Lincoln in the World
Page 20
Presidents before Lincoln had long been reluctant to use the office as a platform to influence public opinion. They considered it undignified to engage in the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics once in high office. But the telegraph and other innovations in communication had changed the world dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Our government,” Lincoln told a Chicago banquet in 1856, “rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government.” Two years later the future president was even more emphatic. “In this age, and this country, public sentiment is every thing,” he wrote. “With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.” Billy Herndon later recalled that his law partner “made efforts at all times to modify and change public opinion.” As a new force in foreign affairs, “soft power” had arrived.5
And yet, soft power was a volatile thing. In the globalizing world it was a weapon that could be wielded by skillful individuals and like-minded groups—not just heads of state. Karl Marx, a bohemian German philosopher living in exile in London, was one of those feverishly dabbling in the nineteenth century’s new mass media. Marx spent much of his time in the decade before the Civil War squirreled away in the British Museum reading room working on his economic treatises. Yet philosophy alone left the agitator unsatisfied. “The philosophers of the past,” Marx once wrote, “merely interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Marx thought writing for the world’s quickly proliferating newspapers could help effect political change. The world’s most powerful statesmen, Marx insisted, would only respond to what he called “pressure from without.” Starting in the early 1850s, Marx took a job writing regular dispatches for the New York Tribune—the world’s largest newspaper.6
Over the course of the decade, Marx grew to become one of the paper’s most respected correspondents. Marx and the Tribune shared elements of a common vision. The newspaper’s nickname was the Great Moral Organ, and its editors pushed an ambitious slate of reformist policies. Lincoln had carefully pored over the Tribune for years. The president considered its editor, Horace Greeley, so important that he kept a special mail slot in his desk to hold correspondence with the mercurial newspaperman. With more than two hundred thousand readers, the Tribune’s role in “the particular drama which ended with the Emancipation Proclamation” was “as great as any statesman’s save Lincoln,” notes Allan Nevins, the distinguished scholar of the Civil War. Lincoln appreciated the influence of Greeley and his newspaper. “In print,” the president once remarked, “every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.”7
Marx sometimes complained that his bosses on the foreign desk of the Tribune were “impudent” and complained that they represented “the industrial bourgeoisie of America.” Yet he ultimately bragged to friends about writing for “the foremost English-language American newspaper.” Both the paper and its special correspondent in London aggressively lobbied to end slavery in America. When the artist Francis Carpenter painted his famous scene of Lincoln and his cabinet issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Carpenter considered the role of the Tribune so important that he included an issue of the newspaper in the portrait. Marx declared that the Civil War was the first stage in a worldwide working-class revolution. “As the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class,” he predicted, “so the American antislavery war will do for the working-classes.”8
Diplomacy and Imagination
Karl Marx was certainly not a player in the diplomacy of the Civil War in the same sense that men like Seward and Palmerston were. Lincoln had never met Marx, and they corresponded only indirectly. And yet, observing the two men side by side does reveal something important about the international arena in the midnineteenth century. In the years immediately following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, a tight-knit fraternity of highly conventional elites had come to dominate European statecraft. Stability in the international arena meant adhering to a common set of moral principles that would prevent any one nation from upsetting the balance of power. Foreign envoys refined an elaborate system of etiquette. Revolutionary change was frowned upon. Diplomacy had become a game for the orthodox.
By the Civil War, however, that system had broken down. After the outbreak of the Crimean War in the mid 1850s, nations began to act increasingly as free radicals—common moral principles be damned. Scientific progress and new theories of evolution seemed to justify a brutal competition for power and resources. And yet morality had not really disappeared from the international arena. It had simply fractured, diffused, and changed shape. Operating in such a global context required leaders who could make sense of the world for their followers, who could pick up the pieces and craft new narratives that would provide purpose and meaning. Survival, above all, demanded imagination.9
Lincoln and Marx were both creative geniuses who understood better than most that the old rules of foreign affairs were changing. (The word genius has a proactive, slightly spiritual connotation. The Latin root word, gignere, means “to beget”; the French version, génie, evokes its own type of otherworldly presence.) Marx, of course, is known for his materialistic conception of history. Lincoln, too, was a careful student of the concrete elements of power. Yet neither man could ultimately afford to ignore the less tangible elements in foreign affairs. Both enlisted the media of their times to help strengthen the resolve of their acolytes. Each ultimately managed to create a measure of order from the chaos of a changing world.10
Lincoln and Marx, in some ways, were temperamentally similar. Both could be fun-loving and warm; both sometimes sunk into bouts of gloom and pique. Focused on the activity between their ears, both sometimes neglected outside appearances. The prairie lawyer stored important documents in his stovepipe hat; the bohemian intellectual occupied an office covered with dust and tobacco ash. Above all, both men were revolutionaries who believed in the power of money and markets to reshape the world.
Lincoln, however, saw bourgeois life as a guarantor of social mobility; Marx viewed it as a prison. For the U.S. president, a Northern victory in the Civil War would redeem the American promise. The country’s free-labor system, Lincoln believed, was partly what differentiated the United States from the Old World. For Marx, on the other hand, the Union’s success represented the first step toward the revolution’s final stage: proletarian revolt. In the newly interconnected world, the American Civil War had the potential to rally European workers. The sooner middle-class America triumphed over the country’s Southern aristocrats, Marx believed, the sooner the world’s workers could triumph over both. “Labor in white skin,” Marx explained, “cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin.”11
In the near term, however, the aims of Lincoln and Marx were the same. Both sought the defeat of the Confederate States of America, even if the two men disagreed strongly over philosophy and strategy. Marx believed that the North held a key (and underutilized) advantage that had nothing to do with its material resources: the moral high ground. He recommended that Lincoln should use every means at his disposal—including the abolition of slavery—to win global sympathies. Only “the revolutionary waging of war,” Marx believed, would give the Union war effort the ideological consistency it needed to carry the day.
That, of course, was easy for Marx to say from his journalistic perch safely across the Atlantic. Lincoln was the one with the near-impossible task of actually managing the revolution. In the war’s first days, the Union’s enemies seemed dangerously close to home. Secessionists in northern Virginia appeared poised to strike Washington. For all Lincoln knew, Kentuckians might be next. If the president wanted to placate border-state slaveholders, he would need a strategy that was far more subtle and pragmatic than Marx’s prescription. Lincoln decided to save the moralizing for a later date. “The President wanted God on his side,” observed one contemporary, “but he must have Kentucky.” To accomplish that aim, Lincoln originally maintained
that the North was fighting to preserve the Union—not to eradicate slavery.12
Lincoln’s early strategy had not impressed the German dissident. The American president was “a man without intellectual brilliance,” Marx lamented—one of the New World’s “mediocrities of merely local influence.” His cautious war making angered the philosopher. Marx complained that the president was always “hesitant, resistant, unwilling.” Lincoln lacked originality, the journalist believed. Only a public outcry was likely to shift his stance. “Lincoln,” Marx observed as the debate over slavery intensified, “yields only hesitantly and cautiously to this pressure from without.”13
Actually, Lincoln and Marx were headed in the same direction. They were just taking different paths. Lincoln believed that it would have been counterproductive to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves if ordinary Americans were not yet “educated up to it,” as he put it. By early 1862, however, he had come to recognize that the Northern effort needed a morale boost. Although the Union armies had won some major victories—the Battle of Shiloh, in April, was one example—the death tolls on both sides were growing to horrifying proportions. Northern and Southern forces had each lost more than 10,000 men at Shiloh—almost seven times the casualties at Bull Run. Shiloh, notes one historian, was the battlefield on which Americans’ “Romanticism expired.” The Union war effort desperately needed a leader to make sense out of the carnage.14
In the international arena, too, the human suffering was becoming unbearable. Although Southern threats about the power of King Cotton had been overstated, by the middle of 1862, Europeans were beginning to feel the pinch. Factory owners slashed working hours dramatically, throwing tens of thousands of Britons and Frenchmen out of a job. The economic turmoil threatened to turn European workers—many of whom otherwise loathed slavery—against the Union effort. Lincoln feared that the workers might put pressure on decision makers in London to stop the fighting. The president came to believe that a dramatic gesture that revised the war’s aims to include the abolition of slavery might reassure suffering European workers—and buy the North the time to finish the war.
With the Emancipation Proclamation, the strategies of Lincoln and Marx finally began to converge. Each man recognized that only a bold moral appeal would infuse the Union effort with purpose and meaning—both at home and abroad. “National power,” the diplomatic scholar Thomas A. Bailey points out, “is moral as well as physical.” Yet in the tumultuous Victorian era—in which leaders increasingly found themselves amid a wasteland of ideological debris—marshaling the moral elements of power demanded audacious acts of reinvention. Throughout the conflict, both men struggled to manage and manipulate public opinion—a new and unpredictable force in the global arena. Amid the maelstrom of the Civil War, Lincoln and Marx rose to the challenge of their age.15
The Wild Boar
Karl Marx had been trying to reinvent himself—and the rest of the world, for that matter—for almost his entire adult life. He was born in the Prussian Rhineland city of Trier, a picturesque spot filled with vineyards situated along the banks of the Mosel River. He later studied law and philosophy at a series of German universities. The brilliant young scholar was captivated by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, and in particular his concept of historical dialectic. But much of his time was devoted to drinking and carousing. Classmates elected Marx co-president of the Trier Tavern Club, and university police once arrested him for disturbing the peace during a drunken spree. The rowdy student took to carrying a gun, and was wounded above the eye in a saber duel. Marx’s father complained about his son’s “musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp” and “unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum.”16
In between drinking, fighting, and reading, Marx managed to find time to court Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian baron. With her green eyes and auburn hair, Jenny was far out of Marx’s league. Her aristocratic family descended from the Earls of Argyll. Marx descended from a line of rabbis (although his father had converted to the state religion of Protestantism). Still, the passionate philosopher captivated the beautiful and well-bred young woman. The two became secretly engaged in 1836. Marx later boasted that he had snagged “the most beautiful girl in Trier.” Jenny affectionately referred to her short, hairy husband as her “little wild boar.”17
Marx earned his doctorate in 1841. Yet the young philosopher was never satisfied with pure theory. The day was approaching, he insisted, when philosophy must come into contact with “the real world.” Marx turned to journalism. In the early nineteenth century, the profession remained a dumping ground for “the disreputable, the meretricious, the unstable.” Still, Marx saw potential. He moved to the German city of Cologne, where he joined the staff of a newly formed newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, which was financed by the city’s rising business class. One of the paper’s founders recalls the young Marx as “a powerful man of twenty-four whose thick black hair sprung from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence.”18
Marx quickly went to work eviscerating both the Prussian aristocracy and his colleagues in the opposition. For a young journalist whose professed goal was to change the world, Marx could be surprisingly detached. After rising to the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx warned his writers that he considered it “unsuitable, indeed immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines into casual theatre reviews.” Still, the young editor relentlessly advocated the liberalization of Prussian society. Eventually, the Prussian authorities began censoring Marx’s subversive newspaper. Soon they shut it down altogether.19
Marx fled to Paris, then a hotbed of European revolutionaries. It was there that he got to know Frederick Engels, the son of a German industrialist whose parents owned a cotton mill in Britain. In August 1844, Marx and Engels met at a Paris café, then spent ten days drinking red wine and comparing notes at Marx’s apartment. Engels was soon contributing articles to Marx’s publications, and he wrote some early rough drafts of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx was eventually ordered to leave Paris by the French authorities. Jenny quickly sold the furniture, and the family set off for Belgium in the frigid winter weather. Finally ensconced in his new home in Brussels, Marx chain-smoked cigars as he completely rewrote Engels’s draft of the Communist Manifesto.20
The document was a political call to action, but it was also a profound portrait of the globalizing world. Marx and Engels observed that with the rise of the industrial classes, the constant quest for new markets meant that capitalism was destined to spread across the entire planet. The bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels insisted, “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” New technologies like the steamship and the telegraph had the power to transform public opinion, spawning “a world literature.” As a result of the “immensely facilitated means of communication,” they continued, national differences were disappearing by the day. Ultimately, Marx and Engels concluded, “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.” With the publication of the manifesto in 1848, the German exile and his partner had established themselves firmly as the leaders of a new global movement.21
Only a month after Marx completed the Communist Manifesto, revolution erupted in Paris. Soon the entire continent was aflame. Liberal protests attempted to topple autocratic regimes throughout Europe. For decades, conservative European statesmen had maintained a surprisingly sturdy peace on the Continent in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Now, however, Europeans from Switzerland to Sicily were beginning to demand press freedoms and voting rights. The changes were partly fueled by the tremendous advances in communication spawned by the steam press and the telegraph that Marx had described in the Communist Manifesto. In a single month in Paris, 171 separate newspapers began publishing. Marx, however, was not taking any chances. He sent revolutionaries in Prussia cash to pay for daggers and revolvers. On their own, Marx wrote in the years before the uprisi
ngs, “ideas can accomplish absolutely nothing. To become real, ideas require men who apply practical force.”22
Marx moved back to Cologne to help lead the effort in Prussia. He borrowed money to restart his newspaper; this time he named it the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. His employees stocked the offices with rifles and bayonets. Marx resumed his practice of carrying a pistol. Engels recalled that Marx ran the newspaper as “a simple dictatorship,” and wondered whether his abrasive partner was really temperamentally suited to the profession. “He is no journalist and will never become one,” Engels complained. “He pores for a whole day over a leading article that would take someone else a couple of hours as though it concerned the handling of a deep philosophical problem. He changes and polishes and changes the change and owing to his unremitting thoroughness can never be ready on time.”23
As the European revolutions intensified, the New York Tribune, which sympathized with the insurgents, dispatched one of its young writers, Charles A. Dana, to cover the protests. Dana wandered around Paris gathering string and dodging batteries of artillery in the streets, fearing visits from the secret police. The young Tribune reporter was particularly taken aback by the reactionary crackdowns in Germany and Austria. With the spread of press freedoms and universal education, Dana did not see how the old regimes could survive. “It is vain for barbarism and tyranny to attempt to regain the conquests of liberty,” he wrote home. “They may seem to triumph for a while, but they are destroyed by their triumph.” Dana was eager to see the revolutions succeed. The goal of the protests, he understood, was “not simply to change the form of government, but to change the form of society.” The Tribune reporter, a fluent German speaker, eventually left Paris for Berlin. Later, in Cologne, Dana met Marx through a mutual friend.24