Speaking of absentee ballots (as those of us who are obsessed with the Coleman-Franken recount oft do nowadays) and speaking of Abe Lincoln (as I intend to do occasionally this year, the bicentennial of his birth),  I stumbled across an unexpected connection betweeen the two in my Lincoln reading the other day.

Turns out that absentee ballots first came into widespread use in the U.S. the 1860s, inspired by the Civil War. States wanted their soldiers on the front to be able to vote. Early in its history, absentee voting was called "soldier voting." And the beneficiary of the first big year of absentee voting was Lincoln during his difficult reelection of 1864, in the middle of the war, and that Lincoln engaged in what might be viewed as an abuse of his commander-in-chief powers to turn out the soldier vote.

First, those of you who know your Lincoln already know that Lincoln's reelection was not at all a sure thing.

"You think I don't know I am going to be beaten, but I do and, unless some great change takes place, badly beaten," Lincoln said to a friend in 1864, according to one of his most esteemed biographers (David Herbert Donald, "Lincoln," page 529).

But even though Lincoln's Democratic opponent was General George B. McClellan, the former top commander of the Union troops whom Lincoln had fired, Lincoln believed he would carry the soldier vote. (McClellan was a harsh critic of Lincoln's management of the war, and the Democratic Party was running on a peace platform that, while ambiguous, seemed to allow for the war to be ended without the restoration of the Union.) So Lincoln took steps to turn out the soldier vote, in states that allowed absentee voting and those that didn't.

In the latter category, Lincoln was worried about Indiana, which he expected to be a close state and which didn't allow absentee voting. He wired Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (this is from "Team of Rivals," by Doris Kearns Goodwin):

"that Sherman had many soldiers under his command from Indiana, 'whose soldiers cannot vote in the field. Any thing you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home and vote at the State election, will be greatly in point.' He emphasized that 'this is, in no sense, an order' but merely a request."

Lincoln was also worried about New York, where antiwar sentiment had led to riots and which he expected McClellan to carry. According to Goodwin:

"When [New York Republican boss Thurlow Weed] alerted the White House that among the sailors 'on Gun Boats along the Mississippi,' there were 'several thousand' New Yorkers ready to vote if the government could provide a steamer to reach them and gather their ballots, Lincoln asked [Navy Secretary Gideon] Welles to put a Navy boat 'at the disposal of the New York commission to gather votes.'"

Lincoln ended up carrying Indiana fairly easily, New York by just 7,000 votes (a one percentage point margin) and was reelected by a solid margin in both the popular and electoral votes.