Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the November 1864 presidential election, some Confederates performed what Jason Phillips has described as “somersaults of reasoning” to convince themselves that this outcome was not a blow to their hopes of independence. That summer, rumor had traveled around Confederate army camps and in correspondence home that the North was beset by disaffection and that success for the Democratic Party in the election would bring peace. These assumptions were challenged when the Democratic candidate George McClellan announced his war policy and seriously compromised when Lincoln’s reelection was confirmed. Facing this situation, a good few Confederate diehards slipped into the realms of the far-fetched to maintain their belief that peace and independence remained within their grasp; some, for instance, claimed that more states were now sure to secede and further fracture the Union. B. P. Alston, writing from his camp near Richmond, joined in with such questionable reasoning.