When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, America was at peace, and despite Lincoln stating repeatedly that he would not interfere with the institution of slavery in the South, for he believe that he did not have the Constitutional authority to do so, the southern States seceded anyway. Even with such succession, Lincoln stayed his hand, yet, when the South took it upon itself to fire shots against the federally owned Fort Sumter in South Carolina, forcing its surrender, Lincoln's hand was forced to bring the southern States to heel for their rebellion, so as to re-unite these United States and thereby restore the Union, and to make vividly clear that those that lost elections through sound democratic methods via the ballot box, could not and would not then as the losers of such, win via the bloodshed of the battlefield, so the fight was joined.
In America, Presidential elections are held every four years, so by the time of 1864, the rebellion, our civil war, was still in effect, and unlike virtually any government that preceded it or succeeded it, of any stripe, and of any type, in America, a free election of those States that were still part of the Union was held as scheduled, in which the incumbent, Abraham Lincoln faced off against the man who was once the general-in-chief of all the Union armies, George McClellan, before he was relieved of such in November of 1862. Lest one think, that McClellan had no chance, he was extremely popular and well known throughout America, and was considered to be a formidable opponent, certainly capable of winning the election and thereby, since he ran as a Democrat under their party platform of being the so-called peace candidate, the course of history of how the war would have been conducted or concluded under McClellan, might, in fact, left slavery as an institution permitted within the southern States in return for the peaceful submission by those States currently in rebellion.
This means that the stakes were incredibly high in 1864, in which, Lincoln could have, and certainly did have, the Executive wartime power as well as the most reasonable of excuses, to postpone such an election, because the country was in the midst of a bloody civil war but Lincoln did not postpone the election, and had he been defeated, he would have left office and been replaced by a new commander-in-chief. The foregoing demonstrates conclusively the great character of this President, who took the Constitution as well as our Declaration of Independence, not as documents to be subverted, not as documents to be ignored so as to aggrandize unto himself powers not given to the Executive office, but to, even in this darkest of hours, to work within the Constitutional powers to reunify this nation without becoming a dictatorship, or suspending any laws unless absolutely necessary.
This world is filled with countries that suspend Constitutional or governmental law, replacing such with dictatorships, or military juntas, or leaders who take upon themselves executive powers for life, whereas, Lincoln did nothing of the sort. How many others during a civil war that tested core values of what it meant to be an American citizen, what it meant to be a nation, and what it meant to be these United States, would risk a free election, yet, those of great character and those of great integrity, will willingly do so, because Lincoln was no summer soldier, and no sunshine patriot, he was a determined man, made extraordinary by the testing of his character in this crucible of this most trying of times, our civil war.