ABSTRACT
For three years the Armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia had fought desperate battles "without materially changing the vantage ground of each." The Southern press and people, with more shrewdness than was displayed in the North, finding that they had failed to capture Washington and march on to New York, as they had boasted they would do, assumed that they only defended their capital and Southern territory. Abraham Lincoln should send a peace commission to Jefferson Davis, the New Yorker proposed. Raymond was certain Davis would reject the olive branch, but reasoned that this rejection would "unite the North as nothing since the firing on Fort Sumter." Lincoln and McClellan, following custom, did not campaign publicly. However, the President did manage to make his political points in his little responses to serenades, especially to the soldiers. On April 8, 1864, the proposed amendment had passed the Senate but failed to secure the necessary two-thirds vote in the House.
