Campaign badge displaying an image of President Abraham Lincoln.	An envelope featuring pictures of President Abraham Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson.	An 1864 campaign button bearing an image of President Abraham Lincoln. All photos by Nicole Murray

These artifacts move me because I've always felt that to wade into Lincoln's 1864 wartime election is to get not only a deeply intimate understanding of the deathly wariness that had settled over him by then, but to truly grasp the essence of his qualities as a leader. Too often we forget how precarious the war was as late as the fall of 1864. Much of the north was literally crying out for the war’s end: as Horace Greeley wrote, "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peace." Meanwhile, battalions of peace movements had cropped up across the North and became the basis for the Democratic Party platform.  In response, an exhausted and weary Lincoln moaned, "I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me."  Consider how tempting it would've been for Lincoln to have canceled the election, citing the exigencies of war, or to have engaged in peace talks with the South, as so much of the union was clamoring for.  That he at once stood firm for the nation's democratic principles while standing equally firm in prosecuting the war is as vivid a testimony of his heroic leadership as anything else I can think of.

Jay Winik is the author of April 1865: The Month That Saved America.