Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Starting in November 1862, a cascade of popular demonstrations rolled across Britain. Over the following two years, British workers held more than a hundred such gatherings. The Emancipation Proclamation, Charles Francis Adams observed, had “rallied the sympathies of the working classes.” The London Times sniped that the crowds consisted of “nobodies.” But Lincoln’s diplomats reported home that the meetings were actually organized by a combination of religious dissenters and middle-class agitators. In London, huge halls were packed to capacity. Swarms of demonstrators spilled out into the streets. Inside, the mere mention of Lincoln’s name inspired euphoric whelps. “I think in every town in the Kingdom,” John Bright wrote to Sumner in January, “a public meeting would go by an overwhelming majority in favor of President Lincoln and of the North.”107

  Marx wrote newspaper dispatches about the meetings, helping to bolster the impression that popular enthusiasm was building. He believed that such demonstrations were the key to wresting concessions from Britain’s ruling class. “No important innovation,” he wrote, “no decisive measure, has ever been carried out in this country without pressure from without.” The new burst of working-class energy was a positive omen. Marx saw the meetings as “a splendid new proof of the indestructible soundness of the English popular masses.” Still, if the workers wanted change, he insisted, they would have to remain visible on the national stage.108

  Lincoln, too, did his best to encourage the demonstrators. Any sympathy he might win from ordinary Britons and Frenchmen, he believed, could help to exert pressure on European decision makers to support the North—or at least stay out of the war. The resolutions passed in at least some of the gatherings had actually been carefully crafted by Lincoln and his team. The messages contained a decidedly moral appeal. In one example, Lincoln’s men offered a resolution declaring that no slaveholding nation should be recognized by “the family of Christian and civilized nations.” Sumner shipped the text across the Atlantic to Bright. In some cases, the Lincoln government actually sent secret payments to help fund the meetings, which the president believed could help convince British statesmen that intervention would be an unpopular policy.

  Lincoln, meanwhile, wrote public letters appealing to the sympathies of workers. “I have understood well,” he told laborers in Manchester, “that the duty of self-preservation rests solely with the American people. But I have at the same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence in enlarging and prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has seemed to authorize a belief that the past action and influences of the United States were generally regarded as having been beneficent toward mankind. I have therefore reckoned upon the forbearance of nations. Circumstances … induced me especially to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain.” Lincoln told the demonstrators that his hopes now appeared to be well placed, and thanked the workers for their “sublime Christian heroism.” The meetings, he declared, provided “an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”109

  Seward continued to privately resent the proclamation. At an intimate dinner with the president’s old friend Orville Browning in late January, the secretary of state complained (as Browning later told his diary) that he “regretted the policy of the administration—thought the proclamations were unfortunate, and that we would have been nearer the end of the war and the end of slavery both without them.” Still, Seward sighed that the decision was “now past, and we must look to the future.” At least relations with the European powers seemed to be improving. The secretary of state recalled that “it was not alone the abolition clamor at home that induced the president to issue [the Emancipation Proclamation], but that he was farther influenced by the wishes of foreign nations who could not be made to understand our condition.” Seward acknowledged that “there was no prospect of foreign interference now—that France and England were jealous of each other and neither had any intention of interfering with us.”110

  On March 26, 1863, British workers organized their most ambitious meeting yet, at St. James’s Hall in London. Marx was among the spectators in the throbbing, cheering crowd. Some historians have speculated that the communist actually helped to put together the event. Henry Adams, who also attended and sent a report home to Washington about the meeting, later recalled that he had assumed Marx had taken the lead. Modern scholars are less certain about what role—if any—Marx played in organizing the gathering. We do know, however, that the emotional demonstration impressed the ornery philosopher. “The workers,” Marx reported to Engels two weeks later, “spoke excellently.” The following year Marx lauded the St. James’s Hall demonstrators as the “labor kings of London.” The meeting, Marx maintained to a friend, “prevented Palmerston from declaring war upon the United States.”111

  Marx’s analysis was far too simplistic. Palmerston could be combative and at times seemed to favor the dissolution of the United States, yet the British prime minister actually acted as a realistic check on more interventionist members of his cabinet. At first, the news of the Emancipation Proclamation seemed to push Palmerston closer to the interventionist position. Eventually, however, worries about proliferating crises closer to home kept him from reaching out. The popular enthusiasm unleashed by the Emancipation Proclamation further cemented the British prime minister’s resolve to refrain from intervention.112 Lincoln’s men in London gleefully took note of the shift in opinions. “The Emancipation Proclamation,” Henry Adams wrote home to his brother, “has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor.”113

  Marx discovered that the War Between the States had dramatically reinvigorated European workers—a goal that he had been trying to accomplish for two decades. “It would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the importance of the Civil War for the subsequent history of the British Labour movement,” writes Royden Harrison, a leading scholar of socialism. “Even more than the Polish and Italian national movements, the Civil War helped to widen the horizons of the British workers, and prepared their leaders for participation in [international organizations of workingmen].”114

  In Britain’s industrial districts, laborers were becoming politically active out of necessity. When newspapers were delivered, workers would read the dispatches out loud, attracting a crowd. City employees posted the latest issues on the walls of railroad stations and public buildings. Almost every edition contained details of the American conflict. With mills shuttered, out-of-work laborers attended special schools and learned to read. The rise in literacy helped to fuel political awareness and demands for change. Still, political leaders found the new readers of Britain’s textile districts difficult to propagandize. Nineteenth-century newspapers, modern scholars emphasize, mirrored public attitudes as much as they guided them.115

  In the case of the Bee-Hive, public attitudes seem to have actually played a role in ousting the paper’s pro-Confederate editor. In January, as the public pressure was intensifying, the Bee-Hive’s editorial board fired its chief. The paper quickly swung its support behind Lincoln and the North. It attacked Britain’s ruling class, which it derided as “a few effete aristocrats who love their moneybags more than their fellow men.” The paper reserved an entire page for the massive meeting in St. James’s Hall. Lincoln was portrayed as a hero to the workers, many of whom considered themselves “wage slaves.” Marx worked feverishly to gain control of the paper for his increasingly active international organization of workers. “It is impossible,” he later wrote Engels, “to have a movement here without a press organ.”116

  Marx and the political program he supported were gaining ground. He had always insisted that it was imperative that the working classes “master them
selves the mysteries of international politics” if they were to succeed. Now Marx began to put his theories into action. Marshaling the workers was exhausting. The philosopher spent days at mass meetings, late nights at committee meetings, and hours signing new membership cards in London pubs. Marx told Engels that he was overwhelmed. His organizing work “haunts me like a nightmare,” he complained. His health continued to fail. Uncomfortable boils spread across his body, as they did almost every winter. Marx complained to Engels that he had grown a “second Frankenstein on my back.” Marx sometimes took “medicines,” including opium, arsenic, and Spanish fly in an attempt to cure the sores.117

  Marx, meanwhile, was beginning to gain a greater respect for Lincoln. But his support had never been a sentimental thing. The philosopher’s careful analysis of economic and demographic trends told him that the Federal government was sure to overwhelm the Confederacy eventually. Although Marx supported the “bourgeois republic” in the short run, he believed a Union victory would ultimately bring about the system’s demise. “Most observers who spoke of the promise of America,” notes the scholar Laurence Moore, “found that promise in America’s difference from Europe. Marx and Engels turned this vision on its head. America could become a promised land to the extent that it became just like Europe—and multiplied its vices.” Marx’s old boss Horace Greeley had once complained about “the unprincipled egotism that is the soul of European diplomacy.” Marx, on the other hand, believed that America—like all capitalist countries—was also drowning in “the icy water of egotistical calculation.”118

  Lincoln believed strongly that human beings, whether American or European, tend to act in their own self-interest. Yet that worldview—and, in fact, his entire approach to foreign affairs—took on dramatic new dimensions with his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Until now, Lincoln had maintained that “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” should be the principle that guides policy, including global affairs. During the Mexican War, he had coolly worked to avoid upsetting the sectional balance. In the first days of the current conflict, Lincoln had calmly reined in his hot-tempered secretary of state. After the seizure of the Trent, the president had tamped down passions and ultimately made a deeply unsatisfying—but also eminently reasonable—decision to release the captives.119

  Yet with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln reimagined his core principle—an innovation that the new world of the midnineteenth century demanded. The decree still represented a calculation of national interest. Lincoln hoped that freeing slaves in the Confederate states would both preserve the Union at home and win sympathies abroad. The decision, he later explained, was “not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and Steam-power are measured and estimated.” Lincoln, to be sure, had long opposed slavery. Yet he had also believed that the Constitution protected the institution. Now, however, the president merged his old attempt to preserve the Union with the new tool of the Emancipation Proclamation. The synthesis, he argued, would help to defeat the Confederacy while fundamentally improving the Union in the process.120

  Crafting—and ultimately selling—that policy required a creative genius who could marshal all the tools of his age to convince his countrymen of its merits. The proclamation’s efficacy as an instrument of foreign relations is still contested by historians. There is, however, no debating that the measure marked a major step forward in the evolution of presidential power. “The effectiveness of the President’s personal propaganda warfare could not be measured,” writes historian David Donald, “for it was not so much public statements or popular rallies as the internal dynamics of British and French politics, plus fears of ultimate American reprisal, that determined a course of neutrality for the two major European powers. But for Lincoln the opportunity to use the White House as a pulpit, to speak out over the dissonant voices of foreign leaders to the common people, daringly broadened the powers of the Presidency.”121

  Yet even as Lincoln expanded executive influence, the office was taking its toll on the man. In February 1863, as the monster meetings in Britain intensified, a White House staff member found Lincoln looking “worn and haggard.” The president’s hands trembled as he attempted to write a letter. Lincoln, the staffer observed, was “growing feeble.” The president would need his strength in the months to come. The Emancipation Proclamation may have ended the threat of British intervention. But it did not end Lincoln’s foreign-affairs troubles. The proclamation may have actually emboldened France’s emperor, Napoleon III, to challenge Lincoln’s government for control of North America.122

  Marx considered the French emperor “clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an undecipherable hieroglyphic.” In the realm of foreign affairs, however, Napoleon III could also be a dangerous man. The French emperor, Marx told readers of the New York Tribune, was “a reckless gambler, a desperate adventurer, who would as soon dice with royal bones as any other if the game promised to leave him a winner.” As the war ground on, France’s gambling emperor prepared to bet against Abraham Lincoln.123

  Lincoln believed that defining America’s place in the world was at the core of the Union’s mission. The “central idea” of the Northern effort, he explained, was to prove “that popular government is not an absurdity.”

  As an ambitious young politician in Springfield, Lincoln cultivated the support of the powerful Edwards family, which held weekly salons where guests were greeted in French.

  Mary Todd Lincoln had grown up in a Kentucky house adorned with French mahogany furniture and Belgian rugs. She attended a boarding school run by Parisian aristocrats who had fled the country in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

  Lincoln’s impetuous law partner Billy Herndon complained that his friend was harming himself politically by his opposition to the Mexican War. “I will stake my life,” Lincoln responded, “that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did.”

  Lincoln was almost certainly in the audience in Lexington, Kentucky, in November 1847, as an elderly Henry Clay delivered a moving speech opposing the Mexican War.

  Lincoln initially worried that he was unprepared to manage foreign affairs. “I don’t know anything about diplomacy,” he told one European envoy. “I will be very apt to make blunders.”

  Holograph of Lincoln’s response to Seward’s “foreign war panacea.”

  Secretary of State William Henry Seward proved to be a capable statesman—yet he also possessed an outsize ego and a sometimes volatile temperament. “When he was loaded,” recalled the son of one of Lincoln’s diplomats, “his tongue wagged.”

  As First Lady, Mary Lincoln meddled in diplomatic appointments. She urged Seward to name her personal choice to a post in the Sandwich Islands and demanded that Lincoln appoint one of her favorite clergymen to a consulship in Scotland.

  Lincoln’s minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was an old friend of the First Lady’s. The president came to believe that Clay possessed “a great deal of conceit and very little sense.”

  Charles Sumner, the powerful Massachusetts senator who chaired the foreign-relations committee, often tangled with Seward, who complained that there were “too many secretaries of state in Washington.”

  Britain’s Lord Palmerston generally opposed intervening in the Civil War. Britain’s “best and true policy,” he wrote his foreign minister in 1861, would be “to keep quite clear of the conflict.”

  As a journalist in London, Karl Marx steadfastly supported the Union. The sooner bourgeois America defeated the slaveholding aristocracy, Marx believed, the sooner the proletariat could triumph over both.

  Foreign observers were baffled by the inscrutable French emperor Napoleon III. One Lincoln aide dubbed him the Sphinx of the Tuileries. Otto von Bismarck described the French monarch as “a great unfatho
med capacity.”

  The influential French empress Eugénie was troubled by the rise of the United States. “Sooner or later,” she said, “we shall have to declare war on America.”

  Tall, blue-eyed General Joseph Hooker—nicknamed Handsome Captain by local women during the Mexican War—longed to invade Mexico again. The general, recalled one contemporary, was “very eager to raise an army on the Pacific coast for a fight with a foreign nation.”

  Radical Republicans such as Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis urged Lincoln to take a harder line over the French occupation of Mexico. Davis used the issue—unsuccessfully—to try to unseat the president during the 1864 campaign.

  Napoleon III installed Austrian archduke Maximilian on the Mexican throne. Locals referred to the new emperor as Featherhead, for his poor judgment.

  Lincoln’s glib young personal secretary John Hay thought the president’s foreign envoys were “generally men of ability,” but also “not always of that particular style of education which fits men for diplomacy.”

  More than thirty years after Lincoln’s assassination, Hay was appointed secretary of state—a position he held under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay once gave Roosevelt a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair encased in it.

  As the war drew to a close, Lincoln’s demeanor alternated between relief and melancholy. “There has been war enough,” the president told a reporter who wondered whether the Union and Confederacy would now unite to invade Mexico.