Contemporaries interpreted the election of 1864 as a triumph for Lincoln’s policy of compelling the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. “I am astonished,” wrote the American correspondent of the London Daily News, at “the extent and depth of [this] determination . . . to fight to the last. . . . [The northern people] are in earnest in a way the like of which the world never saw before, silently, calmly, but desperately in earnest.”70
