Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Faced with a no-win decision, Lincoln tried to punt. Such a strategy would place the ball in Palmerston’s hands, and allow the American president to maintain some measure of freedom of action in the meantime. It would also give passions time to cool. While the British prime minister mulled his response, Lincoln could quietly work to prepare public opinion for the envoys’ release.

  The consequences of a rash decision on the president’s part were too serious to ignore. Lincoln, toward the end of the war, would sometimes dream that the White House had burned down. In the winter of 1861, it was not such a fanciful prospect. All Americans who had lived through the War of 1812 could imagine the powerful British navy surging up the Potomac and laying siege to the Northern capital.59 As the crisis reached its climax, New York mayor George Opdyke wrote Lincoln complaining about “the exposed condition of this city.” He worried that “a fleet of [British] steamers might readily pass the exposed defenses of our harbor and hold this city at their mercy.”60

  Allies abroad repeatedly remonstrated with the president to release the Confederate diplomats. French author Agénor-Étienne de Gasparin implored Lincoln in a letter “to give England immediately the full satisfaction that she demands.” The Frenchman acknowledged that Wilkes had a right to search the British packet, but marveled at the commander’s poor judgment in seizing the diplomats. “To rouse the opinion of England and all of Europe against you! To run the risk of a new war! … Your wisdom will have recognized that whatever the subtleties of the law may be, it is not necessary to advance the affairs of the Richmond government. That would be suicide.”61

  Lincoln did his best to assure visiting officials that he wanted to avoid a war. In early December, the Canadian finance minister, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, met with the president at the White House to discuss the rising tensions between Britain and the United States. Lincoln reassured Galt that the Trent affair “could be arranged, and [he] intimated that no cause of quarrel would grow out of that.” Galt left the White House convinced of the U.S. president’s good intentions. Still, the Canadian wrote in a memo shortly after the meeting, “I cannot … divest my mind of the impression that the policy of the American government is so subject to popular impulses that no assurance can be, or ought to be, relied on under present circumstances. The temper of the public mind toward England is certainly of doubtful character.” Galt mentioned that “the vast military preparations of the North” made him uneasy.62

  In reality, the North had done very little to prepare for a major conflict with Britain—one more detail that has inclined some modern historians to accept Charles Sumner’s contention that Lincoln was “essentially pacific” during the Trent crisis. When a delegation of Quakers visited the president at the White House in early December, Lincoln reiterated his desire to see the whole flap resolved peacefully Standing in his office in the heat emanating from his marble fireplace, the president listened as the Quakers reminded him that there were Britons like Bright who were sympathetic to the United States. Lincoln, whose “sad, yet strong countenance” had initially struck the visitors, was buoyed by the report. “These,” he told the group, “are the first words of cheer and encouragement we have had from across the water.”63

  As late as a month after the Trent incident, Lincoln still seemed to hope that the crisis would simply go away. At a wedding on the evening of December 10, he told Orville Browning that he had heard through French officials that British experts had concluded that the seizure was legal. Lincoln predicted that there “would probably be no trouble about it.” The president later suggested that if he could just meet face-to-face with the British representative in Washington, “I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace.” Still, at a memorial for Baker at the Capitol the following day, the president appeared wary and old. When Lincoln entered the packed Senate chamber, he looked unusually gaunt, with deep lines around his mouth. Snowflakes dotted his hair from the flurries outside. Taking his place behind the speaker’s podium, John Hay observed, the president sat quietly, “leaning his shaggy leonine head upon his black-gloved hand, with more utter unconsciousness of attitude than I ever saw in a man accustomed to being stared at.”64

  Lincoln tried to put on a brave face. The Trent crisis did not temper the president’s enthusiasm for his burgeoning navy. A week earlier, in his annual message to Congress, he had boasted that “it may almost be said a navy has been created and brought into service since our difficulties commenced.” He added that “squadrons larger than ever before assembled under our flag have been put afloat and performed deeds which have increased our naval renown.” The president cited a report by his secretary of the navy suggesting that the Union was prepared for battle if necessary. The federal government, Lincoln asserted, could “show the world, that while engaged in quelling disturbances at home we are able to protect ourselves from abroad.”

  The president, trying to calm passions, did not mention the Trent tension specifically in his message. “One thing is pretty certain,” observed a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun later that month, “to wit: that the Senate is not to be consulted on the question.” Lincoln’s cursory remarks to Congress were one more hint of his evolving view that foreign-affairs crises often demanded executive discretion. “There is little evidence,” notes one distinguished Lincoln biographer, “that the participation of Congress in this task of international adjustment would have been helpful. Heroically to take a stand, or to deliver a resounding stump speech in the form of a legislative resolution, was hardly calculated to improve the situation.” Lincoln, during the Trent affair, confined his correspondence with Capitol Hill to “innocuous and collateral aspects” of the crisis, such as forwarding copies of the State Department’s dispatches to peripheral powers like Austria and Italy.65

  There was one particular senator, however, on whom the president relied heavily. After Seward’s string of unpredictable outbursts earlier that spring, Lincoln had begun consulting regularly with Charles Sumner, the patrician chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The pretentious senator, Lincoln once remarked, represented “my idea of a bishop.” (To needle the stiff Bostonian, Lincoln sometimes asked to stand back-to-back with Sumner to compare their heights.) The Massachusetts senator, who maintained a frequent correspondence with liberal Britons like Bright and the Duchess of Argyll, was convinced that war with the Palmerston ministry would be anathema. He raised his case for conciliation with Lincoln frequently as the crisis intensified. Sumner maintained a deep suspicion of the volatile Seward. “You must watch him,” the senator urged Lincoln, “and overrule him.” Seward, for his part, complained that there were “too many secretaries of state in Washington.”66

  As December unfolded, the president’s men filled the news vacuum with hot air. “I do not think we can be bullied into a war,” Hay told readers of the Missouri Republican in one anonymous dispatch. “But if I understand the old gentleman who at present lives in the Executive Mansion, there will be no sacrifice of honor or principle even to avoid a war with the swaggering bully of the United Islands.” If Britain demanded the release of Mason and Slidell, Hay brazenly insisted, “Mr. Seward will probably reply, ‘Send on your burial cases.’ ”67

  Indeed, Seward thought a new front increasingly likely as the fall wore on. Shortly before Wilkes seized the Confederate envoys, the secretary of state wrote home about his own “intense anxiety.” Seward worried that the pressure Southern agents were placing on European statesmen was beginning to win sympathies. It was “doubtful,” he told his family, “whether we can escape the yet deeper and darker abyss of foreign war. The responsibility resting upon me is overwhelming.” Like Lincoln, the Trent news seems to have cheered Seward initially. According to Gideon Welles, “no man was more elated or jubilant over the capture of the emissaries than Mr. Seward.” The secretary of state, Welles recalled, “made no attempt to conceal his gratification.”68

  Seward’s mood darkened again, however, on December 15, when t
he British demands finally reached Washington. Lincoln was having tea with Orville Browning at the White House when Seward swept in with the news. Browning reacted with indignation. “We will fight her to the death,” he vowed. But he did not really expect a war. Lincoln, on the other hand, recognized the unpredictability of a transatlantic game of chicken. Slidell’s wife had been telling people that Wilkes’s executive officer, after boarding the Trent, had declared: “Oh, John Bull would do as he had done before, he would bark, but not bite.” Lincoln was more cautious. He told a story about an aggressive bulldog he had known in Springfield. Everyone said the dog was friendly—but was he, really? “I know the bulldog will not bite,” Lincoln said. “You know he will not bite, but does the bulldog know he will not bite?”69

  Seward asked Britain’s minister in Washington to withhold his country’s demands for a few days before making the official presentation. The secretary of state wanted more time to formulate a response before the Brits turned over their seven-day hourglass. The British minister graciously obliged. Seward, meanwhile, reverted to his old blustering ways. On December 16 the secretary of state showed up loaded for bear at a dinner at the Portuguese legation. Looking “haggard and worn,” with his trademark cloud of cigar smoke following him about the room, Seward boasted about the potential American reaction if Britain were to make war. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” Seward cried. The historian George Bancroft reported that Seward “looked dirty, rusty, vulgar, and low; used such words as hell, and damn, and spoke very loud.” Edward Everett, the Massachusetts statesman who had once filled the difficult job of secretary of state himself, was more forgiving of Seward’s behavior that winter. The New Yorker was “really overworked,” Everett told Cassius Marcellus Clay, “and every allowance must be made for him.” Europe’s diplomats had grown accustomed to Seward’s violent outbursts. “That’s all bugaboo talk,” one guest at the Portuguese party had explained to a British journalist. “When Seward talks that way he means to break down. He is most dangerous and obstinate when he pretends to agree a good deal with you.”70

  Lincoln recognized that opening another front would be fatal. But first he would have to convince the public, which was still in no mood to back down. While Seward strutted about Washington’s ministries, the president quietly began reaching out to friendly newspaper editors. He urged John Forney of the Philadelphia Press to try to counteract the popular fury. “I want you to sit down and write one of your most careful articles, preparing the American people for the release of Slidell and Mason, and for the statement that Captain Wilkes acted without the authority of his government,” Lincoln told the editor. The president tried to play to the editor’s vanity, adding: “I know this is much to ask of you, but it shows my confidence in you, my friend, when I tell you that I have chosen you because I can trust you, because I think you equal to the task. You will be much abused by our honest and impatient people. But when I tell you that this course is forced upon us by our peculiar position; and that the good Queen of England is moderating her own angry people, who are as bitter against us as our people are against them, I need say no more.” Forney, who was a personal friend of Wilkes’s, was initially full of “resentment” over the request, he later recalled. Still, “a little reflection and a fuller revelation of facts decided me,” and he agreed to write the piece.71

  Lincoln may also have enlisted his personal secretary as a propagandist. John Hay, whose anonymous newspaper reports often seemed to echo Lincoln’s views, wrote that there was “little excitement and no trepidation in Washington,” even after news of the British demands arrived. The capital’s denizens had displayed “no serious apprehensions” about the Trent crisis, Hay wrote. Residents blithely strolled the shopping districts in the unseasonably warm weather, wearing their best “silk, feathers and broad cloth.” Hay insisted that cool heads would prevail and war could still be avoided. A “quiet contempt” toward Britain had replaced Americans’ former “intense sensitiveness,” Hay observed. “Having ceased utterly to think anything of them, of course we are entirely indifferent to what they think of us.” Lincoln’s secretary stressed the material consequences of a pointless and destructive war.72

  As Lincoln and Seward mulled their response to the British ultimatum, dire reports began pouring in from expats in Europe. Seward’s old kingmaker, Thurlow Weed, had embarked for the Continent earlier that year to try to improve the North’s image abroad. Yet now he warned that the Federals were taking a miserable beating in the French and British press. More troubling, Weed reported, Britain appeared to be preparing for a major conflict. “Everything here is upon a war footing,” he wrote Seward. “Such prompt and gigantic preparations were never known.” Weed advised the White House to simply release Mason and Slidell. The best policy, he insisted, would be to turn “if needs be, even the other cheek rather than smite back at present.” The Confederate envoys, he insisted, “would be a million times less mischievous here than at Fort Warren.” War, he warned, “unless you avert it, is inevitable.”73

  Britons were particularly hostile to Seward. The secretary of state, Weed reported, was being “infernally abused” in London drawing rooms and was “wholly misunderstood.” Seward’s poor reputation stemmed at least partly from an offhand comment he made to the Duke of Newcastle during his trip to England in 1859. Seward had remarked that if he should be elected president, he would go out of his way to insult Britain—or so the duke thought he had heard. Throughout the country, Weed told Seward, Britons were “ransacking” the secretary of state’s collected works, looking for “every word against England.” They were convinced that Seward wanted to provoke a foreign war in order to unite North and South. A number of prominent Englishmen told Weed that he should write to Lincoln demanding Seward’s immediate dismissal.74

  Meanwhile, liberal Britons like John Bright and Richard Cobden tried to influence Lincoln through other channels. Palmerston was an old antagonist of the two men. “Palmerston prime minister!” Bright had once exclaimed. “What a hoax!” Cobden referred to the prime minister as “the old dodger.” Bright dubbed Palmerston “the hoary imposter.” Bright and Cobden believed commercial ties bound Britain tightly to its former colonies. Palmerston, on the other hand, allowed nothing to bind him. He dismissed Bright and Cobden as unrealistic pacifists. “It would be very delightful,” the prime minister wrote, “if your utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce and would give up fighting and quarrelling altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal.” Conflict, the prime minister insisted, was simply “human nature.”75

  Still, both Bright and Cobden also urged Washington to do its part to avoid a conflict. Cobden believed that Charles Sumner possessed “a kind of veto” on Seward’s influence with the president. “At all hazards,” Bright wrote Sumner, “you must not let this matter grow to a war with England, even if you are right and we are wrong.” Bright urged Sumner to be “courteous and conceding to the last possible degree.” He suggested that the American president might submit the affair to an international arbiter. Sumner, who met almost daily with Lincoln as the Trent crisis intensified, shared the letters with the president. Former president Millard Fillmore also wrote Lincoln in mid-December arguing that arbitration was the only way to avoid being “overwhelmed with the double calamities of civil and foreign war at the same time.” Lincoln agreed that arbitration was the way to go. “There will be no war,” the president assured Sumner, “unless England is bent upon having one.”76

  A Glutton of Gloom

  With no transatlantic telegraph yet working, diplomatic dispatches took a maddening two weeks to cross the ocean by steamship. As Lincoln pondered his response to Britain’s ultimatum, Palmerston waited anxiously. Finally, a dispatch arrived in London from Washington on the evening of December 16 affirming that Wilkes had acted “without instructions and even without the knowledge of the government.” The news cheered some. “We
shall not have war with America,” said a relieved Lady Palmerston. The prime minister himself was not so sure. “As to any dispatch written by Seward before he received our demands,” Palmerston told his foreign minister, “I attach very little value to it, and one cannot speculate on the nature of the answer we shall receive. We are doing all we can do on the assumption that we are to have a refusal and that is all we can be expected to do.”77

  Lincoln’s diplomats, for their part, found themselves unsure about who was in charge in London. “Where is the master to direct this storm?” Charles Francis Adams asked his son as the crisis intensified. As the Trent affair approached its climax, the British prime minister physically broke down. Palmerston, now in his late seventies, had long walked with a stoop and could barely see. Sometimes he simply fell asleep in Parliament. For a statesman with such an outsize public image, Palmerston’s deteriorating body shocked some visitors. Lord Granville thought the Most English Minister looked like “a retired old croupier from Baden.” Now, at a moment of high tension between Britain and the federal states, an attack of gout crippled the prime minister. Rumors flew through London that Palmerston had died.

  Adding to the prime minister’s stress, the ailing Prince Albert finally passed away on December 14. Palmerston had often tangled with the prince consort, but Albert had earned a degree of his respect. Palmerston feared that the monarch’s death at the height of an international crisis could complicate an already delicate situation. The prime minister considered it a “calamity” that was “too awful to contemplate.” The entire British nation, he added, had been “plunged … into the deepest affliction” by the news.78

  As Palmerston’s health deteriorated, his friends began to worry. The prime minister had always led a vigorous life. In his youth Palmerston had vowed to “make exercise a religion,” and preferred to work at a standing desk rather than sitting in a chair. Even in old age he “ate like a vulture.” Now, however, the prime minister was “very far from well,” Lord Clarendon reported. “He overtaxes his strength, and unless he makes some change in that respect, he cannot last long.” Albert’s passing had only made matters worse. “The death of the prince has affected him much,” Lord Granville observed. “I never saw him so low, but there is enough to make him so, coupled with the depression always caused by the gout. Lady Palmerston appeared to me for the first time to be a little anxious about him.”79