Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Union finances were one major cause for concern. All fall Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, had been trying to secure loans from European financiers to bolster the war effort. Chase had not been having much luck, even before the Trent crisis. Yet after the capture of the mail packet, that prospect vanished completely. “Not a dozen battles lost could have damaged our good cause as much as the ill-judged, and overzealous act of Capt. Wilkes,” August Belmont, the American agent of the European Rothschild banking family, complained to Chase. To make matters worse, the uncertainty spawned by the crisis caused Americans to hoard gold and silver. The U.S. treasury, which paid its debts in specie, went virtually broke.100

  One dramatic solution propounded by Lincoln and his allies in Congress was to issue a national paper currency. Aside from precious metals, the country’s primary form of money until now had been notes issued by some 1,600 state banks. Chase had originally been concerned that a measure to print federal greenbacks would be unconstitutional. Lincoln had his own anxieties about such a revolutionary step. The president, however, convinced Chase that the exigencies of the war justified the move, according to one recollection. Congress ultimately passed the Legal Tender Act—a law that eventually pumped more than $450 million in federal greenbacks into the economy during the war—in late February 1862. As the new paper money began rolling off the presses, Lincoln’s bodyguard observed, the president was “in high spirits” and “seemed to feel happier than I had seen him for a long time.”101

  The greenbacks were not enough to reverse the Union’s financial fortunes on their own. Yet the measure went a long way toward building a more powerful and centralized American state. The Legal Tender Act, notes one modern historian, amounted to a “major innovation increasing the economic influence of the national government—linking Americans with ever stronger economic sinews.” The creation of the first national income tax also made it easier for the central government to tap the resources of the wider country. Finally, Lincoln pushed hard to establish a national bank, which Congress finally created in 1863. These sweeping modernizations of the nation’s financial system were critical prerequisites to America’s rise to world power.102

  Foreign affairs and global finance, Lincoln had learned over the course of his first year in office, were a serious and complex business. European chancelleries were no place for dilettantes or slouches. Still, it was always difficult for Lincoln to resist the pleas of his friends. In January, Billy Herndon traveled from Springfield to Washington to see his old law partner. According to Springfield tradition, Herndon had made the trip to ask the president to appoint him to a diplomatic post in London or Rome. Considering the gravity of the international crisis, Lincoln could not in good conscience have obliged his volatile partner. Whether the rumors about Herndon’s intentions are true or not, the younger man ultimately left Washington without a foreign posting from the tense and “considerably careworn” president. (Herndon did, however, ask the president if he could borrow $25.)

  In later years Lincoln liked to tell the story of an office seeker who at first demanded a diplomatic post—and then, when the request was denied, asked for a series of lesser jobs. Eventually, the office seeker said he’d settle for a pair of old trousers. It is not hard to imagine Billy Herndon playing the role of diplomatic supplicant in the joke. According to one newspaper report, Herndon returned to Springfield “very sour on Lincoln.” If Herndon wanted an English or Italian vacation, he would have to make the trip on his own.103

  In the wake of the Trent affair, Lincoln and his team did their best to project the insouciance of would-be victors. One State Department assistant observed the “confidence in the certainty of triumph” that was “growing and deepening” in Washington. “The only fear now,” he continued, “is of foreign interference. If that can be warded off it is felt all is safe.” On January 28 the aide attended a reception at the Executive Mansion—“the largest and most brilliant of the season,” as the Baltimore Sun described it. In the Blue Room the president and First Lady greeted French, Prussian, and Swedish diplomats (along with “one notable looking personage,” observed the Washington Evening Star, who was dressed in a “peculiar uniform, which consisted of purple tights and jacket, with a dragoon sword, wearing a cock’s feather in his left breast”). The State Department functionary reported that Lincoln appeared “care worn but in good spirits. Indeed, such are the prevailing feelings.”104

  As winter faded, the navy once again buoyed the president’s spirits. On January 30, the first ironclad finally launched. The news panicked Britons. The London Times worried that the innovation had made Britain’s fleet of 149 “first-class warships” obsolete. Only its two experimental ironclads would now be of any use in a war with the United States. “There is,” the Times reported, “not now a ship in the English navy apart from these two that it would not be madness to trust to an engagement with that little Monitor.”

  The Monitor, Henry Adams observed from London, “has been the main talk of the town ever since the news came, in Parliament, in the clubs, in the city, among the military and naval people. The impression is that it dates the commencement of a new era in warfare, and that Great Britain must consent to begin over again.” News of the ironclad’s launch spread rapidly through a reception hosted by Lady Palmerston. Henry’s father spotted the prime minister at the event, and noted in his diary that Palmerston, whose arm was still in a sling from his gout, “certainly looks badly.” The American minister marveled at the “revolution in opinion concerning the formidable character of the United States.” Still, he added, the “feeling of jealousy” was “all pervading here, and scarcely covered with a decent veil.”105

  Cassius Marcellus Clay, who had met with Palmerston in London the year before, told Seward that he still “very much fear[ed] England’s interference,” even after the resolution of the Trent affair. “My first impressions in Europe are not changed nor weakened, but rather strengthened,” Lincoln’s man in St. Petersburg confided. “Nothing but quick and effective success will save us from foreign enemies.” Clay, ever the firebrand, suggested that the Lincoln administration “fortify our coast lines everywhere. We ought to commence at once a war navy of iron vessels, on the seas and the lakes—first capable of protecting the seaport towns, and next taking the ocean against all enemies.”106

  With transatlantic tensions building once again, the Lincoln administration did its best to smooth ruffled feathers. A month after releasing Mason and Slidell, Seward wrote to Queen Victoria under the president’s signature offering his condolences on Prince Albert’s death. “The People of the United States are kindred of the People of Great Britain,” Seward wrote. “With all our distinct national interests, objects, and aspirations, we are conscious that our moral strength is largely derived from that relationship, and we think we do not deceive ourselves when we suppose that, by constantly cherishing cordial friendship and sympathy with the other branches of the family to which we belong, we impart to them not less strength than we derive from the same connection. Accidents, however, incidental to all States, and passions, common to all nations, often tend to disturb the harmony so necessary and so proper between the two countries, and to convert them into enemies.”107

  Four days later, Mary Lincoln threw a huge party at the White House. All the diplomats were there, chests dripping with colorful decorations. The First Lady had hired the renowned (and expensive) Maillard’s to cater the affair. The assembled diplomats could not have missed the tributes to America’s burgeoning navy. Mary’s centerpieces included a model of the steamship Union made out of confectionary sugar, as well as a large Japanese punch bowl that Commodore Perry had brought back as a souvenir from the East. As the diplomats mingled under the elegant gaslight chandeliers, the Marine Band played the “Marseillaise,” the French revolutionary anthem. To show her sympathy for Queen Victoria, Mary’s white silk gown included dozens of black flowers in remembrance of Prince Albert.108

  Even as the
Lincolns paid tribute to the British monarch’s grief, they were about to sink into a family horror of their own. While the diplomats mingled in the East Room, the Lincolns’ eleven-year-old son, Willie, was lying sick with a fever in his bedroom upstairs. Both the president and First Lady frequently left the party to check on Willie. Mary’s seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, spotted the president upstairs in Willie’s room with his back to the fireplace, hands locked behind him, staring solemnly at the carpet.

  Willie died on February 20. Both Lincolns were disconsolate. “Well, Nicolay,” the president told his secretary, his voice cracking, “my boy is gone—he is actually gone!” As Keckley was dressing Willie’s dead body, Lincoln walked in to take a last look at his child. He lifted the sheet, uncovering the boy’s face—and then broke down. “It is hard, hard to have him die!” the president cried, burying his face in his hands. “His grief unnerved him,” Keckley recalled, “and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.” For months afterward, Mary, too, would burst into tears whenever someone mentioned Willie’s name. She could not get out of bed for weeks.

  Still, the First Lady took some comfort in the elaborate rituals of Victorian mourning. Mary had carefully studied the etiquette of the British royal family. One of her favorite books was Agnes Strickland’s multivolume Lives of the Queens of England. Now Mary deliberately imitated the example of Queen Victoria’s sorrow over Albert. Among other mourning clothes, Mary sent away to New York for a black bonnet of “the finest, jet black English crape,” specifying that it must be “exceedingly plain and genteel.” She also began holding séances in an effort to contact Willie through spiritualist mediums—a practice that Victoria had reportedly also tried in an effort to commune with the late prince consort.109

  With their son’s death, both Lincoln and his wife grew increasingly superstitious. At night, the president told friends he sometimes dreamed of “a sweet communion” with “my lost boy Willie.” The First Lady, for her part, chose absurdly disreputable mediums for her séances. She invited Charles J. Colchester, who went by the sobriquet Lord Colchester and claimed to be an English peer, to the Executive Mansion in an effort to contact Willie. White House aides soon lost their patience. The journalist Noah Brooks recalled attending one such session, in which he eventually rose from his seat and “grasping in the direction of the drumbeat, grabbed not a disembodied spirit, but rather the very solid and fleshy hand of the Lord Colchester himself who was beating a drum in the darkened Red Room.” The president, after learning of the meetings, eventually put a stop to the charade.110

  Mary’s reverence for all things European often displayed a pathetic insecurity. And yet for the president, there were plenty of good reasons to carefully study trends on the Continent. American statesmen had long prided themselves on their independence from European affairs. Time and experience, however, had undermined that treasured principle. It was impossible, Lincoln’s diplomats were discovering, to withdraw from the world. Throughout the spring, Cassius Marcellus Clay continued to urge the Lincoln administration to bolster its defenses. “Since steam can throw, in twelve days or less, the entire navies of Europe upon our country,” he argued, “it is useless to deceive ourselves with the idea that we can isolate ourselves from European interventions. We become, in spite of ourselves—the Monroe Doctrine—Washington’s farewell—and all that—a part of the ‘balance of power’.… We must then strengthen ourselves like other nations.”111

  At the same time, however, Lincoln and Seward began to look for new ways to bolster the “cordial friendship and sympathy” between the Union and the European powers. One source of persistent tension remained America’s lackluster enforcement of its bans against the international slave trade. Radical Republicans had long advocated using the power of the federal government to stanch the continuing flow of slaves from West Africa. Earlier that year Lincoln had refused to commute the sentence of Nathaniel Gordon, an American who had been condemned to death for engaging in the trade. “It had to be done,” the president later recalled, adding that he sought to make “an example” of Gordon. “Any man,” Lincoln remarked as the Civil War unfolded, “who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I will never pardon, and he may stay and rot in jail before he will ever get relief from me.”112

  Palmerston, too, vigorously opposed the slave trade. Now British leaders proposed crafting a treaty that would create a joint U.S.–British force to stop and search U.S. vessels off the coast of Africa—a sensitive subject, considering the history of Anglo-American animosity over impressment. The Lincoln administration acquiesced, as long as the idea could be made to appear to have originated in Washington. Britain’s minister in the capital, Lord Lyons, observed an eagerness at the White House “to rally the antislavery feeling in England to the northern cause.” Lincoln and the vast majority of his cabinet were “warmly in favor” of the measure, which the White House submitted to Congress in April. Seward was reclining on his couch in his office at the State Department when Charles Sumner arrived to tell him that the Senate had unanimously ratified the treaty. “Good god!” the secretary of state cried as he jumped off the sofa. “This is the greatest act of the administration.”113

  Lincoln continued to look for additional ways to sway European public opinion. The leaders of Britain and France were generally hardheaded realists and would act primarily in what they perceived as their own selfish interests. And yet they were also human, susceptible to the same passions and romantic feelings as the rest of us. Furthermore, ordinary Britons and Frenchmen might have some power to sway their aristocratic statesmen if Lincoln could somehow appeal directly to the masses. In a game of brinksmanship in which European recognition of the Confederacy could mean the difference between the life and death of the Union, Lincoln would need to seek foreign goodwill wherever he could find it.

  The president may have seen a dispatch published February 1, 1862, in the New York Tribune titled “English Public Opinion.” The article, by the paper’s special correspondent in London, argued that the English war furor had been misleading. The exultant reaction of ordinary Britons to the release of Mason and Slidell proved “the unpopularity of the apprehended war.” The “venal and reckless” British press may have tried to gin up a conflict, the correspondent wrote. Still, it “ought never to be forgotten in the United States that at least the working classes of England, from the commencement to the termination of the difficulty, have never forsaken them.” The Tribune’s editors published the dispatch without a byline, but it was written by one of the paper’s most provocative and controversial contributors. The author, Karl Marx, was about to urge Lincoln to make his boldest foreign-policy stroke yet.114

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lincoln vs. Marx

  ON THE SUNNY, COOL MORNING OF JANUARY 1, 1863, A LINE OF FOREIGN DIPLOMATS PARADED INTO THE WHITE HOUSE “ARRAYED IN GOLD LACE, FEATHERS, AND OTHER TRAPPINGS.” The envoys, one journalist remarked, presented “a truly gorgeous appearance.” Seward’s daughter Fanny marveled at the diplomats’ “full court dress.” The whole reception, she told her diary, was “very brilliant.” After the foreign representatives had entered, sentries opened the gates to the general public. A chaotic mob pushed its way through the north portico. Inside, Mary Lincoln hovered in a black velvet dress with lozenge trimming. The president stood in the corner of the Blue Room, stiffly shaking each hand as the receiving line passed.1

  The president was exhausted. He had not slept at all the night before. Over the past several weeks, Lincoln had sunk into a deep depression. “His hair is grizzled,” reported one journalist who met Lincoln that winter, “his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.”

  The Union’s continuing military setbacks weighed heavily on the commander in chief. In mid-December the Army of the Potomac had launched an ill-advised assault on a d
ug-in Confederate position near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Southern forces, occupying the high ground and bristling with more than three hundred pieces of artillery, drove back repeated Union charges. During two days of battle, the Confederate defenders killed or wounded 12,653 Union men. (The Southern forces lost less than half the Federal tally.) The rest of the Northern troops fell into a panicked retreat under a driving rain. Lincoln was disconsolate. “We are now on the brink of destruction,” the president told an old friend after the battle. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.”2

  There was, however, one bright spot on this New Year’s afternoon. After Lincoln retired to the White House residence, Seward arrived with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation for Lincoln’s signature, unrolling the document onto a table. Lincoln dipped a pen in ink—but then he hesitated. He had been greeting guests and shaking hands since early that morning. Now the president found that his arm was numb. The signature, he worried, would be carefully scrutinized. “If they find my hand trembled,” he said, “they will say ‘he had some compunctions.’ ” Lincoln waited for a moment for the shaking to subside. Then he swept the pen firmly across the paper. “That will do,” he said with a smile.3

  The president had long opposed slavery, which he considered “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” As the Civil War unfolded, he also began to view antislavery as a tool of foreign relations. The Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln believed, “would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.” It was aimed particularly at England’s textile workers, who were the most likely to be affected by the cotton shortages produced by the war—and also the most likely to respond to a moral appeal. The popular energy produced by the proclamation, he believed, could help to apply pressure on Britain’s aristocratic ruling class, many of whom supported the Confederacy. After Lincoln signed the proclamation, Seward’s State Department quickly printed copies and shipped them abroad to the diplomatic corps.4