Peacetime Abe: Party Leader

Remove the Civil War from the equation of Lincoln's time as president, and it seems to me that his primary political reality would have been this: he was the leader of a new, fragile political party. I think that shoring up the Republican political foundation would have been a top priority of a peacetime Lincoln presidency. I also think that his task in this regard would have been much more complicated and problematic without the war.

Lincoln was a party man, and made no apologies for this at all; indeed, he once stated his belief that a politician without a political party was "nothing." And we can see from what he did during his wartime presidency (not to mention his various machinations and manuvers as a Whig during the 1840s and early 1850s) that he had no problem wielding the patronage tool on Republicans' behalf. I'm sure Peactime Abe would have done so, as well.

But I also think that Peacetime Abe would have confronted two stark and difficult realities that were not so readily apparent during the war. First, the fact of the Republican Party's geographic isolation: not just its total lack of presence in the South, but also the fact that the Republicans got shut out of the Border States, as well. This would have seemed a dire political reality to both Lincoln and other party leaders during his first term; they surely would have thought that they could not count on a four-way split of the American electorate again in 1864, as in 1860.* Among other factors, the Democratic Party likely would have found a way to heal itself, at least superficially, in time to field only one candidate in 1864. Maybe the Deep South was beyond hope, but Republicans could entertain thoughts of peeling away votes in the Upper South and Border States.

Second, the party's fissure between radicals and conservatives would have been quite pronounced, and required a good deal of smoothing over by Lincoln and other party leaders. The war did this for Lincoln, in many ways. In the real world, from 1861 to 1865 the two wings of the Republican Party could at least agree on one thing: the need to defeat the Confederacy. But after the war the divisions in the party became very apparent. Something like this Reconstruction process would have confronted Peacetime Abe.

Take all this together, and I think Peacetime Abe as party leader would likely have steered his presidency in a fairly conservative direction. He would have felt strong pressure to include numerous Southerners and Border State men in his cabinet, and he would I think have felt more pressure to placate Republican conservatives than radicals, feeling perhaps that radical Republicans were highly unlikely to bolt for the party of Stephen Douglas. They would surely continue to vote Republican (especially with no viable abolitionist political party on the immediate horizon) whereas conservative Republicans might be tempted to cast their votes elsewhere.

All presidents steer towards the political center once they enter office. Peacetime Abe would have done so, but the need would have possibly been even more pronounced. And this would have had a decided impact on his policymaking.

*Here's an interesting little aside: could the Constitutional Union Party have survived the 1860 election, had there been no war? On the one hand, it was an exceedingly weak party in ideological terms (heck, it had no ideology or platform to speak of). On the other hand, it did carry some key states, especially Virginia. If the party's structure, such as it was, had remained intact, and had it found a more dynamic leader than John Bell (a telegraph pole would have been more dynamic), then who knows?