Abraham Lincoln.
"According to historian Jonathan White, his new study of the soldier vote during the Civil War Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln is the topic's first book length scholarly treatise to appear since Josiah Benton's 1915 work Voting in the Field: A Forgotten Chapter of the Civil War. The question of whether soldiers should even be able to vote in the field has vexed politicians and citizens since the early years of the republic. At the beginning of the Civil War, only one Union state (Pennsylvania) allowed army voting, but in the wake of Republican electoral defeats in fall 1862, the Lincoln administration and Republican party sought to leverage the soldier vote to their advantage. Thus, with hundreds of thousands of potential voters in the field, a rather quiet, albeit counterintuitive, part of the American democratic process suddenly became a volatile political football. Democrats argued (presciently, as will be seen) that voting in army camps could never be free and fair, but some of their more paternalistic arguments (ex. ignorance stemming from lack of access to information from both sides and inability to escape Republican propaganda in the army's closed society) offended many soldiers in their own party, who felt perfectly capable of understanding the issues of the war and exercising their right to vote.
The main premise of White's book is that the character and meaning of the soldier vote in the 1864 elections has been widely misinterpreted as an expression of unity toward administration war aims (i.e. restoration of the Union via any number of means, including hard war policies, heavy restrictions on civilian civil rights, and emancipation). The author effectively challenges the conclusions of several well respected historians, taking them to task for their simplistic views and evidence mishandling on the subject. According to White, several factors need to be considered in order to place the 78% soldier vote for Lincoln in its proper context. Rather than being indicative of resounding approval of the Lincoln administration's war and societal aims, the author finds that voter turnout, the drumming out of the service of Democratic officers and men in the post-Emancipation Proclamation years, intimidation at the army polls, and the circumstances of the 1864 nonpresidential elections significantly complicate the issue.
A common concern with Civil War soldier studies is, given the huge amount of source material available, even large selections can be cherry picked to support just about any argument. White goes some way toward mitigating such objections to his own work by using and citing a vast amount of primary source material to support his arguments, including newly examined court martial records and other government documents as well as a huge volume of manuscript material located all across the country and representing soldiers serving in all major armies and theaters
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