Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  When the president had finished, Seward complained that the order might have the opposite of its intended effect in Europe. The move, he cautioned, could well prompt the powers to intervene. Emancipation would “break up our relations with foreign nations … for sixty years,” Seward insisted. At the least, the secretary of state argued, Europeans would see the move as a sign of weakness. The North’s military efforts had been stalled for weeks. General George B. McClellan, Lincoln’s commander of the Army of the Potomac, had conceived a plan to march his troops—more than a hundred thousand—up the Virginia Peninsula, hoping to capture Richmond. Yet by midsummer his forces had bogged down near the outskirts of the city. During the Seven Days’ Campaign in late June and early July, troops commanded by Confederate general Robert E. Lee audaciously attacked McClellan’s forces, charging across the Chickahominy River. Although the Union army ultimately stopped the Confederate assault, McClellan was forced to withdraw his forces. Lee and his men had dramatically shifted the war’s momentum.

  A proclamation freeing the slaves now, Seward argued, “may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help.” The secretary of state feared that Europeans would consider the measure the North’s “last shriek, on the retreat.” The New Yorker advised Lincoln to hold off until the army scored more decisive victories on the battlefield. Seward’s arguments, the president later recalled, “struck me with very great force.”67

  The secretary of state did not seem sanguine about the proclamation, no matter when it would be issued. “Proclamations are paper without the support of armies,” Seward complained to his wife a week after the cabinet meeting. “It is mournful to see that a great nation shrinks from a war it has accepted, and insists on adopting proclamations, when it is asked for force. The Chinese do it without success.”68

  Lincoln felt that his Federals had already demonstrated their prowess on the battlefield and was nonplussed by the lack of faith in Europe. In late July the Frenchman Agénor-Étienne de Gasparin wrote to Lincoln from Europe uging the president to avoid “revolutionary measures” like “precipitate emancipation.” The administration should remain neither “indifferent to abolition” nor “carried away by the extreme abolitionists,” he said. Either position might inspire European powers to meddle in the war. Gasparin asserted instead that clear battlefield victories would be the key to avoiding intervention. “You are quite right,” Lincoln shot back, “as to the importance to us, for its bearing upon Europe, that we should achieve military successes.… Yet it seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much. But let us be patient.”69

  Still, there was truth in Gasparin’s missive. Henry P. Tappan, the president of the University of Michigan, had been traveling through France in the summer of 1862. “To the minds of Frenchmen,” Tappan wrote Lincoln, “our government has shown only weakness and irresolution. To them, we have exhibited no military ability. They regard our conduct of the war as a grand failure.” The situation was much the same in Britain. “It is too late now to change these sentiments by diplomacy,” the educator told Lincoln. “We can reestablish ourselves abroad only by manful and successful doing at home.… The thunder of victorious cannon on the Potomac is the only diplomatic agency that can prevail on the Seine and the Thames.” Another American, William T. Dahlgren, wrote to Lincoln from London that summer emphasizing that the U.S. “must sooner or later establish their status by force of arms. It is all very well talking—or rather dreaming—of ‘fraternity’ etc., but might more than ever rules the day, and the sooner we make ourselves understood, the better.”70

  At home, public opinion was approaching a tipping point. The rising swell of abolitionist sentiment emboldened Horace Greeley. “Do you remember that old theological book containing this: ‘Chapter One: Hell; Chapter Two: Hell Continued’?” Greeley asked Charles Sumner in early August. “That gives a hint of the way Old Abe ought to be talked to in this crisis.” The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, like Marx, lamented that the president “is not fighting vigorously and heartily enough.” If the government were only true to its ideals, he argued, the Northern states alone might form “the strongest nation on the face of the globe.” In Lincoln, however, the Union was led by “a first-rate second-rate man.” The only way to get movement from the president, Phillips complained, was by applying intense pressure. “We have constantly to be pushing him from behind,” he said. The abolitionist later quipped that if Lincoln grew in office, it was only “because we have watered him.”71

  Marx believed the conflict had reached a critical moment. Until now, Lincoln’s regard for the border states had “blunted the Civil War’s points of principle,” Marx wrote in August, and “deprived it of its soul.” Slavery, he argued, had been “transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South into its invulnerable horny hide.” Observing the North’s faltering military efforts, Marx took the opposite lesson from Seward. “The long and the short of the story seems to me to be that a war of this kind must be conducted in a revolutionary way,” he wrote Engels in August, “whereas the Yankees have been trying so far to conduct it constitutionally.” Engels went even further, arguing that the South had virtually won the war. Marx disagreed, but he took his collaborator’s criticisms in stride. “In regard to the North’s conduct of the war,” he wrote Engels, “nothing else could be expected from a bourgeois republic, where swindle has been enthroned for such a long time.”

  Still, Marx viewed public opinion as a potential savior of the North. The president could be bullied into adopting what Marx called “the great radical remedy.” The war was about to take “a revolutionary turn,” Marx predicted. He noted the public pressure from abolitionists like Wendell Phillips that was building in the American press. The Northwest and New England would push Lincoln to abandon his “diplomatic methods of waging war,” Marx wrote Engels. The philosopher predicted that there would be a new American revolution if Lincoln did not cave in to the abolitionists. “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war,” he wrote. “The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”72

  A Masterpiece of Art

  Marx rightly perceived the shift in American public opinion. Yet he underestimated Lincoln’s media savvy. Marx had always considered the American president something of a backwoods dunce, thrust into power by the vagaries of demographics and buffeted by the unpredictable winds of democratic politics. Lincoln himself sometimes felt as if he had lost control. Once, when the president was asked to describe his policy, Lincoln replied, “I have none. I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.” In the case of abolition, however, Lincoln was actually shrewdly and quietly preparing the public for a major transformation of the war aims.73

  On August 20, Greeley published an editorial in the Tribune titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” The newspaper editor complained that Lincoln was acting too slowly on the slavery issue. Greeley griped that the president was “unduly influenced” by “certain fossil politicians hailing from the border slave states.” The men, the editor insisted, were providing Lincoln with only “timid counsels.” The North’s preservation of slavery was causing its war efforts to founder. “On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile,” Greeley wrote.

  Lincoln responded two days later, writing a letter to Greeley—and then leaking it to a rival newspaper. The president began magnanimously. If Greeley’s letter displayed “an impatient and dictatorial tone,” Lincoln wrote, he would ignore it “in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.” Then
the president offered a defense of his cautious position on slavery. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.”74

  On the surface, Lincoln’s response to Greeley appears to be a defense of the president’s original, limited war aims. Actually, as Lincoln’s conversations with his cabinet earlier that summer reveal, the president had already determined on a policy of emancipation more than a month before Greeley’s “Prayer.” Why, then, would the president seem to resist the editor’s plea? First, despite Lincoln’s assurances, he must have been miffed by Greeley’s impetuosity. That the president printed his response in a rival newspaper offers one clue to his true feelings. Second, Lincoln wanted to prepare border-state holdouts for the inevitability of emancipation. By defining abolition as a tool of national salvation, he tried to address their fears that the shift would degenerate into a slave revolt. Finally, Lincoln still needed to temporize. The president may have convinced himself of the necessity of emancipation, but he saw the logic in Seward’s pleas to await military success.75

  Yet the victories remained elusive. In late August, with a small force of only thirty-two thousand men, Union general John Pope attacked a unit of Stonewall Jackson’s rebel troops dug in around Manassas, Virginia. Reinforcements eventually arrived, but by the time the battles were finished, the Federals had taken more than sixteen thousand casualties. Rain poured down on Lincoln’s defeated troops as they streamed back toward Washington. The battle, later known as Second Bull Run, was one more blow to Lincoln’s plans. When one radical Republican complained to the president on August 31 about the slow pace of the emancipation effort, Lincoln shot back: “You would not have it done now, would you? Must we not wait for something like a victory?”76

  The battle disheartened Lincoln and his men. “You could scarcely find a gloomier city than Washington is today,” John Hay wrote on August 31. The whole capital was depressed and despondent. Even the sky was gray. The summer rain soaked clothes and dampened moods. Lincoln brooded around the Executive Mansion. “Well, John,” he told Hay, “we are whipped again, I am afraid.” The president, according to one of his cabinet secretaries, “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish.” Lincoln complained that he felt like hanging himself.77

  The president had good reason for concern. In Europe the cotton shortages produced by the blockade were finally beginning to take their toll on workers. The livelihoods of more than two hundred thousand Frenchmen and a million Britons were tied up with the industry. In the early months of the war, British and French textile manufacturers had been able to draw on existing cotton surpluses and additional supplies from countries like India. Yet by September cotton stocks had plunged to crisis levels. Roughly three quarters of British textile workers were unemployed or underemployed. The New York Times reported that English laborers were pawning their clothes and blankets to survive. In London, Charles Francis Adams tried to remain sanguine. He was “inclined to believe,” he wrote home to the State Department, “that we are at the crisis of the difficulty, and from this time things will rather mend than grow worse.” Just days later, however, Adams was forced to revise his estimate, sheepishly informing Washington that “the distress in the manufacturing districts is rather on the increase.”78

  As the crisis deepened, Britain’s Lord Palmerston began to question the wisdom of nonintervention. The prime minister had long been reluctant to get involved. Yet momentum in the conflict seemed to be shifting. The Federal troops “got a very complete smashing” at Manassas, Palmerston wrote to his foreign minister in September. The British prime minister thought a mediation proposal that would settle the conflict by separating the combatants might finally be a good idea. France would go along if Britain took the lead, Palmerston predicted. If the North lost one more battle, the prime minister wrote, “the iron should be struck while it is hot.” If the Federal troops managed to eke out some more victories, on the other hand, the prime minister was willing to take a wait-and-see approach.79

  Lincoln’s men seem to have at least dimly perceived the impending peril. John Hay boasted that, despite the Confederate troops on Washington’s doorstep, the capital remained safe. Hay attributed the city’s lack of alarm to the “truculent-looking” fleet of Northern gunboats protecting the Potomac. Still, Hay recognized that if Confederate forces did manage to capture Washington, European intervention was sure to follow. “We would find the whole world about our ears,” Hay wrote. Such a turn of events, Hay believed, would amount to a death blow for the nation.80

  On September 13 a delegation representing “Chicago Christians of All Denominations” visited Lincoln at the White House. The men presented the president with a petition favoring emancipation that had resulted from a meeting of Chicago abolitionists a week earlier. The clergymen argued that a proclamation abolishing slavery “would secure the sympathy of Europe and the whole civilized world.… No other step would be so potent to prevent foreign intervention.” Lincoln conceded the point. Still, he wanted to make sure that any such proclamation was taken seriously. “I do not,” the president protested, “want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!”81

  And yet only four days later, Lincoln changed his mind. Near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, Union and Confederate armies clashed in an epic fourteen-hour battle that produced more than twenty thousand casualties. Lincoln recognized that a Union victory was critical. If the Federals had been driven back, the president later recalled, Lincoln would have found himself “in a bad row of stumps.” Northern generals spun the battle as a triumph for their cause. McClellan believed that he had produced “a masterpiece of art.” Seward dashed off a letter to Charles Francis Adams in London lauding the “renewed and reinvigorated forces of the Union.” The battle at Antietam Creek was indeed a Union victory. Yet McClellan’s men ultimately allowed the Confederate troops to escape rather than pursuing them and inflicting a crushing blow. The outcome, however, was good enough for Lincoln. He believed he had finally found an excuse to issue his proclamation.82

  Lincoln misjudged European reactions to Antietam. The president believed that the battle would weaken the interventionist camp across the Atlantic. In fact, as the diplomatic scholar Howard Jones has convincingly shown, in the short term it did nothing of the kind. European statesmen were indeed carefully awaiting the battle’s results, but they were less impressed by the outcome than Lincoln. When Palmerston got the news, he dashed off a letter to his foreign minister. The prime minister considered the battle “just the case for the stepping in of friends. One thing must be admitted and that is that both sides have fought like bulldogs.” Still, just days later, Palmerston reverted to his prior vacillation. “The whole matter is full of difficulty,” he wrote his foreign minister. An armistice now, Palmerston argued, “would only be like the breathing time allowed to boxers between the rounds of a fight, to enable them to get fresh wind.” More decisive battles would be needed to change his mind.83

  Karl Marx, on the other hand, shared Lincoln’s view that Antietam represented a “decisive” moment in the conflict. “The brief campaign in Maryland,” Marx told the readers of Die Presse, “has decided the fate of the American Civil War.” The German émigré had no love for McClellan, whom he derided as a “military incompetent.” Yet Marx remained unshaken by the setbacks of 1862. No single commander could ruin the Northern war effort. The Federals still possess
ed far greater resources than the Confederacy. Marx repeatedly assured Engels that the North would prevail. The philosopher would “wager my head” on the prospect, he wrote to his collaborator. “In world history,” Marx insisted, “reason does conquer.”84

  The Last, Best Hope of Earth

  Five days after Antietam, on September 22, Lincoln sent his cabinet an urgent message instructing them to report to the Executive Mansion. The men were given only a few hours’ notice. When they arrived, Lincoln began by reading a comedic sketch by one of his favorite writers, Artemus Ward. Then he got down to business. The president told the men that he was ready to issue a preliminary proclamation announcing that slaves in the Confederacy would be freed within a matter of months. “I think the time has come now,” Lincoln said. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition.” He acknowledged that the result of Antietam was not “quite what I should have best liked.” Still, Lincoln felt that he had to do something. The president appeared a little superstitious to some members of his cabinet. “I made the promise to myself,” Lincoln told the men—and then, after hesitating a little, he added, “and … to my Maker.”85

  Lincoln’s cabinet was giddy after the meeting broke up. The men joked around, calling one another abolitionists. John Hay noted in his diary that the cabinet officers “seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.” Seward, falling in line behind his boss, quickly sent copies of the preliminary proclamation to his diplomats in the field. “The interests of humanity have now become identified with the cause of our country,” he told his minister in London. Yet the secretary of state was still not completely convinced of the wisdom of emancipation. He wrote to his daughter wondering whether the proclamation might be premature. Seward lamented the “confused” state of American foreign relations. Even Lincoln later conceded that he had serious doubts about the timing.86