Matías Romero, the charming and well-connected young emissary who represented Mexico’s government in Washington, cleverly reinforced Lincoln’s views on hemispheric independence. The Mexican diplomat declared that the principles of the Monroe Doctrine “seem to be written for the present occasion.” Early in Lincoln’s term Romero had visited the new president at the Executive Mansion to give the Illinoisan a primer on Mexican affairs. The Mexican diplomat explained that there were two main factions in his country—a “liberal” party that aimed “to imitate the United States,” as Romero put it; and a “reactionary” wing “composed of the clergy, the demoralized part of the old army, some moneychangers, and a few other illusionaries and fanatics who collectively are in an evident minority.” Napoleon, Romero told Lincoln, would seek to ally himself with the latter faction; the United States, he argued, should work closely with the former.
The American president listened quietly with “marked attention,” Romero told his superiors, and assured the Mexican that he considered the country a priority. Yet he offered no practical proposal for keeping France out of Mexico. Lincoln, Romero noted, seemed to “lack confidence” that he could do much of anything abroad with a war already raging at home. Privately, Lincoln and Seward were even more nonplussed by the Mexican turmoil than they let on. “The actual condition of affairs in Mexico,” Seward had written to Thomas Corwin, the Union minister to the country, “is so imperfectly understood here that the President finds it very difficult to give you particular and practical directions for the regulation of your conduct during your mission.”44
An American invasion of Mexico was out of the question, particularly at such an early stage in the war. The president’s forces had demonstrated at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, and other early skirmishes that they could not defeat a band of Confederate rebels, much less the military of one of the world’s great powers. “Since the United States, for the present, must allow no foreign complication to interfere with their war for the Union,” wrote Marx, “all they can do is to protest.” Any serious response to the French-led operation would have to wait until Lincoln’s armies had made more headway against their domestic foes. “Upon the settlement of this family quarrel,” the New York Times promised, “the case of Mexico will be attended to.”45
In the meantime, the White House lodged a perfunctory complaint with the Tuileries. “We cannot look with indifference,” Seward wrote to the U.S. minister in Paris, “upon an armed European intervention for political ends in a country situated so near and connected with us so closely as Mexico.” Lincoln sent Congress a proposal to float a loan to the Mexican government so the country could continue to make payments on its debt. British policymakers, for their part, were cool to the idea. “A mortgage of Mexico to the United States,” Palmerston believed, “would certainly lead to foreclosing.”
Lincoln’s diplomats countered that Palmerston had it the wrong way around. Corwin argued that if the American aid package was rejected, England would then “own” the country, directing Mexican affairs “as fully as she does the policy of India or Canada.” In that event, Corwin told another correspondent, “England and France will absorb Mexico, and we shall have less to do with it than we have with the African Kingdom of Dahomy.” Lincoln, however, seemed lukewarm about the whole enterprise, and sent word that he “could suggest no plan by which aid could be given to Mexico.” The reluctant U.S. Senate eventually tabled the measure and the loan proposals ultimately went nowhere.46
As the spring unfolded, the news improved for the Lincoln administration. In April, Britain and Spain decided to withdraw their troops from Mexico, leaving Napoleon on his own. Foreign-affairs crises closer to home demanded the attention of the European powers. Meanwhile, yellow fever stalked the French troops who remained behind in Mexico. Napoleon’s army was badly weakened by May 5, when it marched on the Mexican town of Puebla. Though the French soldiers were far better armed, Mexican guerrillas hiding in the town’s baroque churches rained bullets on the invaders. The Mexicans ultimately drove the French forces out of town. (The Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo celebrates the victory at Puebla.) The French army survived to fight another day. Yet the expedition was off to an unimpressive start.47
Nevertheless, Napoleon’s army of thirty-five thousand continued its steady march toward Mexico City. Lincoln’s inner circle grew increasingly alarmed. In July, John Hay published an anonymous article in the Missouri Republican arguing that if the United States did not shore up its relationships with Mexican republicans, great powers like France would step into the void. A “grasping European dynasty” on America’s southern border would gravely threaten U.S. security, Hay insisted. It was “almost impossible,” he wrote, “to overestimate the importance” of keeping the “continent free from the footsteps of European absolutism.” As the New Year approached, with French forces slowly cementing their hold on the country, that prospect looked increasingly unlikely. Meanwhile, Napoleon III was about to present Lincoln with his boldest challenge yet.48
The Sphinx of the Tuileries
Prussia’s iron chancellor, Otto von Bismarck—a future antagonist of Napoleon’s—once described the French emperor as “a great unfathomed capacity.” The French statesman’s contemporaries found it notoriously difficult to make sense of his whims. Even those closest to him found him hard to read. “Had I married him,” recalled one youthful flame, his cousin Mathilde, “I think that I might have broken his head open just to see what was in it.” To Europe’s statesmen, increasingly steeped in the logic of Realpolitik, the French emperor’s romantic scheming seemed baffling. “Ideas proliferated in his head like rabbits in a hutch,” Palmerston complained. Americans, separated by a vast ocean, were even more perplexed by the inscrutable Frenchman. John Hay wrote of the “plots and schemes that lurk in the tortuous brain of the impassive and silent emperor of the French.” Hay called Napoleon the Sphinx of the Tuileries.49
Lincoln had once defended the French emperor against his radical foes—at least rhetorically. In 1858 a band of conspirators led by Italian nationalist Felice Orsini had attempted to assassinate Napoleon III, throwing bombs at the emperor’s coach. Lincoln, in his memorable speech at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860, had compared the attackers to zealous abolitionists like John Brown, who had repeatedly attacked American slaveholders. “Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon,” the Illinoisan told the crowd, “and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same.” Both crimes, Lincoln explained, had been committed by “an enthusiast” who “imagines himself commissioned by Heaven.”50
By the summer of 1862, however, Napoleon’s meddling in the Americas had begun to grate on Lincoln and his deputies. John Bigelow, the president’s consul in Paris, complained that Napoleon had “lost pretty much all of the little faith he had in our ability to reduce the South to obedience.” The emperor, Bigelow continued, was “hovering over us, like the carrion crow over the body of the sinking traveler, waiting till we are too weak to resist his predatory instincts.” His unpredictability was unsettling. With Europe wracked by its own crises, most of the Continent’s power brokers found it difficult to justify far-flung adventures. Yet just as the other European powers were pulling back their commitments in the New World, Napoleon redoubled his efforts to meddle in the Western Hemisphere. In early January 1863, the French emperor floated an offer to mediate between North and South. To Lincoln, the proposal represented one of the most dangerous moments in the war.51
Part of the problem was that many of Lincoln’s own erstwhile supporters embraced the French offer. The president had always viewed the volubility of his own constituents as one of his weaknesses. Lincoln’s bodyguard once compared the president’s situation to that of the great French statesman Cardinal Richelieu. Lincoln did not see the similarities. Richelieu, the president pointed out, “had a united constituency; I never have had.” Lincoln assumed that any French effort to mediate would end with the division of the United State
s. As French troops closed in on Mexico City, that prospect seemed particularly troubling.
Still, with Federal armies bogged down in the winter of 1863, many Americans just wanted to stop the bleeding. Horace Greeley argued in the New York Tribune that Napoleon III was now “more popular with his people than any other European monarch.” In the past, Greeley had been convinced that the autocratic Napoleon could never be a fair judge of events in republican America. Yet by late January, after intense lobbying efforts from an American businessman, Greeley suddenly shifted his stance. The emperor, Greeley was now convinced, “is inspired by the most friendly feelings to the Federal Government and the loyal states.” The mercurial editor advocated taking the French emperor up on his offer.52
The French mediation proposal also coincided with a revival in the popularity of peace Democrats, known as Copperheads. (The activists, who got the name from sniping Republicans, cut the figures of Liberty from copper pennies and proudly wore them in their lapels.) The group eagerly sought to end the war, even if it meant the preservation of slavery. The Copperheads’ most charismatic spokesman was Clement Vallandigham, a tall, slender Ohioan with dark hair and skin that accentuated his “light flashing eyes.” In speeches throughout the country, Vallandigham derided the president as a tyrant, railing against “King Lincoln.”53
On January 14, 1863, Vallandigham rose in the House of Representatives and urged the warring parties to accept the French offer. The Copperhead congressman insisted that he was not defeatist. America’s emergence as a world power, he believed, was simply contingent on stopping the war. “Union,” he told the chamber, “is empire.” In some ways, Vallandigham’s underlying rationale was not so different from Seward’s own conciliatory position during the secession winter. Yet the Ohioan’s means were vastly different. Vallandigham implored his colleagues to consider Napoleon III’s proposal. “It would be churlish to refuse,” he declared. “As proposed by the Emperor of France, I would accept it at once. Now is the auspicious moment. It is the speediest, easiest, most graceful mode of suspending hostilities.”54
Lincoln, already worn down by the winter’s battlefield defeats, was shaken by Napoleon’s mediation proposal. When he got the news, recalled one newspaper correspondent, the president appeared “so careworn and dejected.” The dispatches coming in from Lincoln’s diplomats in the field did nothing to improve his mood. Henry Sanford reported that talk of a rivalry between the “Latin race” and American republicans was being repeated “ad nauseam in Parisian salons.” State Department adviser Edward Everett warned that he had heard murmurs that France was attempting to wrest control of “a larger Texas” for an imperial possession. Lincoln’s minister in Paris complained that Americans were beginning to “distrust” the emperor. His countrymen, he protested, “do not like to see His Majesty’s hand always in this business.” Alexander Hamilton’s son James wrote Lincoln urging him “to throw a large force without delay into Texas” in order to “admonish the emperor” over “his magnificent designs” on the continent. Such a move, Hamilton argued, “would perhaps shake his throne.” Yet with increasingly desperate battles raging with Southern forces at home, there was little else Lincoln and his diplomats could do.55
Lincoln, meanwhile, once again intensified his efforts to establish overseas colonies of American blacks. After failing to arouse much interest among the European powers for colonization, the president turned instead to Bernard Kock, an American businessman who wanted to establish a colony on the Île à Vache, a small island off the coast of Haiti. Kock told the president that the island was “beautiful, healthy, and fertile” (adding that it was “known to be free from reptiles”). The president was intrigued. Seward suggested delaying the venture in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, but Lincoln ultimately overruled him. Kock, flush with promises of U.S. government funds, set sail in April from Virginia with a band of 453 colonists.
Historians have often viewed Lincoln’s colonization proposals as something of a public-relations ploy. His support for overseas settlements, the thinking goes, was largely an effort to conciliate Northern racists who were angry about emancipation. More recently, however, scholars have questioned this “lullaby thesis.” Evidence suggests that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization long after the Emancipation Proclamation. “Lincoln,” historians Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page observe, “likely saw colonization as one of many avenues to approach an anguishing difficulty that had no simple resolution.” Embarking on a “second wave” of such schemes in 1863, the president met repeatedly over the course of the year with British officials whom he believed might be convinced to help facilitate new colonies in Central America.56
At home, Lincoln’s men did their best to put a positive spin on the continuing fighting. Seward audaciously compared America’s burgeoning forces to those of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. “Our armies,” the secretary of state declared on the second anniversary of Fort Sumter, “are moving on with a firmer step than those of the Roman Empire or the French Republic ever maintained.” In reality, the situation remained perilous throughout the spring. In May, Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee defeated Lincoln’s army at Chancellorsville, Virginia. The news devastated the president. “Clasping his hands behind his back,” recalled one witness, “he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ” In the process, however, Confederate general Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson had been fatally wounded. Lincoln’s diplomats clung to any sliver of positive news from the battlefield. “The truth is,” Henry Adams wrote from the legation in London, “all depends on the progress of our armies.” Lincoln acknowledged as much to Mexico’s man in Washington, Matías Romero. The Mexican recalled Lincoln once telling him that he “had always believed … that the settlement of Mexico’s present difficulties depended upon the course events would take here [at home].”57
In Mexico, meanwhile, Napoleon’s forces were finally making their own progress. On June 7, 1863, French troops broke through the remaining Mexican defenses and poured into Mexico City. The scene was somewhat reminiscent of the American conquest less than two decades earlier. Officers jumped off their horses near the cathedral and listened to a performance of the Te Deum, the ancient Christian hymn of praise. Supporters threw flowers and affixed posters of the emperor and empress to every wall in the city. Back in Europe, the emperor of the French wept with joy upon hearing news of the conquest.58
For Lincoln, the French occupation of Mexico City could not have come at a worse time. Lee’s Confederate forces were inching closer to the Federal capital. Lincoln was growing despondent. A former State Department employee who spotted the president walking the streets of the capital in June 1863 reported that he looked “exhausted, careworn, spiritless, extinct.” A visitor to the White House around the same time described Lincoln’s “drooping eyelids, looking almost swollen; the dark bags beneath the eyes; the deep marks about the large and expressive mouth; the flaccid muscles of the jaws.” In the depths of that summer, Mary Lincoln’s seamstress recalled the president walking with a “slow and heavy” step into the First Lady’s dressing room, collapsing onto the sofa, and then covering his eyes with his hands—“a complete picture of dejection.” He consoled himself by reading the Book of Job. Even Mary began to worry about her husband. “What do you think of Mr. Lincoln?” she asked her half sister as the year wore on. “Do you think he is well?”59
Mary, for her part, did not do much to ease the president’s anxieties. Even as Lincoln fretted over Napoleon’s troops in Mexico, the First Lady was busy taking French lessons and mimicking the empress’s fashions—a particularly expensive taste. Eugénie’s innovation had been to increase the size of the steel hoops supporting her skirts—which also doubled the amount of fabric necessary to make them. Mary was not entirely successful in her attempts to imitate Eugénie. A relative of Napoleon III’s who visited Washington toward the beginning of the war told his diary
that Mary had received him “dressed in the French style without any taste.” Nor was Lincoln thrilled with the fashions. Aside from the expense, the dresses could be scandalously low cut. One U.S. senator complained that the First Lady “had her bosom on exhibition” at one reception. She seemed determined, he added, “to exhibit her milking apparatus to public gaze.” The president sometimes told Mary that he wished she would show a little more restraint. “Whew,” Lincoln said on one occasion, “our cat has a long tail tonight. Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in better style.”60
Abraham Rex
As 1863 unfolded, Lincoln finally began to get comfortable in his role as commander in chief of the military. “Some well-meaning newspapers advise the president to keep his fingers out of the military pie,” John Hay wrote to a colleague as the Union war effort gathered momentum. “The truth is, if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess.” Lincoln understood that the war effort at home and the work of his diplomats abroad were intricately linked. European statesmen were closely watching results of key battles as they debated whether to intervene and stop the fighting. Only a steady string of victories would ultimately deter the cold-eyed great powers.61
The president, from the first days of the war, had begun cramming on military affairs. “He gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation,” Hay recalled. “He read a large number of strategical works. He pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge and the keen intelligence of his questions.”62
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