Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  When Seward raised the conundrum with the president, Lincoln answered by telling one of his famous stories. Once upon a time, he began, a man in Tennessee had been consulting with his preacher. The clergyman was not very encouraging. There were two potential roads before his parishioner, he explained. One went “straight to hell”; the other went “right to damnation.” The advice seeker, Lincoln continued, then opened his eyes wide and told the preacher that given those options, he would blaze a third path: “I shall go through the woods.” The president compared himself to the sinner in the story. “I am not willing,” Lincoln told Seward, “to assume any new troubles or responsibility at this time.” And so, he concluded, he would “take to the woods. We will maintain an honest and strict neutrality.”140

  It was classic Lincoln—a foreign-policy approach that the president applied with formidable patience as the disheartening first year of the conflict ground on. For a young but growing nation, a Hamiltonian strategy in international affairs demanded tremendous forbearance on the president’s part. “The virtue of patience,” John Hay later observed, was “one of the cardinal elements of his character.” Lincoln recognized that the Union would first need to survive the rebellion, avoiding giving the European powers any pretext for intervention. Only then could the economic forces that both Lincoln and Seward placed so much faith in propel America to world power.141

  In the meantime, Lincoln did his best to assuage the qualms of the diplomatic corps about the continuing chaos in the New World. At a dinner for the foreign diplomats in June 1861, Lincoln calmly pressed the Union case with his ornately costumed audience. The White House staff tried to reinforce a sense of normalcy. Fresh-cut flowers filled vases in the Blue Room, and the elegant chandeliers were “gracefully festooned with wreaths.” The dinner-table conversation occasionally grew heated. The Danish chargé d’affaires groused to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Todd Grimsley about the dangers of American sectionalism. “What is there to bind you together?” the diplomat asked. In Lincoln’s own speech to the dinner guests, the president reassured them that European powers had nothing to fear from the American tumult. “Time,” Lincoln declared, “would make all things right.”142

  And yet in at least one sense, neither Lincoln nor Seward left their country’s future in the hands of time and fate. They feverishly worked to build a Union navy—virtually from scratch—that could successfully enforce the blockade. In the U.S. Constitution, the power to raise an army (and a navy) is vested by the Framers in Congress. Lincoln, in general, respected and valued that separation of powers. Yet in the weeks between the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the start of a special session of Congress on July 4, necessity demanded swift executive action. As the sectional crisis intensified, Lincoln issued a presidential order adding eighteen thousand men to the federal navy.

  The president justified this and other early presidential directives with a vivid analogy. “Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution?” he asked. “By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through preservation of the nation.”143

  Citing his own presidential “war power”—a concept he had invented—the president insisted that his blockade was “strictly legal.” Lincoln, however, ultimately sought congressional approval for his newly minted sailors when the body finally reconvened. (The legislature rubber-stamped the measure in August.) Nevertheless, Lincoln’s executive action bolstering the federal navy represents an important precedent for later presidents who have sought greater authority and maneuverability in their disputes with foreign powers.144

  American Whigs had long obsessed over naval affairs. They viewed naval expansion as a peaceful project that would help to bolster foreign trade. Whigs had been the biggest boosters of Commodore Perry’s mission to Japan in the 1850s, and their elder statesmen had been drooling for decades over the vast Asian export markets. Still, as American vessels began to swarm over the seas, they also risked clashing with the ships of the world’s greatest naval power, Britain. The tensions came to a head one fateful morning in the balmy Bahama Channel, 250 miles off the coast of Cuba.145

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lincoln vs. Palmerston

  THE FEDERAL NAVY WAS THE ONLY BRANCH OF THE MILITARY THAT BROUGHT LINCOLN MUCH JOY IN THE SECOND HALF OF 1861. ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE JULY, THE PRESIDENT invited his old friend Orville Browning to the Executive Mansion for dinner. The two men spent several hours chatting about the progress of the war. Browning found Lincoln “very melancholy.” The president acknowledged that he was depressed, but claimed there was “no special cause for it.” Actually, there were plenty of good reasons for distress. A week earlier the rebel army had embarrassed Lincoln’s bluecoats at Bull Run, killing more than 600, taking 1,200 prisoners, and sending the rest pouring back into Washington covered in mud, rain, and shame. Lincoln acknowledged that the whole thing looked “damned bad.”1

  The Union defeat at Bull Run appeared even more disturbing when viewed against the backdrop of the international stage. On the one hand, the president was eager to demonstrate to Europe that he could subdue the rebellion. All spring he had been urging his military commanders to strike. When his officers protested that the new Northern troops were still unprepared, Lincoln had responded: “You are green, it is true; but they are green, also; you are green alike.” The sooner Lincoln’s Federals could show their strength, the president believed, the less likely the European powers would be to throw in their lot with the Confederacy.2

  And yet, as the disaster at Bull Run quickly made clear, that strategy had the potential to backfire. Now Lincoln’s forces simply looked incompetent in European eyes. “Our prestige in Europe [is] gone,” Carl Schurz wrote home to Lincoln from Spain in the wake of Bull Run. “All our efforts abroad will be of no avail if we are beaten at home.” Schurz complained that the “public press all over Europe is treating us with sneering contempt or granting us the small boon of a little pitiful sympathy.” The whole episode, the diplomat told Lincoln, was “bitter and humiliating in the extreme.” Only military success would be capable of changing European minds. “Nowhere,” Schurz concluded, “can this disgrace be washed off but on the battlefields of America.”3

  Yet the same military strategy that Lincoln was employing to defeat the Confederacy had the potential to strain transatlantic ties. Lincoln’s top general, the Mexican War hero Winfield Scott, had conceived a strategy known as the Anaconda Plan, which aimed in part to use the federal navy to strangle the Confederacy like a snake coiled around the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Still, Scott’s design also risked angering European merchants and their monarchs, who depended on cotton from the South.4

  Now, at the White House, Browning asked Lincoln if he worried that European nations might be dragged into the war. The president admitted that he was concerned about the blockade’s effect on Britain and France. If those nations chose to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy, Scott’s Anaconda would be far less effective. The only thing worse than alienating the great powers would be if the small Federal navy—around forty ships at the start of the war—also failed altogether in its attempts to blockade the Southern coast. That would be like showing weakness to an already angry dog. Furthermore, the key European powers considered an ineffective “paper blockade” illegal under international law. The only solution, Lincoln had decided during one sleepless night in the wake of Bull Run, was to beef up the fleet. Browning recalled Lincoln saying that “we had better increase the navy as fast as we could and blockade such ports as our force would enable us to, and say nothing about the rest.”5

  August brought some good news from the high seas. While Lincoln’s generals were still agonizing over Bull Run, the navy scored a decisive victory. Sailors patrolling the Atlantic coast off North Carolina
had grown increasingly concerned about the steady flow of blockade runners launching from Hatteras Inlet. Federal commanders put together a strike force of seven ships with 141 guns to assault the Confederate stronghold. When naval officials woke Lincoln up late one night to give him the news that Hatteras had been subdued, the president was ecstatic. Wearing only a nightshirt, Lincoln wrapped one assistant secretary in a bear hug. The two men “flew around the room once or twice,” recalled one witness, “and the night shirt was considerably agitated.” In the wake of the naval triumph, Seward told an acquaintance that he believed the danger of European intervention was now “pretty well over.”6

  Lincoln insisted that he was ignorant about naval matters. “I know but little about ships,” he told his secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, at the beginning of the conflict. In fact, Lincoln, the former flatboat and steamboat pilot, knew plenty. In 1849 he applied for a patent for a device he had invented for lifting steamboats and other vessels over shoals. Lincoln actively pushed for innovations in the navy, signing a bill that would allow the service to develop a fleet of ironclads. That autumn a New York iron manufacturer approached Seward with a novel design. The secretary of state quickly brought it to Lincoln’s attention. Some naval officers ridiculed the vessel, which resembled “a cheese box on a raft.” Lincoln, however, was impressed with the design’s simplicity. At one development meeting, the president hoisted a small pasteboard model of the odd-looking craft. “All I have to say,” Lincoln remarked, “is what the girl said when she stuck her foot into the stocking: ‘It strikes me there is something in it.’ ”7

  Still, the slow job of building the navy frustrated Lincoln. In October one of the president’s secretaries found him “pale and careworn, as if the perpetual wear-and-tear of the load which presses upon him were becoming too much even for his iron frame and elastic mind.” As Lincoln and his team awaited completion of the ironclads, they were forced to rely on the navy’s existing fleet—and its old heroes. That fall Captain Charles Wilkes, a sixty-two-year-old former Antarctic explorer, was assigned a routine mission to travel to the coast of Africa, recover the screw sloop USS San Jacinto, and deliver her to the Philadelphia naval yard. Wilkes was nearing the end of his career and had earned a reputation for immoderation. One naval official complained that the captain, who once burned a Fijian village to punish the theft of his crew’s property, possessed “a superabundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment.” Naval secretary Gideon Welles agreed that the old sailor had “abilities but not good judgment in all respects,” and observed that it was “pretty evident that he will be likely to cause trouble.” He was, Welles added, not “as obedient as he should be.”8

  Wilkes decided to make one last stab at glory before his retirement. He disobeyed his orders, diverting the San Jacinto toward the Caribbean in order to hunt for Confederate blockade runners. While in port at Cienfuegos, in southern Cuba, Wilkes and his crew discovered that two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, were scheduled to sail from Havana on November 8, heading to Europe to take up diplomatic posts in London and Paris. The Southrons made no efforts to hide their plans. Most well-informed Habañeros knew of their impending departure. Wilkes ordered his crew to position their sloop in the middle of the Bahama Channel. Then he waited for his prey.9

  Wilkes’s executive officer warned his captain that seizing the mail packet, the HMS Trent, might violate international law. But the aging Wilkes could not resist the opportunity. On November 8, the captain told his diary that the day was “one of the most important in my naval life.” Shortly before noon, Wilkes climbed onto the deck of the San Jacinto and peered through a telescope. He spotted the Trent in the distance. Wilkes ordered his crew on deck, armed with rifles and bayonets. Then someone shouted the fateful order to fire. A cannonball soared across the bow of the British packet, dropping into the water some distance from its target. When the Trent continued on its course, Wilkes’s men fired another shell—this one landing closer. After the British ship finally slowed to a stop, Wilkes ordered his men onto the English vessel to seize Mason and Slidell, dubbing them the “embodiment of dispatches.” After a brief struggle, Wilkes’s sailors hauled the Confederate diplomats back to the San Jacinto. The Trent was permitted to continue on its course—but Wilkes had his captives.10

  And Lincoln had a mess. Northerners, at least at first, did not seem to recognize the dangers. A British journalist traveling in the United States noted the “storm of exultation sweeping over the land” when the news of the capture arrived. “The whole country now rings with applause,” the New York Times reported. “We do not believe the American heart ever thrilled with more genuine delight.… As for Commodore Wilkes and his command, let the handsome thing be done. Consecrate another Fourth of July to him. Load him down with services of plate and swords of the cunningest and costliest art.” Crowded theater audiences honored Wilkes with echoing ovations when he returned to shore. P. T. Barnum personally invited the captain to visit his museum. Wilkes, the Boston Transcript gushed, had “dealt a heavy blow” to “the very vitals of the conspiracy threatening our national existence.” The U.S. Congress passed a resolution lauding the new American hero “for his brave, adroit and patriotic conduct.” Americans were so eager to congratulate Wilkes that the captain’s hands began to blister from too much shaking.11

  Both Lincoln and Seward initially seemed inclined to defend Wilkes. As the early euphoria faded, however, the president and his secretary of state began to express second thoughts. “If Commodore Wilkes acted under orders,” the Richmond Inquirer noted perceptively, “we do not see how Lincoln can possibly escape the most serious complications with the English government.” Lincoln acknowledged in November that Wilkes “had no right to turn his quarterdeck into a prize court,” and complained that he was losing sleep over the incident. “I fear,” Lincoln told another visitor in November, “the traitors may prove to be white elephants.” A State Department employee told his diary that from early on in the crisis Lincoln favored releasing the “traitors.”12

  Britons erupted when they read the initial reports of the Trent seizure. Londoners, reported one American in the city, were “frantic with rage, and were the country polled, I fear 999 out of 1,000 would declare for immediate war.” Britain’s prime minister, the irascible Lord Palmerston, called an emergency meeting of his cabinet. “I don’t know whether you are going to stand this,” he is said to have thundered as he threw his hat on the table, “but I’ll be damned if I do!” The prime minister threatened to dispatch a fleet of gunboats to U.S. waters, and asked his war department to reconsider recent spending cuts. “Relations with Seward and Lincoln,” he wrote, “are so precarious that it seems to me that it would be inadvisable to make any reduction in the amount of our military force.” Palmerston demanded a halt to gunpowder and ammunition exports to the federal government, and ordered more than ten thousand redcoats to Canada. By early December, the British prime minister confidently assured his monarch that the country was well prepared for war. “Great Britain,” Palmerston reported to Queen Victoria, “is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon, and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”13

  God Wouldn’t Trust Them in the Dark

  Lincoln sometimes liked to needle Britons, whom he considered stuffy and self-important. He told a favorite joke about an Englishman who hung a portrait of George Washington in his outhouse. The punch line: “There is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.” Another favorite knee-slapper starred an old Indian chief from the West. “He was visited by an Englishman,” Lincoln explained, “who tried to impress him with the greatness of England. ‘Why,’ said he to the chief, ‘the sun never sets on England.’ ‘Humph!’ said the Indian. ‘I suppose it’s because God wouldn’t trust them in the dark.’ ”14

  “Nothing can be more virulent than the hatred that exists between the Americans of the Uni
ted States and the English,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed two decades before the Civil War. “But in spite of those hostile feelings,” he noted, “the Americans derive most of their manufactured commodities from England”—a dynamic that fueled both economies. By the midnineteenth century, American interests were best served by a healthy relationship with John Bull. London held $444 million worth of American stocks and bonds, making it by far the United States’ largest creditor. Lord Byron, whose poetry Lincoln admired, liked to insist that the Baring brothers and the Rothschild banking houses were “the true lords of Europe.” Yet in America’s case, because of the breakneck speed of economic growth, the debt figures were not particularly oppressive.15

  Lincoln had mixed feelings about carrying debt. On the one hand, he shared the Hamiltonian view that a debt could be a “national blessing” if it helped to fund development projects and bring the country together. He had long favored a state bank in Illinois, and once jumped out a window in Springfield to avoid a vote that would put it in danger. Yet Lincoln had also experienced crushing personal obligations firsthand. As a young man, after one investment in a local dry-goods store went bad, Lincoln complained to friends about his own “national debt.” On another occasion, according to a close friend, Lincoln visited a prostitute. After he “stript off and went to bed” with the young woman, the gawky Illinoisan discovered that he did not have enough cash. Lincoln dressed and called off the encounter. “I do not wish,” the future president explained, “to go on credit.”16 Or so the story is told.