Lincoln in the World Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Peraino

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House LLC,

  a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peraino, Kevin.

  Lincoln in the world : the making of a statesman and the dawn of American power / Kevin Peraino.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. United States—Foreign relations—1861–1865. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. I. Title.

  E469.P47 2013

  973.7092—dc23 2013022550

  ISBN 9780307887214

  Ebook ISBN 9780-307887221

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Cover image: The Granger Collection, NYC—All rights reserved

  CREDITS FOR PHOTO INSERT

  Library of Congress: this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page.

  Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum: this page.

  Massachusetts Historical Society: this page.

  International Institute of Social History: this page.

  Getty Images: this page.

  Brown University Library: this page.

  v3.1_r1

  To my parents,

  Sam and Donna Peraino

  If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall counsel.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1796

  Westward the star of empire takes its way;

  The girls link-on to Lincoln, as their mothers did to Clay.

  —LINCOLN CAMPAIGN BANNER, 1858

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: Lincoln vs. Herndon

  CHAPTER TWO: Lincoln vs. Seward

  CHAPTER THREE: Lincoln vs. Palmerston

  CHAPTER FOUR: Lincoln vs. Marx

  Photo Insert

  CHAPTER FIVE: Lincoln vs. Napoleon

  CHAPTER SIX: Lincoln vs. Lincoln

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCE NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Prologue

  IN THE COLD, DIM BALCONY OF FORD’S THEATRE, MARY LINCOLN RESTED A HAND ON HER HUSBAND’S KNEE, THEN HUDDLED CLOSER TO HIS SIDE. SHE WAS NOT ALWAYS SUCH A TENDER WIFE. During spells of anger, she had been known to batter her husband with broomsticks, books, timber, and “very poorly pitched potatoes”—at least once drawing blood from his nose. Mary, whom a White House secretary had nicknamed Hellcat, was at her worst when she felt trapped. The sight of transatlantic steamers preparing to cross the ocean could touch off a storm of self-pity. “How I long to go to Europe,” she would complain. Mary mercilessly taunted her husband that for her next marriage, she would make sure to choose a man who could afford the price of passage.1

  Mary might not have considered her husband wealthy, but tonight—finally—she could not deny that he was powerful. When the couple had entered the theater, a half hour late, the entire performance came to a halt. The orchestra brayed “Hail to the Chief” over the unyielding roar of the crowd. The First Lady, battling a headache, had not wanted to go out at all. The president, too, appeared stooped, exhausted, and sad. Actually, though, Lincoln had good news for his wife. They would finally travel to Europe. When his term was over, he told Mary, he wanted to do some exploring, to go “abroad among strangers.” The couple would spend time “moving and travelling,” he promised.2

  Mary had always been the more cosmopolitan of the two. As a girl in Lexington, Kentucky, she had attended a boarding school where students spoke French, run by Parisian aristocrats who had fled the Reign of Terror. The great American diplomat Henry Clay was a neighbor and close family friend; a young Mary once stopped by his estate to parade her new pony. As an adult, there was something slightly pathetic about her pining. A White House staff member complained that the First Lady put on “the airs of an Empress.” Her affectations grated on Lincoln’s diplomats. She overused the word sir—“as if you were a royal personage,” one of them griped. When asked if she spoke French, the First Lady replied: “Très poo.”3

  Mary was like a “toothache,” Lincoln’s law partner once remarked, keeping her husband “awake night and day” to political opportunities. When it came to foreign affairs, however, Lincoln had become his own man. The Illinoisan had been telling friends for years that he wanted to visit Britain, the land of his forebears and his favorite writers, Shakespeare, Byron, and Burns. As the Civil War erupted and intensified, the president repeatedly underlined the conflict’s global importance, arguing that “the central idea” behind the Union effort was to prove to the world “that popular government is not an absurdity.” He had long since come to terms with America’s rise to power. “We are a great empire,” he told a Michigan crowd as early as 1856. “We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world.”4

  Now America’s army had grown to the largest on the planet, and its massive new navy threatened the Continent’s outdated fleets. Hyperventilating European newspaper correspondents worried that the American president might send “a fleet of gunboats sailing up the Seine” or his million-man army marching through Hyde Park. At the start of the Civil War, cartoons in Britain’s popular Punch magazine had portrayed Lincoln as a “silly-faced” buffoon. By the end, the magazine’s depictions of the American president “bore the stamp of despotic ferocity.”5

  As Lincoln sat in the dark of the theater, his ambitious wife gripping his hand, the night’s entertainment must have seemed somehow appropriate. The play, a lighthearted tale of an American trying to collect his inheritance in Europe, had the audience in hysterics. And then, in an instant, the laughter ended and the screaming began. Mary Lincoln saw the sickening flash accompanied by the report of a pistol. She felt a body dash past, brushing against her shawl, and watched her husband’s head slump onto his chest. In another moment a distant voice cried out, “Thus ever to tyrants!” in a foreign tongue from ages past.6

  Abraham Lincoln is not often remembered as a great foreign-policy president.7 He had never traveled overseas and had no personal friends in Europe. His upbringing in rural Kentucky and Indiana was so provincial that, when a stranger came to town who could speak a few words of Latin, he “was looked upon as a wizzard.” As a rising politician he had studied just enough German to charm immigrant voters. As for French, the nineteenth-century language of diplomacy, he did not understand enough to read a menu. (“Hold on there,” the Railsplitter once told a waiter in a New York French restaurant. “Beans. I know beans.”) The Illinoisan’s only pre-presidential brush with the diplomatic service came in 1841, when a friend tried to get him appointed chargé d’affaires in Colombia. Lincoln had been struggling with a bout of depression—he had gone “crazy as a loon,” one acquaintance recalled—and his allies thought a change of scenery would do him good. The secretar
y of state, Daniel Webster, not surprisingly passed him over.8

  In the White House, Lincoln’s attempts at diplomatic finesse could seem comically inept. His efforts to bow elegantly to visiting diplomats were so “prodigiously violent” that they had “almost the effect of a smack” in their “rapidity and abruptness.” On one occasion, receiving a delegation of Potawatomi Indians, Lincoln greeted his guests in broken English. “Where live now?” he asked, as his aides chortled. “When go back Iowa?” Foreign envoys accustomed to the refined rituals of European chancelleries were repelled. “His conversation consists of vulgar anecdotes at which he himself laughs uproariously,” the Dutch minister complained. Even Lincoln’s young son Tad noted that his father looked “pretty plain” compared to the European diplomats at one state dinner, who were “all tied up with gold cords” and “glittered grand.” The president recognized his shortcomings. “I don’t know anything about diplomacy,” he told one foreign envoy. “I will be very apt to make blunders.”9

  Nor, at least at first glance, did the American president’s foreign-policy team seem very promising. The tiny diplomatic corps in the midnineteenth century was still a dumping ground for political enemies and inconvenient radicals. “There is hardly a court in Europe which has not had some specimen of the American character in its worst form—a sot, or rake, or swindler,” the New York World warned as Lincoln took office. Lincoln’s choice for secretary of state, William Henry Seward, was actually a capable diplomat who had traveled widely. Yet he could also be vain and impetuous. He tended to drink heavily at dinner parties and issue idle threats of war from behind a cloud of cigar smoke. “When he was loaded,” recalled the son of Lincoln’s minister to Britain, “his tongue wagged.”10

  Lincoln’s men in the field could be just as volatile. The president’s personal secretary John Hay noted that while Lincoln’s envoys were “generally men of ability,” they were “not always of that particular style of education which fits men for diplomacy.” At the American legation in Paris, “French is a language as unknown as Hottentot,” Hay observed, adding acidly that the post’s secretary “will have to postpone his French studies till he acquires enough English to enable him to make a decent appearance in society.” Lincoln’s minister in the French capital—“a gentleman not remarkable for his alertness or undeviating attention to the public business,” in the words of one historian—ended up dying in the Paris apartment of “a woman not his wife,” and his body had to be smuggled back to his home. Cassius Marcellus Clay, the president’s fiery minister in Russia, was fond of walking around with three pistols and a dagger he called an “Arkansas toothpick” dangling from his waistband. Hay judged Clay to be “the most wonderful ass of the age.” Lincoln acknowledged that his man in St. Petersburg possessed “a great deal of conceit and very little sense.”11

  And yet somehow Lincoln and his team managed to pull off one of the most breathtaking feats in the annals of American foreign policy: they avoided European intervention on behalf of the Confederacy, which could well have led to a Southern victory. European opinion about the conflict was diverse and nuanced, but plenty of aristocrats were content to watch the young republic founder. Even cold-eyed observers like the Economist’s Walter Bagehot, who ultimately expected the North to win, crowed that the war would leave the United States “less aggressive, less insolent, and less irritable.” Amid such tension, even a small indignity could have sparked a devastating transatlantic conflict. “A single major mistake,” notes one modern diplomatic scholar, “could have changed the course of the Civil War.”12

  The iconoclast H. L. Mencken once described Lincoln as “the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality … a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.” This “plaster saint,” Mencken insisted, was suited only “for adoration in the chautauquas and the Y.M.C.A.s.” Many Americans share that view. All we really need to know about Lincoln, the thinking goes, we learned in kindergarten. “There can be no new ‘Lincoln stories,’ ” one of the president’s former secretaries wrote 115 years ago. “The stories are all told.”13

  And yet for all that has been written, Lincoln’s life is only rarely examined against the backdrop of his own world. “We all need a course in Lincoln,” observed former secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes. In the age of Lincoln, we see shadows of our modern global arena. The midnineteenth century was an era of brutal realism, the world stage dominated by powerful, self-interested warriors. Britain’s foreign policy was directed by Lord Palmerston, its shrewd, ruthless prime minister. Dubbed Lord Pumicestone by the British press, Palmerston was perhaps best known for declaring that Britain had no eternal friends—only national interests. The continent’s other leaders were no more charming. In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck saw Europe’s future emerging from the interplay of “blood and iron.” Foreign policy, he said, was “the art of the possible, the science of the relative.” France’s Napoleon III was less competent, but certainly not warm and fuzzy. Victor Hugo described the emperor as “a man of middle height, cold, pale, slow, who looks as if he were not quite awake … esteemed by women who want to become prostitutes and by men who want to become prefects.”14

  Lincoln, too, could be cold and ruthless. He was better suited to the age of great-power politics than might be assumed. A skilled chess player, he was steeped in the rational philosophy and political economy of Enlightenment thinkers, and as a young politician, he glorified “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” as the only road to peace. Lincoln, said his former law partner, Billy Herndon, was “a realist as opposed to an idealist.” He was temperamentally suited to view the world without illusion. The future president’s mind “crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham,” Herndon recalled. “Everything came to him in its precise shape and color.” Lincoln’s whole life, said another old colleague, “was a calculation of the law of forces.”15

  Modern realists see strong similarities to our own times in the nineteenth-century age of the great powers. They argue that the post–Cold War notion that America is now the world’s sole superpower is fundamentally flawed. Even before the recent credit crunch and stock market crash, Third World nations like China and India had been slowly eroding the relative power of the United States. In reality we will soon be, if we are not already, living in a multipolar world of competing nations with vastly divergent interests. Such a world demands reasoned calculation, not self-righteous crusades. “For most of its history, the United States was in fact a nation among others, not a preponderant superpower,” notes Henry Kissinger, a dean of the realist school. The era before the “American Century,” he has argued, may well be a more accurate predictor of what is to come.16

  And yet, like ours, the nineteenth century was also an information age, an era of rapid liberalization and globalization.17 Steamships had cut the Atlantic passage to a little over a week, and telegraph workers feverishly strung copper lines across the continent and below the oceans. Fueled by the popularity of the recently invented steam press, the number of American periodicals exploded from 850 in 1828 to more than 4,000 by the eve of the Civil War. “There has never been an age so completely enthralled by newspapers as this,” observed John Hay in the fall of 1861. Karl Marx, himself a journalist and contemporary of Lincoln’s, marveled at “the sheet lightning of the daily press” and the other “immensely facilitated means of communication.” National differences, Marx believed, were “daily more and more vanishing.”

  The new technologies revolutionized the practice of foreign affairs. “Diplomacy has so few secrets nowadays,” lamented the French empress, Eugénie, as she tried to stay ahead of events. The advances in nineteenth-century communications, historian Daniel Walker Howe notes, “certainly rivaled, and probably exceeded in importance, those of the revolutionary ‘information highway’ of our own lifetimes.” The same proliferating media empowered all types of preachers and reformers, filling the globe with a cacop
hony of moral (and too often self-righteous) appeals.18

  In the changing world, Lincoln lifted a global megaphone. By exploiting the newspaper culture and innovations like the daguerreotype, the president anticipated Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit by a generation.19 Secretary of State Seward also seized the new tools of diplomacy, publishing his official dispatches for their public-relations value. The Lincoln administration, the president’s man in Paris explained in 1864, “is the first that has deliberately conducted its diplomacy à découvert and with direct and constant accountability to the public.… How differently would the last fifty years of European history read if every minister of foreign affairs had thus gone to the public confessional at the commencement of every year!”20

  Lincolnian diplomacy was not quite so artless as that. The president, while “not a trickster,” as his law partner once put it, could be “thoroughly and deeply secretive.” Lincoln, like many a successor in the White House, was aggravated by the invasions of the chirping classes. When a visitor showed Lincoln a newly designed weapon, the president shot back: “Now have any of you heard of any machine, or invention, for preventing the escape of gas from newspaper offices?” Still, Lincoln understood intuitively how any glut of information makes power “less tangible and less coercive.” Public opinion, Lincoln declared in 1858, was “everything in this country.” In the realm of international affairs, it could also prove to be a flighty mistress.21

  Foreign affairs has long been considered treacherous ground in the field of Lincoln studies. It occupies one of the few sparsely stocked corners of an otherwise massive library. Part of the reason is that books that try to place Lincoln at the center of his own foreign policy tend to end up as hagiographies, because the president often delegated day-to-day policy to his secretary of state. At the other extreme, in comprehensive diplomatic histories and specialized monographs, Lincoln the man gets lost amid a flurry of detail and bit players. This book makes no attempt to serve as a complete history of Union and Confederate foreign relations.22 I have ignored, or mentioned only in passing, many important diplomatic events and topics in which Lincoln did not play a central role—the Confederate shipbuilding programs in Europe, for example, or the minutiae of the debates in Paris and London about whether to intervene.