 then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the president-elect as to save the union between the election and the inauguration. In other words, he was pledging himself and his cabinet to make an orderly transition to what he thought was going to be McClellan and a Democratic administration. So if anybody tells you that by 1864, union victory or Lincoln's reelection was in the bag, I would respectfully refer them to Lincoln's own estimate of the situation.