Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Abolitionists responded with an outpouring of emotion. “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation,” Greeley exulted in the Tribune. “God bless Abraham Lincoln.” The following day the newspaperman wrote that the proclamation took a nation “sunk in the semi-barbarism of a medieval age to the light and civilization of the Nineteenth Christian Century.” On the night of September 24, a huge crowd arrived at the White House and spilled onto the front lawn. John Hay looked on as revelers hurdled the iron gates and “filled every nook and corner of the ground entrance as quietly and instantly as molten metal fills a mold.” To Hay, the mass of elated merrymakers appeared “lucid and diaphanous in the clear obscure like the architecture of a dream.” When Lincoln appeared at the window over the north portico, he appeared unusually dignified, Hay reported. The president obliged the crowd with a few brief remarks. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment” on the proclamation, Lincoln told the demonstrators, “and, may be, take action upon it.”87 The president would not sign the final version of the document until New Year’s Day, 1863—a hundred-day interval that was intended partly to give Confederate states the opportunity to return to the Union fold before the proclamation was final.

  Lincoln, meanwhile, was making other plans to try to simultaneously sway public opinion in Europe. In late September he repeatedly summoned Edward Everett, the cosmopolitan former secretary of state and minister to Britain, to the Executive Mansion. The president’s allies had been urging him to send Everett to Europe as an unofficial envoy “to exercise a salutary influence to discourage hostile intervention.” The former diplomat was not a big advocate of Lincoln’s emancipation proposal. “The matter,” Everett wrote Charles Francis Adams in London, “stood better without any proclamation.… It raises many troublesome theoretical questions and augments the difficulties under which Union men already labor in the Border States.” Nevertheless, Everett was a strong supporter of the president and the Union war effort. At the White House, the former secretary of state found Lincoln still grumbling about Antietam. The president acknowledged the campaign was well fought, but complained that “he did not know why McClellan did not follow up his advantage,” as Everett later described the meeting in his diary. Lincoln told the former secretary of state that he was doing his best to maintain a “good temper” nonetheless.

  The president explained to Everett that he wanted to send him to Europe—but the appointment would be tricky. If Lincoln named the distinguished former diplomat to an official post as special envoy, the president’s regular men in the field might balk. On the other hand, if he gave Everett an unofficial role, Seward—who was already complaining about the freelancing of Sumner and others—might feel slighted. Lincoln tried to walk a thin line, ultimately drafting an “excessively non-committal and curiously characteristic” letter of introduction, and making an effort to keep Seward in the loop. Everett, however, ultimately declined the appointment, arguing that he was not the right man for the job.88

  Lincoln badly needed help explaining his policy to Europeans. The continent’s ruling classes reacted warily to the preliminary proclamation. Palmerston complained that the document was a piece of “trash.” The London Times wrote that Lincoln was acting like some sort of “moral American pope.” The president, the paper proclaimed, was like “a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy.” The British newspaper published increasingly lurid and provocative editorials suggesting that Lincoln sought to unleash a slave revolt. “He will appeal to the black blood of the African,” the paper warned, “he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.” Blackwood’s magazine sniped that the document was “monstrous, reckless, devilish.”89

  Lincoln was infuriated by European reactions to his proposal. The president’s son Robert later recalled that “what chiefly astonished and grieved” Lincoln during the war was that “the organs of English opinion which had censured Americans for slavery, turned round and condemned them when actual steps were taken for putting it down.” The hypocrisy of it all, Robert added, seriously undermined American respect for the island nation.90

  Still, the president listened when allies urged him to tweak his draft to make it more palatable to Europeans. The language of Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation worried Marx’s old editor at the Tribune, Charles A. Dana. Dana told Seward that the document could be read as if it encouraged slave revolts. The phrasing, he wrote the secretary of state, “jars on me like a wrong tone in music.… This is the only ‘bad egg’ I see in ‘that pudding’—and I fear may go far to make it less palatable than it deserves to be.” In the final draft, the president ultimately altered the text to address the qualms of Dana and others.91

  If Marx had similar concerns, they have not been recorded. He wrote to Engels that October lauding the “world transforming” turn of events across the Atlantic. There was “nothing more disgusting,” he told Engels, than the outcry among British elites over the preliminary proclamation. If anything, Marx thought the American president seemed too timid. “All Lincoln’s acts,” he insisted, “seem like the mean, pettifogging conditions that one lawyer puts to his opponent.” Still, Marx added, “this does not change their historic content.”92

  The proclamation prompted the president to intensify his efforts to establish overseas colonies of American blacks. If slaves were going to be freed, Lincoln believed, they needed somewhere to go. The president had told a delegation of black activists earlier that year that he considered it “selfish” of them to remain in the United States after emancipation. Separation and colonization, he explained, would be “better for us both.” Shortly after taking office, Lincoln had dispatched his brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, to investigate one potential site in what is now Colombia. Edwards, in his report to the president, stressed the economic and geopolitical advantages of the site. It offered a strategically located lagoon that might “save whole squadrons” of American ships in need of refuge. Edwards also lauded the “inexhaustible” coal supply and “vast saving” that the venture might bring the U.S. government. Yet after some members of Lincoln’s cabinet—including his naval secretary, Gideon Welles—had objected to the plans, Lincoln had temporarily set the project aside.93

  Now, two days after issuing the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln called another meeting of the cabinet to discuss colonization once again. Welles still opposed such a move, as did Seward. “I am always,” the secretary of state explained, “for bringing men and states into this Union, never for taking any out.” Seward’s longtime secretary, George Baker, later explained that colonization was the only substantive issue on which Lincoln and Seward strongly disagreed. Still, at Lincoln’s request, the secretary of state canvassed diplomats in France, Britain, and the Netherlands to determine whether the European powers might possess suitable territories in the Caribbean for colonies of free blacks. Lincoln, meanwhile, asked Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would fund potential colonies. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” Lincoln said, “that I strongly favor colonization.”94

  Even as Lincoln tried to refine such ambitious projects, nettle-some smaller diplomatic flaps distracted him. In October, Charles Sumner wrote Lincoln urging him to fire his envoys in the Sandwich Islands. The local government had been complaining about the “intemperate habits” and inability to focus of David L. Gregg—an old friend of Lincoln’s who was now advising King Kamehameha IV. Close trade ties with the Sandwich Islands were particularly important to the northeastern merchants that Sumner represented. Union leaders also worried that Confederate agents might use the islands to outfit privateers. To make matters worse, French forces were rumored to be working to enhance their clout on the archipela
go. “Our influence in the Sandwich Islands,” Sumner told Lincoln, “is seriously impaired by the character of our representatives there.… For the sake of our good name and of our just influence there, and especially of those commercial interests in which Massachusetts has so large a share, I trust that the present commissioner will be recalled.”

  Lincoln’s old friend Gregg tried to shift the blame onto Thomas J. Dryer, the American commissioner on the islands. “He is rude, rough and repulsive to genteel society,” Gregg complained to Lincoln. Dryer’s “backwoods style” might be “appreciated at County Court gatherings, where whiskey more than reason is the convincing argument,” Gregg said. But Dryer’s behavior the last time he was invited to the palace was so disruptive that he would not be invited again. “I do not deem it necessary to mention particulars,” Gregg told the president. “They are almost too bad to mention.… Pray send us a gentleman who will not disgrace his character or give countenance to the idea that we are inferior … to the rest of the world in our diplomacy.” Lincoln ultimately replaced Dryer in January, admonishing Seward to appoint “a tip-top man there next time.”95

  As Lincoln sought to reform the diplomatic corps abroad, he also pushed for a more aggressive strategy on the battlefield at home. The president finally tired of McClellan’s cautious war making. For a year and a half, Lincoln had patiently tolerated the general’s inaction. He barely protested when McClellan—who privately referred to his commander in chief as “the original gorilla”—insulted him. Lincoln complained that McClellan had the “slows.” But the president had always indulged the pompous officer. McClellan, a Democrat who opposed abolition, had complained to his wife that he would not fight for a slave revolt. He had been warning Lincoln that abolition would alienate European decision makers. Now Lincoln decided that he had heard enough from his insubordinate general. The day after the 1862 election, Lincoln dismissed McClellan. To Marx, who was convinced of the cautious general’s “mediocrity,” the decision amounted to another promising step toward “the revolutionary waging of war.”96

  That is precisely what worried Europeans. On October 7, the British Liberal William Gladstone gave a speech to a raucous mass meeting in England in which he seemed to recognize the legitimacy of Confederate independence. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” Gladstone declared, “we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation.” Throughout the fall, British interventionists appeared to be making headway in convincing Palmerston to take action. A few days after the chancellor of the exchequer’s speech, Palmerston remarked that Gladstone was “not far wrong in pronouncing by anticipation the National Independence of the South.” Only days later, however, the prime minister backtracked once again. By October 22, Palmerston wrote that he had “very much come back to our original view of the matter.” British statesmen, he concluded, “must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.” By November, the likelihood of European intervention had lessened considerably.97

  As the New Year approached, however, the pressure on Lincoln only increased. The defeat at Fredericksburg in mid-December shattered Northern morale. Radicals, emboldened by Lincoln’s decision to issue the proclamation, made a determined effort to oust the cautious Seward. The president found himself besieged by Congress, his own cabinet, and the press. “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln complained, “I am in it.”98

  Greeley’s minions, meanwhile, worked feverishly to gin up support for emancipation. In early December, Sumner wrote Greeley’s deputy in New York urging abolitionists to help strengthen public opinion “by argument, persuasion, appeal[s] of all kinds.” Two days later, in a Tribune editorial, Greeley downplayed the notion that emancipation could induce a European intervention. With tensions rising in Italy, Austria, and Poland, the Continental powers had too much on their plates already. “The greater the danger of collision among themselves,” Greeley wrote, “the less European governments will feel an inclination to meddle in transatlantic strife.” The Tribune editor’s analysis, for once, was dead-on.99

  For all the winter tensions, by December, Lincoln and Seward actually had reason for optimism when it came to international relations. “A year ago,” Seward wrote to Lincoln’s emissary in Paris, “it seemed that any foreign nation might assail and destroy us at a blow. I am sure that no one foreign nation would now conceive such an attempt, while combination of several powers for that purpose is impossible.” According to Seward, the president was the most content with foreign affairs that he had ever seen him. The secretary of state reported that the continued “warnings of danger” from U.S. diplomats in the field embarrassed Lincoln, who was otherwise “disposed to take a more cheering view of our foreign relations, at this time, than he has allowed himself to indulge at any previous period since the Civil War commenced.”100

  Part of the reason for Lincoln’s optimism may have been that the president finally had an opportunity to reconcile his realism with his idealism. Even as Lincoln pursued America’s national interest, he also appealed to what Thomas Jefferson had dubbed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” With the burgeoning mass media shrinking the world, such considerations were more important than ever. At the suggestion of his treasury secretary, Lincoln added a line to the Emancipation Proclamation invoking “the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” (Charles Sumner wrote one correspondent shortly after the New Year arguing that while the “last sentence was actually framed by Chase … I believe I first suggested it to him and to the President. I urged that he should close with ‘something about justice and God.’ ”)101

  In his annual message to Congress, Lincoln acknowledged that American foreign relations remained tenuous but claimed they were not as bad as might be expected considering how “unhappily distracted” the country appeared to Europeans. In any case, Lincoln believed that he was about to unleash a potent new weapon. With the looming Emancipation Proclamation, the president would attempt to bridge the Atlantic and speak directly to British workers. If Americans could only finish the job at home, Lincoln told Congress, the result would resonate across the globe.

  “Fellow-citizens,” the president declared, “we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”102

  The Labor Kings of London

  The American press, led by the New York Tribune, had helped set the stage for emancipation. Newspapers printed editorials lauding abolition. Fiery orators like Wendell Phillips riled up huge crowds. The whole dynamic fed on itself. The papers reported on the speeches, the public debated the editorials—and soon the entire country had become a massive echo chamber. Lincoln raised his own megaphone at key moments, writing public letters and corresponding with influential editors. Yet in the new art of public relations, the old laws of power did not neatly apply.103

  Marx had long recognized that power politics had taken on new rules. The novel technologies of the telegraph and the steam press had helped fuel the European revolutions a decade earlier. One of Marx’s earliest editorials as a young journalist had been an analysis of press f
reedoms in Prussia. Yet despite the proliferation of new media, he remained frustrated by the failure of Britain’s working classes to revolt. Part of the problem, he was convinced, was that the nation’s newspapers remained in the hands of venal tycoons. Marx considered the London Times—dubbed the Thunderer by Britons—the worst offender. He derided the paper’s editors as “public opinion-mongers” and their reports as “paid sophistry.”104

  Marx found it difficult to control even smaller newspapers that catered to Britain’s working classes. One of them, the Bee-Hive, persistently abused Lincoln and the Union in the early years of the Civil War. The American president, the newspaper’s editors insisted, was a “mindless man.” His cabinet consisted of “atrocious jobbers, who live better by hostilities than they ever do in peace.” Even in the wake of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—which was intended, after all, partly to shift the opinions of British workers—the Bee-Hive remained antagonistic. How could Marx successfully spread “correct views” in America and on the Continent, he must have wondered, if he could not even shape public opinion in his own backyard?105

  Frustrated by the hard line of the labor movement’s house organs, labor leaders in Britain’s industrial districts began looking for other methods of expressing their support for the Union. One solution was to organize “monster meetings” of workers. Prominent speakers would laud the Northern cause, and the raucous audiences could then vote on resolutions of support. Newspapers—even hostile ones—would be forced to cover the meetings. The organization of mass gatherings, therefore, offered one novel means of co-opting Britain’s conservative media. Marx, for one, appreciated the new tool. Monster meetings, he wrote to Engels the day after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, “cost nothing” but “bring in a great deal ‘internationally.’ ”106