By the time Lincoln occupied the Executive Mansion, however, transatlantic financial and commercial ties left little room for disagreement about a wise foreign policy. A war between Britain and the United States would likely prove disastrous to both economies. “The financial needs of the United States provided a powerful incentive for American statesmen to pursue a conciliatory foreign policy,” notes the Oxford diplomatic scholar Jay Sexton. “The creditor-debtor relationship of Britain and the United States bonded the two nations together and gave them the common interest of avoiding war.” Succumbing to momentary passions or old grudges would prove counterproductive.17
For Lincoln, the Trent crisis in the winter of 1861 was a high-stakes, real-world test of his lifelong belief that rational self-interest—“guided by justice”—should be the overriding principle in American foreign affairs. Lincoln believed that selfishness lay at the bottom of all human motivation. When Herndon sometimes argued that man could act disinterestedly, Lincoln ridiculed his law partner. Ultimately, the future president liked to say, “the snaky tongue of selfishness will wag out.” Lincoln believed that human beings possessed little, if any, free will, and were motivated instead by what he called “the fuel of interest.” Freedom and progress emerged only from the clash of those interests—whether at home or among the nations of the world.18
What about the “better angels of our nature”—Lincoln’s most often quoted phrase? Even those words, spoken in his first inaugural, were a nod to human imperfection. In an early draft of the address, which had been revised by Seward, the New Yorker had urged Lincoln to appeal to “the guardian angel of our nation.” Lincoln could be an idealist, but he had little time for self-righteous crusading. The president-elect revised Seward’s words, preferring a more qualified version. Lincoln believed deeply in the virtues of the American example, and he once referred to the United States as God’s “almost chosen people.” Yet he could never quite bring himself to slip completely into the role of national cheerleader.
Instead, Lincoln considered a kind of inexact justice the highest good. He believed that only “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” could overcome the “basest principles of our nature.” He admired British utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Careful study of the classics also shaped Lincoln’s approach to foreign policy. As a young lawyer, Lincoln pored over the works of Euclid, mastering the Greek mathematician’s theories of geometry by candlelight, his long legs poking out from beneath his bedcovers. Justice, Lincoln believed, was “nothing else but the best reason of wise men” applied to human affairs. For all Lincoln’s genuine, almost religious faith in the power of America’s republican example to reshape the world, his foreign policies also paid great heed to the Old World concept of international equilibrium. Lincoln “was always just,” Herndon observed, “before he was generous.”19
Lincoln’s antagonist in the Trent crisis, Britain’s Lord Palmerston, shared the American president’s reverence for coldly rational policies that would promote the national interest. As a young man, Palmerston had been tutored by a disciple of Adam Smith, who predicted that progress would emerge from the “invisible hand” of brutal competition. As an adult, the British statesman recommended Euclid as the best training for a diplomat; the balance of power, after all, involved constant mathematical calculation and recalculation. “Nothing,” Palmerston counseled, “strengthens the reasoning faculty more than geometry.” Unlike Lincoln, however, the prime minister believed that a shrewd, interest-based policy was the province of well-bred, elite statesmen—not backwoods diplomats like the American president.20
Palmerston was not opposed to injecting morality into foreign policy—provided it served the British interest. He crusaded vigorously against the international slave trade, and assiduously cultivated ties to other constitutional governments on the Continent. Still, the prime minister was a strong believer that his nation should not “go in for chivalrous enterprises.” Britain could not act as “the Quixote of the world,” he insisted. Instead, self-interest should be the “shibboleth” of an English statesman’s policy. Britain could “secure her own independence” from manipulating “the conflicting interests of other countries,” Palmerston believed. At times, in his calls for national freedom of action, Britain’s prime minister sounded like Lincoln’s hero George Washington. “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” Palmerston once declared. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”21
Palmerston recognized that Britain’s interests lay in steering clear of the American crisis. “They who in quarrels interpose, will often get a bloody nose,” he shrewdly cautioned British hawks. Yet the Trent affair presented the prime minister with a troubling challenge to his country’s prestige. Palmerston distrusted democracies. Governments “in which the masses influence or direct the destinies of the Country,” he believed, “are swayed much more by Passion than by Interest.” Palmerston, too, was not always free from hot-tempered outbursts. As the American Civil War erupted, the prime minister gloated that Britain’s former colonies had splintered into what he called the “Disunited States of North America.” In principle, Lincoln and Palmerston were committed to reasoned, interest-based foreign policies. In practice, the Trent episode presented both men with the very real possibility that “emotional crisis” could sweep their nations into a devastating transatlantic war.22
Jupiter Anglicanus
Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, was born in 1784, five years before the U.S. Constitution. From his first days on earth, he inhabited a world of aristocratic privilege. Even in his childhood, Palmerston found himself caught between his age’s competing obsessions with order and progress. He lived through the French Revolution, and was old enough to recall a trip with his parents to revolutionary Paris in 1792. At school classmates thought Palmerston “charming,” but also lacking a certain “zest.” In later years students at one of the elite boarding schools he attended would concoct a song with a verse lauding “Temple’s frame of iron,” but as a young man Palmerston was actually somewhat sickly. Blisters pocked his pale face, and his eyes were so bad that he had trouble reading. In college at Cambridge the young man drank far less than his classmates, but he also studied little aside from geometry. Luckily, as a member of the aristocracy, he was entitled to skip exams. “Certainly philosophy was still-born in Palmerston,” notes Kenneth Bourne, the best biographer of the prime minister’s early years. “No one ever called him an intellectual. But he was very strong on common sense.”23
Palmerston wangled himself a seat in the House of Commons in 1807. He still lacked a statesman’s graces, stammering when he rose to speak and putting off acquaintances with his cold demeanor. The daughter of one of Palmerston’s legislative colleagues found the young man “very pedantic and very pompous,” adding that he “was so priggish and so sedate.” His policies as a young bureaucrat during and just following the Napoleonic Wars revealed his unsentimental approach to public affairs. When popular riots erupted in London in 1815, Palmerston ordered his staff to respond to stone throwing with “a volley of small shot from a bedroom window.” His invocation to “pepper the faces of the mob” raised the hackles of British liberals. Three years later, a lunatic who had cut off his own penis tried to assassinate Palmerston. The would-be killer fired a shot that tore through his target’s clothes and singed his back. Palmerston simply applied ice to the burn and went back to work.24
The young politician quickly acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man. The English press dubbed Palmerston “Lord Cupid,” but his romances tended to display a quality of opportunism and rapacious conquest. At one London club, Almack’s—which was so exclusive that the Duke of Wellington had once been turned away for wearing black pants instead of white—Palmerston is said to have slept with three of the seven directors of the all-female membership committee. Married women came to expect his aggressive advances. One object
of Palmerston’s affections recalls the future prime minister accosting her “in his impudent, brusque way, with a ‘Ha, ha! I see it all—beautiful woman neglected by her husband—allow me, etc.’ ” The future prime minister apparently fathered more than one illegitimate child. In his diary, Palmerston used code phrases like “subscriptions & gifts” as euphemisms for child-support payments. He speckled the volumes with asterisks and phrases like “fine nights” to denote sexual conquests.25
In 1830, at the age of forty-six, Palmerston was named Britain’s foreign minister. The viscount worked extraordinarily hard, especially for a nobleman. At first, the foreign minister felt as though he was drowning. Only when he fell ill did he take a break. “The life I lead,” Palmerston told one of his diplomats in 1834, “is like that of a man who on getting out of bed every morning, should be caught up by the end of one of the arms of a windmill and whirled round and round till he was again deposited at night to rest.” His goal as a government functionary, he once remarked, was to turn “night and chaos into light and order.”26
As foreign minister, Palmerston did not easily embark on crusades. “Governments,” he once said, “are not at liberty to act solely from motives of generous sympathy for the sufferings of an oppressed people.” Yet he shrewdly sought to tap into Britain’s liberal mood. The British foreign minister believed his nation’s best interests would be served by challenging the existing order in Europe. Conservative European monarchs led by Austria’s Prince Metternich had forged an alliance that aimed to suppress liberal movements on the Continent. Palmerston, as a counterweight, cast himself as a champion of constitutional government, working to cement a rapprochement between Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal. “We shall drink the cause of Liberalism all over the world,” the foreign minister declared in 1830. “The reign of Metternich is over.”27
At home, Palmerston’s aggressive leadership sometimes irritated subordinates. As a boss, Palmerston could be a martinet. He scolded employees for smoking cigars at work. Poor penmanship in diplomatic dispatches drove Palmerston to distraction. “Life is not long enough to correct them,” the foreign minister carped, “planting Sugar Canes would not be more labourious.” The foreign minister was so annoyed with the “paleness” of the ink used by his staff in Vienna that he threatened to deny them promotions. Palmerston complained that reading another envoy’s reports was “like running Penknives into one’s Eyes.” The foreign minister even voiced his disapproval when subordinates took off Sunday mornings to attend church. After Palmerston finally stepped down in 1834, according to tradition, his diplomats wanted to illuminate every window in the headquarters as a celebration.28
Queen Victoria, at least at first, was enchanted with her “tall, dark and handsome” chief diplomat. Palmerston, along with the dashing Lord Melbourne, tutored the queen in both foreign policy and chess and accompanied her on afternoon carriage rides. In one lesson Palmerston explained that the English words aristocratic and democratic both derived from the same Greek root word for “power,” kratos. Not all members of the court approved of the queen’s instructors. “She may not know their characters,” griped one, “but they must know their own.” In 1839, when he was fifty-five, Palmerston finally married Emily Lamb, a woman with whom he had been having an affair for thirty years. The following year the queen wed Prince Albert. Victoria and her foreign-policy tutor slowly grew apart. The queen would eventually come to refer to Palmerston as a “dreadful” old man.29
Palmerston could be astonishingly insubordinate. He showed up late to the queen’s first state dinner and developed a lifelong habit of tardiness. He sometimes kept foreign heads of state waiting for hours. The Belgian envoy to London claimed that he had read Samuel Richardson’s entire 1,500-page novel, Clarissa, while waiting in Palmerston’s anterooms. London society had a saying to describe the lateness of the foreign minister and his wife: “The Palmerstons always miss the soup.” The foreign minister was unapologetic. After showing up forty-five minutes late to a dinner at the Ottoman ambassador’s home, he dismissed his host as “a greasy, stupid old Turk.”30
Palmerston’s personal amorality particularly troubled the queen and her prince consort. Once, while visiting Windsor Castle, the future prime minister burst into the bedroom of one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, who screamed until the palace guards arrived. Albert was appalled. Palmerston, the prince told his diary, possessed a “worthless private character. How could the Queen consent to take a man as her chief adviser and confidential counselor in all matters of State, religion, society, Court, etc., he who, as her Secretary of State, and while under her roof at Windsor Castle, had committed a brutal attack upon one of her ladies? Had at night, by stealth, introduced himself into her apartment, barricaded the door, and would have consummated his fiendish scheme by violence had not the miraculous efforts of his victim and such assistance attracted by her screams, saved her.”31
Victoria and Albert referred to Palmerston simply as the Immoral One. The British statesman’s ambivalent Christianity must have irritated his devout monarch. Palmerston belonged to the official Anglican church and believed that the institution provided British society with much-needed order. Yet he attended services only irregularly. British wags joked that Palmerston treated God “as a foreign power.” For political reasons the British statesman sometimes appealed to the “feelings and practices of Christian nations.” But his professions of faith do not appear to have been genuine. On his deathbed, asked by a priest whether he believed in Jesus Christ, Palmerston replied laconically: “Oh, surely.”32
Britons, however, adored their brash statesman and his muscular patriotism. In later years he acquired the sobriquet the Most English Minister. When a French official remarked, “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman,” Palmerston retorted: “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.” During the 1850s the viscount mastered the craft of gunboat diplomacy. He assured Britons that “the watchful eye and the strong arm” of their government would protect them anywhere in the world. “Diplomats and protocols are very good things,” he remarked, “but there are no better peace-keepers than well-appointed three-deckers.” A British journalist dubbed Palmerston the “storm-compelling Jupiter Anglicanus of our Foreign Office.”33
Palmerston did not become prime minister until 1855, when he was seventy years old. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the Most English Minister was well past his prime. Tory rival Benjamin Disraeli sniped that Palmerston “is really an imposter, utterly exhausted, and at the best only ginger-beer, and not champagne, and now an old painted pantaloon, very deaf, very blind, and with false teeth, which would fall out of his mouth when speaking, if he did not hesitate and halt so in his talk.” Disraeli was right about the prime minister’s failing health, but he misjudged Palmerston’s resilience. France’s shrewd, capable diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand hit closer to the mark when he described the British prime minister as “one of the most able, if not the most able, man of business whom I have met in my career.”34
Palmerston had no love for the United States. Memories of his tiff with Seward over the McLeod Affair in the early 1840s still rankled. Palmerston had angered Americans by dismissing the Stars and Stripes as “a piece of bunting.” The prime minister had long viewed Britain’s transatlantic cousin as a threat. The Manifest Destiny movement, he pointed out, was “essentially and inherently aggressive.” Palmerston considered democracy a degenerate form of government. He probably would have concurred with a London Press editorial whose author complained that American politics combined “the morals of a horse race, the manners of a dog fight, the passions of a tap-room, and the emotions of a gambling house.” Palmerston could not believe that the North would succeed in subduing the Southern rebellion. As the secession crisis worsened, the prime minister wrote to Queen Victoria lauding the “approaching and virtually accomplished dissolution in America.”35
Britain, more than any other nation, was in a uniq
ue position to dictate terms to its quarrelsome former colonies. By the mid-1800s—dubbed “Britain’s imperial century” by historians—the vast territories that Palmerston oversaw included outposts from Canada to India to Australia. After Britain defeated its chief rival, France, in the Napoleonic Wars ending in 1815, the empire’s stability and dominance of Europe was stronger than it had ever been. The massive British navy, the largest in the world with its 856 ships, easily outnumbered the American force. At Queen Victoria’s Renaissance-style home on the Isle of Wight, a massive fresco hung over the main staircase that depicted the god Neptune crowning the personified figure of Britannia queen of the seas. The message was clear. “At no other time in history,” writes historian Niall Ferguson, “has one power so completely dominated the world’s oceans as Britain did in the midnineteenth century.” If Britain chose to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy, Lincoln and the Northern cause would face a new threat as perilous as anything Jefferson Davis could concoct.36
Still, for all the British Empire’s power, Palmerston displayed a puzzling insecurity—which is partly what made him so dangerous. Britain still faced serious rivals on the Continent despite its predominance. France remained a threat, even after its defeat at Britain’s hands earlier in the century. Prussia was beginning to maneuver for control of central Europe. Britain and Russia scrambled for control of Asia, a geopolitical conflict that would later come to be known as the Great Game. Finally, in North America, the prime minister was concerned that Lincoln and Seward would try to divert attention by striking at British Canada, which he believed was dangerously unprepared for an invasion. If the Confederate military proved to be “too hard a morsel for his teeth,” he worried, Seward—whom Palmerston considered “a vapouring, blustering, ignorant man”—might convince Lincoln to invade their poorly defended northern neighbor. Palmerston’s fears were not wholly without merit. The year before, Seward had prated that Britain’s North American provinces would make “excellent states.” Palmerston also feared that the war would slow shipments of cotton from the South. “We do not like slavery,” he explained, “but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.” (The Morrill Tariff, passed in early March 1861, raised duties significantly on European imports.)
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