Lincoln in the World Read online

  Instead, I have included only those episodes in which Lincoln was deeply involved or which tell us something important about the character of a Lincolnian foreign policy. “In comparison with Woodrow Wilson, or Theodore Roosevelt, or Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln’s activity in the realm of diplomacy was slight,” writes James Randall, the distinguished Lincoln biographer. “Yet if one subtracts from American international dealings those touches that were peculiarly Lincoln’s own, the difference becomes so significant that his contribution must be regarded as a sizeable factor.”23 A successful study of Lincoln’s role in U.S. foreign relations, therefore, demands a fresh approach that is impressionistic and selective—while at the same time remaining a holistic human story.

  To that end, I have tightly focused my narrative around six distinct episodes that helped to define the character of a Lincolnian foreign policy: his debate, as a young congressman, with law partner Billy Herndon over the conduct of the Mexican War; his conflict with Secretary of State William Seward over the control of foreign policy; his standoff with Britain’s Lord Palmerston during the Trent crisis of 1861; his race with Karl Marx to master the new art of molding public opinion; and his deadlock with Napoleon III over the French occupation of Mexico. An epilogue examines John Hay’s postassassination battle to define the soul and legacy of a Lincolnian foreign policy. True character, it is said, is revealed when a human being makes choices under pressure. Watching Lincoln choose, under the tremendous pressure of a war, is the best way to closely examine that character.24

  Studying foreign policy through the eyes of the personalities who practice it is not a particularly modern approach. Actual power, realists insist, is the function of impersonal factors like access to capital, levels of industrialization, tons of steel produced. “To understand the course of world politics,” argues historian Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, “it is necessary to focus attention upon the material and long-term elements rather than the vagaries of personality.” Kennedy’s observation has much merit. Lincoln lived through—and ultimately helped to manage—a process of seismic economic change. By the start of the Civil War the United States had become an economic colossus, with a greater relative share of manufacturing output than Russia, Germany, or the Hapsburg Empire.25

  The commercial surge left a deep imprint on midcentury diplomacy. Scholars now view this period as the seed bed for America’s later imperial growth. Seward, a man of his times, loudly and repeatedly evangelized commercial expansion. Lincoln more often preferred to stress the moral perils of human bondage in his public remarks; he relentlessly defied expansionists when they aimed to spread the peculiar institution. Still, these were largely differences of rhetorical emphasis. Lincoln’s and Seward’s core views on expansion were actually not all that different. As long as it would not strengthen the position of slaveholders, Lincoln insisted that he was “not generally opposed to honest acquisition of territory.” In the White House he steadfastly backed expansionist measures like the Pacific Railroad and the Homestead Act.

  Like many in the Whig party, Lincoln viewed westward expansion as a safety valve to relieve urban poverty. “In the filling up of countries, it turns out after a while that we get so thick that we have not quite room enough … and we desire to go somewhere else,” Lincoln told a Cincinnati audience in the fall of 1859. “Where shall you go to escape from over-population and competition? To those new territories which belong to us, which are God-given for that purpose.” He considered it a short leap between promoting commerce at home and protecting it with gunboats on the high seas: “The driving [of] a pirate from the track of commerce on the broad ocean, and the removing [of] a snag from its more narrow path in the Mississippi river, can not, I think, be distinguished in principle. Each is done to save life and property, and for nothing else.”26

  In the corridors of the White House, the rise to power could be dizzying. As the Civil War ground on, John Hay had come to see Lincoln as a kind of “backwoods Jupiter,” wielding the “bolts of war and the machinery of government” with a firm and steady hand. He referred to the president in his diary and letters by the nickname Tycoon, after the shoguns that effectively ruled Japan. And yet, even as Lincoln’s power grew, he had become “in mind, body and nerves a very different man” by the start of his second term, his secretary noted. “The boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled.… He aged with great rapidity.”27

  Lincoln’s guilt seemed to grow with his power. As the war neared its climax, the president would sometimes read aloud to Hay late at night from Shakespeare’s tragedies, as his young secretary drifted off to sleep. Lincoln’s favorite soliloquy in Hamlet was King Claudius’s failed attempt at prayer: “O my offense is rank! It smells to heaven.” The president was fascinated, Hay recalled, by Richard II’s third-act speech about the “sad stories of the death of kings.” In Macbeth, Lincoln was struck by “how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim.”28

  Lincoln lived in a romantic era, an age obsessed by guilt and sin. Throughout his life he admired Lord Byron’s poetry, with its melancholy, remorseful protagonists. He would read it aloud to anyone who would listen, kicking his feet up onto his office table. He particularly liked the poet’s Fugitive Pieces, with their tales of crusading knights who come to ugly ends abroad. Another favorite was Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the story of a young man with a “thirst for travel” who sets out across Europe looking for adventure and redemption.29

  There is no greater drama, Lincoln and his team intuitively recognized, than the intersection of power and personality.30 “Power is poison,” Henry Adams, the son of Lincoln’s minister in London, observed in the years following the Civil War. Its effect, Adams concluded, “is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” Adams, like modern realists, believed that foreign affairs had become “a struggle not of men but of forces.” And yet the young diplomat was also fascinated by the human element—“the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prison-house,” desperately seeking a “door of escape.” At the least, Adams believed, the intersection of power and character are worth studying in presidents like Lincoln, because the effects are the same on society at large.31

  Foreign affairs, at least in some quarters, have often been considered best left to a brotherhood of well-bred and well-connected “wise men.” The rough-and-tumble of American popular government is frequently seen as a hindrance to the long-term planning, efficient decision making, and patient state building that a sturdy foreign policy demands. “I do not hesitate to say that it is especially in their conduct of foreign relations that democracies appear to be decidedly inferior to other governments,” Alexis de Tocqueville observes in Democracy in America. “Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient.”32

  Lincoln was certainly neither well bred nor well connected internationally. And yet, as I hope to show in the following pages, he should be considered one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents—a worthy model for students of global affairs. My argument is not simply that the plain-talking Railsplitter, through his common sense and good judgment, was somehow more adept at the arts of diplomacy than the polished and gold-braided envoys of Europe—although that was sometimes the case. “Where men bred in courts, accustomed to the world, or versed in diplomacy, would use some subterfuge, or would make a polite speech, or give a shrug of the shoulders as the means of getting out of an embarrassing position,” observed one British journalist, “Mr. Lincoln raises a laugh by some bold west-country anecdote, and moves off in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke.” Lincoln’s warm chuckle—which one observer compared to “the neigh of a wild horse”—served him well in the hig
h-stakes game of transatlantic brinksmanship.33

  Yet the more important point is that Lincoln during the Civil War boldly tested the versatility of American democracy itself—Tocqueville’s original foreign-affairs bugbear. The Founding Fathers, eager to avoid the pitfalls of Old World monarchies, had wisely—but also somewhat schizophrenically—divided the power to conduct foreign policy between the executive and legislative branches of government. Lincoln, a former Whig congressman, possessed a deep reverence for America’s national lawmaking bodies. Yet he also discovered over the course of his presidency that acute international crises often demanded the firm hand of a chief executive and the steady keel of his State Department. “Necessity,” he once remarked, “knows no law.” Although Lincoln considered many of his innovations temporary war measures, historians of the twentieth century’s “imperial presidency” have identified lasting precedents in his handling of foreign affairs. All the while, Lincoln and his party worked assiduously to build a centralized American state—a critical prerequisite to America’s later rise to power.34

  It would be flat wrong, of course, to label Lincoln an imperialist. He wore his power well, and had a keen sense of international justice and the limits of American influence. He displayed many of the characteristics of great diplomats.35 He was comfortable with the give-and-take of negotiation. He was cool and courteous as he pursued the national interest. Britain’s Lord Palmerston once observed that the practice of foreign affairs is not “an occult science.” It simply demands “plain dealing” and “a regard to justice.” Lincoln had read and reread George Washington’s farewell address—one of America’s bedrock international-relations texts. A wise foreign policy, according to Washington, demands the pursuit of “our interest guided by justice.” Lincoln adopted that sound advice as his virtual motto, once suggesting that Americans should celebrate the first president’s birthday by rereading the “immortal” document.36

  Even Lincoln’s antislavery position was colored by his vision of America’s place in the wider world. The sixteenth president was born only thirty-three years after the Declaration of Independence. The rights of black Americans, Lincoln believed, were guaranteed by the same principle that justified the nation’s freedom from British domination. “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth,” Lincoln wrote one correspondent in 1855. “But now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—for burning firecrackers!!!”37

  Viewed against the backdrop of the global arena, then, our grade-school portrait of the sixteenth president morphs into something pleasantly exotic. One of the unexpected joys of studying Lincoln in the twenty-first century is how much astonishing new material about him has come to light. In recent years, scholars led by Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame have sifted through not just the traditional letters, diaries, and other primary sources in an effort to uncover fresh material about Lincoln, but they have also combed through the archived papers of past biographers and historians, searching for valuable and revealing snippets that have somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor. Their efforts have revealed countless examples of previously uncovered details that have helped to draw a more accurate picture of Lincoln and his presidency.38

  For this book I have taken a similar approach, revisiting not only the memoirs and dispatches of Lincoln’s diplomats, but also searching the unpublished archives of previous Lincoln biographers for clues to his foreign policy. The papers of the imperialist senator and Lincoln biographer Albert J. Beveridge, housed at the Library of Congress, include stacks of transcripts of useful Mexican War–era newspaper clippings. In the personal collection of Mary Lincoln biographer Ruth Randall, we learn that a disgruntled former State Department employee liked to refer to the First Lady as “that ‘Springfield bitch’ ”—a small but revealing detail omitted from Randall’s own sympathetic treatment of her subject.39 The uncataloged files of Lincoln biographer William H. Townsend—stored in a dark corner of a labyrinthine basement in Lexington, Kentucky—include fascinating photographs, newspaper clippings, and other material about Lincoln’s colorful minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay.

  Even the archives of minor diplomatic clerks can shed light on Lincoln and his foreign-policy team. A contemporary account in the papers of Edward Lee Plumb, a businessman and State Department aide, describes a glittering White House reception at which an exhausted but cheery Lincoln mingles with the diplomatic corps in the wake of the Trent affair—a valuable fly-on-the-wall perspective. In another collection, the personal correspondence of Lincoln’s minister in the Netherlands, we find a missive to a friend in the Senate deriding the “pusillanimity” of the administration’s Mexico policy—a telling peek at just how difficult it could be to keep America’s strong-willed foreign envoys on the same song sheet. Taken together with the shelves of diplomatic memoirs and letter books of official dispatches, a textured and surprising portrait emerges of a diplomat in chief whose presidency helped point the way to America’s rise to power.40

  It would be folly, of course, to turn Lincoln into a plaster Richelieu. His foreign policies also included some turkeys. Lincoln clung relentlessly to the misguided idea of colonizing freed slaves to Africa or Latin America. He persistently urged his military commanders to fortify the Mexican border to deter the French army to its south—a fateful decision that led to a military fiasco. (General William Tecumseh Sherman famously derided that campaign as “one damn blunder from beginning to end.”) Even the U.S. consul in Paris, who was an admirer of the president, later recalled that Lincoln had made some “great blunders” in international affairs in addition to his inspired choices. “No one,” the diplomat concluded, “is wise and cool enough to make no blunders” in a conflict as unpredictable and unprecedented as the American Civil War.

  Still, it is well worth studying Lincoln’s lapses in judgment along with his masterstrokes. Our cardinal sin in international relations, as Walter Lippmann once chided American utopians, is the “error of forgetting that we are men and of thinking that we are gods. We are not gods.… We are mere mortals with limited power and little universal wisdom.” As Lincoln pursues his diplomacy, we are reminded of perhaps the most important lesson in modern foreign affairs: that we are human after all.41

  Lincoln’s foreign-affairs education began in the fall of 1847, as columns of American soldiers were hurtling into Mexico City. The Mexican War, which had been raging for more than a year, was America’s first full-scale foreign conflict. Haggard-looking veterans had been flooding back to Springfield for months, parading through the streets waving captured flags and drawing huge crowds. The newspapers were plastered with the army’s exploits. Americans were thrilled by the excitement. The country, a young Herman Melville marveled, had been thrown into “a state of delirium” by the war.42

  As triumphant American troops patrolled the Mexican capital, Lincoln and his family clambered into a stagecoach and set out from muddy Springfield on their first trip to Washington. The Illinoisan, who had just been elected to his first term in Congress, was full of anticipation. For years he had been relentlessly lobbying for this post, sending a flurry of letters to anyone who would listen. Mary, one of Lincoln’s friends observed, wanted “to loom largely” in the capital. Lincoln’s neighbors were skeptical. It would be impossible to turn the disheveled, six-foot-four giant into a gentleman, they sniped.43

  It is easy to imagine the Illinois lawyer and his young family as they traveled east through the blazing fall foliage of the Indiana woods, into the crisp, cold Kentucky hills—and then on to Washington. By the fall of 1847, Lincoln had come to question the wisdom of the Mexican War, but he was not immune to ambition or flights of fancy. Foreign affairs, for better or worse, are a spectacle of power and
romance—a relentlessly human endeavor. A week or so after he arrived in the nation’s capital, the young congressman scratched out a letter to his Springfield law partner, Billy Herndon. “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself,” Lincoln wrote, “I have concluded to do so, before long.”44

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lincoln vs. Herndon

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS NERVOUS. THE FLOOR OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN THE 1840S WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY PLEASANT PLACE TO GIVE A SPEECH—ESPECIALLY THE FIRST major effort of a freshman congressman’s career. The chamber was designed to resemble the Roman Pantheon, framed by marble pillars and crimson drapes, but it reminded more than one visitor of an unruly schoolhouse. Members kicked their heels up on the mahogany desks, hollered at the speaker, rustled newspapers, puffed on cigars, and spat tobacco juice on the filthy carpet. The noise, amplified by a cavernous, sixty-foot ceiling, reminded one visitor of “a hundred swarms of bees.” One of Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisans complained that he “would prefer speaking in a pig pen with 500 hogs squealing” or talking “to a mob when a fight is going on” than trying to keep the attention of his colleagues. It was, he recalled, “the most stupid place generally I was ever in.”1

  Lincoln was accustomed to speaking before juries, but he could never completely suppress the butterflies. Thirty-eight years old, a “rail in broadcloth,” the gentleman from Illinois presented an arresting figure. His suits, more often than not, were rumpled, and his pants tended to hover above his ankles. His law partner at the time, William Herndon, described Lincoln as a “sinewy, grisly” character, with a wild shock of hair that “lay floating where the fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random.” Regardless of his appearance, Lincoln knew on this day that he was likely to get the House’s attention. He had decided to pick a fight over the origins of the Mexican War, the two-year-old conflict that promised—or threatened—to remake the American West.2