While the Jacobins were endeavoring to reorganize the Republican antagonism to the President, Lincoln was taking thought how he could offset still more effectually their influence.  In taking up the emancipation policy he had not abandoned his other policy of an all-parties Administration, or of something similar to that.  By this time it was plain that a complete union of parties was impossible.  In the autumn of 1862, a movement of liberal Democrats in Michigan for the purpose of a working agreement with the Republicans was frustrated by the flinty opposition of Chandler.(1) However, it still seemed possible to combine portions of parties in an Administration group that should forswear the savagery of the extreme factions and maintain the war in a merciful temper.  The creation of such a group was Lincoln’s aim at the close of the year.

The Republicans were not in doubt what he was driving at.  Smarting over their losses in the election, there was angry talk that Lincoln and Seward had “slaughtered the Republican party."(2) Even as sane a man as John Sherman, writing to his brother on the causes of the apparent turn of the tide could say “the first is that the Republican organization was voluntarily abandoned by the President and his leading followers, and a no-party union was formed to run against an old, well-drilled party organization."(3) When Julian returned to Washington in December, he found that the menace to the Republican machine was “generally admitted and (his) earnest opposition to it fully justified in the opinion of the Republican members of Congress."(4) How fully they perceived their danger had been shown in their attempt to drive Lincoln into a corner on the issue of a new Cabinet.

Even before that, Lincoln had decided on his next move.  As in the emancipation policy he had driven a wedge between the factions of the Republicans, so now he would drive a wedge into the organization of the Democrats.  It had two parts which had little to hold them together except their rooted partisan habit.(5) One branch, soon to receive the label “Copperhead,” accepted the secession principle and sympathized with the Confederacy.  The other, while rejecting secession and supporting the war, denounced the emancipation policy as usurped authority, and felt personal hostility to Lincoln.  It was the latter faction that Lincoln still hoped to win over.  Its most important member was Horatio Seymour, who in the autumn of 1862 was elected governor of New York.  Lincoln decided to operate on him by one of those astounding moves which to the selfless man seemed natural enough, by which the ordinary politician was always hopelessly mystified.  He called in Thurlow Weed and authorized him to make this proposal:  if Seymour would bring his following into a composite Union party with no platform but the vigorous prosecution of the war, Lincoln would pledge all his influence to securing for Seymour the presidential nomination in 1864.