John G. Nicolay to Therena Bates, August 28, 1864

Washington, 28 August 1864

. . . I have been rather expecting to make another visit to the West in September, but it is rendered somewhat doubtful by the present rush of affairs.  I think Hay will be back by the middle of September, but it may take both of us to keep the office under proper headway.

I wrote to you that the Republican party was laboring under a severe fit of despondency and discouragement.  During the past week it reached almost the condition of a disastrous panic—a sort of political Bull Run—but I think it has been reached its culmination and will speedily have a healthy and vigorous reaction.  It even went so far as that Raymond, the Chairman of the National Executive Committee wrote a most doleful letter here to the President summing up the various discouraging signs he saw in the country, and giving it as his deliberate opinion that unless something was done, (and he thought that “something” should be the sending Commissioners to Richmond to propose terms of peace to the Rebels, on the basis of their returning to the Union) that we might as well quit and give up the contest.  In this mood he came here to Washington three or four days ago to attend a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Committee.  The President and the strongest half of the Cabinet—Seward, Stanton and Fessenden, held a consultation with him, and showed him that they already thoroughly considered and discussed his proposition; and upon showing him their reasons, he very readily concurred with them in the opinion that to follow his plan of sending commissioners to Richmond, would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering in advance.

Nevertheless the visit of himself and committee here did very great good.  They found the President and Cabinet wide awake to all the necessities of the situation, and went home much encourage and cheered up.  I think that immediately upon the nominations being made at Chicago (it seems now as if McClellan would undoubtedly be the nominee) the whole Republican Party throughout the country will wake up, begin a spirited campaign and win the election.

SOURCE: Michael Burlingame, Editor, With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, p. 153-4