CINCINNATI (AP) — Long before Mitt Romney and Barack
Obama wrestled over Ohio, it was also a crucial political battleground
state for Abraham Lincoln. So much so that when he received word of the
results of the state’s 1863 elections, Lincoln said in a message: "Ohio
has saved the Nation."
"Ohio was almost a civil war unto itself,"
said historian William B. Styple, whose latest book focuses on a
Cincinnati politician who was an influential aide to Union Gen. George
B. McClellan, who ran against Lincoln in 1864. "There was a lot of
turmoil in that state."
Ohio was home to some of the Union’s most
successful generals, led by Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and
Philip Sheridan, as well as Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton,
and treasury secretary, Salmon Chase.
Lincoln brought Chase into
his Cabinet after the former Ohio governor lost his bid for the
Republican nomination in 1860 to Lincoln, as recounted in Doris Kearns
Goodwin’s best-selling book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of
Abraham Lincoln." Much of Stephen Spielberg’s new "Lincoln" movie,
opening widely Friday, is drawn from the book.
But Ohio also was a
home to McClellan, his adviser Col. Thomas M. Key, and other critics of
Lincoln such as former U.S. Sen. William Allen and Rep. Clement
Vallandigham. Vallandigham would lead the stridently anti-war
"Copperhead" movement.
Many Ohioans, especially along the river,
had roots, relatives and friends in Virginia or other parts of the
South, and considered the issue of slavery a matter of states’ rights.
And even after Southern states seceded and Confederates shelled U.S.
troops at Fort Sumter, S.C., there were differences in Ohio over the
goals of going to war.
Historians say that some Ohioans worried
the state would be flooded with newly freed slaves if the war resulted
in emancipation, that there was sometimes-violent opposition to the
federal army draft, and that others simply thought there should be more
efforts at peaceful compromise.
"If you were on the north side of
the (Ohio) river, in real time, during that war, you would have found a
very, very deeply divided populace," said University of Cincinnati
history professor and author Christopher Phillips.
Ohioans
contributed to the Union Army in high numbers, and McClellan,
Philadelphia-born but a Cincinnati resident who was Ohio’s militia
commander, led some of the Union’s first successful engagements of the
war. Lincoln soon put him in command of the Army of the Potomac, which
McClellan helped build up and train.
But McClellan, who warned
that emancipation of slaves would undermine the Union effort, and Key, a
Kentucky-born judge and lawyer in Cincinnati, were Democrats who had
supported Stephen Douglas for president against Lincoln in 1860, Styple
writes.
Historians say McClellan privately referred to Lincoln as
"a gorilla," and Goodwin’s book has accounts of McClellan keeping the
president waiting, including once going to bed while Lincoln sat
expecting to see him.
Lincoln grew impatient with McClellan for
other reasons — the general’s cautious approach to the war and failure
to pursue Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army after the bloody 1862
battle of Antietam in Maryland.
Styple was researching a biography
of his New Jersey hometown’s namesake — Union Gen. Philip Kearny,
killed in another 1862 battle — when he found letters and accounts that
led to his interest in Thomas Key.
Kearny wrote that McClellan or
others with him were "devising a game of politics, rather than war."
Styple’s book, "McClellan’s Other Story," suggests that Key, serving as
McClellan’s "confidential aide," had unauthorized talks with
Confederates and was more interested in protecting McClellan’s political
ambitions than crushing the Confederate army.
During the war,
Lincoln worried about what he called "the fire in the rear" — opposition

within the North. Vallandigham led Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, in
Ohio, denouncing "King Lincoln" until he was finally arrested and exiled

by Lincoln to the South. He made his way to Canada and was the
Democrats’ nominee for Ohio governor in 1863.
Chase, Lincoln’s
treasury secretary and former Ohio governor, returned to Ohio to
campaign for the pro-Union candidate John Brough, Goodwin writes. When
Brough won in a landslide, Lincoln wired his congratulations: "Glory to
God in the highest. Ohio has saved the Nation."
McClellan jumped
into politics as the 1864 Democratic presidential candidate, with
Cincinnati Congressman George Pendleton as his running mate. Union
battlefield victories including the Sherman-led capture of Atlanta
rallied support for Lincoln in the North and among the troops, and he
handily carried Ohio with 56 percent of the vote in his re-election.
Lincoln
thus kept up what would become a historical trend that he began when
elected the nation’s 16th president in 1860 — that a Republican
presidential candidate has never won the White House without winning
Ohio.
That trend continues today, after Republican nominee
Romney’s loss to Democrat Obama in Ohio, a state both sides made a focal
point of their 2012 campaign.
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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.