November 8 · This Day in America
On November 8, 1864, in the middle of a civil war that has already killed hundreds of thousands of its people, the United States does something no country at war had ever dared: it holds a free presidential election and lets the soldiers vote. For the first time, men in uniform cast ballots from camps and field hospitals — and they vote, three to one, to keep Abraham Lincoln and finish the fight. Lincoln had been certain he would lose. He had even written a private memo planning for it. Instead the people, in the worst hour the republic has ever known, choose to see it through. Years later he would call it proof that a government of the people could endure a great rebellion and still trust the people to choose. The ballot held when everything else was breaking.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1889
On November 8, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison signs the proclamation admitting Montana to the Union as the 41st state. The land of copper and the Rockies, of cattle ranges and the Little Bighorn, joins a country racing to fill in its map: four new states in five days that autumn. The frontier was closing, and Montana came in just before the door.
Source: www.presidency.ucsb.edu