Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Lincoln had been laying the groundwork for his speech for weeks. He had voted for fellow representative George Ashmun’s resolution condemning the 1846 American invasion of Mexico as unnecessary and unconstitutional. President James K. Polk claimed that the conflict was a war of self-defense, retaliation for attacks by Mexican guerrillas. Lincoln wasn’t buying. He demanded to know “the particular spot of soil” where American blood had been shed, insisting that U.S. troops had provoked the war by aggressively pushing into contested land.3

  In the red-and-gold House chamber, with its plaster statue of Liberty and its large portraits of Washington and Lafayette, Lincoln went on the attack. He insisted in his high-pitched tenor that his “first impulse” regarding Mexico had been to “remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended.” Yet he finally determined that “I can not be silent, if I would.” Lincoln compared Polk to a shifty lawyer trying to defend a hopeless case. The president “is deeply conscious of being in the wrong,” Lincoln told the chamber. He “feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” Young Hickory, as Polk was known, had been deluded by dreams of military glory: “that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” The freshman congressman’s attacks quickly grew uncomfortably personal. The president, he boomed, was “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man,” whose “mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface.” Polk’s justifications were nothing more than “the half-insane mumbling of a fever dream.”4

  Lincoln spoke quickly as he made his case against Polk, emphasizing his points with an “abundance of gesture.” As a young legislator, Lincoln could be an uneven speaker, shifting on his feet and ranging up and down the chamber’s aisles. His colleagues back in Illinois had once joked about creating a committee to hold him in place. In later years, Lincoln would eventually learn to control his flailing arms, locking them behind his back and instead gesturing mostly with his head. Only occasionally would he shoot out “that long bony forefinger of his to dot an idea or express a thought.” Today, still green and anxious, Lincoln rushed through the address in about forty-five minutes, fearing that he would be cut off by the speaker if he went on too long.5

  Lincoln’s broadside attracted little attention—at least at first. Polk, who had once counseled treating political enemies with “silent contempt,” did not bother to respond. He didn’t even mention Lincoln in his otherwise lengthy diary. Lincoln seemed pleased with his effort, spending a substantial amount of his own money sending copies of the address home to constituents. A week after his appearance, he dropped a note in the mail to his old friend and law partner, Billy Herndon. “I have made a speech,” Lincoln wrote, “a copy of which I will send you by next mail.”6

  Lincoln’s criticism of Polk had merit. By attempting to fortify the Rio Grande, the president had acted provocatively. Friendly newspapers cheered Lincoln’s volley. “Evidently there is music in that very tall Mr. Lincoln,” the Baltimore Patriot exulted. The congressman, reported the Missouri Republican, “commanded the attention of the House, which none but a strong man can do.” Still, in the nineteenth century, periodicals usually acted as party organs. In hawkish Illinois, Democratic-controlled papers pounced. The Illinois State Register called Lincoln’s resolutions “trash,” and complained that the “littleness of the pettifogging lawyer” had “disgraced” the state. It attacked the congressman with headlines like: “Out damned SPOT!” and dubbed Lincoln the “Benedict Arnold of our district.” The nickname that ultimately stuck, coming back to haunt Lincoln in his later political career, was simply Spotty.7

  The congressman suffered another stroke of bad luck a little over a month later: the war ended. Polk’s envoy had secured excellent terms from the defeated Mexicans. In exchange for $15 million and the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the United States would take control of a vast tranche of territory that comprises modern-day New Mexico, California, and other western states. Americans, in general, were elated. But Lincoln’s hobbyhorse had been shot out from under him.8

  Far more troubling were the letters that began pouring in from an unlikely critic: Billy Herndon. Lincoln’s law partner believed that Polk had the right to deter enemy troops by sending U.S. forces “into the very heart of Mexico” if necessary. Moreover, in expansionist Illinois, Lincoln was destroying his career by challenging Polk on the war, Herndon believed. Lincoln’s partner would later boast about his “mud instinct”—his ability to read the political mood. Herndon contended that no politician could survive a vote in which he appeared to oppose his own country in wartime. Lincoln’s law partner wrote to his friend again and again to press his case.9

  Lincoln quickly responded to Herndon, hoping to set his partner straight. The congressman regretted the disagreement, he told the younger man—“not because of any fear we shall remain disagreed, after you shall have read this letter, but because, if you misunderstand, I fear other good friends will also.” Lincoln made a distinction between challenging the war’s origins, by voting for the Ashmun amendment, and agreeing to send supplies to the troops. “I will stake my life, that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did,” he insisted. “Would you have voted what you felt you knew to be a lie? I know you would not.” Skipping the vote was not an option. “No man can be silent if he would,” the congressman wrote. “You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie. I can not doubt which you would do.” Lincoln could not have been happy with his partner’s challenge, but he did his best to maintain the relationship. Although he addressed his Mexican War letters using the formal “William,” rather than the more familiar “Billy,” Lincoln closed them with his usual affectionate signoff.10

  The Mexican War did no lasting damage to Lincoln’s relationship with his law partner. It did, however, mark a turning point in Lincoln’s maturity as a foreign-policy thinker—and, in a larger sense, in Americans’ conception of their country’s place in the world. The early nineteenth century was a romantic era. It was also a period of intense religious revival. Traveling evangelists helped to infuse the country with a crusading spirit. For decades Americans had justified westward expansion with appeals to natural right. In the 1840s, however, a new dynamic emerged. Hawks, especially in the northeastern and northwestern states, began advocating the moral reform of distant societies. The Mexican War was “the best kind of conquest,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1847. “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!”11

  Neither Herndon nor Lincoln was conventionally devout, but Lincoln’s law partner did absorb much of the reform-minded ethos of the time. Herndon, notes his biographer, David Donald, represented an increasingly common American type. He was “a child of that universally optimistic age when everyone had the cure for the world’s ills,” Donald observes. “It was the day of the crank, the crusader, and the crackpot.… Everybody believed in immediate perfectibility through reform.” Herndon was always pushing a cause, and tended to see issues in Manichaean terms. Lincoln was cooler and more cerebral; he did not want to rashly overturn the existing sectional balance. The story of the congressman and his law partner is a fitting prelude to the story of Lincoln’s Civil War diplomacy—and a vivid illustration of a debate that continues to shape American foreign policy to the present day.12

  The Insidious Wiles of Foreign Influence

  Nothing in Lincoln’s early life had prepared him for the foreign-policy donnybrook that accompanied the Mexican War. Yet his childhood was less isolated than is often depicted. Lincoln spent his formative years in a new nation still raw from its war of independence. His earliest memories reflect the instability of the era. In the Kentucky cabin wher
e Lincoln was raised, his parents cared for companies of volunteers returning home from the War of 1812—“strings of them,” one of Lincoln’s cousins remembered. His parents coached him to always treat the soldiers with respect. As a young boy, Lincoln revered the heroes of the American Revolution. He believed that there was “something more than common that those men struggled for,” he later recalled, “something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” He read more than one biography of George Washington, who counseled would-be statesmen to remain “constantly awake” to “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.” A successful foreign policy, Washington advised, should both promote American interests and display a regard for international justice.13

  For the young Lincoln, foreigners were still exotic, the subject of romantic adventures and dangerous liaisons. With his friends, the boy sang ribald “field songs” about erotic escapades abroad. One old standby was titled “None Can Love like an Irishman.” (“The turban’d Turk, who scorns the world, / May strut about with his whiskers curled, … Yet long may he pray with his Alcoran Before he can love like an Irishman.”) Lincoln—whom one neighbor described as “a tall spider of a boy”—read The Arabian Nights, the classic Middle Eastern yarns. He particularly liked “Sinbad the Sailor,” the story of a man from modern-day Iraq who is obsessed with “traveling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands.”14

  Lincoln increasingly shared Sinbad’s obsession. As a teenager, he found ways to see the world outside his tiny Indiana community. He built a small skiff and took it floating out onto the Ohio River. One day a couple of steamboat passengers asked for the young man’s help to haul their trunks aboard their boat. When they were done, each man tossed Lincoln a silver half-dollar. “I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money,” he later recalled. “The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”15

  The following year a local store owner hired Lincoln to take a shipment of meats and grains on his flatboat down the river to New Orleans. Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had visited the city more than two decades earlier and may have told his son stories about his own adventures there. Now the younger Lincoln poled his way down the Mississippi River, drifting across the thirty-first parallel at the Louisiana state line, which not so long ago had marked the international boundary. As historian Richard Campanella notes, entering New Orleans was the closest Lincoln “ever came to immersing himself in a foreign culture.”

  In the Crescent City, steamships bobbed along the mouth of the Mississippi, carrying goods destined for Europe. Locals, including large communities of refugees from Haiti, Nova Scotia, and Latin America, streamed down the cobblestone streets chattering in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Diplomats from Brazil to Sicily to Sardinia dined on turtle steaks and other exotic fare at the Globe Coffee House on Chartres Street. The city’s women were notoriously lovely. During the War of 1812, British troops had egged themselves on toward the city with promises of “beauty and booty.” Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited around the same time as Lincoln, remembered seeing “faces with every shade of color.”

  Lincoln returned to New Orleans in 1831, this time passing St. Louis—a city founded by French fur traders that retained much of its Old World character. The region, observed one visitor, was now home to “foreigners of every description—Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Irish, &c.” The leafy hills along the riverbank were dotted with Catholic chapels and Spanish-style homes. The roots of Lincoln’s ethnic and religious tolerance, some historians argue, can be found in these early journeys. In later life, writes Campanella, “Lincoln explicitly embraced the sort of pluralism he first witnessed in the large Catholic and foreign-born population of New Orleans.”16

  Lincoln’s encounters with the wider world seemed to shape his early writing. His first major political statement, a March 1832 handbill, argues that local schools should make more of an effort to teach students about foreign cultures. The goal, he writes, should be to assure that every man is capable of reading “the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions.” The document also makes the case for improving local roads and building canals—vital links to the outside world. Such developments, he insists, would make it easier to export local crops and bring in “necessary articles from abroad.” And yet, Lincoln often seemed conflicted about the benefits of foreign trade. He frequently mocked Americans who felt the need to ape European fashions.17

  This is the Lincoln—the flatboatman coming to terms with America’s place in the world—whom Billy Herndon first spotted one day in 1832 by the banks of the Sangamon River. Lincoln had volunteered to help pilot a steamboat called the Talisman down the slender waterway. Then a teenager a decade younger than Lincoln, Herndon and a clutch of other boys had cantered alongside on horseback as the boat chugged up the river. Local townsmen helped the craft along, hacking away with axes at the thick brush blocking the route. The technology was primitive. Whenever the steam whistle wailed, the boat lurched to a stop. Still, Herndon was enthralled. When the Talisman finally reached its destination, near a local mill, Herndon and the other teens jumped off their horses and spilled onto the boat, “lost in boyish wonder.”18

  Steam power promised to shrink the world. It seemed, at least at first, certain to inspire greater harmony with distant peoples. Yet old-fashioned grudges remained a reality on the frontier. In the spring of 1832, battles erupted with the “British Band” of Indian warriors led by Black Hawk, who had sided with the redcoats during the War of 1812. A unit of volunteers elected Lincoln captain, and he shipped off to the front. Lincoln later mocked his own war experience, insisting that he had killed only mosquitoes. “The whole thing was a sort of frolic,” remembered one of Lincoln’s friends.19

  Still, moments of peril interrupted their romp. On one occasion Lincoln and his unit stumbled upon the scene of a massacre. Scalps were impaled on ram rods and the bodies of dead children hung upside down. Another time, Lincoln and his men discovered and had to bury the dead bodies of fellow troops. “The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay, heads toward us, on the ground, and every man had a round red spot on the top of his head, about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp,” Lincoln recalled. “It was frightful, but it was grotesque, and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.”20

  Because of—or in spite of—his early war experience, Lincoln was generally reluctant to challenge foreign powers during this period. A series of articles in his local newspaper in the late 1830s, likely written by Lincoln, taunted Democrats who wanted to gin up a war with Britain or France. In an 1838 address before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Lincoln jeered at Democratic hawks. “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” he asked his audience. “By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”21

  The real peril, Lincoln argued, “cannot come from abroad.” Instead, he feared “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” would spring up at home. The American population had been doubling every two decades—expanding six times faster than most other countries’. The economy was growing by almost 4 percent each year. And yet for the young lawyer beginning his career, personal wealth and power remained elusive. Money was so tight and housing so scarce that Lincoln was forced to share a bedroom with several other bachelors above a Springfield dry-goods store.22

  Lincoln’s roommates included Billy Herndon, then a nineteen-year-old clerk at the shop downstairs. Kinetic and sloe-eyed, with a wide smile and a mop of blue-black hair, Herndon had until recently been studying at a nearby college. Yet political de
velopments had ultimately changed his plans. After an abolitionist newspaperman, Elijah Lovejoy, was murdered by a proslavery mob, Herndon had been swept up in the antislavery backlash on campus. Herndon’s father, a stalwart Democrat, had somehow learned of his son’s agitation. He halted the boy’s tuition payments, dismissing his son as “a damned abolitionist pup.” Herndon was on his own.23

  The dry-goods store quickly turned into a meeting place for the capital’s young wits. The men gathered in the back around a wood-burning stove, discussing politics and reading poetry. Lincoln honed his debating and storytelling skills before a small audience that included some of the capital’s rising figures. Herndon, still a junior member, would sit on a keg, taking it all in. The philosophical discussions may have fired both men’s imaginations, but they still did not pay the bills. “Poverty,” Herndon wrote in 1842, “is staring us all in the face.”24

  Priests, Dogs, and Servants

  In Springfield, it was known as Aristocracy Hill. On top sat the mansion of Ninian W. Edwards, one of the wealthiest men in town. Edwards was Springfield royalty. His father had been the state’s governor, and had been named the first U.S. minister to Mexico. (After being caught up in a political controversy, however, he never actually made it to Mexico City.) In his gold-lace cloak and elegant broadcloth suit, the father would have looked at home in most of the world’s chancelleries. A Springfield resident remembered how the local patriarch flew around town in “a magnificent carriage drawn by very spirited horses.” John Hay recalled the politician as “a magnificent old gentleman in fair top-boots and ruffled wristbands” who projected “the grand Seigneur airs of the Old School.” At his son’s two-story brick mansion on Aristocracy Hill, the hosts chattered in French as distinguished guests arrived for regular weekend salons.25