National Union Party (United States)

Creation of a "Union Party" was a frequent proposition in the decade preceding the American Civil War. During the presidency of Millard Fillmore, Daniel Webster and others envisioned the Union Party as a vehicle for political moderates to support the Compromise of 1850 against attacks from abolitionists and secessionist Fire-Eaters. The Union Party movement failed to displace the established party system; however, some state parties lingered into the 1850s. The decline and collapse of the Whig Party after 1854 prompted a national political realignment in which members of the anti-extensionist Free Soil Party joined Whig and Democratic opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to organize the Republican Party on a broad antislavery basis. In the 1856 presidential election, the Republican candidate John C. Fremont polled a plurality of votes cast in the free states, making the Republicans the largest party in the North.{{sfn|Holt|1999|pp=599, 677–78, 838–39, 841, 979}} 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.{{sfn|Foner|1995|p=199}} Many of these conservatives joined the Constitutional Union Party that nominated John Bell and Edward Everett in the 1860 presidential election.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|p=221}} The Bell-Everett ticket carried the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, ran second in the remaining slave states, and claimed 14% of the popular vote in Massachusetts, but the Republicans won the votes of most former Whigs and thus the election.{{sfnm|1a1=Dubin|1y=2002|1p=159|2a1=Foner|2y=1995|2p=218}}

Antebellum Americans were steeped in antiparty ideology, even as political parties played an essential role in the political culture of the nation. In the crisis of the 1850s, Revolutionary era warnings against the ill effects of factionalism in a republic attracted renewed attention and commentary. Observers frequently attributed rising sectionalism and radicalization 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=9–10, 37, 16}}

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 of Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania who had declined to support Fremont in 1856, and whose ideas were at odds with the Radical wing of the Republican Party.{{sfn|Foner|1995|pp=217–18}} He had received few votes in the border states outside of St. Louis and none in any of the states that formed the Confederacy, 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 the Fire-Eaters, Vice President John C. Breckinridge.{{sfn|Dubin|2002|p=159}} 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=27–31}}

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 of white 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 the French ambassador to the United States, William H. Seward, soon to be secretary 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=27, 29}}

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.{{sfn|Holt|1999|p=983}} During the winter of 1860–61, he intervened decisively to defeat the Crittenden Compromise, a set of proposed constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed the existence of slavery in perpetuity south of the 36°30′ line. This would have constituted an abandonment of the Republican platform pledge to oppose the extension of slavery into the U.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 court conditional unionists, as Whig President Millard Fillmore had done in 1850, Lincoln sought to recruit unconditional unionists from the border states for positions in his administration.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=31, 33}} In his first inaugural address, the new president endorsed the proposed Corwin Amendment, which would have guaranteed slavery in the slave states, but not in the territories—an offer the secessionists had already rejected.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|p=262}} While Lincoln knew his compromise proposal could not be accepted, it allowed him 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.{{sfn|Foner|1995|pp=220–21}}

The commencement 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 of Fort 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 in Maryland and Kentucky by the creation of Union parties that won congressional elections in the summer of 1861; in Missouri and western Virginia,{{efn|Virginian unionists principally from the western counties organized the Restored Government of Virginia in 1861; in 1863, this government assented to the separation of 50 western counties that became West Virginia.}} unionists organized special conventions that constituted the loyal governing authority in those areas.{{sfnm|1a1=Webb|1y=1969|1p=111|2a1=Baker|2y=1973|2p=1962|3a1=Parrish|3y=1971|3p=31|4a1=Curry|4y=1969|4p=82}} 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.{{sfn|Astor|2012|p=174}} 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. The Blair 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=33}}

In the free states, the Union Party was a grassroots 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 the First Battle of Bull Run prompted administration supporters to organize Union state tickets to contest the 1861 and 1862 United States elections.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=34–36}} 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.{{sfn|Holt|1992|pp=330–31}}

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 from safe 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, and California 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.{{sfn|Holt|1992|pp=352, 326–28, 337–338}}

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 of New England and the Upper 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=57–58, 60}}

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 Democrat David Tod for governor in 1861 on a platform endorsing the Crittenden–Johnson Resolution on the war's aims. Tod won the election comfortably over Democrat Hugh 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 endangered Republican organization (which called itself the People's Party in 1860) with Douglas Democrats alienated from the state party's Breckinridge faction.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=41–42}} A similar situation unfolded in Indiana, where the Democratic Party was divided between partisans of U.S. senator Jesse D. Bright and former governor Joseph A. Wright. When Bright was expelled from Congress for colluding with the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Republican governor Oliver P. Morton seized the opportunity to appoint Wright to his vacant seat and bring Wright's supporters into Indiana's nascent Union Party.{{sfn|Thornbrough|1989|p=116}}

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, and Iowa, party names and loyalties remained mostly unchanged by the war.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=41}} Administration supporters in Michigan still called themselves Republicans in 1862, while Democrats co-opted the "Union" label.{{multiref|{{cite news |title=Republican State Nominations |url=https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85033611/1862-10-23/ed-1/seq-2/ |work=Cass County Republican |date=October 23, 1862}}|{{cite news |title=Union State Ticket |url=https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn97063063/1862-10-21/ed-1/seq-2/ |work=East Saginaw Courier |date=October 21, 1862}}}} Minnesota Republicans evaded an attempt to organize a Union ticket in their state in 1861, and the incumbent governor Alexander Ramsey was re-elected as a Republican that fall.{{sfn|Blegen|1975|p=249}}

Some Democrats were especially eager to distance themselves from their party's anti-war faction, producing temporary realignments in several states. In Connecticut and Wisconsin, 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 in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. In Rhode Island, the regular Republican candidate for governor was defeated by the conservative incumbent running on the Union ticket with the support of the state's Democrats and former Whigs.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=41}}

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, the New 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=42–43}}

The pre-war Republican Party was especially weak in the Pacific states, where Lincoln gained 32 percent (in California) and 36 percent (in Oregon) 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=41}} Circumstances in Kansas produced an unusual alliance of Democrats and Radical Republicans, who formed the Union Party in 1862 to oppose the controversial leadership of Jim Lane. Lane's allies dominated the regular Kansas Republican Party, which remained affiliated with the Lincoln administration. The split in the Republican ranks persisted through the end of the war.{{sfn|Ponce|2011|p=163–64}}

Democrats made gains in the 1862–63 United States House of Representatives elections, aided by the rise of the peace movement and anti-abolitionist backlash to the Emancipation Proclamation. In Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York the electoral verdict for the administration was dire. Republican-Unionists retained a thin plurality in the lower chamber, where border state unionists held the balance of power. The lack of absentee 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=57–58}}

The "palpable failure" of the Union Party to secure the Lower North increased the importance of the border states to the Union coalition.{{sfn|Holt|1992|p=347}} 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 the Unconditional Union Party defeated both the Democrats and the Conservative Unionists in the 1863 congressional elections.{{sfn|Baker|1973|p=87}} Kentucky's Union Democratic Party narrowly avoided a schism in 1863, but after the 38th United States Congress convened in December three Radical congressmen—Lucien Anderson, Green Clay Smith, and William H. Randall—crossed the floor and joined the Republican–Unionist coalition, laying the foundation for Kentucky's Unconditional Union Party.{{sfn|Hood|1978|p=205}} 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.{{sfn|Parrish|1971|pp=101–02}}

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.{{sfn|Holt|1992|p=347–48}}

The Union Party won key elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania in the fall of 1863. In Ohio, the Union candidate John Brough defeated the former U.S. representative Clement Vallandigham, a nationally prominent Peace Democrat.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=91}} Vallandigham's arrest and conviction by a military court on charges of disloyalty was controversial, and he conducted his campaign while living in exile in Canada.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|pp=596–98}} In Pennsylvania, the incumbent governor Andrew Gregg Curtin was re-elected over Peace Democrat George Washington Woodward.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=91}} 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.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|pp=687–88}}

{{Main|1864 United States presidential election}}

Delegates of the National Union Party held their national convention in Baltimore 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 for Ulysses S. Grant but switched their votes before the end of balloting.) The convention nominated the military governor of Tennessee Andrew Johnson for vice president. Johnson, a Southern unionist and former Democrat, defeated the Republican incumbent vice president Hannibal Hamlin and the Democratic former U.S. senator from New York Daniel S. Dickinson for the nomination; his selection emphasized the nonpartisan and bisectional premise of the Union Party.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=102–3, 105}}

Differing views on Reconstruction posed a major issue that threatened to split the Union coalition in 1864. In December 1863, Lincoln issued the Proclamation 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 population pledged loyalty to the United States and accepted Congressional and executive actions relating to slavery.{{sfn|Foner|2014|pp=35–36}} The proclamation did not guarantee the political or civil rights of freedpeople, but permitted states to adopt "temporary arrangement[s]" with respect to freedpeople "consistent ... with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class."{{sfn|United States|1866|p=738}} Lincoln's handling of Reconstruction was a major point of contention with abolitionists and Congressional Republican-Unionists who favored stronger guarantees of emancipation and the rights of freedpeople and considered the proclamation overly lenient to former Confederates.{{sfn|Holt|1992|p=349}} The creation of reconstructed governments in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee raised fears that Lincoln intended to circumvent Congress and reestablish the Antebellum political order with virtually no changes.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=104}} These fears were seemingly confirmed when Lincoln pocket vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill, prompting swift congressional condemnation.{{sfn|Holt|1992|p=350}}

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 of Salmon 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.{{sfnm|1a1=McPherson|1y=1988|1pp=714–15|2a1=Parrish|2y=1971|2p=110}} At Baltimore, an effort to seat delegates from the seceded states met with furious Radical opposition. Pennsylvania delegate Thaddeus 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 from Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia were not.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=104–5}} Most seriously, a convention of abolitionists and German-American radicals met at Cleveland on May 31 and nominated John C. Fremont as the presidential candidate of the Radical Democratic Party.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|p=715}} 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=115}}

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 by Robert 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 that Millard 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 at Philadelphia on December 24, 1863 and nominated George B. McClellan for president and William B. Campbell for vice president. McClellan was subsequently nominated by the 1864 Democratic National Convention, but on a platform which called for the immediate cessation of hostilities followed by a convention 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=117–18, 121}}

While despairing of success for much of the summer, Lincoln's reelection prospects brightened significantly following the Union victory in the Atlanta 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.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|pp=771, 776}}{{efn|Smith gives the date of Fremont's withdrawal as September 23,{{sfn|Smith|2006|p=123}} while McPherson says September 22.{{sfn|McPherson|1988|p=776}}}} 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.{{sfn|Smith|2006|pp=150–51}}

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 critical gubernatorial 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, while Delaware and Kentucky fell in the Democratic column.{{sfnm|1a1=Smith|1y=2006|1pp=149–51|2a1=McPherson|2y=1988|2pp=804–5}}

{{see also|Reconstruction era #Johnson's presidential Reconstruction}}

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 biracial Union Leagues organized in the immediate aftermath of the Confederate surrender represented a broad working-class constituency for federal Reconstruction policies, Johnson's intense racism and opposition to Black suffrage led him to consider moderate elements of the old planter 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.{{sfn|Foner|2014|pp=177, 219–20, 184, 283, 191–92}}

Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865 abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States except as punishment for a crime. Many members assumed the amendment also abolished "badges and incidents" of slavery, including laws restricting civil rights on the basis of race.{{sfn|Foner|2019|pp=127–28}} During 1865 and 1866, reconstructed state governments in the former Confederacy enacted laws to severely restrict freedpeople's economic and social mobility, in effect recreating slavery under a new name.{{sfn|Foner|2014|p=199}}

• 1866 National Union Convention
• History of the United States Democratic Party
• History of the United States Republican Party

{{notelist}}

{{reflist}}

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• {{cite book |last1=Foner |first1=Eric |title=Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77 |date=2014 |publisher=HarperPerennial |location=New York |edition=Revised |url=https://archive.org/details/reconstructionam0000fone_q8w6}}
• {{cite book |last1=Foner |first1=Eric |title=The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution |date=2019 |publisher=W. W. Norton and Company |location=New York |url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Second_Founding_How_the_Civil_War_an/W_yKDwAAQBAJ}}
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• {{cite book |last1=Holt |first1=Michael F. |title=The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War |date=1999 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |url=https://archive.org/details/risefallofameric0000holt_a7l7}}
• {{cite journal |last1=Hood |first1=James Larry |title=For the Union: Kentucky's Unconditional Unionist Congressmen and the Development of the Republican Party in Kentucky, 1863–1865 |journal=Register of the Kentucky Historical Society |date=July 1978 |volume=76 |issue=3 |pages=197–215 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23378981}}
• {{cite book |last1=McPherson |first1=James M. |title=Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era |date=1988 |publisher=Oxford University |location=New York |url=https://archive.org/details/battlecryoffreed0000unse}}
• {{cite book |last1=Parrish |first1=William E. |title=A History of Missouri, Volume 3: 1860 to 1875 |date=1971 |publisher=University of Missouri Press |location=Columbia |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofmissour0003unse}}
• {{cite book |editor-last1=Ponce |editor-first1=Pearl T. |title=Kansas's War: The Civil War in Documents |date=2011 |publisher=Ohio University Press |location=Athens |url=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kansas_s_War/lu9HBAAAQBAJ}}
• {{cite book |last1=Smith |first1=Adam I. P. |title=No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North |date=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |url=https://archive.org/details/nopartynowpoliti0000smit}}
• {{cite book |last1=Thornbrough |first1=Emma Lou |title=Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880 |date=1989 |publisher=Indiana Historical Society |location=Indianapolis |url=https://archive.org/details/indianaincivilwa0003thor}}
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• Nicolay, John G. and John Hay (1890). Abraham Lincoln: A History. vol 9. ch. 3, 15 and 16.
• McSeveney, Samuel T. (1986). "Re-Electing Lincoln: The Union Party Campaign and the Military Vote in Connecticut". Civil War History. 32(2). pp. 139–158.
• Waugh, John C. (2001). Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency. [https://archive.org/details/reelectinglincol00waug online]
• Wilson, Charles R. (1936) "New Light on the Lincoln-Blair-Fremont 'Bargain' of 1864" American Historical Review 42#1 pp. 71–78. [https://doi.org/10.2307/1840266 online]
• Zornow, William Frank (1954). Lincoln and the Party Divided. [https://archive.org/details/lincolnpartydivi0000zorn online]

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