In the spring of 1864, however, it sometimes seemed as if the war would never end. Grant plunged his army south through Virginia, but the campaign was slow going. Northern and Southern troops battled fearsomely in the Wilderness—a bleak stretch of land near the Rapidan River consisting of little more than scrub trees and tangled vines. As Grant’s forces bogged down in their drive south toward Petersburg, casualties mounted dramatically. By June more than sixty-five thousand Union troops had been killed, wounded, or had simply vanished—more than half as many as had been lost in the preceding three years.105
Lincoln took the setbacks hard. He found it difficult to get any sleep during the Wilderness campaign. One visitor to the White House that May, the artist Francis Carpenter, found Lincoln in the residence dressed only in a “long morning wrapper,” pacing in front of a window, “his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast—altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries.” During those tense days, Carpenter noted, the president would usually take his dinner upstairs, alone. “I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety,” Lincoln complained, “or it will kill me.” Lincoln observed that no matter how much rest he got, it “seemed never to reach the tired spot.”106
The president had neither the energy nor the will to confront Napoleon over Mexico now. Seward, too, found it baffling that some people still wanted to divert troops needed to defeat the Confederate rebellion. The secretary of state, Gideon Welles reported in late May, “is becoming very anxious in view of our relations with France.” Seward continued to resist taking a harder line. “I think,” the secretary of state protested in late May to Bigelow in Paris, “with our land and naval forces in Louisiana retreating before the rebels instead of marching towards Mexico, this is not the most suitable time we could choose for offering idle menaces to the Emperor of France.… Why should we gasconade about Mexico when we are in a struggle for our own life?” Seward insisted that the American people would never forgive the administration if the country slipped into a new war over “a contingent and merely speculative issue like that of the future of Mexico.”107
Lincoln and Seward could never completely drown out the calls for the French emperor’s head, but they did try to placate Napoleon in small ways. In May Lincoln relaxed the blockade somewhat, permitting the export of the type of horses “as have been bought for the personal use of the Emperor of the French.” Napoleon—whose squat legs and awkward gait made him prefer making his public appearances on horseback—undoubtedly appreciated the gesture.108
Yet even as Lincoln was making efforts to normalize trade ties with Napoleon, activists were pressing the First Lady to boycott French goods. Washington was full of Continental fashions that spring. The wives of diplomats and legislators happily strolled Pennsylvania Avenue “in full Parisian attire,” one newspaper reported. As the season unfolded, a representative from a group calling itself the Ladies’ National Covenant approached Mary and urged her to avoid buying European “web-velvets and plushes, satins, white and black thread laces, foreign embroideries, foreign artificial flowers and feathers, ermine, camel’s hair shawls, French hats, bonnets, caps, and head-dresses.” The women even tried to ban champagne from Washington parties. At first Mary was receptive. She “impulsively” agreed to sign the pledge, one activist later recalled. Lincoln, however, was outraged at the First Lady’s freelancing on critical trade issues. “You have no idea what a hornets’ nest you are stirring up,” he told his wife. Considering the delicate “state of our foreign relations,” the president explained, signing the boycott “will never do.”109
The Day of Reckoning
On May 28, 1864, the Novara, carrying Maximilian and Charlotte, finally made landfall in Veracruz, Mexico, after the six-week transatlantic journey. At least at first, the European monarchs were discouraged by what they found. As they climbed ashore, Maximilian and Charlotte had to pass the carcass of a wrecked French ship and a cemetery full of French yellow-fever victims. Vultures picked at garbage alongside the dilapidated ruins of the customs houses. Someone had erected a few arches made of flowers by way of welcome. But on their first night in the country, a furious windstorm blew the arches down.110
The trip to Mexico City was no more encouraging. The views were breathtaking; they drove past acres of mango, banana, and coconut groves. Yet the road was pocked with pits and rocks and the rainy weather was depressing. Few locals turned out along the route to welcome their new head of state. “Everything in this country calls for reconstruction,” Charlotte wrote to Eugénie after finally arriving in the capital two weeks later. “Nothing is to be found, either physical or moral, but what nature provides.” The whole venture, she told the French empress, “remains a gigantic experiment, for one has to struggle against the desert, the distance, the roads, and the most utter chaos.”111
Once in Mexico City, however, Maximilian and Charlotte warmed to their surroundings. As they entered the capital, residents peppered the imperial couple with flowers from the balconies, waved sombreros, and shot off firecrackers. To Charlotte, the capital actually seemed vaguely cosmopolitan. “In Mexico City,” she told Eugénie, “it is very much as in Europe.” Maximilian bragged to his brother about the beauty of Mexican women. The couple particularly enjoyed the palace at Chapultepec—the magnificent castle perched atop a basalt cliff just west of Mexico City. From the top, the views stretched out toward huge volcanoes and snowcapped peaks. Hummingbirds and butterflies fluttered between giant, thousand-year-old cypress trees. Elaborate gardens filled the air with the scent of rose blossoms and oranges.112
In Washington, meanwhile, Lincoln was beginning to pick up the scent of a second term in office. “No man knows what that gnawing is till he has had it,” the president admitted of his rising desire. On June 7–8, Lincoln supporters gathered in Baltimore to re-nominate the president. The delegates took the opportunity to launch one more rhetorical volley at Napoleon. They passed a resolution declaring that the party would “view with extreme jealousy, as menacing to the peace and independence of their own country, the efforts of any such power to obtain new footholds for monarchical governments, sustained by foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States.” The statement, Hay and Nicolay later recalled, “was a wider and more energetic extension of the Monroe Doctrine than had ever before been put forward in so authoritative a form by any body representing the majority of the people of the United States.”113
Lincoln found himself pushing back against his own party to avoid antagonizing the French emperor. The president “heartily approved” the resolutions passed by the convention but went to great lengths to assure the convention committee that he would stand by his cautious approach to the occupation. “While the resolution in regard to the supplanting of republican government upon the Western continent is fully concurred in,” he wrote the delegates, “there might be misunderstanding were I not to say that the position of the government, in relation to the action of France in Mexico, as assumed through the State Department, and approved and indorsed by the convention, among the measures and acts of the Executive, will be faithfully maintained, so long as the state of facts shall leave that position pertinent and applicable.”114
The convention also dumped Lincoln’s vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and replaced him with Tennessee’s military governor, Andrew Johnson. Some observers believed that Lincoln had favored Johnson because he thought a Southerner on the ticket would bolster support for the Union overseas. (Lincoln’s secretaries denied that he had in any way influenced the choice.) In any case, Johnson almost immediately gave Lincoln heartburn when it came to Mexican diplomacy. Shortly after learning of his nomination, Johnson appeared at a huge rally in Nashville. “The day of reckoning is approaching,” the vice-presidential nominee told the cheering crowd. “The time is not far distant when the rebellion will be put down, and then we will attend to this
Mexican affair and say to Louis Napoleon, ‘You can get up no monarchy on this continent.’ ” The crowd broke into wild applause. Johnson sneered that an American invasion of Mexico would be “a sort of recreation” for the battle-hardened troops. “The French concern,” Johnson declared, “would quickly be wiped out.”115
By the middle of 1864, Lincoln was increasingly buoyed by the Union military. “The national resources are not at all exhausted,” the president told one crowd in Philadelphia. “This war has taken three years.… We are going through on this line if it takes three years more.” The audience whooped in delight. Having riled up the throng, the president then asked if he could count on them if he needed even more recruits for Grant’s armies. “Will you give them to me?” he asked. The crowd roared back: “Yes!”116
Throughout the summer, however, Congress continued to press Lincoln on Mexico. The attacks gradually grew more serious. Organized Radical Republicans—not just individual agitators—began using Lincoln’s foreign policy as an election-year cudgel. In late June the Senate sent the president a resolution demanding information about potential arms shipments to Mexican republicans. John Hay asked Seward what to do about the request. The secretary of state was miffed. “Our friends are very anxious to get into a war with France, using this Mexican business for that purpose,” Seward told Hay. “They don’t consider that England and France would surely be together in that event. France has the whip hand of England completely.” The Union was fortunate that England had abandoned its part in the Mexican project, the secretary of state told Hay. Since then, the European powers had been kept apart through “good management” on behalf of Northern diplomats. Why reunite England and France now? “Worse than that,” Seward added, “instead of doing something effective, if we must fight, they are for making mouths and shaking fists at France—warning and threatening and inducing her to prepare for our attack when it comes.”117
There was little chance that any attack would come before the November elections, which were quickly approaching. By the late summer of 1864, Lincoln’s prospects for reelection seemed dim. If things did not improve on the battlefield, Napoleon and Mexico would be someone else’s problem in a matter of months. The president, noted one visitor to the White House in July, “shows marks of mental overwork.” Lincoln felt that his administration had “no friends” in Washington. On August 23, he gathered his cabinet in the Executive Mansion. The president passed around a folded sheet of paper, and, without revealing the contents, asked each cabinet officer to sign the back. “This morning,” Lincoln had written inside, “as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” The president did not reveal the contents until weeks later, when the campaign was finally over.118
Even some of Lincoln’s erstwhile admirers in the diplomatic corps had begun to turn against him. Matías Romero, the increasingly frustrated Washington-based representative of the anti-Maximilian Mexican liberals, met over the summer with James McDougall, the drunken California senator who had been aggressively advocating a harder line on Mexico. McDougall complained to Romero that the president’s reelection would be a “calamity” for Mexico. The senator grumbled about his one-time acquaintance Lincoln’s “very objectionable conduct of United States foreign affairs, most especially his policy in regard to Mexico.” Romero, who was eager for a new American administration that might challenge Maximilian’s regime more forcefully, agreed to help McDougall compile opposition research—a dossier that would help Mexico hawks “vigorously to attack the government on the subject.”119
Lincoln’s reelection prospects improved instantaneously, however, with the arrival of a telegram from General William Tecumseh Sherman on September 3. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” the dispatch read. Lincoln’s armies finally dominated the heart of the Southern Confederacy. From the Hague, the U.S. minister to the Netherlands reported that the news had effected “a marked change in the public sentiment of Europe in regard to our affairs.” The capture of Atlanta “suddenly destroyed the illusion” that the major Confederate cities were invulnerable. As a result, the diplomat observed, “the public judgment on the whole subject fell to pieces.”120
Seward was in the library of his home in Auburn, New York, when he got the news. Euphoric revelers poured into the park across from his house, as cannon thundered and church bells tolled in celebration. The secretary of state gave an hour-long speech lauding the victory. In a reference that Napoleon III would not have missed, Seward compared Lincoln’s secretary of war to the military mastermind of the French Revolution. American newspapers began comparing Sherman to the French emperor’s conquering uncle.121
Actually, imperial adventures remained the last thing that Lincoln and Seward wanted in the autumn of 1864. With the final defeat of the Confederacy in reach, only some unpredictable event like an unwanted war with France had the potential to scuttle the Union victory. In late September, Seward wrote to a Union military commander in New Orleans, reiterating that he should avoid provoking a conflict with France at all cost. “On no account,” Seward wrote, “and in no way, must the neutrality of the United States in the war between France and Mexico be compromised by our military forces.” The president sent a good-natured letter to Napoleon congratulating him on the birth of a second son to his cousin Prince Napoleon Joseph Bonaparte and Marie Clotilde of Savoie. Lincoln wrote that he hoped God would protect the royal family, warmly signing the missive, “Your Good Friend.” Mention of the Monroe Doctrine was nowhere to be found.122
Gratuitous threats were unnecessary. The events of the fall spoke for themselves. Lincoln’s reelection on November 8 could not help but impress the European powers. Around seven p.m. on a drizzly election night, the president and a small band of supporters left the White House and walked over to the War Department to get the returns. Lincoln, despite the wet weather, was in a good mood. In the warmth of the war office, the president joked around and served fried oysters to his guests. The news was all good. Telegram after telegram arrived announcing wide margins for Lincoln. The party did not break up until well after midnight, when Lincoln’s reelection appeared sure. The president ended up winning by more than four hundred thousand ballots and nearly two hundred electoral votes.123
Two nights later, a euphoric crowd arrived at the White House after dark, pushing up to the front gates and then spilling onto the front lawn. The revelers dangled lanterns and hoisted banners, while a band played military marches. The concussion from a pounding cannon shivered the windows of the Executive Mansion, delighting eleven-year-old Tad. The boy flew from window to window taking in the scene.
Lincoln dreaded serenades. “I never know what to say on these occasions,” he once remarked. Nevertheless, he scratched down several dozen lines of a short speech in his clear, looping hand. Then he walked to a window above the north portico, gazing out at the dim shape of the crowd shifting in the dark below. When the revelers spotted the president’s tall, gaunt figure, they erupted in “the maddest cheers”—a “deafening racket” that lasted for several minutes.124
As he began to speak, Lincoln reminded his audience of the Civil War’s global significance. The progress of the war shows “how sound, and how strong we still are,” the president cried, in his shrill, piercing voice with a hint of a Kentucky drawl. The Union victories were not just a message to the Confederacy, Lincoln insisted, but a demonstration to the world. “We have more men now, than we had when the war began. Gold is good in its place; but living, brave, patriotic men, are better than gold.” The London Times considered Lincoln’s brief remarks “one of the best speeches he has ever made.” Lincoln’s secretaries, too, thought the serenade response “one of the weightiest and wisest of all his discourses.” It contained, Hay and Nicolay later hel
d, “the inmost philosophy of republican governments.”125
Meanwhile, congratulations flooded in from supporters at home and abroad. From London, Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association to congratulate Lincoln on “the triumphant war cry of your reelection.” In a private letter to a relative a few weeks after the election, Marx marveled at the “gigantic transformation” in American politics. The results, Marx declared, would “have a beneficent effect on the whole world.” John Lothrop Motley, Lincoln’s minister in Vienna, saw Lincoln’s reelection as a victory for the New World at the expense of Old Europe. Motley told the president that it had been naïve of Union diplomats at the start of the war to think they could change the minds of “the privileged classes of Europe.” Public opinion in elite quarters remained “depraved,” Motley wrote Lincoln. And yet, the diplomat added, the Union effort had managed to secure “the sympathy of the uncounted millions of mankind throughout the civilized world, who would be left without a hope if the great transatlantic commonwealth should go down in this struggle.”126
In Atlanta, meanwhile, Sherman prepared to jump off on his commanding March to the Sea. The disheveled, chain-smoking former banker had recognized the international implications of the war early on. Shortly before Lincoln’s reelection, Sherman telegraphed Grant, suggesting that if they could manage to march an army straight through Confederate territory, it would provide “a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist.” Lincoln, however, was not initially so sanguine. He later admitted to being “anxious, if not fearful” as Sherman’s army of sixty thousand departed Atlanta on November 15 for the Georgia coast.127
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