Third Party Presidential Candidacy Reviewed

January 11, 1864

President Lincoln continues his conversation about presidential politics by again meeting with former Ohio Governor William  Dennision and Postmaster General MontgomeryBlair  regarding a possible third-party candidacy Secreary of the Treasury Salmon P.  Chase or General John C.  Fremont.  The Fremont candidacy eventually materializes in May and dissolves in September.

White House aide William O. Stoddard writes in an anonymous newspaper dispatch: “The intense cold weather for this latitude, by interrupting travel, prevented Congress from reassembling very promptly, and individual stragglers are still missing. “

The campaign for the Thirteenth Amendment to eliminate slavery is begun by Missouri Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri.  Historian Roy Basler wrote in A Touchstone for Greatness: “On January 11, 1864, Henderson introduced a Joint Resolution into the Senate proposing ‘that slavery shall not exist in the United States.’  Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, however, preferred different language and introduced his own Joint Resolution on February 8, providing that ‘everywhere within the limits of the United States, and of each State or Territory thereof, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.’  The phrase ‘all persons are equal before the law,’ taken from the Constitution of Revolutionary France, was particularly dear to Sumner.”

President Lincoln writes son Robert Todd Lincoln: “I send your draft to-day.  How are you now?  Answer by telegraph at once.”

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