The fate of the 1864 presidential election in the United States – and that of the entire nation – could have turned out differently due to a conspiracy that used voting by mail to sway the poll in favour of Democrats.
For much of that year, Abraham Lincoln had grim chances for winning a second term as the Civil War raged on and the North began to lose confidence in a president who refused to compromise with the Confederacy.
It was at that time that a plot materialised to bring down Lincoln’s National Union Party and assist his opponent, General George B. McClellan.
Soldiers of the Union Army were able to cast absentee votes from military camps. To do so, troops had to assign their power of attorney on ballots that contained four signatures: that of the voter, the person authorised to receive the ballot, the witness to the voter’s signature, and a fellow officer. These papers were then mailed to soldiers’ counties to be tallied in the final vote.
A group of conspirators in Washington and Baltimore were forging the papers and the signatures to rig the vote in favour of McClellan, according to The New York Times’ reporting from 1864.
One of the masterminds was Edward Donahue, who was authorised as an agent of New York State to receive the soldiers’ votes.
Donahue and his crew put the names of active-duty, dead and non-existent soldiers and officers in the blanks. They also left the envelopes open so they could replace the votes of Lincoln supporters with fraudulent votes for McClellan.
Donahue received rosters of soldiers from a New York-based general, who wrote: “Enclosed in this package you will find tickets; also a list of names of the actual residents of Columbia County, now members of the One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Regiment. With my best wishes for your success, I remain, &c.”
The New York Times also cites a letter from Albany Sheriff H. Cromdell who offered to send additional men to assist Donahue in Baltimore.
The plot was busted by Orville Wood, a merchant from the New York State who was “look[ing] after the local ticket” at the Baltimore headquarters of New York’s 91st Regiment at the behest of his county’s committee.
Wood, a Lincoln supporter, testified that he sensed something was up when Donahue’s associate Moses Ferry told him that Lincoln had received just 11 votes in the regiment compared with McClellan’s 400. Wood gained Ferry’s confidence by pretending to support the Democratic candidate and turned in Donahue and Ferry after he had seen enough evidence of fraud.
The two were arrested and tried before a military commission less than two weeks before the election. Ferry pleaded guilty on 27 October 1864; Donahue initially rejected the charges but later asked the judges for mercy as evidence mounted and more accomplices were caught.
The judge advocate called the case “one of the most gigantic frauds ever attempted to be perpetrated on this nation”.
If successful, it could “have produced a disruption of our entire country, and our war for the preservation of the Union will be practically at an end and futile”, he added. “A crime so enormous as this calls for a vigorous punishment, and I do not hesitate to say merits the extreme penalty of death.”
Lincoln, however, approved the tribunal’s recommendation of life in prison for the two men, according to The Washington Post. He went on to win the election with 212 out of 233 total electoral votes as a series of victories boosted the North’s morale and McClellan had to repudiate his own party’s anti-war platform.