Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  The First Lady’s dislike of Seward did not stop her from shamelessly harassing him to appoint her allies to key posts. She quickly suggested that he install one of her friends as the new consul in Honolulu. On another occasion, she cornered Lincoln and insisted that he name a favorite Springfield clergyman, the Reverend Dr. James Smith, as the American consul in Dundee, Scotland. An exasperated Lincoln threw his hands in the air and demanded to know the rationale for the appointment. The preacher’s résumé was certainly very thin. Even Billy Herndon, a bit of a scamp himself, later referred to Smith as “a great old rascal.” Smith’s son-in-law had written Lincoln in February arguing for the appointment on the grounds that the preacher “is quite advanced in life and … is poor in this world’s goods and therefore he needs some assistance to enable him and the old lady to support themselves in Scotland.” The president at first tried to steer a middle course by appointing Smith’s son to the post. Still, when the younger man fell ill, the president ultimately relented under the pressure of his wife and Smith’s other allies. “Send your preacher to the Cabinet Room,” Lincoln told Mary. The president made his wife promise that this would be the last time she tried to box him in when it came to diplomatic appointments.116

  Mary’s influence on Lincoln’s foreign policy was complex, though ultimately minimal. On the one hand, she operated as a kind of free radical—threatening to tip delicate diplomatic balances in an already unsteady capital. Mary’s “natural want of tact … her blundering outspokenness, and impolitic disregard for diplomatic considerations,” as one society reporter put it, posed a challenge for the president. She once told her old Kentucky friend Cassius Marcellus Clay, who considered himself “open enemies” with Seward, that she and the president “had no confidence whatever in Mr. Seward’s friendship,” and that Clay “need not fear [Seward’s] influence.” Lincoln, Mary told her friend, “only tolerated [Seward] for political reasons.” For years after the war, Southern sympathizers taunted the First Lady (however unfairly) for her interference with diplomatic patronage. “What opulent presents were made in advance / By seekers of missions to Russia and France,” jeered the Richmond Southern Opinion. And yet for all Mary’s meddling, her influence was not entirely negative. Lincoln could sometimes be a homebody. Mary’s cosmopolitan ambitions helped the president to get outside himself—a critical prerequisite for successful diplomats. “If his domestic life had been entirely happy,” John Hay’s uncle Milton once observed, “I dare say he would have stayed at home and not busied himself with distant concerns.”117

  Still, for Lincoln, that growth process must have been painful. Mary, in her determination to establish her husband’s authority over Seward, could be maddening. “It is said you are the power behind the throne,” she once told the secretary of state, according to Mary’s sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards. “I’ll show you that Mr. L is president yet.” She even challenged Seward on minor points of diplomatic protocol. Usually it fell to the secretary of state to host the first state dinner of an administration. In this case, however, the First Lady—who once referred to the events as “stupid state dinners”—insisted on hosting it herself.118

  If the goal was to impress the diplomatic corps and other distinguished guests, her efforts were not entirely successful. A British journalist who attended the dinner described the First Lady as “of the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the embonpoint natural to her years; her features are plain, her nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance homely.” In any event, after Mary’s guests departed for the evening, the First Lady had the $900 bill for the dinner sent over to Seward. Mary’s power games were starting to irritate the secretary of state and his staff.119

  Stress, or spring fever, or some combination of the two, seemed to afflict virtually all members of Lincoln’s inner circle as April approached. As the president fell ill, Seward began to behave erratically. At one dinner party in late March, an agitated—or drunk—secretary of state threatened the representatives of England, France, and Russia, that if their ships were captured leaving Southern ports, the United States would not compensate them. The conversation had begun amiably enough, but it eventually devolved into a shouting match. Sipping whisky and puffing on a cigar, Seward gradually grew “more and more violent and noisy,” the British minister reported home to his government. The American, he recalled, uttered threats that it would have been “more convenient not to have heard.”120

  God Damn Them, I’ll Give Them Hell!

  As March turned to April, both Lincoln and Seward had reached a breaking point. The president and his cabinet needed to make some critical decisions about how to respond to Southern intransigence—choices that, if poorly handled, risked drawing European powers into the conflict. Confederate leaders had begun to isolate the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, a brick-walled fortress just off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln appeared unsure about whether to send reinforcements to the troops. Confederate leaders made clear that doing so would result in war. Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, warned Lincoln that abandoning the fort would invite recognition of the Confederacy by foreign powers. Yet Seward, trying to remain conciliatory, told Confederate representatives that he doubted Lincoln would choose to provision the garrison. Asked as April dawned whether Lincoln intended to resupply the fort, Seward told one Southern representative: “No, I think not. It is a very irksome thing to him to surrender it. His ears are open to everyone, and they fill his head with schemes for its supply. I do not think he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”121

  Seward was ultimately mistaken about Lincoln’s resolve. To start, the president bought Blair’s argument that abandoning the fort could lead to European recognition of the Confederacy. Retreating from the garrison, Lincoln later explained, “would be utterly ruinous,” going far to ensure the Confederacy “recognition abroad.” Abandoning the fort, he concluded, “would be our national destruction consummated.” Lincoln eventually chose to send supplies (although not weapons) to the fort—a shrewd and fateful compromise that led directly to the first shots of the war and rallied the North around the president’s war effort.122

  In some ways, Seward’s restraint in the face of the tremendous public pressure for action is as impressive as Lincoln’s clever solution. Both men, it should be remembered, were being continually badgered by newspapers, political opponents, and their own allies, to stake out a bold position. Each day brought another wave of dire news. Critical border states like Kentucky threatened to slip out of the Union. Confederate forces continued to seize federal arsenals and garrisons, and seemed poised to attack Washington. “For god’s sake do something,” one correspondent urged Seward in late March. “We have been drifting too long already. I repeat for god’s sake do something.”123

  Lincoln later recalled the intense pressure he felt as he tried to resolve the secession crisis. “Of all the trials I have had since I came here,” he told his old friend Orville Browning later that year, “none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”124

  Shortly before the secretary of state presented Lincoln with his notorious April Fools’ Day memo and “foreign war panacea,” Seward complained to his wife that he too was full of “anxieties.” Still, he cautioned, “they must not enter into our correspondence. Dangers and breakers are before us.” Seward was right to worry. His memo to the president certainly might have been viewed as insubordination—a firing offense. Lincoln, however, chose to take the high road and retain Seward. The president “easily dismissed the incident,” his secretaries later recalled.125

  With a series of major foreign-policy decisions looming, the president needed Seward’s counsel. The secretary of state was not the only observer who believed Lincoln was vacillating on international-affairs issues. “Foreign governments seem to tak
e advantage of our difficulties; the Spanish invasion of San Domingo is an indication of what we may expect,” Carl Schurz complained to the president in early April—sounding much like Seward. Schurz lamented the “dissension within and aggression from without” the Union. “It seems to me,” he continued, “there is but one way out of this distressing situation. It is to make short work of the secession movement and then to make front against the world abroad.” Years later, however, when Seward’s April Fools’ memo was revealed, Schurz marveled at the secretary of state’s “incomprehensible” and “utterly delusive … fantastic schemes of foreign war.”126

  Spanish officials agreed that the Lincoln administration was too preoccupied to give the Caribbean much attention. Seward’s bombast caused them little concern. Madrid considered Lincoln a weak president with few good options. “The Union is in agony,” the Spanish minister in Washington, Gabriel García y Tassara, reported home as Lincoln prepared to take office, “and our mission is not to delay its death for a moment.” Still, the conservative Spanish diplomat worried that abolitionists might seize control of Union foreign policy—and then push for reforms in Spain’s Caribbean territories. Lincoln and Seward, in this scenario, were actually the moderates. Aggressively challenging the Union government risked strengthening the radicals. The American president, Tassara explained to his superiors, served as a kind of mediator between conservative constituents who valued the “old compromises” and more revolutionary figures who wanted “the complete subjugation of the South.”

  Tassara’s analysis was not far from the mark. Expansionists had been urging Lincoln to act from the first days of the administration. Just a month into the president’s term, Washington wise men and various adventurers had begun pressing Lincoln to consider schemes to establish colonies of black Americans outside the United States—perhaps in the Caribbean or Central America. Lincoln had long been a supporter of colonization proposals, which he viewed as “a middle ground” between uncompromising abolitionists and remorseless slaveholders. Both Lincoln’s idols Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson had also supported colonization. In retrospect the schemes seem wildly impractical. Few black Americans were eager to leave the country where they had been born and raised to set out for a dangerous and untested foreign colony. Still, in the midnineteenth century, as a devastating sectional crisis threatened to tear the country apart, Lincoln honestly believed such projects had the potential to help calm domestic passions.127

  They also presented the president with a thicket of complex foreign-policy questions. For starters, any proposals to carve colonies out of Caribbean or South American nations had the potential to alienate Latin Americans, who resented U.S. encroachment. The Lincoln administration could not afford to anger any foreign governments in the midst of a looming conflict at home. Lincoln must have recognized that many of the proposals he was asked to consider displayed a decidedly expansionist cast—a dynamic that had bothered him since his time in the House. Boosters lauded the schemes as a means of projecting American power into the Southern Hemisphere. Colonies might serve as coaling stations for the navy or footholds from which to expand export markets. In 1858, Francis P. Blair Jr. had urged colonization on Congress as a means of exploiting “the untold wealth of the intertropical region.” And yet, despite the expansionist rhetoric, Lincoln was soon meeting with advocates of the ventures and assigning diplomats to look into potential locations for colonies in Guatemala and Honduras.128

  While Lincoln was considering the colonization schemes, he also faced an urgent decision about how to handle the Southern cotton trade, which continued to fill Confederate coffers and fuel the rebellion. Lincoln was presented with two choices. In one scenario, the Federals could proclaim a blockade, enlisting their small navy to attempt to slow seaborne traffic. A second possibility consisted of closing the ports altogether. Any decision was sure to arouse the attention of European powers, which maintained a robust trade with the South. The possibility of decisive European intervention hung on Lincoln’s decision.

  Seward argued that the president should declare a blockade. Such a course would prove far more acceptable to Europe, the secretary of state believed, since it would only slow trade with Europe—not halt it altogether. The strategy carried risks. A blockade would offer an acknowledgment that North and South were at war—which could spur European intervention in itself. Lincoln’s naval secretary, Gideon Welles, and several other members of the cabinet opposed Seward’s suggestion. Yet Lincoln ultimately shared his secretary of state’s view, which seemed less likely to antagonize Europe. “We could not afford,” the president explained to an April 15 meeting of his cabinet, “to have two wars on our hands at once.”129

  Lincoln disingenuously pleaded ignorance when challenged by opponents of the blockade. “I don’t know anything about the law of nations,” Lincoln protested to one critic. “I’m a good enough lawyer in a western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the law of nations up there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left it to him. But it’s done now and can’t be helped, so we must get along as well as we can.”130 Lincoln recognized the gravity of his decision, which came while Congress had not yet convened. The president was known for the lighthearted poems he sometimes composed when asked to sign autograph books. Yet on April 19, 1861, the day he announced his intention to blockade, he scribbled a single grim sentence in the book of one autograph hunter. “Whoever in later times shall see this,” he wrote, “and look at the date, will readily excuse the writer for not having indulged in sentiment, or poetry.”131

  Almost immediately after Lincoln’s decision to blockade, Britain proclaimed its neutrality in the conflict. “God damn them, I’ll give them hell,” Seward erupted. The crown’s announcement did not mean London considered the Confederacy an independent nation—but Northern leaders believed it was a step in that direction. The British decision was based on a complicated calculus and carried some important advantages for the South. Neutrality, for example, would allow the Confederate government to buy weapons and borrow money from Europe. (Under international law, the proclamation meant both sides were considered “belligerents.”) In reality, however, British leaders were doing their best to steer clear of the American chaos. Neutrality technically prohibited British subjects from equipping warships for use in the conflict.

  Still, Seward growled “like a caged tiger” when he heard the news. Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that the secretary of state’s anger “had a curious effect on his face; his nose appeared twisted and almost corvine.” But there was also a certain logic to Seward’s bluster. He told his daughter that he was concerned that “Great Britain and France have lost their fear, and with it their respect for this country, in a good degree.” Seward designed his threats to put the great powers back on guard. The secretary of state composed a belligerent dispatch warning London that further provocative moves could lead to conflict with the United States. American diplomats marveled at Seward’s apparent impetuosity. The whole thing was “shallow madness,” Henry Adams complained. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who arrived in Washington while the crisis was unfolding, found “the president and every one else under the apprehension of an immediate rupture with England and France proceeding from suggestions of Mr. Seward.”132

  Lincoln wisely toned down his secretary of state’s dispatch before authorizing a sanitized version. The president peppered Seward’s draft with the admonition “Leave out.” Lincoln challenged Seward’s value judgments—replacing, for example, his secretary of state’s accusation that British efforts were “wrongful” with the milder “hurtful.” The president removed passages that seemed to threaten war. Seward had written that if Europe intervened in the American conflict, then “we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and (become once more, as we have twice before been), be forced to [become] enemies of Great Britain.” Lincoln softened his secretary of state’s bellicose rhetoric significantly.133

  Lincoln demonstrated that he was
perfectly willing to rein in his secretary of state when necessary. And yet, as the years passed, the president eventually grew to trust Seward, delegating many quotidian duties to his chief diplomat. By the end of his first term, Lincoln signed off on some of his dispatches without even reading them. Seward’s enemies thought the secretary of state had become Lincoln’s “evil genius.” Chicago newspaper editor Joseph Medill complained that Seward “kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.” The president laughed at the notion that his secretary of state was rolling him. While his critics “seemed to believe in my honesty,” Lincoln observed, “they also appeared to think that when I had in me any good purpose or intention Seward contrived to suck it out of me unperceived.” Actually, Lincoln cleverly managed his secretary of state.134 “Seward,” the president once remarked, “knows that I am his master!”135

  The two men provided each other with a critical gut check and sounding board. Each acted as the other’s “sober second thought.”136 Their lifelong shared approach to foreign policy kept either man from ranging too far afield.137 Seward, like Lincoln, recognized that the patient and peaceful pursuit of commerce—not wild land grabs—would ultimately do the most to strengthen America’s empire. Unnecessary foreign wars could slow the achievement of that goal.138 By the summer of 1861, one U.S. senator observed, Seward had grown surprisingly “mild and gentle.” Lincoln’s secretary of state ultimately came to deeply respect his boss. “Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities,” he wrote his wife. “The President is the best of us; but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”139

  As for the crisis that prompted Seward’s “foreign war panacea”—the Spanish reoccupation of Santo Domingo—Lincoln’s patient approach ultimately paid off. Shortly after the arrival of its troops, Spain voted to annex its former colony and continued to dominate Dominican politics for many months. Yet the European nation’s transatlantic attempts to control the Caribbean eventually faltered even without interference from the Union. Revolts broke out among those protesting Spanish rule. The Dominican rebellion presented Lincoln with a dilemma. On the one hand, if the Union openly supported the Dominicans, it would risk aggravating tensions with Spain—an un-needed headache. On the other hand, failing to support the protesters against their imperial overlords would look to some like a hypocritical abandonment of the principles elucidated in the Monroe Doctrine.