CHAPTER FIVE
Lincoln vs. Napoleon
AS THE CIVIL WAR ENTERED ITS FINAL DAYS, MARY LINCOLN WORRIED THAT HER HUSBAND WAS BEGINNING TO LOOK “SO BROKEN-HEARTED, SO COMPLETELY WORN OUT.” IT WAS A judgment that many visitors shared during those last months of the president’s life. When the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher dropped in on Lincoln at the Executive Mansion in late winter 1865, he found the exhausted president alone in his receiving room. Lincoln’s hair was shooting up “every way for Sunday,” the minister recalled. “It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble field.” The president wore a pair of slippers, and his suit vest flapped free. Lincoln welcomed the minister, and then sank into his chair. The president, Beecher later recalled, “looked as though every limb wanted to drop off his body.”1
In one sense, Lincoln had little reason to be weary. For a year and a half now, his armies had been relentlessly on the offensive. The early days of tentative war making were long past. The president had replaced hesitating figures like George B. McClellan with effective new generals like Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Within one week in July 1863, Union forces had bested their Southern foes at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg, decisively shifting the war’s momentum. Fierce fighting continued for more than a year in the wastes of northern Virginia. Yet by the last months of the war, Union success appeared all but inevitable. Lincoln’s army, led by the irascible Sherman, finally captured both Atlanta and Savannah in late 1864. As the New Year dawned, Sherman’s troops were still on the move, cutting a devastating path through the American South.
By the start of 1865, the president had also subdued the most dangerous of his personal critics. Throughout the previous year, Lincoln’s antagonists—including members of his own party and cabinet—had been angling to defeat him in his bid for reelection. Even some of Lincoln’s diplomats in Europe threatened to come home and campaign against him. Buoyed by the success of his armies in the weeks leading up to the election, however, Lincoln had ultimately won a second term by a huge margin. Grant forwarded a message of congratulations to the victorious candidate saying that in Europe, Lincoln’s reelection would be “worth more to the country than a battle won.” The “importance of this event, in its influence upon the reputation of the nation,” agreed Charles Francis Adams in London, “would be difficult to overestimate.”2
Meanwhile, a series of crises on the Continent unrelated to the Civil War were preoccupying the great powers. In early 1863, Polish rebels had revolted against Russian domination of their country, begging in vain for British and French assistance. The following year, Prussian and Austrian armies had invaded the Danish-controlled duchies of Schleswig and Holstein—a move that shocked European liberals and threatened to upset the region’s fragile balance of power. Palmerston had once vowed to defend the territories against aggressors. Yet in the final calculus, he determined that it would be wiser to stand aside. The whole drama undermined the Anglo-French relationship and exposed the surprising weakness of the world’s most powerful nation. By the early months of 1865, the threat of British intervention in the American Civil War had vanished.3
And yet, the French emperor, Napoleon III, remained one lingering cause for anxiety. The Confederacy, he warned Lincoln’s representative in Paris, would be too “difficult to subdue.” The emperor believed that North and South “would never come together again.” Napoleon had been working steadily, almost since the start of the American conflict, to extend French influence into North America. As the Union and Confederate armies began to clash, he convinced British and Spanish policy makers to join a three-way intervention in Mexico, advertised as a mission to recover unpaid debts. Actually, Napoleon’s scheme was an ambitious project to restore France’s imperial prestige, improve its economy, and bolster its geopolitical position.
Within months Britain and Spain cooled on the adventure and withdrew their forces. Napoleon, on the other hand, decided to double down on Mexico. Even as the Polish and Danish crises simmered, he continued to send troops across the Atlantic. Ultimately the emperor installed his puppet, the Austrian archduke Maximilian, on the Mexican throne. “No more sinister project, in terms of American interest, American influence, and American ideas,” writes historian Dexter Perkins, “has ever been conceived in the history of the Monroe Doctrine.”4
Lincoln recognized that Napoleon’s troops just south of the border (and the emperor’s desire to mediate an end to the war raging north of it) represented serious foreign-policy problems. Still, as Lincoln’s army—and his power—grew, the president’s options for confronting Napoleon also increased dramatically. Lincoln saw that the tumult on the Continent severely limited the European powers’ freedom of maneuver in the New World. The president told one visitor in a moment of frustration that he would “be d[amne]d if he wouldn’t get 1,000,000 men if France dares to interfere.”5
As the Union victories mounted, support for a dash south of the border built. In Congress, hawks like Henry Winter Davis urged Lincoln to challenge the French. The Northeastern penny press egged on the radicals. The New York Herald, a forceful advocate of a Mexican expedition, suggested “forming together a grand army to drive the invaders into the Gulf.” By early 1865, Russia’s minister in Washington reported home that “a sure source” told him that Lincoln’s men were urging an invasion. Some Northerners viewed a joint expedition as a means of welcoming Confederate soldiers back into the Federal fold. France’s chargé d’affaires in the capital wrote his superiors that a war with French troops in Mexico could serve as a “pivot of reconciliation” between North and South.6
The Progress of Our Arms
Now, in early 1865, Lincoln finally had to make a decision. Francis P. Blair Sr., the distinguished former Democrat and the father of Lincoln’s postmaster general, had arranged a summit with Confederate representatives at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in part to consider the prospect of a joint invasion. The president boarded a train south to attend the conference with just one aide and a small bag. Seward had already gone ahead, carrying with him two bottles of champagne and three more of whisky to help lubricate the negotiations. On February 3—just over two months before his assassination—Lincoln and his secretary of state met the Confederate commissioners in the saloon aboard the River Queen, a steamboat that had been draped in red-white-and-blue bunting for the occasion.7
The Confederate delegation included Vice President Alexander Stephens, who had served with Lincoln in the House of Representatives. Back then, like Lincoln, Stephens had given a passionate speech in the House chamber challenging Polk’s conduct of the Mexican War. At the time, Lincoln had written to Herndon lauding Stephens’s remarks as “the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” Now, however, seventeen years later, the circumstances in Mexico had changed dramatically. Stephens prepared to urge his old legislative ally to send his armies into Mexico to oust the French forces.8
Stephens—whom Lincoln had once described as “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man”—argued that a joint invasion could help bring the warring factions together. It was important, the Confederate vice president suggested, to find some issue that would “divert the public mind” from the conflict, in which both sides shared “a common feeling and interest.” Stephens held forth for some time about “the so-called Monroe Doctrine,” as one witness put it. The tiny man who had once eloquently opposed an American invasion of Mexico now proposed taking “the whole of the North American continent by the states of the two confederacies.” Such a move, Stephens argued, could engender “fraternal feelings” while at the same time keeping foreign powers from establishing a foothold in the New World.9
Both Lincoln and Seward acknowledged that they were concerned about the French emperor’s invasion. Seward seemed particularly sympathetic to Stephens’s plan. The proposal was not so different, after all, from the secretary of state’s own “foreign war panacea.” Yet Lincoln, despite his ear
lier outburst about raising a million-man army, remained wary. The president pointed out that Congress would need to authorize any new conflict. And the Union could not afford to undermine its own war effort at home. Even if North and South could settle their domestic differences, Lincoln added, he feared the two sides might turn against each other again during any potential Mexican operation. The whole scheme, Lincoln finally concluded, simply “could not be entertained.”10
After four hours, the meeting broke up. Stephens asked Lincoln one more time to reconsider his Mexico proposal. “Well, Stephens,” Lincoln replied, “I will reconsider it; but I do not think my mind will change.” The president said that he had already “maturely considered” the scheme and had decided that it was unworkable. The conference at an end, the Confederate commissioners then boarded a small boat and headed back to their own craft. As the Southerners drifted away, Seward decided to send them one of the leftover bottles of champagne as a goodwill gesture. The secretary of state dispatched a black aide in a small rowboat after the Confederates to deliver the gift. When it arrived, the commissioners thanked Seward by flourishing their handkerchiefs. Lincoln’s secretary of state lifted a boatswain’s trumpet and bellowed good-naturedly across the water, “Keep the champagne, but return the negro!”11
Lincoln, in one sense, got lucky with the outcome of the Mexican crisis. He benefitted, at least in part, from fortunate circumstances. The European ferment over Poland and Schleswig-Holstein, combined with Napoleon’s own hubris, certainly made the episode more manageable for the president. Lincoln, a lifelong fatalist, often felt as though he were being buffeted by powerful winds that he could not fully control. “I claim not to have controlled events,” he once explained, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Sometimes that worldview inspired hopelessness and melancholy. Yet in other cases, like the French thrust into Mexico, it engendered patience and long-term thinking. In international affairs, where major shifts in the power grid are often the product of vast, impersonal forces, a little healthy fatalism is not always such a bad thing.12
And yet the Mexican crisis also demanded a series of determined acts of will from the president. Lincoln understood that the Union military effort at home had a profound impact on his diplomacy abroad. Nothing would unnerve Napoleon as effectively as the massive Northern army surging south through the hills of Georgia. As the Civil War progressed, the president delved deeply into military affairs, studying thick tomes on the subject that he had borrowed from the Library of Congress. John Hay recalled hearing Lincoln’s creaking footsteps pacing in the White House late at night as the president examined the latest volume. As the fighting intensified, Lincoln began to devise strategy himself. He relentlessly questioned his generals and demanded that Union tactics remain consistent with his overriding political goals—including keeping foreign powers like France out of the war. The stakes, he realized, were enormous. Upon “the progress of our arms,” Lincoln declared, “all else chiefly depends.”13
Lincoln’s approach to military strategy was subtle, original—and ruthlessly effective. The president, especially after the Army of the Potomac’s maddeningly slow start, was eager for decisive engagements. Still, while impetuous generals like Joseph Hooker longed to seize the great prizes—Richmond, for example, and later Mexican territory—the president took a more measured approach. Lincoln’s careful study of both war and economics had led him to believe that occupying territory was far less important than depleting the material resources of his foes. As the conflict intensified, the president peppered his generals with notes insisting that they focus on destroying enemy armies, not necessarily capturing cities. This strategy, argues historian Gabor Boritt, was “the most original and probably most significant of Lincoln’s military contributions.”14
A wild lunge into Mexico, he had come to realize, would do nothing to empower America in the long run. Lincoln ultimately chose to keep his massive army north of the Rio Grande in the face of powerful headwinds from the penny press, important military officers, and some members of Congress, who at times were all urging an invasion. The Mexican episode is a critical illustration of Lincoln’s ability to use the powers of his office to direct foreign policy in a crisis. In 1864, as Napoleon was redoubling his efforts to secure Mexico, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the venture. Yet Lincoln’s State Department, eager to avoid unnecessary trouble while the war was ongoing, privately assured the French through diplomatic channels that the clamor on Capitol Hill was simply noise.
Legislators objected to being sidelined. They passed another measure maintaining that “Congress has a constitutional right to an authoritative voice in declaring and prescribing the foreign policy of the United States.” Yet Lincoln and Seward’s insistence that the protests were not binding is the legacy that has endured. The outcome, notes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of The Imperial Presidency, “helped confirm the practice of regarding such [congressional] resolutions … as purely advisory.” Lincoln and Seward had once again helped to shape an executive office that was better suited to the country’s role as an emerging world power.
Ultimately the whole episode also served to refine and crystalize one of the key tenets of American foreign policy. For propriety’s sake, both Lincoln and Seward shied away from using the term “Monroe Doctrine” during the Mexican crisis. Still, while prior to the Civil War the Doctrine “had not yet attained the importance of a truly national principle,” in the words of one historian, by the end of the Mexican drama “it emerged … immensely strengthened, and firmly anchored in the thought of the American people and in the policy of their government.” And yet, a clean break from the fallen Old World—as the authors of the Monroe Doctrine had hoped for—remained elusive. Independence, after all, is sometimes just another word for power.15
Monsieur Oui-Oui
Napoleon III was deeply troubled by the American debate over whether to invade Mexico. His protégé Maximilian wrote Napoleon shortly before the conference at Hampton Roads lamenting that the French troop levels in the country were “barely sufficient” to maintain his hold on the place. Napoleon was a risk taker, but he was also pathologically insecure. As a young man, the pale, stocky future emperor would lurch awake in the middle of the night convinced that burglars had broken into his home. Once he was enthroned in the Tuileries Palace, Napoleon’s crown never rested comfortably on his head. He fretted that European monarchs did not take him seriously as a peer. The French leader’s outsider status, noted one Austrian diplomat, was “the worm that eats at the heart of Emperor Napoleon.” Now, despite Lincoln’s forbearance, Napoleon had one more cause for self-doubt. The French emperor’s most ambitious foreign-policy scheme was crumbling about his ears.16
The emperor’s insecurities seem to have begun in his youth. Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, was a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. His father was Bonaparte’s brother, and his mother, Hortense de Beauharnais, was a daughter of Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine, from her previous marriage. Some of Louis’s earliest memories consisted of outings with his celebrated uncle. The Gallic conqueror did his best to toughen up his young nephew. At family gatherings, Bonaparte would clamp one hand on each of the boy’s ears and lift him up onto the table by his head—as Louis’s mother watched in horror.17
Louis was a quiet and introverted boy. His family called the child “Monsieur Oui-Oui,” mocking the toddler’s pronunciation of his own name. Louis was only seven in June 1815, when the Duke of Wellington and his armies crushed his uncle’s forces at Waterloo. Fearing that her children were in danger, Hortense sent Louis and his brother to hide out in a small Paris apartment belonging to her dressmaker. In the tumult following the Napoleonic Wars, the family fled to Switzerland, where they settled in a château surrounded by pine trees and vineyards along the shores of Lake Constance.18
Louis found Swiss provincial life dull. During lessons with his tutor, he would sometimes imagine that he was a bird and co
uld soar out through the window to freedom. He amused himself by flirting with the local girls around Lake Constance, serenading the young women and reading to them from pulp romance novels. His youthful flirtations may have been one more balm for his insecurities. If so, his mother did nothing to bolster his self-esteem. She admitted that her child was “not attractive enough to make the women run after him.”19
The exiled prince occasionally escaped the sleepy Swiss village for excursions to Italy with his family. On his way home from one journey, Louis stopped at the Rubicon River and filled a bottle with water as a keepsake. Eventually the young man’s Italian adventures got him into trouble. As a twenty-two-year-old, Louis traveled to Italy with his family and established contacts with Italian nationalists who were conspiring against the pope. Roman authorities finally confronted the young man and expelled him from the city. Louis’s mother eventually had to travel across northern Italy to rescue her son.20
By the time he reached his late twenties, the future emperor was plotting more ambitious schemes. In the summer of 1835, he joined a group of collaborators and began planning a coup that he hoped would oust King Louis Philippe in France. One morning in late October of the following year, Louis told his mother that he was going to visit a cousin. Actually, the young man slipped into the French city of Strasbourg, in the country’s northeast corner. After a sleepless night, he dressed in epaulettes and a cocked hat and crept out into the city in the early morning hours. Over a thin blanket of snow, Louis and his co-conspirators fanned out toward key power centers like the army barracks and telegraph office. At first the plot seemed to come off well. Louis led a column of soldiers through the town, past crowds cheering, “Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoléon!” Yet the coup unraveled quickly. After a loyalist army officer shouted that Louis was an imposter, the king’s men swiftly rounded up the conspirators.21
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