Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Democrats traditionally had better luck wooing foreign-born voters. Yet with the Democratic field hopelessly divided in 1860, the Republican ticket was virtually assured of victory in November. As the fall unfolded, the reality of Lincoln’s impending election began to set in. “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands,” Lincoln wrote Seward in mid-October. On election night, Lincoln ended up winning more than twice as many electoral votes as his closest Democratic challenger. “I guess there’s a little lady at home who would like to hear this news,” he told supporters at the telegraph office after the returns were finalized. When he reached his house, Lincoln exclaimed, “Mary, Mary, we are elected.”75

  High Road to a Slave Empire

  Meditating on his election, Lincoln once mused that it was “very strange that I, a boy brought up in the woods, and seeing, as it were, but little of the world, should be drifted into the very apex of this great event.” The men who would become Lincoln’s future diplomats shared the president-elect’s sense of wonder. John Bigelow, whom Lincoln would eventually appoint as his consul in Paris, wrote to a correspondent in England that the Illinoisan was “not precisely the sort of man who would be regarded as one entirely a la mode at your splendid European courts.… He is essentially a self made man and of a type to which Europe is as much a stranger as it is to the Mastodon.”76

  And yet a perilous world almost immediately confronted the president-elect. Charles Sumner thought the 1860 election would “cause a reverberation that will be heard throughout the globe.”77As the winter deepened, Northerners and Southerners staked out increasingly firm positions on American expansion—the same issue that Lincoln had been debating since the Mexican War. By November 1860, the president-elect had developed exceptionally nuanced arguments on the subject. Like many in his party, Lincoln supported westward expansion and commercial development. That social mobility, he believed, was the very thing that differentiated the United States from Old Europe.78 Yet he opposed most compromises that would avert the secession crisis at the cost of extending slavery.

  In his makeshift office in the capitol building in Springfield, Lincoln tried to make sense of the crisis. The city had become “one grand mud hole,” observed a journalist. “It has been raining, snowing, sleeting, blowing, and freezing for eight days.” Lincoln surrounded himself with a surprisingly cosmopolitan crowd. Advice poured in from Europeans—many of them hawkish German émigrés who had experienced the revolutions of 1848 firsthand. Gustave Koerner, a German immigrant and one of Lincoln’s Illinois allies, presented Lincoln with the recent example of Switzerland, whose government called up 100,000 troops and managed to intimidate a few breakaway cantons into abandoning their rebellion.79

  The coaching may have had some effect. The president-elect dispatched a barrage of letters to political allies in Washington and elsewhere making his position on expansion southward abundantly clear. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote to Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull. “Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Lincoln cautioned another friend to prevent “compromise of any sort” on the extension of slavery. Any deal, the president-elect believed, would provide a signal for Southern filibusters to pour into the new territory and begin claiming the land for future slave states. “On that point hold firm,” Lincoln wrote, “as with a chain of steel.” To Pennsylvania congressman James Hale, Lincoln insisted that if his administration struck a deal, one “year will not pass” before the United States will “have to take Cuba” in order to satisfy the slave states. Only “one compromise,” Lincoln concluded, “would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory.”80

  At the same time, Lincoln began attempting to woo Seward. On December 8, he sent his one-time opponent a letter asking him to join the cabinet as secretary of state. Lincoln then penned a second, longer letter—marked “Private & Confidential”—that he dispatched along with the first. The second missive assured Seward that he genuinely wanted him to take the job. The president-elect made reference to rumors in the newspapers that he would offer Seward the post simply “as a compliment, and with the expectation that you would decline it.” Lincoln insisted that he had intended Seward for the position since the day of his nomination. He concluded by praising his former opponent’s “integrity, ability, learning, and great experience.” Seward responded a few days later, asking for “a little time to consider whether I possess the qualifications and temper of a minister and whether it is in such a capacity that my friends would prefer that I should act if I am to continue in the public service.”81

  Still, the two men were once again drifting apart—this time over a matter of policy. Seward and Thurlow Weed began pushing for a deal to avert the secession crisis. Both men favored a plan that would extend the line of the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In such a package, slavery would be protected south of the line, and prohibited north of it. Many Northeastern businessmen—including a significant number of Seward’s constituents—favored such a deal if it would prevent a disruptive war. In late December, Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden introduced a series of constitutional amendments based on a similar plan. Seward, at first, joined the chorus of politicians lobbying to approve the Crittenden Compromise. But Lincoln feared that any deal that allowed the extension of slavery southward would lead to war in the long run.82

  Seward’s secession-winter maneuvering, the scholar Eric Foner has noted, “has proved to be something of a puzzle for historians.” Seward had long been considered a firm antislavery man. His radical reputation contributed to his defeat for the Republican nomination in 1860. Yet there was a great deal of subtlety in his position. The New Yorker had opposed the peculiar institution because he believed it hindered America’s rise to world power. A free-labor economic system would achieve that goal far more efficiently, he believed. And yet if Northern statesmen refused to compromise with slaveholders, the Union would be torn apart—almost certainly halting its imperial drive.83

  As the New Year approached, Weed traveled to Springfield—at least partly to try to impress upon Lincoln the wisdom of the Crittenden Compromise. But Weed’s was a hopeless mission. The president-elect believed the Crittenden measure would likely defuse the crisis in the short term. Still, Lincoln was sure that the debate would ultimately flare up again in the near future, when Southern sympathizers attempted to seize Mexico. Lincoln responded to the Dictator’s pleas with “undisguised hostility,” the New York Herald reported. “I will be inflexible on the territorial question,” Lincoln explained, adding that he believed any compromise would offer an invitation to filibusters. Weed found the president-elect “at ease and undisturbed” during their all-day meeting at Lincoln’s home. Ultimately, though, the political operative’s mission failed. Lincoln sent Weed back east with his own set of compromise resolutions that would prevent the extension of slavery. The president-elect suggested that Seward should introduce the resolutions himself.84

  While Weed worked on Lincoln in Springfield, Seward brazenly tested new ideas. During one trip from his home in upstate New York to Washington, Seward stopped at the Astor House Hotel in Manhattan and gave an impromptu speech to a boisterous dinner of the New England Society. The future secretary of state arrived late in the night, and cracked jokes to the liquor-and cigar-fueled audience. Seward may have gotten carried away. At one point he seemed to intimate that a war with a foreign power could help to unify the United States. “I am very sure,” Seward said, “that if anybody was to make a descent upon New York tomorrow—whether Louis Napoleon, or the Prince of Wales, or his mother, or the Emperor of Russia or Austria—if either of them were to make a descent upon the City of New York tomorrow, I believe all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population to the rescue of New York.” The crowd, according to a newspaper reporter who was present, responded with loud cheering and “eve
ry demonstrable evidence of delight.” Historians have long pointed to this speech as confirmation that Seward advocated picking a fight with Europe to head off the domestic crisis. Yet, when read in context, it seems unlikely that he genuinely desired a war with a distant foe.85

  Seward eventually fell in line, voting against the Crittenden Compromise and accepting Lincoln’s invitation to join the cabinet. But the New Yorker refused to stop angling for a deal. On January 12, 1861, Seward appeared in the Senate chamber and delivered one of his most memorable addresses, urging concessions to avert the crisis. “Hours before the Senate met,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “the galleries were full to crushing and fainting. The lobbies and cloakrooms were literally packed with an anxious throng.” Spectators included the “whole diplomatic corps,” which “gave the deepest attention to every word.”

  Seward enumerated a list of potential compromises designed to placate the South. Yet the speech is most notable as a window onto Seward’s approach to politics and foreign affairs. Lincoln’s future secretary of state struck his favorite theme about the importance of maintaining U.S. prestige in the wider world. “The American man-of-war is a noble spectacle,” Seward told the Senate in his husky monotone. “I have seen it enter an ancient port in the Mediterranean. All the world wondered at it, and talked of it. Salvos of artillery, from forts and shipping in the harbor, saluted its flag. Princes and princesses and merchants paid it homage, and all the people blessed it as a harbinger of hope for their own ultimate freedom. I imagine now the same noble vessel again entering the same haven. The flag of thirty-three stars and thirteen stripes has been hauled down, and in its place a signal is run up, which flaunts the device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. Men ask, ‘Who is the stranger that thus steals into our waters?’ The answer contemptuously given is, ‘She comes from one of the obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.’ ”

  Avoiding such an ignoble fate, Seward believed, would demand a flexible and pragmatic approach to the secession crisis. “I learned early from Jefferson that, in political affairs, we cannot always do what seems to us absolutely best,” Seward told the packed chamber. “We must be content to lead when we can; and to follow when we cannot lead; and if we cannot at any time do for our country all the good that we would wish, we must be satisfied with doing for her all the good that we can.” After Seward finished, the assembled diplomats eagerly quizzed U.S. senators about whether the New Yorker’s counsel would be followed.86

  Lincoln was also a pragmatist who reined in the most radical elements of his party. But Seward’s freelancing aggravated him. The president-elect was “not overpleased with Seward’s speech,” one acquaintance reported. Lincoln complained that his secretary of state designate was making his remarks without getting his input. Lincoln’s most strident allies in Illinois marveled at the compromises of the man they once viewed as a leading antislavery agitator. “What do you think of Seward?” one of Lincoln’s supporters asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power.” Seward felt that he was doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. “Distraction rules the hour,” he wrote home to his family. “I hope what I have done will bring some good fruits.” Yet even Seward’s outspoken wife replied by complaining of her husband’s “concessions.”87

  For weeks Seward had been urging Lincoln to leave Springfield and come to Washington early. The capital, he explained, was full of “a feverish excitement” that “awakens all kind of apprehensions of popular disturbance and disorders.” Seward suggested that Lincoln plan to arrive in Washington by early February. The president-elect’s presence would be “reassuring and soothing,” he explained. The following day Seward reiterated his plea for Lincoln to arrive “earlier than you otherwise would” and come in “by surprise.” Yet Lincoln took his time, instead holding court in Springfield.88

  In the meantime President James Buchanan and his secretary of state, Jeremiah S. Black, fumblingly tried to salvage America’s reputation abroad. Buchanan, who had served overseas as the U.S. minister in London, declared secession unconstitutional, but he also maintained that the federal government could not prevent it. Eventually, however, Black issued a circular urging his diplomats to guard against European overtures to the Confederacy. “If the independence of the ‘Confederated States’ should be acknowledged by the great powers of Europe,” Black wrote, “it would tend to disturb the friendly relations, diplomatic and commercial, now existing between those powers and the United States.”89

  Lincoln’s allies, however, complained that Buchanan’s diplomatic corps was dangerously subversive. Missouri congressman Francis P. Blair Jr. wrote to the president-elect cautioning that the existing foreign envoys were as “traitorous” as Buchanan’s cabinet. Blair worried that the American emissaries were using “all their art and power to persuade the Courts to which they are accredited that the separation of the states was a fixed fact.” Blair urged Lincoln to swiftly appoint “men of tact and ability” with “some European reputation” to “counteract the impressions made by those now in Europe.”90

  In Springfield, meanwhile, the president-elect received a visit in late January from Matías Romero, the twenty-three-year-old Mexican envoy to Washington. The two men discussed Mexican affairs, and Lincoln asked about the dismal conditions of the peons—the involuntary servants who worked as planters in Mexican fields. Romero reported home to his government that the president-elect “did not appear to be well-informed on Mexican affairs.” Still, Romero was impressed with Lincoln’s sincerity—a welcome change from the cynical envoys he was used to dealing with. The Mexican representative praised the president-elect as a “simple and honest man.” His conversation with Lincoln, Romero told his superiors, was refreshingly free of the “pompous and empty phrases used by persons educated in the school of false pretenses who have the habit of promising much but doing nothing.”91

  By early February, the president-elect was more convinced than ever that caving in on expansion would place Mexico at the mercy of Southern filibusters. He wrote to Seward emphasizing that he remained “inflexible” on the “territorial question.” Lincoln explained that he would reject any “compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.” Furthermore, he added, “any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other.” Such schemes, Lincoln insisted, would only place the United States on “the high road to a slave empire.”92

  Seward recognized that Lincoln’s inflexible stance would likely lead to war with the South. With his attempts at conciliation failing, the future secretary of state apparently began looking for another way out of the crisis. In late January, Seward warned a foreign diplomat that the only solution may be to pick a fight with Europe. “If the Lord would only give the United States an excuse for a war with England, France, or Spain,” he told Rudolf Schleiden, Bremen’s envoy to Washington, “that would be the best means of reestablishing internal peace.” Two weeks later Seward complained again to Schleiden that he could find no excuse for a foreign war.93

  While Seward blustered in Washington, Lincoln holed himself up in the back room of a general store in Springfield, and began writing his first inaugural. For inspiration, Lincoln asked Herndon to fetch Henry Clay’s address on the sectional crisis of 1850, the text of the U.S. Constitution, and Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against nullification. Herndon brought the requested materials to the “dingy, dusty, and neglected back room” where his partner was working. Lincoln also wanted a copy of Washington’s farewell address—the seminal foreign-policy statement that Lincoln had read as a boy. When Lincoln was finished, he sent a draft to Seward, who was stunned by the uncompromising document. On February 24, Seward wrote Lincoln warning that if he delivered his bold address as it was, “the dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration.”94 He urged the president-elect to tone down the most strident passages. />
  By the time he left for Washington, Lincoln was already weary. A friend observed in January that the president-elect appeared “care worn and more haggard and more stooped than I ever saw him.” Shortly before his departure, Lincoln asked to meet his law partner at their office. Lincoln told Herndon to leave the sign hanging out front. They would resume their practice when his term was up. The pressure of the office already seemed to be weighing on Lincoln. The president-elect, Herndon recalled, “threw himself down on the old office sofa,” and spent several moments silently staring at the ceiling. Later, as the two men walked out of the office together, Lincoln confided to his partner that he was “sick of office-holding already.” He told Herndon that he shuddered to “think of the tasks that are still ahead.”95

  In the days before their departure, the Lincolns threw a huge party at their Springfield home. Hundreds of revelers packed into the house. “Such a crowd,” one guest reported, “I seldom, or ever saw at a private house.” Guests waited for twenty minutes just to get into the front hall. Finding the exits at the end of the night was no easier. The Lincolns navigated the crowd good-naturedly. Mary wore a dress made of “white moiré antique silk, with a small French lace collar.” At one point, a guest recalled seeing Lincoln’s son Robert approach his father, playfully extend his hand, and exclaim, “Good evening, Mr. Lincoln!” The president-elect gave his son “a gentle slap in the face.”96