Something is amiss in election results in 1862. Abraham Lincoln and Election Fraud? | Democracy, elections, and voting

According to Richard Pildes at Election Law Blog, something is amiss in Abraham Lincoln’s election results in 1862. Apparently there is more controversy to be investigated here according to the article, Did Election Fraud Help Win the Civil War?”  Here is an excerpt:

One remarkable feature of the American Civil War is that in its midst we nonetheless held regularly scheduled elections.  And as is well-known, in the 1862 mid-term election, President Lincoln and the Republican Party suffered devastating losses in the U.S. House.  The Republican Party barely retained partisan control of the House, with the plurality but not the majority of seats (even with almost no representation of the Confederate States), although the Republicans did remain firmly in control of the Senate.  The five largest states in the North, all of which had gone for Lincoln in 1860 — New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Lincoln’s home state, Illinois — now sent Democratic majorities to Congress, as did New Jersey.

Without effective Republican control of the House, many of the legislative measures essential to the war and emancipation might not have been enacted during the critical years between 1863-65. But did the Republican Party manage to maintain control of the House only because of election fraud?  That’s the striking, underdeveloped allegation I ran across in reading a provocative new book on the origins of the Civil War, Thomas Flemming’s A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. Flemming makes this assertion just in one paragraph, which I quote in full here:

Worse, the Republican Party took a drubbing in the November midterm elections. Kentucky was carried for the Union using totally desperate tactics. At each polling place, there were detachments of Union troops. When a Democrat arrived to vote, the officer in command warned him that he could not guarantee his safety on the way home. Most of the time, the man decided not to vote. Kentucky’s fraudulently elected delegation enabled the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives. If the Democrats had won, they would have had the power to cut off funding for the war.

According to the extensive and monumental work, ‘Ordeal of the Union’, by Joseph Allan Nevins, the writing of which took from 1947 to 1971, Lincoln faced passionate anti-war opposition during the election of 1862:

Republicans lost 22 seats in Congress, while the Democrats picked up 28, for a net swing of 50 seats (or 27 percent) out of a total House membership of 185.  The mid-term elections in 1862 brought the Republicans serious losses due to sharp disfavor with the Administration over its failure to deliver a speedy end to the war, as well as rising inflation, high new taxes, ugly rumors of corruption, the suspension of habeas corpus, the draft law, and fears that freed slaves would undermine the labor market. The Emancipation Proclamation announced in September gained votes in Yankee areas of New England and the upper Midwest, but it lost votes in the ethnic cities and the lower Midwest. While Republicans were discouraged, Democrats were energized and did especially well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and New York. Elated Democrats from the Northwest hailed the elections as a repudiation of the emancipation heresy.

The Republicans did keep control of the major states except New York. Most important, the Republicans retained control of the House, in spite of falling from 59% of the seats to just over 46% because of their alliance with the 24 Unionist representatives; the Unionists were a group of disaffected pro-war Democrats who broke with their party during the previous Congress. The voters, editorialized the Cincinnati Gazette, “are depressed by the interminable nature of this war, as so far conducted, and by the rapid exhaustion of the national resources without progress.”

Also in the more recent work by Bruce Tap, “Race, Rhetoric, and Emancipation: the Election of 1862 in Illinois. Civil War History“, the reason for the opposition was directly related to the war:

A typical result came in Lincoln’s home district of Springfield, Illinois, where John T. Stuart, a Democrat and one of Lincoln’s former law partners, defeated the Republican incumbent. Anti-black sentiments that overwhelmingly favored forbidding immigration of freed slaves and preventing black suffrage was primarily responsible.