Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Back in January, after enduring a string of lackadaisical commanders, Lincoln had decided to elevate the energetic and dynamic General Joe Hooker to command of the Army of the Potomac. With his rust-colored hair, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes, the tall and lean Hooker cut a striking figure. (During his service in the Mexican War, local women referred to Hooker as Handsome Captain.) Lincoln liked Hooker, but he was also wary of the zealous officer. One of the president’s acquaintances recalled that Lincoln loved Hooker “as a father might regard a son who was lame.” The president told his secretary of the navy that he thought “as much as you or any other man of Hooker, but I fear he gets excited.” Lincoln was not afraid to level with the hot-blooded officer, who once declared that he thought the Federal government needed a dictator. “Beware of rashness,” the president wrote Hooker upon his appointment. “Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”63

  The president frequently cabled Hooker and other officers, laying out his vision for a successful Union war effort. In one exchange, in early June, Hooker telegraphed Lincoln, reporting that he saw an opportunity to march on Richmond “at once,” hammering the Confederate capital with a “mortal blow.” Lincoln swiftly responded by reminding Hooker that such a maneuver would not be consistent with the Union strategy: “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” The implication was that territorial gain was far less important than depleting the enemy’s human and material resources. Furthermore, the president understood, “[i]f our army can not fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of intrenched lines into a fortified city.”64

  The same point applied to the standoff with Napoleon. Lincoln believed that a determined show of force in Texas might serve as a warning to the French emperor. Yet while Hooker and many of Lincoln’s other generals itched to surge into Mexican territory, the president persisted in wearing down his enemies north of the Rio Grande. The French emperor was far more likely to be deterred by a Union defeat of the Confederacy. A Mexican adventure would divert resources from the main event and offer too many opportunities for something to go wrong. Furthermore, if the United States invaded Mexico, the French public—which had long been skeptical of the emperor’s North American scheme—might decide to rally around its monarch.

  In the first days of July, Lincoln’s commanders at long last turned the tide of the war—bolstering Northern diplomatic efforts. After a brutal, three-day battle, Federal forces halted the rebel army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The following day, the Union armies finally took the Mississippi city of Vicksburg as well. The victories deflated the Copperheads, who had been so forcefully pushing the French intervention scheme. They also immediately buoyed Lincoln’s diplomats in the field. “I wanted to hug the army of the Potomac,” recalled Henry Adams in London. “I wanted to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I wanted to fight some small man and lick him.”65

  Lincoln recognized that the successes had reinforced his diplomacy at a key moment. Yet the president and his cabinet remained anxious about the French maneuvering in Mexico. “The Mexican Republic has been extinguished,” naval secretary Gideon Welles told his diary in late July, “and an empire has risen on its ruins.” The supercilious Welles believed that Mexico was “[t]orn by factions, down-trodden by a scheming and designing priesthood, ignorant and vicious,” and “incapable of good government.” He added, however, that “I don’t expect an improvement of their condition under the sway of a ruler imposed upon them by Louis Napoleon.” British aristocrats, too, remained full of “malignant and disgraceful hatred of our government and people,” in Welles’s view. “Palmerston and Louis Napoleon,” he sneered, “are as much our enemies as Jeff Davis.”66

  Lincoln shared Welles’s concerns about France, but he believed that war with Britain was actually now unlikely. The victories at home had also encouraged the president. Washington that summer was dull, Hay reported—“dismal as a defaced tombstone.” And yet, Hay told one correspondent, the president was in “fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil. I am growing more and more firmly convinced that the good of the country absolutely demands that he should be kept where he is till this thing is over. There is no man in the country so wise, so gentle and so firm. I believe the hand of God placed him where he is.”

  Hay credited Lincoln’s proactive management of the war for the summer’s successes on the battlefield. “The old man,” Hay wrote to Lincoln’s other secretary, John G. Nicolay, in early September, “sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady and equally firm.” Hay began referring to the president in his letters as “Abraham Rex.”67

  The reinvigorated American president unsettled the chronically insecure French emperor. Maximilian wrote to Napoleon in early August worrying that the revival of Northern fortunes presented a “most serious difficulty” for the French effort. The North, Maximilian believed, was both “bent upon expansion” and “hostile to the monarchical principle.” The archduke argued that only more French troops in Mexico would prevent an American thrust southward. The United States, Maximilian predicted, “will doubtless be unable to await its own internal stabilization before proceeding to the overthrow of the throne erected at its gates.”68

  By midsummer Lincoln was pushing hard to challenge Napoleon—even if he was not willing to send American troops all the way into Mexico. Lincoln’s allies were alarmed by rumors of French designs on Texas. Considering the “movements of France in Mexico,” Francis P. Blair Sr. implored Lincoln, it was “of vast importance” to get an army down to Texas as soon as possible. Lincoln had already begun quietly advocating the same course. “Can we not renew the effort to organize a force to go to Western Texas?” the president asked his secretary of war on July 29. “Please think of it. I believe no local object is now more desirable.” Two days later, Lincoln called a meeting of his inner circle to discuss the matter further. The president ultimately ordered one of his favorite officers, General Nathaniel Banks, to begin the planning. “Recent events in Mexico, I think, render early action in Texas more important than ever,” Lincoln wrote the general. The president made the same point to whomever he could get to listen that August. “I am greatly impressed,” Lincoln wrote to Grant on Aug. 9, “with the importance of reestablishing the national authority in Western Texas as soon as possible.”69

  For the first time in months, Lincoln seemed to be cheering up. Mary and the kids had fled the hot, dry Washington summer, leaving Lincoln alone with his staff at the White House. Lincoln’s family—particularly Mary—sometimes drove the president to distraction. Still, he missed them when they were away. Even as Lincoln was mulling a show of force along the Mexican border, he found the time to write Mary an affectionate letter with news of their son Tad’s pet goat, Nanny. The boy was known for terrorizing the White House staff with the animal, disrupting state dinners and parading her through the grounds. Now, Lincoln reported, the goat had gone missing. “This,” the president wrote Mary, “is the last we know of poor ‘Nanny.’ ”70

  “With Mary out of town,” Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, “Lincoln found John Hay a ready companion.” Hay was almost like an adopted child—“far more intimately connected to the president than his own eldest son.” Both John Hay and John Nicolay would go on to work in the foreign service in overseas postings in the years following the Civil War. Hay, in particular, distinguished himself as a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Britain and secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. As a foreign-policy education, it was hard to beat the crucible of the American Civil War
. From Seward, Hay learned about the hard realities of international politics at the elbow of one of America’s greatest diplomats. From Lincoln, the president’s young secretary learned something more subtle but just as critical—how to wield great power with grace.71

  That was certainly easier when things were going well. By late summer, Hay told his diary, Lincoln was “in very good spirits. He thinks the rebel power is at last beginning to disintegrate—that they will break to pieces if we only stand firm now.” One Sunday afternoon in August, the president took Hay to Alexander Gardner’s photo studio to have their picture taken together. Even on Sabbath outings, the president remained obsessed with the French emperor’s plotting. Hay reported that Lincoln was “very anxious that Texas should be occupied and firmly held in view of French possibilities.” The president, his secretary recorded, believed that mission even more important than efforts to subdue Mobile, Alabama—a move that some of Lincoln’s generals were advocating instead. Any attack on Mobile would have to wait until “the Texas matter is safe,” Lincoln believed.72

  The president, however, remained opposed to a full invasion of Mexico. “I’m not exactly ‘skeered,’ ” one of Lincoln’s military commanders later recalled the president saying about the French intervention, “but [I] don’t like the looks of the thing.… My policy is, attend to only one trouble at a time. If we get well out of our present difficulties and restore the Union, I propose to notify Louis Napoleon that it is about time to take his army out of Mexico. When that army is gone, the Mexicans will take care of Maximilian.” Lincoln repeated his favorite old story about the man on his deathbed who was feuding with a friend. Since he was already ill, he agreed to reconcile. But, went the punch line, “I want it distinctly understood that if I get well the old grudge stands.”73

  At least some of Lincoln’s commanders proposed more radical remedies. Hooker, for one, was eager to take the war south of the Rio Grande. In Washington on September 9, Hooker dined with Hay and other Lincoln administration officials. The general, Lincoln’s secretary told his diary, “was in a fine flow” during the meal. Hooker bragged about the quickly growing Federal army. It was, the general insisted, “the finest on the planet,” Hay recalled. “He would like to see it fighting with foreigners.” The general quizzed Hay “very anxiously about our relations with France. He seems very eager to raise an army on the Pacific coast for a fight with a foreign nation. His eye brightened as he talked of it.” Lincoln’s secretary noted that although Hooker did not drink much at the dinner, “what little he drank made his cheek hot and red and his eye brighter.”74

  The following night, Hooker seemed even more determined to pick a fight with a foreign power. The general dined again with Hay and naval official Gustavus Fox, this time at Wormley’s, a Washington watering hole on I Street that would become renowned during the Gilded Age for its wine cellar. Whatever the men were drinking sparked a raucous conversation about foreign affairs. Fox stated that Britain would have to atone for all the “insults and wrongs” she had committed during the war—“of ports closed to us and opened to the enemy—of flags dipped to them and insultingly immovable to us—of courtesies ostentatiously shown them and brutally denied us—that will make the blood of every American boil in his brain-pan. We shall have men enough when this thing is over.”75

  Hooker agreed. “We will be the greatest military power on earth,” the general told the table, “greatest in numbers, in capability, in dash, in spirit, in intelligence of the soldiery. These fine fellows who have gotten a taste of campaigning in the last three years will not go back to plowing, and spinning and trading, and hewing wood and drawing water. They are spoiled for that and shaped for better work.” Hooker said that if there were no domestic war, the men would look abroad for their next conflict. Before the dinner broke up, the men reminisced a little, sharing stories about their Mexican War adventures. The young Hay was clearly caught up in the romance. As Hooker was preparing to return to the field from Washington later that month, Hay scrawled in his diary, “I wish to God I was able to go with him.”76

  Cooler heads in the Lincoln administration counseled a less belligerent approach to Mexico. While Hooker was crowing about raising an army of invasion, Seward wrote to his consul in Paris, John Bigelow, admitting that Napoleon’s troops were not really such a threat. The secretary of state told Bigelow that the Federal government was too busy trying to put down the rebels to pick a fight with France. Seward suggested that he thought Napoleon probably also had his hands full trying to subdue Mexico. In the meantime, the emperor would be unable to cause much trouble for the Union. “I may be wrong in the latter view,” the secretary of state told Bigelow. “But, if I am, there is likely to be time enough for us to change our course after discovering the error.”

  Seward was so eager to reassure French policy makers that he hinted to French minister Henri Mercier that the United States might be willing to distance itself from Mexican republicans. In mid-September, the secretary of state dragged the French minister to the White House for an audience with Lincoln, during which the president “reiterated very cordially the assurance of his government’s neutrality.” The president, Hay and Lincoln’s other personal secretary, John G. Nicolay, later recalled in their joint biography, “if he erred at all,” was determined “to err on the side of strict neutrality.”77

  Washington was full of rumors that France sought to seize parts of Texas and the Mississippi River. In the event of a “rupture with France,” argued Frank Blair, the son of Francis P. Blair Sr. and the brother of Lincoln’s postmaster general, “it may be necessary to march into Mexico and relieve that country.” Blair asked his brother to lobby Lincoln to send him to Texas and place fifty regiments under his command. (Lincoln declined.) Some diplomats whispered that Maximilian’s representatives were plotting with Confederate agents. Lincoln tried to turn a deaf ear to the gossip. “He does not allow himself to be disturbed by suspicions so unjust to France and so unreasonable in themselves,” Seward explained to one correspondent, “but he knows, also, that such suspicions will be entertained more or less extensively by this country, and magnified in other countries equally unfriendly to France and to America; and he knows also that it is out of such suspicions that the fatal web of national animosity is most frequently woven.”78

  Secretly, however, some Americans with ties to the State Department were quietly working outside standard channels to aid the Mexican liberals. At the request of Mexican minister Matías Romero, American Mexico expert Edward Lee Plumb reached out that autumn to what he later described to Romero as “various gentlemen of great wealth and of very high position … gentlemen whose names I am not at liberty to mention in this letter, but who are known to you by reputation.” Plumb urged the men, “whose capital would enable them to act swiftly and secretly,” to sponsor between 25,000 and 50,000 mercenaries that could be slipped into Mexico to assist the liberals. The businessmen, however, thought the operation would be too expensive, and “the final decision was unfavorable,” Plumb explained. Still, the episode reveals the lengths to which opponents of Lincoln’s conciliatory foreign policy were willing to go.79

  Napoleon, meanwhile, was concerned that anarchy in Mexico was already threatening his North American project. He urged Maximilian not to worry so much about an American invasion. Lincoln and Seward fully understood that France was backing the venture, the emperor reminded him. The United States could not send its armies south into Mexico “without at once making an enemy of us.” In the meantime, Napoleon urged Maximilian to begin thinking about how he might bring greater order to chaotic Mexico. He said the project would require a firm hand. “A state which is sunk in anarchy is not to be regenerated by parliamentary liberty,” Napoleon wrote. “What is wanted in Mexico is a liberal dictatorship.”80

  Meanwhile, Lincoln’s efforts to make a show of force near the Mexican border ran into trouble. In early September, a flotilla of four Federal gunboats attempted a landing near Sabine Pass, on the
Texas-Louisiana line. The Confederate post, manned by only about fifty troops with six light guns, was highly vulnerable. Yet the invasion immediately foundered. Southern gunners quickly shot out the boiler in one of the Union vessels. A second gunboat washed up in shallow water—making an easy target for the Confederate guns. By the time Lincoln anxiously wrote to Banks late that month expressing his “strong hope that you have the old flag flying in Texas by this time,” the invading force had long since retreated. It was not until November that Banks’s seven thousand troopers finally took Brownsville, Texas, and established a foothold just north of the Mexican boundary. “The importance of Texas,” Banks later wrote to Lincoln, “will be felt if we imagine it to be in possession of the French.” In that event, Banks argued, the territory might become “a nucleus for all the enemies of the country.”81

  Lincoln needed—and got—a break that autumn, when a group of six Russian warships showed up off the Atlantic coast. The ships’ arrival looked to the world like a show of solidarity with the Union cause—and a not-so-veiled threat to the French, their old antagonists in the Crimean War. Actually, Russian commanders had ordered the fleet into open waters for its own protection. If rising tensions in eastern Europe should erupt into all-out hostilities, the ships would be safely out of the line of fire. Yet the Russian strategy was poorly understood at the time. French officials had long been wary of any potential U.S.-Russian alliance. Decades before the Civil War, Alexis de Tocqueville had warned that the United States and Russia seemed “to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” Napoleon III shared that view, rightly believing that the two countries would rise to dominate the world stage by the twentieth century.82