that forever changed the course of American history. And sealed Lincoln's legacy too.

America has indeed been more divided than we are today. And there have been more important elections than the one before us. One look at 1864 proves that point with clarity.