Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  The cold reality of power politics intruded, however, when Seward finally landed in Liverpool. The contrast between the young republic and the massive British Empire was staggering. To the American traveler, even “the magnificent stone docks” of the English coastline seemed far superior to “the mean, rickety, wooden slips and quays of New York.” Seward roamed around London, visiting Westminster Abbey, climbing to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and gazing out over the sprawling industrial metropolis, smothered in “a dense cloud of fog and coal-smoke.” He found himself impressed as he watched a debate from the galleries of the House of Commons. The British chamber was far more orderly and its members more energetic than the chaotic U.S. House, with its “listless” representatives. Even the American diplomats in London seemed second-rate. The U.S. legation, Seward noted, was tucked away above a tailor’s shop in the West End.33

  And yet despite the obvious disparities in power, the Britons Seward met seemed curiously insecure. The English, he recalled, were “continually disturbed” by fears that they were becoming Americanized. Americans, the future of secretary of state noted, were perfectly justified to be jealous of their more powerful cousins across the Atlantic. But why were the British, securely wrapped in the trappings of empire, so defensive? “It seemed to me then,” Seward observed, “that, little as we loved the English nation, they loved us still less.” The past provided one explanation. The young traveler came across an old issue of a British magazine that referred to the U.S. legislature as the “rebel Congress” and its leaders as “most destitute of principle.” The future offered another answer. With their rapidly growing economy and population, Britain’s former colonies would inevitably soon eclipse their motherland.34

  When Seward crossed the English Channel to France, he was struck by the contrast. The French country landscapes, speckled with apple, pear, and plum orchards, enchanted him. Still, poverty plagued the countryside. Paris seemed lively, he thought, but it was also full of beggars and vagrants who streamed through the narrow, unlighted, badly paved streets. The scars of revolution “disfigured” the whole place, Seward observed. “Everything,” he noted, “reminded me of the frequency and violence of political changes.” One day Seward and his father paid an executioner 15 francs to watch the guillotine—that iconic weapon of the French Revolution—demonstrated on a sheep.35

  The highlight of the French leg came when father and son visited the aging and ailing Marquis de Lafayette at his Paris home and later at his country château, La Grange. As a young man in his early twenties, Seward had once shepherded the tall, dignified general around upstate New York on one of his visits to the United States. Recalling—or pretending to recall—their last meeting, Lafayette exclaimed: “I am happy to see you again!” Seward was inspired by his encounter with the last of the great Revolutionary War heroes. On the wall of Lafayette’s bedroom, he noticed, the general had hung a copy of the Declaration of Independence. In his anteroom, Lafayette displayed a bust of himself.36

  Back in the United States, Seward soon returned to the boredom of his law practice. But the travel bug refused to abandon him. He had never particularly enjoyed his work at the bar. He considered himself “little better than a galley slave,” he told his father in 1835. In later years Seward would compare his job to a treadmill. Global affairs held a stubborn allure for the frustrated lawyer. Seward once joked to a friend that he had visited a phrenologist—a charlatan who measured the circumference of his brain—and was told that the lumps on his head betrayed a “fondness for foreign travel.” The diagnosis, in this case, was accurate enough. “When I travel, I banish care,” he wrote one acquaintance. Seward was hooked.37

  Even when he could not travel abroad, Seward made an effort to mingle with great American diplomats at home. During a visit to Quincy, Massachusetts, in the early 1830s, Seward dropped in at the home of John Quincy Adams, the former foreign envoy, secretary of state, and president. Adams received his young visitor in the parlor of his plainly furnished home—a spare space that included a few mahogany chairs and old portraits of the Founding Fathers. To the younger man, Old Man Eloquent, now over sixty, appeared slight, balding, and overweight, and wore a melancholy expression. “He was dressed,” Seward recalled, “in an olive frock-coat, a cravat carelessly tied, and old-fashioned, light-colored vest and pantaloons.” The former president’s eyes were “weak and inflamed” from reading.

  The two men chatted for several hours about politics, public men, and mutual friends. The former president was polite but betrayed “hardly a ray of animation or feeling in the whole of it,” Seward later recalled. “In short, he was exactly what I before supposed he was, a man to be respected for his talents, admired for his learning, honored for his integrity and simplicity, but hardly possessing traits of character to inspire a stranger with affection.” The aging statesman ultimately grew on the future chief diplomat. Seward would one day author a biography of Adams. Much later, Seward declared that he had derived “every resolution” and “every sentiment” from the example of the former president. Modern diplomatic scholars view Seward as Adams’s “logical successor.”38

  Both men were expansionists. Adams dreamed of an American empire that would stretch across the North American continent. Seward imagined it spanning the oceans. Their prescriptions for achieving those goals proved to be remarkably similar. The growth of American power first demanded independence from the avaricious and corrupt Old World. “Above all,” the young Adams once told his father, “I wish that we may never have occasion for any political connections in Europe.” Adams and his allies imagined an “American System” of economic development and political strategy that would oppose the Old World order. The key would be to build national institutions like banks, and foster trade and communications links throughout the New World. “The American [System],” Adams had remarked in 1795, “will infallibly triumph over the European system eventually, provided it can be pursued with as much perseverance.”39

  In practice, however, building a hemispheric system to oppose Europe’s demanded a delicate balancing act. Statesmen needed to develop trade agreements with North and South American countries based on reciprocity—the notion that the United States and key partners would mutually lower tariffs to encourage commerce. At the same time, the Whigs maintained tariffs for many European nations, aiming to promote American industry. Finally, Whig statesmen recognized that American independence from Europe was a long-term goal—not always an immediate reality. In order to finance development projects like roads and canals, American policymakers needed access to British capital. That meant statesmen often preached independence while subtly refraining from policies that would antagonize the Old World.40

  Seward came to typify this “double game.” On the one hand, he declared, the long-term goal of American foreign policy should be “our own complete emancipation from what remains of European influence and prejudice.” He derided Britain as “the greatest, the most grasping, and the most rapacious in the world.” Seward believed the trend lines suggested that British power would vanish from the Western Hemisphere within twenty-five years—or “at least within half a century.” And yet, those predictions depended on the maintenance of peace. Seward often challenged belligerent Democrats and other hawks who championed foreign wars to boost their political status. “Peaceful activity is safer,” the New Yorker insisted. “It is cheaper; it is surer; it saves all the elements of national strength and national power, and increases them.”41

  An Absorbing Desire for Power

  New Yorkers elected Seward governor in 1838. The young politician had won his office partly by appealing to Irish immigrants who nursed grudges against Britain. The first years of Seward’s tenure in Albany vividly demonstrated the Whigs’ love-hate attitude toward the European powers. A revolt against British rule in Canada was raging just north of the New York State border. The fighting occasionally spilled across the national boundary. In late 1837, Canadians loyal to Britain attacked a st
eamer called the Caroline, which the rebels had used in their insurgency, burning it into the water. The assault, which took place within New York territory, killed one American. Three years later, when a British subject named Alexander McLeod visited the state, New Yorkers arrested the man and charged him with murder and arson in connection with the Caroline incident.42

  Governor Seward found himself boxed into a corner. On the one hand, he was determined to try McLeod in his own state’s courts. The attack had inflamed popular passions among his constituents. After McLeod was arrested, supporters of the Canadian insurgents swarmed around the prison where he was being held, firing cannon and pounding drums. And yet the episode also infuriated British statesmen. The affair should be treated as an international incident to be resolved by the two national governments, they insisted. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign minister, threatened “immediate and frightful” war. “With such cunning fellows as these Yankees it never answers to give way,” Palmerston wrote to a colleague in January 1841, at the height of the McLeod drama. The Americans, he insisted, “keep pushing on their encroachments as far as they are permitted to do so; and what we dignify by the names of moderation and conciliation, they naturally enough call fear; on the other hand as their system of encroachments is founded very much upon bully, they will give way when in the wrong, if they are firmly and perseveringly pressed.”43

  The whole episode alarmed Daniel Webster, the U.S. secretary of state. A pillar of the Whig party, Webster had long cultivated close ties to Britain. For a time he actually worked as the U.S. representative of one of England’s largest banks. The secretary of state and his allies considered Seward’s stance “savage as a meat axe.” Webster dispatched envoys to New York in an effort to bring the governor around. Seward claimed the secretary of state was trying to “smother” him. In the end, a New York court tried and quickly acquitted McLeod—a verdict that largely defused the crisis. Yet the incident tested transatlantic relationships and offered a crisp picture of the Whig conundrum.44

  Seward survived the crisis. By the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, New Yorkers had elected their popular governor to the U.S. Senate. Like Lincoln, Seward tried to walk a line—questioning the wisdom of the war without setting himself wholly in opposition to expansion. “I want no war,” Seward wrote in 1846. “I want no enlargement of territory, sooner than it would come if we were content with ‘a masterly inactivity.’ ” Seward derided the conflict as a “bastard war,” but like Lincoln he was careful to make sure the troops were well supplied. The New York senator believed a full-throated opposition to the conflict would be bad politics at the least. He did “not expect,” he wrote, “to see the Whig party successful in overthrowing an Administration carrying on a war … in which the Whig party and its statesmen are found apologizing for our national adversaries.”45

  Seward first crossed paths with Lincoln in the last days of the 1848 presidential contest, when the Illinois congressman campaigned through New England for Taylor. Whigs in Boston invited both men to address a rally at the city’s Tremont Temple. Lincoln, one local newspaper reported, made a “powerful and convincing” speech that was “cheered to the echo.” Seward was less impressed. Lincoln’s effort, he later recalled, consisted of a “rambling, storytelling speech, putting the audience in a good humor but avoiding any extended discussion of the slavery question.” Seward focused his own remarks primarily on the issue of slavery, a topic that was gaining prominence in the wake of the Mexican War. According to Seward’s recollection, at a hotel after the event, Lincoln went out of his way to praise the New York senator. “Governor Seward,” the younger man began, “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”46

  As the 1850s unfolded, Seward increasingly spoke out on world issues that captured American hearts and headlines. When Austrian and Russian forces attempted to crush a rebellion of Hungarians led by Louis Kossuth, Americans expressed their outrage. In 1851 Congress passed a resolution inviting Kossuth to the United States. A regal-looking figure with drooping eyelids and a bushy beard, the Hungarian leader arrived to the cheers of enormous crowds of sympathizers. Still, some Americans felt that the pro-Hungarian enthusiasm undermined America’s traditional independence in foreign affairs. Seward was not convinced. “If we are never to speak out,” he asked, “for what are our national lungs given us?”

  The senator invited Kossuth to spend a weekend at his home. Thousands of New Yorkers crowded into the streets to watch the arrival of the Hungarian hero, whose carriage was drawn by four black horses. Supporters fired cannons, rang church bells, and waved Hungarian flags as the procession wound its way to the town’s American Hotel for a reception. Seward’s thirteen-year-old son, Willie, and his friends paraded loudly through the streets carrying wooden spears and wearing silk badges, claiming to represent the “Kossuth Cadets.”47

  Lincoln, too, expressed sympathy for the Hungarian cause—though he carefully qualified his support. At a meeting at the Springfield courthouse in early 1852, Lincoln offered resolutions lauding the insurgents. America’s sympathy, he argued, “and the benefits of its position, should be exerted in favor of the people of every nation struggling to be free.” Still, Lincoln drew a clear line between friendly solidarity and intervention. Any nation, he insisted, had the right to “throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose.” And yet nonintervention remained a “sacred principle of the international law,” he cautioned. The United States, Lincoln argued, should not ignite or materially aid such revolutions.48

  The United States, however, was beginning to exert a measure of influence beyond its own borders. Only decades before, American statesmen had worried that they were considered merely “a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war,” as John Quincy Adams once put it. Now Lincoln felt comfortable challenging Britain’s role as international arbiter. “There is nothing in the past history of the British government,” Lincoln proclaimed at the Springfield courthouse, “to encourage the belief that she will aid … in the delivery of continental Europe from the yoke of despotism.” That responsibility, he implied, ultimately belonged to America.49

  The United States finally possessed the power to support its friends abroad. Yet America’s rising strength also carried risks—not least to its own national soul. Lincoln and Seward had both come to prominence on a wave of vast, impersonal economic forces—as had America.50 Yet even as the country adjusted to its new world role, it was forced to reevaluate its relationships with old friends around the globe. “Worldly wisdom,” Seward’s wife, Frances, once wrote her husband in another context, “certainly does impel a person to ‘swim with the tide’—and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port. A magnanimous friendship might suggest a more elevated course and even reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary.” Still, she concluded, “magnanimous friendships are rare—incompatible I think with an absorbing desire for power.”51

  Rich Wines, Golden Chains, and Diamond Rings

  Friendship and power, commerce and war—Europe presented a continent of contrasts when Seward finally returned in 1859, twenty-six years after his first voyage with his father. This time Seward found that all strata of British society were eager to meet him—from the royal family to the London bankers to the working classes of the country’s industrial heartland. Seward’s reputation had grown significantly over the course of the 1850s. Britons believed they were likely meeting the next president of the United States. In letters home, Seward boasted of the “great and titled visitors” who eagerly called on him. He was introduced, one after another, to quarters that he had once “regarded as forever inaccessible to me.” The world, Seward wrote home, seemed smaller than ever.52

  Britain’s orderly elegance impressed Seward. At a
concert one night at Buckingham Palace, he marveled at the massive concert hall filled with tiers of crimson-cushioned chairs. The room, he wrote home, appeared “larger than our church.” As Queen Victoria entered, the crowd fluttered with graceful bows. After the performance, Victoria stopped by the diplomatic section and greeted Seward. She mentioned that Britain must have changed a great deal since his last visit. “All is changed, Madam,” he replied. “It is improved?” the queen asked. “Vastly improved,” Seward said. The two discussed the profound changes wrought in both Britain and the United States by the railroads, steamships, and the telegraph. “Do you think the improvement will go on?” the queen asked. “I trust so,” Seward replied, “if we can preserve peace between the two branches of one great family.”53

  Still, as Seward traveled throughout Europe, he was struck by the powerful—and unpredictable—forces reshaping the continent. The source of Britain’s strength, Seward recognized, was not simply in its military but in the economic underpinnings of its society. As Seward traveled north from London, into industrial Lancashire and then up to Scotland, he passed a wilderness of chimneys belching flame and thick, black coal smoke. In Glasgow, Seward observed, “for a distance of fifteen or twenty miles around it, forges, furnaces, and other huge structures fill up the scene, not merely crowding the valleys, but climbing the hills on all sides. There seemed to be no green earth. But everywhere multitudes of men and engines were tearing up the ground to its very foundations, and melting them, or dissipating them into ashes, in ten thousand fires that climbed to the sky, amid wreaths of heavy and impenetrable smoke, which blackened the earth below.” Seward credited the growth to the forty years of peace that Europe had enjoyed in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Now, he concluded, Britain had succeeded in making the whole world “tributary to her work-shops.”54