Indeed, as Sherman’s forces plunged on to Savannah, stomping through the red-clay roads with bands blaring “John Brown’s Body,” Europeans seemed puzzled by the maneuver. “Military history,” the London Times observed, “has recorded no stranger marvel than the mysterious expedition of General Sherman, on an unknown route against an undiscoverable enemy.” Henry Adams reported from London that Britons remained skeptical. Still, he added, the “interest felt in his march is enormous.” If Sherman were to succeed, Adams wrote, “you may rely upon it that the moral effect of his demonstration on Europe will be greater than that of any other event of the war. It will finish the rebs on this side.”128
The tens of thousands of battle-hardened Federal troops hurtling southward must have unnerved Napoleon. The Mexican adventure had long since lost its charm for the French emperor. He insisted that Maximilian should abandon any illusions of liberal reforms and first try to get a grip on his country. “I consider,” the French emperor wrote to Maximilian in November, “that Your Majesty is bound to keep the absolute power in your hands for a long time.” From Chapultepec, Maximilian and Charlotte begged the emperor to avoid further drawdowns of French troops. Charlotte complained to Eugénie that their efforts to control the country were “much hampered” by the shrinking French forces. As the New Year dawned, Charlotte reported that the Mexican monarchy was passing through “a grave crisis.” Only “big battalions,” she insisted, would save Napoleon’s project.129
There Has Been War Enough
As Northern armies laid siege to the last bastions of Confederate power, Lincoln began to feel his oats. With Grant’s army stalled near Petersburg, Virginia, a delegation visited the White House, complaining about the Union army’s progress. Lincoln walked over to a map and explained to the visitors how close Grant actually was to victory. The president then broke into one of his ribald stories—this one about “a wicked and lascivious sinner” in Indiana who had asked to be baptized. The preacher took the man to the local river and dunked him in. When the sinner came up for air, “gasping and rubbing his face,” he immediately asked to be dunked again. The preacher was puzzled but ultimately obliged. When the man emerged the second time, he exclaimed, “Now I’ve been baptized twice, and the Devil can kiss my ass.” Lincoln jabbed a finger at a place on the map, and insisted that when his army arrived at that spot, the Union would finally be victorious. “And then,” Lincoln told his visitors, “the Southern Confederacy can kiss my ass.”130
The same went for Napoleon III. Fortunately, by early 1865, French public opinion had also turned violently against the adventure in Mexico. Auguste Laugel, a French correspondent for The Nation magazine, wrote about the changing national mood in his country—and urged U.S. policymakers to avoid sending the military south of the Rio Grande.
Charles Sumner brought Laugel to the White House to see Lincoln in January. The Frenchman found Lincoln in his second-floor office, running one of his huge hands through his coarse, disheveled hair. Through two large windows Laugel could make out “the white streak of the Potomac, the Virginia heights, the unfinished Washington obelisk.” Lincoln displayed an “almost paternal gentleness,” Laugel told his diary. The Americans did not seem inclined to challenge the French emperor. At a dinner at Seward’s the following night, the secretary of state sounded even more sympathetic. “It is not my judgment that the emperor is hostile to us,” Seward said. “It seems to me that I could bring him over.”131
Still, ordinary Americans did not appear so magnanimous. In late January the French journalist visited the Federal armies in the field. There he found “great irritation against England” in the ranks. “Sir,” one young soldier from Vermont told Laugel, “if war were declared against England, were it ten years hence, or twenty, I would not wait a day to enter a regiment, as a private if need be.” Laugel suspected that the troops harbored as great an anger against France—but concealed it “out of politeness.” With each day that passed during his travels, Laugel became more convinced that France should be courting America rather than provoking it. “America has felt her strength,” he later wrote, “and will want to make use of it like a bird who feels its wings.” France, he insisted, should be positioning itself to “profit by this new force”—not antagonize it.132
Back in France, Napoleon seemed to be slowly getting the message. “What I really want,” the emperor told Bigelow in February, “is to get out of Mexico altogether.” The French emperor alleged that his efforts had done some good in Mexico. Maximilian’s regime, Napoleon said in a speech from the throne in February, was “establishing itself, the country is becoming peaceful, its immense resources are being developed; a happy effect of the bravery of our soldiers, the good sense of the Mexican population, and the intelligence and energy of the sovereign.” And yet later in the same speech, Napoleon announced a dramatic reduction in French troop levels around the world. “Thus,” the emperor continued, “all our overseas expeditions are reaching an end.” The French army in Mexico, Napoleon said, “is already returning to France.”133 In the meantime, the French emperor did his best to reassure his protégés in Mexico. “We have been rather uneasy at the news from America,” Napoleon wrote. “However, it looks as if the war will still last a long time, and when peace comes, the United States will think twice before declaring war on France and England.”134
High above Mexico City, in their palace at Chapultepec, Maximilian and Charlotte tried to whistle past the graveyard. With his empire crumbling around him, Maximilian did his best to distract the diplomatic corps in the city. Each Monday Charlotte would throw a ball and invite the “boring” local diplomats. The former Belgian princess would fill the events with “a bevy of the loveliest women,” Maximilian told his brother. Guests at the balls could often hear the rumbling cannon from battles with guerrillas in the distance over the music. The former Austrian archduke resorted to stuffing the foreign envoys with rich cuisine and wines from the imperial cellars. “The diplomatists gorge and swill to such an extent,” Maximilian told his brother, “that as a rule after dinner they can only mumble inarticulate sounds.”135
Lincoln, too, could barely speak as the war entered its final days. Shortly before the second inaugural, the president’s old friend Joshua Speed visited the White House and found Lincoln “worn down in health and spirits.” Lincoln complained that he felt ill. “I am very unwell,” he told Speed. “My feet and hands are always cold. I suppose I ought to be in bed.” The poet Walt Whitman spotted the president at the White House the following week. Lincoln, he reported, appeared “very much worn and tired; the lines indeed of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, the demands of life and death cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness [remained] underneath the furrows.”136
Lincoln’s tragic sensibility seemed to pervade even his public pronouncements. On the cool, cloudy morning of March 4, Lincoln delivered his second inaugural in the shadow of the newly completed Capitol dome. The president, appearing “gaunt” and “skeleton-like” to one observer, perched his steel-rim glasses on his nose and gathered together the oversize sheets of foolscap on which he had written the 703 words of the speech. Lincoln’s audience included Washington’s diplomatic corps—one of whom, a journalist reported, “was so stiff with gold lace” that he could barely sit down. (In his own address, before Lincoln’s, a drunken Vice President Andrew Johnson had insulted the gathered diplomats, mocking the “fine feathers and gewgaws” of their ornate uniforms.) Now, as Lincoln began his own address, a ray of sun emerged from the clouds.137
Lincoln’s second inaugural should be considered one of America’s seminal foreign-policy documents. The only explicit reference to global affairs comes in the last line, with its appeal for a just and lasting peace “with all nations.” Yet the president’s words can be read as a profound meditation on America’s place in the world. Both North and South, Lincoln told the crowd, “read the same Bible, and pray
to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”138
France, England, Spain, Mexico, and Russia, of course, also read the same Bible and prayed to the same god. Understood one way, then, the address trenchantly sets forth a worldview in which Lincoln’s Union is portrayed as one nation among others—not as God’s chosen people on earth. If morality were to be found in international relations, it would emerge from a just balance of competing national interests—not romantic crusades. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a shrewd thinker about the place of love and justice in global affairs, later observed that Lincoln’s second inaugural proclaimed the “partiality of all historic commitments.” The president’s address, Niebuhr concluded, “put the enemy into the same category of ambiguity as the nation to which his life was committed.”139
Europeans appreciated the appeal to international justice. From tense Paris, the Chicago Tribune correspondent reported that Lincoln’s speech “has been received here with unmitigated satisfaction.” Frenchmen praised the address for “its moderation of tone, its wise reticence with respect to the war, the absence of all boasting either as regards the glorious past or the hopeful future.” Bigelow wrote home from the French capital to say that the address “has enjoyed a rare distinction for an American state paper of being correctly translated and almost universally copied here. This, I think, is less due to its brevity than to its almost inspired simplicity and Christian dignity.”140
America’s penny press, on the other hand, did not universally laud the oration. The New York Herald scolded Lincoln for saying nothing about the French presence in Mexico. Lincoln later dismissed the gripes. “Men are not flattered,” the president explained, “by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”141
And yet even as Lincoln proclaimed his government’s humility, the president celebrated the occasion in high style. One fashion magazine reported on the “august assemblage” of “foreign ministers with their wives” that paraded through the inaugural ball. Mary wore a white satin dress with a matching lace flounce. Heavy silk cords and tassels swung from the garment, and white-and-purple flowers adorned her hair. The scene, the correspondent continued, “impressed us as being fully equal to the … pageants of the Old World.” As March progressed, even the president began to loosen up a little, occasionally taking Mary out to the opera. “Mr L.,” the First Lady told a friend, “when he throws off his heavy manner, as he often does, can make himself very, very agreeable.”142
Not all Europeans were comfortable with the rejoicing across the Atlantic. The American president now commanded the world’s largest army and a navy shimmering with ironclads. Any cold analysis of the new balance of power could not fail to take note of the colossus of North America. From Mexico, Charlotte wrote to Eugénie pleading that Napoleon’s regime not be “too optimistic” about their prospects in Mexico. Maximilian’s government was like “ivy,” Charlotte told the empress—“we shall grow into a tree, but for the moment we still need a trunk to cling to.” Austria’s minister in Washington, Baron Wydenbruck, also cautioned against taking American power lightly. “It is certain that the inexhaustible resources at the disposal of the American people have developed in an eminent degree its sense of its own power and of the part reserved for it in the events of the world,” he warned. “The naval powers of Europe will in future have to reckon more and more with this proud and sensitive people.”143
As the spring unfolded, the news only improved for Lincoln. In the first days of April, Grant’s Army of the Potomac finally penetrated the Confederate defenses around Richmond. Lincoln had traveled from Washington to the front lines with his son Tad to witness the fall of the Confederate capital. From City Point, Virginia, the president watched as Grant’s men made their final assault on a rainy, moonless night. Lincoln could hear the pounding of the cannon and see their flickering light reflected against the clouds. On the warm, sunny Sunday morning of April 3, Grant’s men finally broke the Confederate lines and barreled into Richmond. “Thank God that I have lived to see this,” Lincoln exulted. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.” The president and his son walked the shattered streets of the Confederate capital, surrounded by cheering crowds.144
On April 6, Mary Lincoln joined her husband at City Point. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Chambrun—a young grandson of Lafayette’s who was visiting the United States. Mary, long a Francophile,145 had renewed her French studies once again in the last days of the war. She peppered Chambrun with flowers and invitations. Now Mary and the Marquis joined Lincoln in the saloon of the River Queen—the same space in which Stephens had pressed his case for an invasion of Mexico earlier that year. Lincoln showed Chambrun around the room, pointing out where each of the delegates to the conference had sat.
Chambrun thought the sunburned Lincoln’s eyes looked sunken and full of “deep sadness.” He marveled at the way Lincoln would shift, in the course of a single evening, from mirth to melancholy—one moment regaling his company with jokes, and the next closing his eyes to “retire within himself.” One night the Frenchman counted more than twenty “of these alternations and contrasts.” The president’s demeanor left Chambrun with an odd, slightly unsettling feeling. “Every time I have endeavored to describe this impression,” he later recalled, “words, nay, the very ideas, have failed me.”
The Frenchman quizzed the president about his intentions with regard to Mexico. Would he invade? “There has been war enough,” Lincoln replied. “I know what the American people want, but, thank God, I count for something, and during my second term there will be no more fighting.” Still, the president could not resist a subtle jab at his imperial antagonist in the Tuileries. With Chambrun looking on, Lincoln told the band to strike up the “Marseillaise”—the French revolutionary standard that Napoleon III had prohibited. When the band had finished, Lincoln told them to play it again.146
With Richmond finally secure, relief broke over Washington. Seward, for once, was pleased with the outlook for American foreign relations. On the sunny afternoon of April 5, he closed up shop at the State Department and went for his usual afternoon carriage ride, taking along his son Frederick, his daughter Fanny, and one of Fanny’s friends. But as their carriage rattled up Vermont Avenue, the door kept flapping open, and the driver suddenly lost control of his horses. The secretary of state lurched for the reins—but then caught a heel and tumbled into the street.
The fall knocked Seward unconscious, dislocating his shoulder and breaking his jaw on both sides. Blood poured from his nose as he lay in the street with his heavy overcoat thrown over his head. Frederick, along with a clutch of bystanders, carried the secretary of state’s limp body up the stairs to his bed. Fanny sat by her father’s side as he muttered incoherently in his sleep. When he woke up, the secretary of state was in excruciating pain. Seward’s wife, when she arrived at his bedside, found his face “so marred and swollen and discolored that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity; his voice so changed; utterance almost entirely prevented by the broken jaw and the swollen tongue. It makes my heart ache to look at him.” The secretary of state remained incapacitated for days.147
After Lincoln heard the news, he returned to Washington. Inside the secretary of state’s Lafayette Square home, the president found the gaslights turned down to a dim flame. The house was filled with whispers. As Lincoln entered Seward’s sickroom, he found his secretary of state completely wrapped in bandages. He sat down on the edge of Seward’s bed. The New Yorker could hardly speak. “You are back from Richmond?” Seward whispered to the president. “Yes,” Lincoln said, “and I think we a
re near the end, at last.” The president then told stories from the front until Seward drifted off to sleep.148
Lincoln, despite his early tension with Seward, had grown fond of his secretary of state. He had come to rely on the New Yorker’s foreign-affairs counsel.149 Fortunately, the threat of a foreign war now seemed distant. Euphoric Washingtonians paraded through the streets waving flags and exploding fireworks over Lafayette Square. Lincoln even allowed himself to daydream about traveling abroad. He fantasized about taking his family on a vacation to Europe. The president, who came into office with virtually no experience with the world outside America’s borders, explained that he had a strong desire to spend time “moving and traveling.” He also wanted to visit the Middle East. Mary later recalled her husband telling her that “there was no city on earth he so much desired to see as Jerusalem.”150
In the meantime, Lincoln satisfied his escapism by going to the theater.151 The president was particularly captivated by the tales of jealousy, murder, and guilt in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. Lincoln was attending the theater so often in the spring of 1865 that aides worried he would make an easy target for an assassin. His security was so light, one friend lamented, that “any able-bodied woman in this city” would be able to make an attempt. An Iowan had once written to Lincoln’s personal secretary offering to construct a special shirt made of gold-plated chain mail to protect the president. “I am told that Napoleon III is constantly protected in this way,” he explained, “and that his life was thus saved from small pieces of the Orsini shells, which killed his horses and several persons. I shall be very happy to get this done for Mr. Lincoln if he will accept of it.” Lincoln declined the eccentric offer.152
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