Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  On the night of April 14—Good Friday—the president attended the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre with Mary, along with a young Army major and his fiancée. It was a comedy, and loud and frequent peals of laughter filled the theater. Few patrons paid much attention to the twenty-six-year-old actor who crept upstairs toward the president’s box. As the audience tittered and guffawed, the young man peered at the president through a small peephole that had been cut into the door of the box.153 Then he pushed through the entrance and lifted his snub-nosed pistol.154

  John Hay was in his bedroom in the residence of the Executive Mansion that evening, when an anxious, hurried crowd came pouring through the compound’s east gate. Lincoln’s twenty-six-year-old secretary, the White House doorkeeper later recalled, was “a handsome young man with a bloom on his cheeks just like that of a beautiful young lady.” When the doorkeeper told him that Lincoln had been shot, Hay “turned deathly pale, the color entirely leaving his cheeks.” Now the stricken young man hurried down the White House stairs alongside the president’s son Robert, with whom he had been studying Spanish earlier that night. They hustled into a carriage and sped off toward the boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre where Lincoln was being treated for his gunshot wound.155

  Hay had once dismissed the threat of Lincoln’s assassination. It would be impossible to prevent, the young man told his diary, and so was not worth worrying about. Now, however, the nightmare scenario was unfolding before his eyes. When Lincoln’s secretary arrived at the boardinghouse, he found his mentor lying diagonally on the bed, his hair caked with blood. Robert wept uncontrollably. Mary, also wailing, was finally taken from the crowded room. As the sun rose, Lincoln’s breathing grew shallower. Hay was at Lincoln’s bedside when the doctor pronounced the president dead at 7:22 a.m. “Now he belongs to the ages,” said the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.156

  The assassination, as it turned out, was part of a coordinated plot to strike at key figures in the Lincoln administration. Late on the same evening that the president had gone to Ford’s Theatre a tall, dapper figure showed up at the front door of Seward’s home on Lafayette Square, claiming that he brought a message from the secretary of state’s doctor. Despite the late hour, the man was brought upstairs through the dim, gas-lit corridors. Most of the family had already gone to bed. Seward’s son Frederick explained that his father was off limits for the night. At first the messenger seemed ready to depart. “Very well, sir, I will go,” he muttered, and turned back toward the stairs.

  Then, in a flash, the man pulled out a revolver and lunged toward Seward’s son. A gunshot cracked in the quiet house—but the assailant had missed his mark. Now the intruder brought the pistol crashing down onto Frederick’s head, shattering his skull and fracturing the gun itself. In another instant he dashed into Seward’s room, where the bandaged secretary of state was still recovering from his carriage accident. The would-be assassin drew a bowie knife and slashed at Seward’s face and neck. A pool of blood spread across the bed. After the commotion drew the screams of the secretary of state’s family, the attacker fled down the stairs, flailing wildly at anyone who tried to stop his escape. He jumped on a horse and galloped off, leaving Seward for dead.157

  The assailant had cut Seward’s throat on both sides. “His right cheek,” the secretary of state’s wife later recalled, was “nearly severed from his face.” In the commotion, the bandaged and bleeding Seward had tumbled from his bed. Yet the metal frame that had been immobilizing his head after the carriage accident had protected him somewhat, parrying at least some of the knife blows.

  In the days that followed, Seward’s family propped their recovering patriarch on pillows in his darkened room so he could look out the window at Lafayette Square. They were careful, at first, not to tell him about the president’s assassination. But then Seward spotted a lowered flag fluttering in tribute outside his window. “The president is dead,” he told his nurse. “If he had been alive, he would have been the first to call on me. But he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am; and there is the flag at half-mast.”158

  Evil Days

  With Lincoln dead and Seward slowly recovering, the White House team did its best to maintain a steady keel on Mexican policy. Shortly before the assassination, Lincoln and Seward had appointed John Hay as the secretary of legation in Paris. With Napoleon’s troops lingering in Mexico, it was more important than ever that the president and secretary of state have men they could trust in France. Hay was more than willing to make the trip. He was “thoroughly sick of certain aspects of life” in Washington, he had told his brother in March. Lincoln’s young secretary considered the move “a pleasant and honorable way of leaving my present post which I should have left in any event very soon.”159

  After the assassination, Washington became intolerable for Hay. He found the “shadow of recent experiences resting on everything,” he wrote to Robert Lincoln in the months after the president’s death. Hay seemed vaguely disgusted that life could go on after the tragic events of the spring. When he visited Andrew Johnson’s White House shortly before leaving for Paris, Hay found the Executive Mansion “full of new faces.” The specter of the “evil days” of Lincoln’s assassination, Hay told Lincoln’s son, still haunted his former home. Returning to the Executive Mansion was “worse than a nightmare,” Hay wrote. “I got away as soon as I could from the place.”160

  By July, Hay was in Paris. The American legation—with its imperial intrigue and high-stakes diplomatic drama—was a good place to try to forget the “evil days” surrounding Lincoln’s death. With the enormous material strength of the Federal armies on full display, U.S. diplomats were exultant in the summer of 1865. At a Fourth of July party in the French capital, diplomats danced by the light of flaming candelabras as red-white-and-blue fireworks burst overhead. Ecstatic American expats hurrahed and raised their hats as a band blared “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia.”161

  Hay, who possessed a melancholy streak similar to Lincoln’s, could not quite bring himself to enjoy the celebrations. Even in Paris, images of Lincoln were everywhere. Shops sold badly drawn portraits of the American president; Hay complained that they were “mere caricatures” of the man he had known. “When I see anything that you would like in Paris,” Hay wrote to Robert Lincoln in August, “for a moment I wish you were here, and then I think how the light and the noise and the gaiety of this town would jar more heavily on your spirit than it does on mine, and I envy you that you are at home.”162

  With tensions rising over Mexico, Franco-American relations were “not in a state to talk about,” Hay wrote home to his brother. On the one hand, the massive Federal army had largely demobilized over the summer. And yet Johnson’s military still possessed eight times as many men as France had under arms in Mexico. Some former American soldiers had already begun slipping across the border on their own, joining Mexican republicans. Meanwhile, Grant ordered Sheridan to the Rio Grande with fifty thousand troops to make a show of force along the Mexican boundary. Sheridan began smuggling tens of thousands of muskets across the border to Maximilian’s enemies.

  Senior generals, including Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, all seemed eager to invade. Grant considered Napoleon’s actions in Mexico “a direct act of war against the United States.” Sheridan warned in August that it was “no use to beat around the bush in this Mexican matter; we should give a permanent government to that republic. Our work in crushing the rebellion will not be done until this takes place.… Most of the Mexican soldiers of Maximilian’s army would throw down their arms the moment we crossed the Rio Grande.”

  Seward, who had by now largely recovered from the assassination attempt, pushed back against the hawkish generals. At a cabinet meeting attended by Grant in June, the secretary of state “was emphatic in opposition” to the military proposals, Gideon Welles recorded in his diary. The French-sponsored monarchy “was rapidly perishing,” Seward maintained. American interference wo
uld only “prolong [Maximilian’s] stay and the Empire also,” he said. The secretary of state, Hay and Nicolay later recalled, “carried on with the same unswerving skill, dignity, and forbearance the policy inaugurated in the lifetime of Mr. Lincoln.” Still, the army was now wildly popular in the wake of the Union victory. The belligerence of its senior officers posed serious new risks to what had been the Lincoln administration’s conciliatory strategy.163

  By the fall of 1865, Napoleon and Eugénie were feeling heavy pressure to end the Mexican adventure. “I hope that America will not trouble the new empire,” Napoleon wrote to Maximilian in August. The emperor advised his protégé to “cause us no embarrassment, since France is making such sacrifices for your support.” Eugénie complained that American diplomats were starting to get “discourteous” in their demands to end the Mexican venture. “It is very necessary,” Eugénie wrote to Charlotte in late September, “not to give rise to any complications in that quarter.”164

  From London, Lord Palmerston tried to reassure Maximilian. Despite the bellicose American rhetoric, Palmerston wrote, Johnson’s men would “have enough to do reorganizing their immense territories and repairing the calamities following the disastrous war” that they would probably “refrain from disturbing your majesty.” But then in October, the legendary British statesman died. It was “strange,” wrote Queen Victoria, “to think of that strong, determined man, with so much worldly ambition—gone!” British liberals were less forgiving. “I wish,” wrote John Bright, whose portrait Lincoln had kept in his anterooms, that “there were more to be said in his praise.” Modern historians use Palmerston’s death to mark the beginning of the British empire’s relative economic decline.165

  By the holiday season, the French imperial couple were doing everything they could to try to charm the Americans in Paris. At a dinner party on Christmas Eve, the emperor confided to Bigelow that he was eager to withdraw his troops from Mexico. It was “too expensive,” Napoleon said with a smile, to keep French soldiers there indefinitely. Bigelow assured the emperor that the Johnson administration would do “nothing to embarrass him.” Both Napoleon and Eugénie were all sweetness and light with the American. The empress told Bigelow that she was eager to travel to the United States now that the war was over. (Her doctor had recommended a trip across the Atlantic to treat a persistent cough.) Recounting the evening in a confidential letter to Seward, Bigelow wrote that he “derived the impression from these conversations that the Emperor had made up his mind to seize the first available opportunity to close his accounts with Mexico and Maximilian, and was anxious that we should do nothing to render his task more difficult.”166

  As the New Year dawned, even the relatively junior Hay found himself showered with invitations to the Tuileries. On the morning of January 1, Hay was presented at the imperial court for the first time. His uniform, he wrote home to his mother, included “more gold than broadcloth. I was as gorgeous as a drum-major.” Hay and the other diplomats lined the walls of the emperor’s throne room, which was filled with imperial officials dressed in “shining raiment.” Napoleon slowly worked the room, speaking a few words to each guest. “He is a short, stubby looking man,” Hay told his mother, “not nearly so tall as I.” (Hay was five foot two.) The emperor “wore a rotten threadbare uniform with tarnished epaulettes.” Napoleon’s face, Hay wrote, “is just as you see it in the pictures, only older and more lifeless. I never saw so dead a looking eye.” When the emperor arrived at the American delegation, he quizzed Hay about life in Washington. “Were you present,” Napoleon quietly asked Hay, “at the death of President Lincoln?”167

  In the summer of 1866, the Empress Charlotte made a surprise trip to Paris to press her case one last time with the imperial couple. Eugénie complained to a friend that the visit was “like a bolt out of the blue.” Charlotte, too, was taken slightly aback when Eugénie arrived at her suite at the Grand Hôtel. “The Empress,” Charlotte wrote home to Maximilian, “has lost much of her youth and strength since I last saw her.” Charlotte was put off by the ignorance of French officials about conditions in Mexico. “What struck me,” she told Maximilian, “was that I know more about China than these people here know about Mexico, where they have ventured upon one of the greatest enterprises in which the French flag has ever been involved.”168

  As Charlotte pressed her case, Hay scrambled to gather what intelligence he could. Lincoln’s former secretary met with the French foreign minister and quizzed him about the visit. The official assured Hay that despite Charlotte’s visit, there would be no change in the French government’s promise to withdraw its troops. The French foreign minister, Hay explained, “was so emphatic in his assertion of the continued intention of the Emperor’s Government to adhere to the arrangement already announced and so careful to say nothing of the objects for which the princess [Charlotte] is in Paris, that I did not deem it prudent to insist upon an answer on that point.” Still, Hay reported that he was hearing in “informed circles” that Charlotte was complaining that without “timely assistance” from France, the Mexican venture would be “at an end.” Other confidants of the emperor assured Hay that Napoleon had no intention of changing his plans as a result of Charlotte’s pleas.169

  With Charlotte’s mission at an end, Napoleon finally decided to level with Maximilian. “We had the great pleasure,” the emperor wrote on August 29, “in receiving the Empress Charlotte, and yet it was very painful to me to be unable to accede to the requests which she addressed to me.” The Mexican venture was approaching “a decisive moment,” Napoleon admitted. “It is henceforward impossible for me to give Mexico another écu or another man.… Can you maintain yourself by your own strength? Or will you be forced to abdicate?” Rising tensions on the Continent were taking all the French emperor’s energies. “We can no longer lull ourselves with illusions,” he told Maximilian, “and it is necessary that the Mexican question, in so far as it concerns France, should be settled once for all.”170

  Napoleon’s decision to abandon Mexico marked a significant, if posthumous, vindication of Lincoln and Seward’s foreign policy. Both the American president and his secretary of state saw that the shifting geopolitical landscape in Europe, combined with the Union’s ruthlessly efficient war effort at home, would make any French venture in Mexico a nearly hopeless endeavor. The best policy would be, as Lincoln once put it, simply to “take to the woods.” A strategy of delay would give the president the time to consolidate his strength north of the Rio Grande. At the same time, the powerful, impersonal forces that were combining to scuttle the French emperor’s plans would be left alone to work themselves out.

  And yet successfully maintaining that policy of restraint actually demanded determined leadership. Lincoln and Seward—confronted with hawks in Congress, the military, the press, and representatives of the Confederate States—firmly resisted calls for an invasion to oust the French-supported regime. An invasion, at the least, would have risked drawing Napoleon’s forces into the American conflict. Lincoln and Seward’s conciliatory policy gave Napoleon enough political cover to pull out on his own. The whole episode left a lasting imprint on the American diplomatic tradition. Lincoln and his team had proven that the American chief executive and his State Department could shrewdly manage a dangerous foreign-policy crisis, even in the face of stiff opposition from his own countrymen.

  The emperor Maximilian was less successful at beating back his domestic foes. The former Austrian archduke decided to remain in Mexico for the denouement of his short-lived empire. As republican forces closed in on the capital in the early months of 1867, Maximilian fled the city with 1,500 men and a few pieces of artillery. He made a last stand at Queretaro, one of the final bastions of imperial support. Guerrillas ultimately surrounded the village, intimidating the inhabitants by sending dead bodies floating into town on the currents of the local river. Finally they captured the emperor, locking him in a makeshift prison cell in a convent with little more than a crucifix and a coupl
e of candlesticks. On the morning of June 19, Maximilian’s captors marched him to a hill along the outskirts of Queretaro. “I forgive everybody,” the Mexican monarch cried as he faced his firing squad. “Long live Mexico, long live independence!” Then, under a clear blue sky, a team of riflemen fired six bullets into his body.171

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lincoln vs. Lincoln

  JOHN HAY WAS IN VIENNA ON THE DAY OF MAXIMILIAN’S FUNERAL, IN JANUARY 1868. THE FORMER HAPSBURG PRINCE HAD BEEN VIRTUALLY DISOWNED BY AUSTRIA’S ROYAL FAMILY AFTER he accepted the throne of Mexico. Now, however, ordinary Austrians respectfully welcomed home his lifeless body, lining the route as the solemn cortege carrying the former archduke’s corpse wound its way to its crypt. “All the streets and adjoining squares were filled with a vast crowd of citizens and strangers,” Hay wrote home to Seward. Lincoln’s former secretary was struck by the “genuine and touching” sympathy for Maximilian that spilled into the streets. Still, despite the nationwide mourning, Hay told Seward that he considered the whole affair a vindication of republican principles—“a sensible blow at the prestige of kings.”1

  In the years following the Civil War, Hay was uniquely positioned to observe the conflict’s international fallout. After his stint in Paris, the young Illinoisan took diplomatic posts in both Madrid and Vienna. Along the way, he stopped in London to watch the wrangling in the British Parliament over the Reform Bill of 1867—a measure that would ultimately double the number of Britons eligible to vote. Hay sat spellbound in the gallery as legendary figures like William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli debated the legislation. The bill had been inspired by far more than just the Civil War. Still, the redemption of the world’s most prominent democracy had indeed chastened many English aristocrats and softened their resistance to reforms. “It is probably no exaggeration,” notes the scholar James McPherson, “to say that if the North had lost the war, thereby confirming Tory opinions of democracy and confounding the liberals, the Reform Bill would have been delayed for years.”2