Elihu Washburne

by Michael Hill

  When the war began, the ambassadors of every major foreign power fled the capital. “The gaudy butterflies of the salons speedily fluttered out of sight,” mocked one newspaper as diplomats rushed out of Paris. But one diplomat, American Elihu Washburne, remained, holding fast to his diplomatic post. His superiors in Washington, President Ulysses S. Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, allowed him the option to leave, but he would have none of it. “This is my place where duty calls me and here I must remain,” he wrote at the time.

  Along with millions of Parisians, Washburne endured months of bombardment, brutally cold weather, and dwindling food supplies. Despite all the hardships and dangers (one Commune member insisted he be hanged and the American Legation leveled to the ground), Washburne found time to chronicle these remarkable events in his diary, personal letters, and diplomatic dispatches. Whether exhausted, sick, or cold, Washburne tended to his journal and correspondence almost each day, pouring out his thoughts and impressions onto sheets of blank paper, later interwoven into leather-bound books. He knew he was at the center of history and was determined to record it all, providing a unique and riveting account of the monumental events swirling about him.

  He later incorporated portions of the diary into a two-volume book, Recollections of a Minister to France, 1869–1877, published in 1887. But like many nineteenth-century diarists, he edited and rewrote many entries from the journal, often deleting significant personal passages and reflections and paraphrasing others. The Recollections also omit his personal correspondence to family, friends, and colleagues during the years he was under siege. Those letters are invaluable, as they occasionally provide a more detailed account of events or, in some instances, fill gaps in the diary. In this book I have assembled selections from Washburne’s journal and letters, drawn from the original manuscript sources at the Library of Congress and Washburne family archives in Maine.

  Washburne began the diary shortly after the outbreak of the war and kept it through the end of the bloody Commune. It is a vivid personal account of life in Paris during some of its darkest hours. Separated from his loved ones and isolated from the outside world, he often took time to reflect on his parents, family, and friends back home. Filled with insight about political and military events in Paris, the diary and letters also have an unmistakable charm, at times blending homespun expressions with quotations from Shakespeare, Shelley, and the Bible. Perhaps he wrote as a remedy for loneliness, but for the reader they are pure gold. We come to know and admire Washburne as he struggles to stay alive, do his duty, and not let his country down. As he would later write, “With no experience in such matters, and with no pretension of having been initiated in what are called the mysteries of diplomacy . . . I had simply to do the best I could under the circumstances.”

  Above all, Washburne’s story is a great American story—a man rising to greatness in the midst of difficult and extraordinary times.

  Elihu Washburne arrived in Paris on May 12, 1869. It was only the second time he had ever set foot in a foreign land, and the expectations for him as a diplomat were modest. Far from the town of Galena, Illinois, where he had once struggled as a small-town lawyer and politician, he was now “a denizen of the rough west . . . [in] . . . the most polished and artistic city in the universe.”

  He dressed plainly, wearing a blue or black broadcloth coat. His hair was “iron gray, worn long, half rolled under at the ends like a Southerner’s or a man from the rural districts,” wrote a reporter for the New York Tribune. His eyes were “large and full . . . shining like diamonds.” His manner and style were part Midwest, part New England. “The model is Yankee, but the cargo is Western,” one reporter noted.

  Although “without fortune in dollars and cents,” he would now “hobnob” with Emperor Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie, attend lavish state dinners, and enjoy the company of royalty and foreign diplomats from around the world.

  He was representing the United States of America at the imperial court of France. It had been a long road to the magnificence and splendor of Paris, a journey that had begun nearly sixty years earlier in a country village in northern New England.

  Elihu Benjamin Washburne was born in Livermore, Maine, on September 23, 1816. The sixty-acre Washburn homestead (Elihu later added the e to his name to reflect the old English style) rested on a rise of hills some forty miles east of the White Mountains. On a clear day Mount Washington was visible in the distance. Warm winds swept over the land in summer, but the winters were cold and severe.

  He was the third of eleven children, seven boys and four girls (one boy died in infancy). The family, he would recall, was always “very, very poor.” His father, Israel, a man never “habituated to manual labor,” ran a general store in the village, where townspeople gathered to talk politics and religion. But bad times and “misfortune” struck in 1829, and his father’s business failed, the building itself hauled away by a sheriff and a team of oxen. His father tried to make a go of it as a farmer, but the “unwilling acres” made it hard to support a family of ten children. Elihu, twelve years old by now, helped his father as well as he could, once joining him in a nine-day cattle drive to the nearest market in Massachusetts.

  Despite all the hardships of life on the farm, Washburne was devoted to his father. “With me memories are awakened of his virtues, all his kindnesses, all his devotion to his family,” he later wrote. “When I look back upon his life and character . . . I [am] filled with admiration and gratitude. The turf shall always grow green over his honored grave and then shall be written on his monument that he was a kind father and an honest man . . .”

  Washburne adored his mother, Martha Benjamin Washburn. Born in Livermore in 1792, she was the daughter of Samuel Benjamin, an American Revolutionary War officer who had fought at the battles of Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Although of little education she “was possessed of a quick and rare intelligence and excellent common sense.” She could be “firm and resolute” in tough times, but also kind and “tender-hearted.” She died at age sixty-nine, on May 6, 1861, only weeks after the outbreak of the Civil War. After her death Washburne wrote, “When I think of her labors, her anxieties, her watchfulness, her good and wise counsels and her attention to all our wants, my heart swells with emotion of gratitude towards her which no language can express.”

  Washburne spent much of his youth as a hired hand for neighbors, trying to help support the family and pay off his father’s debts. “I dug up stumps, drove oxen to the plow and harrow, planted and hoed potatoes and corn, spread, raked and loaded and stowed away hay.” He worked for one neighbor for $5 a month to pay off a $25 debt. “I was called up every morning at sunrise and worked until sunset through all the days of summer,” he would later write. “No slave boy under the eye of a taskmaster ever worked harder.”

  His early years of school were no less difficult. When he was only seven years old his parents had sent him to live with his maternal grandparents in Boston. His grandfather was “stern and severe . . . [and] to him there was no nonsense in life,” Washburne would recall. They enrolled him at a local school, but as a stranger he was “not regarded kindly” and was treated harshly. He would never forget a “brutal beating” he received at the hands of the schoolmaster for some minor infraction. “The sad and heavy months wore on,” he would later recall, “until finally my father came to take me home.”

  He had come from Livermore with a horse and chaise and we drove back, being three days on the way . . . We arrived at home about midnight of the third day and I remember the joy of my poor mother at seeing me again.

  Washburne attended schools in Livermore over the next few years, but he had little time for his studies. When he was not tending to chores or farmwork, however, he would educate himself by “eagerly” reading the newspapers and devouring books of history and biography at the local library.

  By the age of seventeen Elihu had decided that farm life was not for him. “Witnessing the poverty and struggles of my pare
nts,” he would recall, “I determined to shift for myself.” During the next several years he tried his hand at a variety of jobs, working as a printer’s devil (an apprentice who mixes ink and fetches printing type) at a nearby newspaper and spending time as a local schoolteacher. Finally, at the age of twenty he decided to pursue law.

  Before entering law school, Washburne devoted himself to two years of schooling at the Kent’s Hill School in Maine and then moved to Boston, where he was tutored in the law by attorney John Otis. More than just a teacher, Otis became a “true friend,” helping Washburne with room and board expenses and tuition while he attended Harvard Law School.

  After Elihu’s admission to the bar, his younger brother Cadwallader persuaded him to move out west to Illinois. Cadwallader had become wealthy as a Midwest lawyer handling mineral and timber land grants. “A fellow who comes to a new country, penniless and an entire stranger, cannot jump into a fortune at once,” Cadwallader warned about life in the Midwest. “He has many things to contend against which are not to be overcome in a moment. But if he holds out, minds his own business, does not become dissipated . . . he will generally come out right side up.”

  Traveling by train and steamboat, Washburne arrived in the rough lead-mining town of Galena, Illinois, in early 1840:

  I was a passenger in the little stern-wheel steamboat Pike [he would later write] . . . We arrived at the levee before daylight, and when I got up in the morning it was bright and clear . . . The mud in the streets knee-deep, the log and frame buildings all huddled together; the river full of steamboats discharging freight, busy men running to and fro, and draymen yelling.

  He was a “green Yankee boy” with nothing to aid him “except hard experience and a high resolve” to succeed. In Galena, Washburne found “. . . miners, Americans, Germans, Swiss, good men and bad men and all rough men, sturdy pioneers like himself who had gone West to succeed and would have succeeded anywhere,” as one biographer wrote.

  He took a room in a log cabin boardinghouse for $4 a week sleeping “in the straw” with other boarders. At night he would be kept awake by the “howl” of calves from a nearby stockyard. Washburne soon set to work on establishing a law practice, renting a small office with a “table, three chairs and a Franklin stove.” Galena was a “horrid rough place,” but Washburne had little trouble establishing a successful practice. The people in town, he said, “are a litigious set.”

  Shortly after arriving in Galena, Washburne met Adele Gratiot, the young daughter of one of the town’s most prominent families. Her father, Colonel Henry Gratiot, was a successful prospector and also federal Indian agent for the region. In 1827 he had helped preserve peace in the territory by successfully mediating a dispute between settlers in Galena and the Winnebago Indians.

  Adele was ten years younger, attractive, charming, well educated, and “a fine conversationalist.” It was said that she was a woman “of gentle manners and quiet dignity” and “charmed everyone by the grace and amiability of her manners.”

  Five years later, on July 31, 1845, they were married in Galena. They would have seven children, the first, Gratiot, named for Adele’s family. Throughout their forty-two-year marriage, Elihu and Adele were devoted to each other and their children. An early biographer wrote that “no personal trait . . . is as outstanding as the devotion he felt and showed” for his wife. She held a charm and influence over him that few others did. Above all, she believed in him and “never had a doubt that he could do anything which he set out to do.”

  Settled down with a family and a flourishing law practice, Washburne turned his ambitions toward local and national politics. By 1844 he was attending national political conventions as a Whig delegate, and only eight years later he was nominated by his party as a candidate for the United States Congress.

  He later described the exhausting and exhilarating days he spent on the campaign trail:

  I made a canvass of some ten weeks, almost single-handed, and alone . . . not wanting in energy or activity. “No dangers daunted and no labors tired.” I made one, and very often two speeches, each day. There were but a few miles of railroad in the whole district stretching from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi river. I travelled in buggies, in stage-coaches, on horseback and on foot, in farmer’s wagons; any way to get along and meet my appointments. I visited the leading men at their homes, talked with their wives and caressed their children, went to church on the Sabbath and contributed to the support of Sunday schools. I attended all the parties and danced with the young ladies, and made them promise to have their sweethearts vote for me. I attended all the county fairs, and made speeches, praising very justly the magnificent exhibits, and the more beautiful display of wives and daughters. I went through the floral halls and “toted” the young ones in my arms, drank cider and ate cakes at the booths on the outside of the ground.

  At times, however, his stops on the circuit proved less colorful and more frightful, requiring the full measure of his fortitude and charm:

  I called one afternoon to see Mr. J, a well to do farmer, an old line abolitionist and a man of some influence in his neighborhood, but very mean, and with a wife still more mean. She was a thin visaged, long nosed, cadaverous looking creature, with a pair of spectacles tied on her head with a tow string. She first saluted me by saying that she did not know what business these politicians had to be running about the county keeping honest people from their work. I withdrew after her first fire in a somewhat damaged state, never expecting to see her again. But as luck would have it, I had an appointment to make a speech in the . . . school house in the neighborhood that evening. When the meeting broke up it was raining in torrents—I could not go to the neighboring village some ten miles away . . . and Mr. J was the only man I knew there. He saw my plight and could not but ask me to go home with him and I had no alternative but to go . . .

  When Washburne arrived back at Mr. J’s house, an annoyed and grim-faced wife met them at the door. She had no bed for him, she snapped.

  I put on my blandest smile and said that I never slept in a bed—had not such an institution in my house, but that I always slept on the floor when I was at home, and I begged her to let me sleep on the floor. No, she would not agree to that, but said “I’ll take the two gals with me and you and the old man shall sleep together.” When I took another look at the dirty old codger I was horror struck, but there was no getting out of it and with many mutterings the old woman packed us off into a dirty old straw bed alive with bugs. I jumped into the back side . . . leaving as wide a space as possible between us. After a long talk . . . fatigue finally brought sleep. The morning came. I congratulated the old woman on her nice bed and the splendid sleep I had had—told her that everything showed she was an elegant house keeper and that I hoped her daughters would prove her equal, and if so they would make splendid wives. Soon the “gals” appeared and I congratulated them on their genteel appearance and expressed my regret that I had no boys large enough to be their sweet-beaus. And now the old woman began to relent and she flew round & got me some breakfast which I declared to be superior to any breakfast I ever ate in Boston.

  From that day forward, Washburne would proudly proclaim, Mr. and Mrs. J became “the firmest and most devoted friends” he ever had in the county.

  Finally, on November 2, 1852, the “great day of trial finally came.” Washburne spent election day on horseback canvassing the district, seeking any last-minute support he could muster. At the end of the day he arrived home, worn to the bone and with his “green blanket coat . . . completely covered with mud.” Although the outcome of the election was uncertain, he knew he had done his best and considered his “duty accomplished.”

  The next day Washburne learned he had been elected to Congress by a slim majority of 286 votes. He would go on to serve eight consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  In Congress, Washburne quickly developed a reputation for independence and honesty. In 1856, only four years after first being el
ected, he became chairman of the Committee on Commerce. (Three other brothers, Israel, Cadwallader, and William, would also serve as members of Congress from the states of Maine, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, respectively; Elihu, Israel, and Cadwallader made history by serving in Congress at the same time between 1855 and 1860.) As chairman, Washburne took a keen interest in legislation affecting the development of the West, such as the building of the transcontinental railroad and improvements to navigation on the Mississippi River. All four brothers would eventually champion the antislavery cause in Congress.

  Later, as chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, Washburne assumed a role as a “Watchdog over the Treasury,” taking every opportunity he could to protect the “public purse as if it had been his own.”

  He was “one of the ablest and most faithful of the representatives of the people,” one newspaper declared. “He steadily set his face against corruption and extravagance in every form, and incurred the bitter hostility of the hungry and plundering hordes who annually came to Washington with all manner of schemes to rob the Treasury . . .” Others found him impossible to deal with, calling him the “meanest man in the House.”

  Washburne also had the good political fortune to meet two figures who would shape the rest of his public life: Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Washburne first met Lincoln during the winter of 1843–1844 when they were both in Springfield, Illinois, attending a session of the state Supreme Court. At first, Washburne was hardly impressed, seeing only an “awkward” lawyer wearing a “swallow-tail coat . . . thin pantaloons . . . a straw hat, and a pair of brogans with woolen socks.”