1864 - US Presidential Election -With a defeated and now fractured country, Abe Lincoln decided not to run for re-election in 1864. Largely seen as the one man that tore the country apart, Lincoln moved west....more on that later. Republican John C. Fremont of California ran on a hard line Republican platform that blamed Lincoln for not emancipating the slaves sooner, which he hoped would give the North the moral high ground and hopefully prevent the British and French from recognizing the Confederacy, and generally mismanaging the war. Fremont ran against Horatio Seymour of New York. Seymour ran as a fiscal conservative and railed against the abuses of federal power by president Lincoln. The country's political parties have been completely fractured. The Republicans are seen as the people who started and eventually lost the war. The Democrats are seen as nothing other than Copperheads in disguise. William Buckingham, governor of Connecticut, left the fractured Republican Party and joined the newly formed American Party. The American Party was anti-immigrant, isolationist, and also supported lowering the tariff. Buckingham received some support in Ohio and some industrial parts of New England. Though they were frightened by the spector of electing another Republican to the presidency, the Union elected Fremont by a narrow margin.