Civil War Political History, Morgan County Ohio Union Ticket for Lincoln and Johnson in the 1864 Presidential Election

Abraham Lincoln

Posters, Broadsides, Prints, Maps, &

Lincoln, Abraham, Union Presidential Ticket, November 8, 1864, documents Civil War electoral mobilization through a printed county ballot listing national, state, and local Union candidates during the only United States presidential election held while the nation was actively at war with itself. The ticket records the Union Party electoral system through its Lincoln and Johnson presidential slate, state electors, and Morgan County candidates, revealing how wartime party organization operated in practice by connecting national reelection politics to local printed voting materials. Lincoln defeated George B. McClellan in the 1864 election by 212 electoral votes to 21, and the National Union coalition joined Republicans with War Democrats in support of continuing the war and restoring the Union.

Union Presidential Ticket. Morgan County, Ohio: Union Party, November 8, 1864. Broadside-style printed election ticket, approximately 3 by 7 inches. The ticket lists Abraham Lincoln for President and Andrew Johnson for Vice President, together with state electors and local candidates, showing the practical mechanics of nineteenth-century party voting before standardized government-printed ballots. A patriotic vignette depicts Columbia holding a sword labeled “Union,” linking the act of voting to national preservation, military sacrifice, and loyalty to the federal cause. The election followed the Union capture of Atlanta in September 1864, a military success that strengthened Lincoln’s political position after months of uncertainty about his reelection prospects.

The ticket’s timing gives it particular force: Lincoln’s reelection made him the first president since Andrew Jackson to win a second term, and he was assassinated on April 14, 1865, dying the following morning less than two months after beginning that term. As a county-level ballot from Ohio, the piece provides primary-source evidence for the study of Civil War political culture, Union campaign symbolism, local election administration, and the wartime coalition that paired Lincoln with Tennessee War Democrat Andrew Johnson. Two light vertical folds not noted; no tears or losses described; overall excellent. A compact but unusually direct artifact of the 1864 Union electoral system, linking Lincoln’s national reelection campaign to the printed voting practices of a specific Ohio county.

Item #15662

Price: $450.00