Mr. Lincoln took no measures whatever to promote his own candidacy.  While not assuming airs of reluctance or bashfulness, he discouraged on the part of strangers any suggestion as to his reelection.  Among his friends he made no secret of his readiness to continue the work he was engaged in, if such should be the general wish.  “A second term would be a great honor and a great labor, which together, perhaps, I would not decline if tendered,” he wrote Elihu B. Washburne.  He not only opposed no obstacle to the ambitions of Chase, but received warnings to beware of Grant in the same serene manner, answering tranquilly, “If he takes Richmond, let him have it.”  And he discouraged office-holders, civil or military, who showed any special zeal in his behalf.  To General Schurz, who wrote asking permission to take an active part in the presidential campaign, he replied: 

“Allow me to suggest that if you wish to remain in the military service, it is very dangerous for you to get temporarily out of it; because, with a major-general once out, it is next to impossible for even the President to get him in again....  Of course I would be very glad to have your service for the country in the approaching political canvass; but I fear we cannot properly have it without separating you from the military.”  And in a later letter he added:  “I perceive no objection to your making a political speech when you are where one is to be made; but quite surely, speaking in the North and fighting in the South at the same time are not possible; nor could I be justified to detail any officer to the political campaign during its continuance and then return him to the army.”

Not only did he firmly take this stand as to his own nomination, but enforced it even more rigidly in cases where he learned that Federal office-holders were working to defeat the return of certain Republican congressmen.  In several such instances he wrote instructions of which the following is a type: 

“Complaint is made to me that you are using your official power to defeat Judge Kelley’s renomination to Congress....  The correct principle, I think, is that all our friends should have absolute freedom of choice among our friends.  My wish, therefore, is that you will do just as you think fit with your own suffrage in the case, and not constrain any of your subordinates to do other than as he thinks fit with his.”

He made, of course, no long speeches during the campaign, and in his short addresses, at Sanitary Fairs, in response to visiting delegations, or on similar occasions where custom and courtesy decreed that he must say something, preserved his mental balance undisturbed, speaking heartily and to the point, but skilfully avoiding the perils that beset the candidate who talks.