National Union Party | |
|---|---|
 1864 National Union Party campaign banner | |
| Chairperson | Henry J. Raymond[1] |
| Governing body | National Union Executive Committee |
| U.S. Presidents | Abraham Lincoln Andrew Johnson |
| U.S. Vice President | Andrew Johnson |
| Speaker of the House | Schuyler Colfax |
| Founded | 1861; 164 years ago (1861) |
| Dissolved | 1867; 158 years ago (1867) |
| Merger of | Republican Party War Democrats Unconditional Union Party |
| Merged into | Republican Party |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Ideology | |
| Colors | Red White Blue (United States national colors) |
| Senate | 40 / 52 (1865, peak) |
| House of Representatives | 147 / 192 (1865, peak) |
| Governors | 26 / 36 (1866, peak)[7] |
TheNational Union Party, commonly known as theUnion Party, and sometimes as theRepublican-Union coalition, was a wartime coalition ofRepublicans,War Democrats, andborder stateUnconditional Unionists that supported theLincoln administration during theAmerican Civil War. It held the1864 National Union Convention that nominatedAbraham Lincoln forpresident andAndrew Johnson forvice president in the1864 United States presidential election.[8] FollowingLincoln's assassination, Johnson tried and failed to sustain the Union Party as a vehicle for his presidential ambitions.[9] The coalition did not contest the1868 elections, but the Republican Party continued to use the Union Republican label throughout the period ofReconstruction.[10]
Abraham Lincoln won the1860 United States presidential election, polling 180electoral votes and 53 percent of the popular vote in thefree states; opposition to Lincoln was divided, with most NorthernDemocrats voting for the seniorU.S. senator fromIllinoisStephen Douglas.[11] Followinghis inauguration, Lincoln sought support from Douglas Democrats andSouthern Unionists for his efforts to preserve theUnion.[12] He encouraged the formation of bipartisan Union coalitions in the loyal states that replaced the Republican Party throughout much of the Lower North.[13] Besides allowing voters of diverse pre-war partisan allegiances to act collectively, the Union label served a valuablepropaganda purpose by implying the coalition's opponents weredis-unionists.[14]
The preeminent policy of the National Union Party was the preservation of the Union by the prosecution of the war to its ultimate conclusion. They rejected proposals for a negotiated peace as humiliating and ultimately ruinous to the authority of the national government. The party's 1864 platform called for theabolition ofslavery byconstitutional amendment, a "liberal and just"immigration policy, completion of thetranscontinental railroad, and condemned theFrench intervention in Mexico as dangerous torepublicanism.[15]
Creation of a "Union Party" was proposed frequently in the decade preceding the American Civil War. During thepresidency of Millard Fillmore,Daniel Webster and others envisioned theUnion Party as a vehicle for political moderates to support theCompromise of 1850 against attacks from abolitionists andsecessionistFire-Eaters. The Union Party movement failed to displace the establishedparty system; however, some state parties lingered into the 1850s. The decline and collapse of theWhig Party after 1854 prompted a nationalpolitical realignment in which members of theanti-extensionistFree Soil Party joined Whig and Democratic opponents of theKansas-Nebraska Act to organize the Republican Party on a broad antislavery basis. In the1856 presidential election, the Republican candidateJohn C. Fremont polled a plurality of votes cast in the free states, making the Republicans the largest party in the North.[16] However, a significant number of ex-Whigs, including various opponents of the Democrats in the slave states, remained aloof from the new Republican organization, in part because of the party's reputation for abolitionism.[17] Many of these conservatives joined theConstitutional Union Party that nominatedJohn Bell andEdward Everett in the 1860 presidential election.[18] The Bell-Everett ticket carried the states ofKentucky,Tennessee, andVirginia, ran second in the remaining slave states, and claimed 14% of the popular vote inMassachusetts, but the Republicans won the votes of most former Whigs and thus the election.[19]
Antebellum Americans were steeped in antiparty ideology, even as political parties played an essential role in thepolitical culture of the nation. In the crisis of the 1850s,Revolutionary era warnings against the ill effects offactionalism in arepublic attracted renewed attention and commentary. Observers frequently attributed risingsectionalism andradicalization to the work of unscrupulous party agitators whose reckless pursuit of power had brought the nation to the brink of destruction. These "ignorant, vicious, and corrupt" individuals sowed divisions amongst the electorate and substituted appeals to self-interest for concern for the general good. Simultaneously, the belief that the success of one's party was in the best interest of the survival of the nation naturally lent itself to the conclusion that partisan rivals were a threat to Union and republicanism. Calls for a "Union Party" appealed to both ideals by dissolving old party allegiances in favor of a coalition of all loyal citizens while identifying its opposition as disloyal and disunionist.[20]
The election of Abraham Lincoln precipitated the secession of 11 slave states between December 1860 and June 1861, plunging the nation into an unprecedented political crisis. Lincoln owed his election to the support of conservative ex-Whigs in the key states ofIndiana,Illinois, andPennsylvania who had declined to support Fremont in 1856, and whose ideas were at odds with the Radical wing of the Republican Party.[21] He had received few votes in the border states outside ofSt. Louis and none in any of the states that formed theConfederacy, apart from Virginia, where the unionist backcountry remained loyal to the national government. Instead, unionists in these states had predominately voted for Bell or Douglas against the preferred candidate of theFire-Eaters, Vice PresidentJohn C. Breckinridge.[11] Any attempt to restore national authority and mobilize anti-secessionist sentiment behind the Union war effort would therefore require Lincoln to forge political ties with elements who shared his unionist orientation but remained averse to the Republican label and could not be easily integrated within existing Republican organizations.[22]
In the months between Lincoln's election and inauguration, conservatives implored the incoming administration to break with the Republican Party in order to facilitate an alliance with Southern moderates that could restore the Union and avert a civil war. Substantial opinion maintained that a majority ofwhite Southerners still opposed secession, but that the influence of abolitionists prevented them from working in concert with the Republican Party. A Union Party would avoid this obstacle by making preservation of the Union the only test of loyalty to the administration. At a dinner in honor of theFrench ambassador to the United States,William H. Seward, soon to besecretary of state in Lincoln's cabinet, charged attendees to renounce "all parties, all platforms of previous committals and whatever else will stand in the way of a restoration of the American Union." Seward and the conservatives believed that any attempt to restore the Union by force would alienate the alleged unionist majority in the slave states. Instead, they hoped to use the Union Party as a vehicle to mobilize opposition to secession and secure reunion peacefully and on the basis of sectional compromise.[23]
Lincoln, however, was unwilling for the Republican Party to follow the fate of the Whigs and alienate its base of support in the free states in pursuit of an alliance with Southern conservatives.[24] During the winter of 1860–61, he intervened decisively to defeat theCrittenden Compromise, a set of proposed constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed the existence of slavery in perpetuity south of the36°30′ line. This would have constituted an abandonment of the Republican platform pledge to oppose the extension of slavery into theU.S. territories, a reversal that Lincoln predicted would damn the Republican Party to be a "mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it." Rather than courtconditional unionists, as Whig presidentMillard Fillmore had done in 1850, Lincoln sought to recruit unconditional unionists from the border states for positions in his administration.[25] In hisfirst inaugural address, the new president endorsed the proposedCorwin Amendment, which would have guaranteed slavery in the slave states, but not in the territories—an offer the secessionists had already rejected.[26] While Lincoln and his advisors knew this compromise proposal could not be accepted, it allowed them to shift the onus for war to the secessionists and "meet Disunion as patriots rather than as partizans." In this way, Lincoln went about laying the foundation for a future Union Party that gave cover to border state unionists to affiliate with the administration without compromising his 1860 campaign pledge to oppose the admission of new slave states.[27]
Thecommencement of hostilities in April 1861 dispelled the possibility of an alliance between administration supporters and conditional unionists. In short order, the Confederate bombardment and capture ofFort Sumter, Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, the secession of the four Upper South states, and military mobilization in the Union and the Confederacy remade the political landscape in both sections. These events had different implications for administration supporters in the free states and the loyal border states. In the latter, the immediate aim of the unionist movement was to prevent secession and install loyal governments that would cooperate with the administration. This was achieved inMaryland and Kentucky by the creation of Union parties that won congressional elections in the summer of 1861; inMissouri and western Virginia,[a] unionists organized special conventions that constituted the loyal governing authority in those areas.[28] The Union parties in the border states evolved from opposition coalitions present in those states at the time of the 1860 election and drew votes from former Whigs,Know Nothings, Republicans, and dissident Democrats.[29] They were not affiliated with a national party organization in 1861 and walked a careful line by providing critical support to Lincoln's wartime administration while opposing the Republican position on slavery. TheBlair family were among those who hoped for a national partisan realignment in which a national "Union Party" would replace the Republicans as the major opposition to the Democrats.[30]
In the free states, the Union Party was agrassroots movement that called on citizens to set aside partisanship in the interest of national unity. Patriotic meetings of citizens vowed to "know no party but the Union party until the question is settled whether we have a government or not." In the first weeks of the crisis, public opinion was virtually unanimous in favor of the suspension of party politics. The rise of the peace movement following the disastrous Union defeat at theFirst Battle of Bull Run prompted administration supporters to organize Union state tickets to contest the 1861 and1862 United States elections.[31] These developments were encouraged by Lincoln, who envisioned a Union coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and Southern unionists as a vehicle for his own re-election in 1864. Such a party would provide the basis for national reconstruction following the end of the war, which Lincoln foresaw as "preeminently a political process" that would be guided by loyal residents of the seceded states.[32]
From the outset, the movement for a Union Party encountered significant Republican resistance. Michael Holt argues that Republican opposition to the Union Party "was the chief source of the disagreements between Lincoln and Congress during the war." Congressional Republicans fromsafe districts saw little benefit to courting Democratic and Whig voters; to the contrary, they feared efforts to conciliate conservatives would dilute the strong anti-Slave Power message on which the party had won in 1860. In Illinois,Ohio, Massachusetts, andCalifornia the move to abandon the Republican label provoked outrage among the party faithful. Radical Republicans in particular feared losing influence to conservatives who continued to stridently oppose the Radical stance on slavery and favored a restrained, conciliatory policy toward white Southerners. Radical opposition to merger with ex-Whigs and Democrats in the Union Party preserved the Republican Party as a separate organization in antislavery strongholds in the Upper North.[33]
The result was a partial realignment in which Union coalitions supplanted—but did not extinguish—the Republican Party throughout most of the North. Most administration candidates who contested the 1861 and 1862 elections ran as Unionists. Party composition varied locally; state-specific unionist parties existed in the border states, while in parts ofNew England and theUpper Midwest the Republican label remained in use. In line with contemporary sources, historians have sometimes referred to the "Republican-Union coalition" or party to suggest the heterogenous character of the administration party during this period.[34]
In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana, the Union Party was a coalition of Republicans and War Democrats. The Republican margin in these states was narrow and Democratic recruits supplied much-needed reinforcements for the administration party. Ohio Unionists nominated Douglas DemocratDavid Tod forgovernor in 1861 on a platform endorsing theCrittenden–Johnson Resolution on the war's aims. Tod won theelection comfortably over DemocratHugh J. Jewett with 58 percent of the vote, representing a substantial gain over the Republicans'1859 result. Pennsylvania's Union Party supplemented the state's endangeredRepublican organization (which called itself the People's Party in 1860) with Douglas Democrats alienated from the state party's Breckinridge faction.[35] A similar situation unfolded in Indiana, where theDemocratic Party was divided between partisans ofU.S. senatorJesse D. Bright and formergovernorJoseph A. Wright. When Bright wasexpelled from Congress for colluding with theConfederate presidentJefferson Davis, Republican governorOliver P. Morton seized the opportunity to appoint Wright to his vacant seat and bring Wright's supporters into Indiana's nascent Union Party.[36]
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Republican strength was greatest in New England and the Upper Midwest, where Radical influence impeded the growth of the Union Party. In Massachusetts,Michigan,Minnesota, andIowa, party names and loyalties remained mostly unchanged by the war.[37]Minnesota Republicans evaded an attempt to organize a Union ticket in their state in 1861, and the incumbentgovernorAlexander Ramsey wasre-elected as a Republican that fall.[38] Administration supporters in Michigan still called themselves Republicans in1862, while Democrats co-opted the Union label.[39] Also that year,Massachusetts Republicansdefeated a coalition of conservative opponents which called itself the People's Party.[40]
Some Democrats were especially eager to distance themselves from their party's anti-war faction, producing temporary realignments in several states. InConnecticut andWisconsin, Republicans and War Democrats met separately and nominated a joint ticket for the 1861 elections. Republicans won three-way races against War Democrats and Peace Democrats inMaine,Vermont, andNew Hampshire. InRhode Island, Republicans faced a conservative coalition led by the wartime governorWilliam Sprague, who won re-election unanimously in thefirst wartime election; Sprague subsequently encouraged his supporters to back the Republican candidate in the1863 election to succeed him, precipitating a realignment that returned Republicans to power in the state.[37]
New York was the most critical Upper North state for the administration; here, War Democrats played an outsized role in the birth of the Union Party. After rejecting a Republican proposal for a nonpartisan unity ticket, theNew York Democratic Party met in convention and adopted a platform condemning Lincoln's wartime policies. A minority of War Democrats walked out and held their own convention, which adopted a platform endorsing the administration's war policies and calling for a union of loyal men of all parties in the upcoming elections. The subsequent Republican-Union convention ratified the War Democrats' platform and adopted its statewide ticket with only a single change. Thus, the Union ticket in New York was dominated by former Democrats, while the majority of its supporters had been Republicans prior to 1860.[41]
The pre-war Republican Party was especially weak in thePacific states, where Lincoln gained 32 percent (in California) and 36 percent (inOregon) of the vote, respectively, in 1860; here, as in Rhode Island, Republicans were junior partners in a Union Party coalition dominated by Douglas Democrats and Constitutional Unionists.[37] Circumstances inKansas produced an unusual alliance of Democrats and Radical Republicans, who formed theUnion Party in 1862 to oppose the controversial leadership ofJim Lane. Lane's allies dominated the regularKansas Republican Party, which remained affiliated with the Lincoln administration. The split in the Republican ranks persisted through the end of the war.[42]
Democrats made gains in the1862–63 United States House of Representatives elections, aided by the rise of the peace movement and anti-abolitionist backlash to theEmancipation Proclamation. In Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York the electoral verdict for the administration was dire. Republican-Unionists retained a narrow majority in the lower chamber, where border state unionists held the balance of power. The lack ofabsentee voting helped to depress the Republican-Union vote, as men in active military service—an overwhelmingly Republican constituency—were unable to cast ballots, contributing to Democratic victories in key down-ballot races.[43]
The "palpable failure" of the Union Party to secure the Lower North increased the importance of the border states to the Union coalition.[44] Border state Unionists swept congressional and state elections held in 1862 and 1863 even as the movement was increasingly divided between Radicals and Conservatives. Radicals won the struggle for power in Maryland, where theUnconditional Union Party defeated both the Democrats and the Conservative Unionists in the 1863 congressional elections.[45] Kentucky's Union Democratic Party narrowly avoided a schism in 1863, but after the38th United States Congress convened in December three Radical congressmen—Lucien Anderson,Green Clay Smith, andWilliam H. Randall—crossed the floor and joined the Republican–Unionist coalition, laying the foundation for Kentucky's Unconditional Union Party.[46] The situation in Missouri was chaotic, but before year's end the Radical Union Party had formed to take up the mantle of emancipation and unconditional union.[47]
Radical strength in the border states helped to clarify the Union Party's position on emancipation and Reconstruction. The importance of conservatives in the Lower North and border states to the war effort and Lincoln's hopes for reelection had put pressure on the president to moderate the Republican stance on slavery in 1861. The failure of conciliatory gestures to win over most Democrats, contrasted against strong showings for Radical Unionists in Maryland and Missouri, diminished the importance of the conservatives just as the Radicals were gaining power. Lincoln's chances to carry the border states in 1864 now appeared to depend on a strong stand in favor of abolition. Over the course of 1863, Lincoln moved to align himself with the Radical position on emancipation and the disenfranchisement of Confederate sympathizers in the border states, effectively eliminating intra-party discord on these issues. The terms and conditions of Reconstruction, however, remained a source of contention within the Union coalition.[48]
The Union Party won key elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania in the fall of 1863. In Ohio, the Union candidateJohn Broughdefeated the former U.S. representativeClement Vallandigham, a nationally prominent Peace Democrat.[49] Vallandigham's arrest and conviction by a military court on charges of disloyalty was controversial, and he conducted his campaign while living inexile inCanada.[50] In Pennsylvania, the incumbentgovernorAndrew Gregg Curtin wasre-elected over Peace DemocratGeorge Washington Woodward.[49] Victory in these two states delivered a symbolic mandate for the administration's military and emancipation policies. Critically, Vallandigham's prominence as an opponent of the war in a campaign that functioned as a referendum on the Emancipation Proclamation allowed Unionists to equate anti-abolitionism with disunion. Woodward's public stand against absentee voting for soldiers, meanwhile, reinforced the public perception of Democratic disloyalty and contributed to the strong swing of military voters toward the Union Party.[51]
Delegates of the National Union Party held theirnational convention inBaltimore on June 6–7, 1864. The attendees included Republicans, War Democrats, conservative former Whigs and Know Nothings, Unconditional Unionists, and representatives from every section of the country. Anti-partisanship was a major theme of the proceedings, and several speakers celebrated the diversity of the Union coalition. Lincoln was nominated unanimously on the first ballot. (The Missouri delegation initially voted forUlysses S. Grant but switched their votes before the end of balloting.) The convention nominated themilitary governor of Tennessee Andrew Johnson for vice president. Johnson, a Southern unionist and former Democrat, defeated the Republican incumbent vice presidentHannibal Hamlin and the Democratic former U.S. senator from New YorkDaniel S. Dickinson for the nomination; his selection emphasized the nonpartisan and bisectional premise of the Union Party.[52]
Differing views on Reconstruction posed a major issue that threatened to split the Union coalition in 1864. In December 1863, Lincoln issued theProclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction to guide the restoration of U.S. civilian authority in the Confederacy. The so-called "Ten Percent Plan" provided for the resumption of civil government in states where 10 percent of the voting populationpledged loyalty to the United States and accepted Congressional and executive actions relating to slavery.[53] The proclamation did not guarantee the political or civil rights offreedpeople, but permitted states to adopt "temporary arrangement[s]" with respect to freedpeople "consistent ... with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class."[54] Lincoln's handling of Reconstruction was a major point of contention with abolitionists and Congressional Republican-Unionists, who favored stronger guarantees of the rights of freedpeople and considered the proclamation overly lenient to former Confederates.[55] The creation of reconstructed governments inArkansas,Louisiana, and Tennessee raised fears that Lincoln intended to circumvent Congress and reestablish theAntebellum political order with virtually no changes.[56] These fears were seemingly confirmed when Lincolnpocket vetoed theWade-Davis Bill, prompting swift congressional condemnation.[57]
Radical opposition to Lincoln's Reconstruction policy nearly produced a schism at several points during the campaign. Prior to the Baltimore convention, some Radicals favored the candidacy ofSalmon P. Chase as an alternative to Lincoln. Chase's candidacy failed to gain momentum, as did the attempt by Missouri's Radical Union Party to substitute Grant at the National Union Convention.[58] At Baltimore, an effort to seat delegates from the seceded states met with furious Radical opposition. Pennsylvania delegateThaddeus Stevens argued that seating the Southern delegates would set a precedent for restoring those states' representation in Congress; ultimately, the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee delegations were seated, while those fromFlorida,South Carolina, and Virginia were not.[59] Most seriously, a convention of abolitionists andGerman-Americanradicals met atCleveland on May 31 and nominated John C. Fremont as the presidential candidate of theRadical Democratic Party.[60] The Fremont movement attracted little popular support, but threatened to become a rallying point for anti-Lincoln Republicans in the event that Radicals bolted the Union Party.[61]
Meanwhile, conservatives who since 1863 had grown increasingly alienated from Lincoln over the president's position on slavery plotted to resurrect the Constitutional Union Party as a haven for conservative Republicans, ex-Whigs, and War Democrats. Led byRobert C. Winthrop, they planned to outmaneuver the peace movement and force the Democrats to accept a Conservative Unionist candidate on a platform committed to the restoration of the Union without emancipation. Many hoped thatMillard Fillmore could be drafted to run as the conservative candidate, but the former president declined a third bid for re-election. The national committee of the Conservative Union Party met atPhiladelphia on December 24, 1863, and nominatedGeorge B. McClellan for president andWilliam B. Campbell for vice president. McClellan was subsequently nominated by the1864 Democratic National Convention, but on a platform which called for the immediate cessation of hostilities followed by aconvention of the states to negotiate the terms of national reunion. While McClellan subsequently repudiated the peace plank, his acceptance of the Democratic nomination under such circumstances effectively ended the conservative splinter movement.[62]
While despairing of success for much of the summer, Lincoln's reelection prospects brightened significantly following the Union victory in theAtlanta campaign. The fall of Atlanta abruptly terminated the movement for a second Republican-Union convention and precipitated Fremont's withdrawal from the race in late September.[63][b] Having proclaimed the war a failure, the changing tide caught the Democrats flat-footed. On election day, Lincoln won a resounding victory, carrying all but three of the loyal states and 55 percent of the popular vote.[66]
As the magnitude of Lincoln's electoral margin became known in the days following the election, it became apparent that the Unionists had achieved a historic victory. Lincoln carried all of the important battleground states in the Lower North, including Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He narrowly carried Connecticut and New York, largely due to the soldier vote, which broke four to one in favor of Lincoln. The Union Party swept state elections held throughout the fall of 1864, including the criticalgubernatorial race in Indiana, where the incumbent Morton narrowly defeated his Democratic challenger with the help of soldier ballots. Unionists formed a three-fourths majority in the new House of Representatives, more than reversing the losses of 1862. In the border states, Lincoln captured 54 percent of the overall vote and carried Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia, whileDelaware and Kentucky fell in the Democratic column.[67]
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Lincoln's assassination elevated Johnson to the presidency on April 15, 1865. The new president inherited Lincoln's cabinet, including the increasingly conservative Seward. Intent on seeking re-election, Johnson sought to preserve the Union Party as a vehicle for his political ambitions. Whereas biracialUnion Leagues organized in the immediate aftermath of theConfederate surrender represented a broad working-class constituency for federal Reconstruction policies, Johnson's intenseracism and opposition toBlack suffrage led him to consider moderate elements of the oldplanter elite as essential to a prospective Union Party coalition in the former slave states. Johnson's efforts to appeal to Southern ex-Whigs led him to abandon his past Radical rhetoric in favor of a conciliatory policy toward ex-Confederates.Eric Foner argues that rather than rebuilding the Southern Whig Party as a viable political force, Johnson's overt hostility to the political and civil rights of freedpeople encouraged further resistance to Reconstruction.[68]
Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865 abolishing slavery andinvoluntary servitude in the United States exceptas punishment for a crime.[69] Many members assumed the amendment also abolished "incidents" of slavery, includinglaws restricting civil rights on the basis of race.[70] During 1865 and 1866, reconstructed governments in the former Confederacy enacted laws to severely restrict freedpeople's economic and social mobility, in effect recreating slavery under a new name. Congress responded by passing theCivil Rights Act of 1866 mandatingbirthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws. Johnson's veto of the legislation alienated him from moderate and conservative Republicans in Congress without whom the Union Party could not succeed.[71]
Johnson's supporters held the1866 National Union Convention at Philadelphia ahead ofmidterm elections that would determine control of the40th Congress. In the interim, the president's uncompromising opposition to theFourteenth Amendment exhausted any remaining good will with moderate Republicans in Congress, pushing the latter into closer collaboration with the Radicals. Influential conservatives concluded that the Union Party movement was unlikely to succeed and would serve only to strengthen the Democrats in the fall elections. Those who signed the call for the convention lacked the political influence to sustain a viable national party. In fact, the movement was internally divided and lacked a cohesive vision; many who supported Johnson's policies stayed away from the convention, and those who attended could not agree on whether it was a new conservative coalition or a pretense for Johnson Republicans to support Democratic candidates. The delegates adopted a platform defending Johnson's policies but took no action to establish a new party. Far from uniting conservative unionists behind Johnson, the convention and Johnson's subsequentspeaking tour discredited the president and strengthened conservative support for Black suffrage.[72]
The 1866–67 elections were a disaster for Johnson and marked the effective end of the Union Party. Those who supported the National Union candidates in 1864 went headlong into the Republican Party, which won enormous majorities in both chambers of Congress. Johnson's intransigence in the face of overwhelming Republican opposition to his policies alienated the most important constituencies for the Union Party in the North, while his efforts to conciliate former Confederates failed to build a party of Southern ex-Whigs in the former slave states. The National Union Convention failed to sustain the Union Party or establish a national organization. Instead, Johnson's demand thatpatronage appointees support the Philadelphia platform prompted moderates and conservatives to desert the Union Party en masse. The Republican Party, which had persevered during the war in Radical strongholds in the Upper North, now reemerged to absorb this exodus. After 1867, Republicans and Unconditional Unionists coalesced in the Republican Party, while Conservative Unionists in the border states went over to the Democrats.[73]
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Johnson was not nominated for re-election. The Republicans nominated Grant attheir convention in Chicago days after Johnson was narrowly acquitted by the Senate in thefirst presidential impeachment trial; the meeting called itself the "National Union Republican Convention."[c] TheDemocratic National Convention adopted a resolution thanking Johnson, but passed him over in favor of the formergovernor of New YorkHoratio Seymour. Grant won thefall election on a platform emphasizing national reconciliation against the backdrop of a campaign marked bywhite supremacistparamilitary violence.[75] Johnson persisted in hope that Seymour would withdraw in his favor as late as October, while Seward waited until the final days before the election to offer a tentative endorsement of Grant.[76]
The Union label fell out of general use after 1867, but it retained some currency during the later years of Reconstruction.Missouri's Republican affiliate called itself the Radical Union Party as late as 1870, when the minority seceded to form theLiberal Republican Party.[77] Published convention proceedings for1872 and1876 used the name of the Union Republican Party; the call for the1880 Republican National Convention was the first since 1860 not to include the word "Union" in the party's official name.[78]
Following the contentious1876 United States presidential election, rumors circulated that the new Republican presidentRutherford B. Hayes intended to revive the National Union Party. TheU.S. secretary of the treasuryJohn Sherman wrote Southern Republicans that Hayes aimed "to combine ... in harmonious political action the same class of men in the South as are Republicans in the North; that is, the producing classes, men who areinterested in industry and property. We cannot hope for permanent success inNew Orleans until we can secure conservative support among white men, property holders, who are opposed torepudiation and willing to give the colored people their rights." Hayes completed a tour of the Southern states in hopes of winning conservative Democratic support for the administration but never seriously considered abandoning the Republican Party.[79] Persistent speculation forced Hayes to deny rumors of a partisan realignment. "The President very earnestly, and almost in these words, said that he had always been a Republican, is a Republican, and that the Republican party was never more necessary to the nation than it is to-day. 'That party ... is good enough for me, and by it I intend to stand.'"[80]
| Election | Ticket | Electoral results[81] | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Presidential nominee | Running mate | Popular vote | Electoral votes | Change | Result | |
| 1864 | Abraham Lincoln | Andrew Johnson | 55.02% | 212 / 234 |  32 | Won |
| Congress | House of Representatives | Senate | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Election | Popular vote | Seats | Change | Percent | Election | Seats | Change | Percent | |
| 38th | 1862–63 | 49.68% | 98 / 183 |  25 | 53.55 | 1862–63 | 31 / 50 |  | 62.00 |
| 39th | 1864–65 | 55.00% | 147 / 192 | 49 | 76.56 | 1864–65 | 40 / 52 | 9 | 76.92 |
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