Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Lincoln had believed strongly in the power of America’s example. In the years following the American Revolution, the president’s idol George Washington had once warned his countrymen that “the eyes of the whole world” were “turned upon them.” The nation’s first president believed that the republican experiment in North America was being carefully observed by both autocrats and liberals across the globe. “With our fate,” Washington had declared in 1783, “will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” Lincoln took that message to heart. The outcome of the Civil War, he told Congress in his first address to the body in July 1861, “embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether … a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”3

  During the Civil War, embracing that faith in democratic government had required the suspension of disbelief. In the midnineteenth century, reasoned observation alone did not necessarily suggest that democracy was on the march. Lincoln, as the crisis deepened, had found himself making an almost mystical appeal to his countrymen. Hay, for one, found himself eagerly worshipping at the side of the new high priest of freedom. “I consider Lincoln Republicanism incarnate, with all its faults and all its virtues,” he wrote in a letter to Billy Herndon shortly after Lincoln’s assassination. “As, in spite of some evidences, Republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.”4

  Lincoln’s presidency and the outcome of the Civil War had resoundingly affirmed American ideals. They also positioned the nation for a dramatic leap onto the world stage. The country’s astonishing expansion in the postwar years—helped along, at least in part, by economic policies crafted by Lincoln, Seward, and their allies—soon placed the United States amid the ranks of the world’s largest and wealthiest countries. In the years between 1860 and 1900, the U.S. population doubled. By 1874 the nation began to export more than it imported—a dynamic that lasted for almost the next century. Annual crude oil production ballooned from 3 million barrels in 1865 to over 55 million barrels in 1898, and the country saw a more than fivefold increase in the production of steel rails. “The figures,” President William McKinley declared in 1901, “are almost appalling.”

  As the economy surged, Hay began to advocate a greater world role for the United States. More than thirty years after the end of the Civil War, he would help to preside over the birth of American imperialism. In late 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, McKinley chose Hay to be his secretary of state. By then, the United States had become an unquestioned economic and political colossus. Power and prosperity sometimes seemed to turn American idealism on its head. Hay, in one letter to Theodore Roosevelt, described the conflict with Spain as “a splendid little war.” Lincoln’s former secretary had traveled a long way from the “terrible war” that his boss had once lamented.5

  There is, then, a natural tension embedded in a Lincolnian foreign policy.6 On the one hand, Lincoln’s moral vision represented American idealism at its best. The Railsplitter, who had never been overseas, understood better than most of his countrymen how slavery undermined the nation’s prestige in the international arena. “I hate [slavery],” Lincoln told one Springfield audience long before he became president, “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.” Lincoln’s later justification of the war in his Gettysburg Address rings with reformist overtones. Only through a cleansing “new birth of freedom,” he declared, would the United States take its rightful place on the world stage.7

  Yet the Union victory also left a more disconcerting imprint on American foreign policy. In the decades that followed, blind faith in American ideals would sometimes come to inspire intolerance and dogmatism. In his 1962 classic, Patriotic Gore, the iconoclast Edmund Wilson acidly derides the “insufferable moral attitudes” spawned by the War Between the States. The outcome of the conflict, notes one modern diplomatic scholar, “purged some old myths only to fuse nationalism even more inextricably with a cult of material progress disguised as a holy calling. That coalescence of Union and creed, power and faith, rendered Americans ever since uniquely immune to cynicism and uniquely prone to sanctimony.”8

  The American foreign-policy tradition is riven by this identity crisis. The mercurial nature of the U.S. approach to diplomacy, former senator William Fulbright has observed, “is not an accident but an expression of two distinct sides of the American character. Both are characterized by a kind of moralism, but one is the morality of decent instincts tempered by the knowledge of human imperfection and the other is the morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading spirit.”9

  Lincoln, on his best days and at his most mature, was the personification of the former type. He infused his moralism with a highly disciplined sense of justice. He was not constitutionally prone to emotional crusades. While his countrymen crowed about regenerating the world, from Mexico to Hungary, Lincoln took a more reasoned, pragmatic approach. “Did Mr. Lincoln rule himself by the head or heart?” Billy Herndon once asked rhetorically. “He was great in the head and ruled and lived there.” Lincoln’s patience and sense of human frailty usually prevented his democratic sympathies from sounding sententious.10

  Lincoln’s foreign-affairs legacy is marked by one other “peculiar paradox,” as the scholar David Donald has labeled it. Lincoln and Seward were both shapers and products of the Whig ethos, which historically had defined itself in opposition to presidential excess. And yet amid the national emergency of the Civil War, Lincoln and his secretary of state firmly—if temporarily—enlarged the powers of the executive to direct global affairs. The president swiftly proclaimed a blockade and expanded the navy by executive order. After his ships clashed with Britain’s on the high seas, he confined Congress’s role in the Trent affair to private consultations with key members. As the conflict intensified, Lincoln used his bully pulpit to speak directly to the British and French publics. In the war’s final days, he resolutely defied hawks in Congress who were eager to invade Mexico. Yet at the same time, the president steadfastly supported congressional measures like the Legal Tender Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act, which worked to strengthen the bonds that united the state. Those legislative reforms, combined with Lincoln’s executive innovations, ultimately helped to boost the country to greater global prominence.11

  Hay found himself caught between the competing traditions that Lincoln’s presidency had helped to inspire. On the one hand, Lincoln’s former secretary had once proclaimed himself “a republican until I die,” strongly dedicated to a belief in popular government. And yet he also plunged into the heady expansionist currents of the late nineteenth century, marrying the daughter of a business tycoon and lusting after what he once called “the pole-star of humanity, $!” As secretary of state, he was a firm advocate of executive power, tangling repeatedly with Congress over foreign policy. Hay’s life was defined by the tension between the individual conscience that Lincoln had helped to shape and the rise to global power that the president had helped to touch off. In the life of his secretary, Lincoln did battle with himself.12

  After his diplomatic travels in the wake of the Civil War, Hay returned to the United States in 1870. He eventually settled in a massive, brick-and-mahogany mansion on Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. Hay’s new home soon became a gathering place for the city’s power brokers. (His dining room was larger than the one at the White House.) He filled his oak-paneled library with souvenirs from his days as Lincoln’s secretary. Hay particularly liked to show off two different bronze life masks of Lincoln’s face that he kept in the library—one made in 1860 and the other in 1865. Lincoln’s former secretary pointed out to visitors how much his boss had aged dur
ing his time in office.13

  From the windows of his home, Hay could see both his old bedroom at the White House and Seward’s former place on Lafayette Square. Henry Adams later recalled an aging and wistful Hay gazing out his windows at the Civil War–era officers walking in the park. Lincoln’s former secretary “would break off suddenly the thread of his talk,” Adams recalled, “as he looked out of the window on Lafayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or his cocktail: ‘There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!’ ” For his children, Hay would turn old Civil War songs into lullabies, sending them off to bed amid the strains of Federal battle hymns.14

  Hay eventually made a name for himself as a writer, first for the New York Tribune—the same “Great Moral Organ” that had employed Karl Marx—and later as a poet, novelist, and historian. His most ambitious literary undertaking was the ten-volume biography of Lincoln that Hay produced with the former president’s other secretary, John G. Nicolay. The serialized version began to appear in Century magazine in 1886. The whole venture gave Hay the opportunity to reexamine and reevaluate the key episodes in Lincoln’s foreign policy—sometimes in light of surprising new documents unearthed in the president’s private papers.15

  Writing at the height of the Gilded Age, Hay and Nicolay were not reflexively opposed to American expansion. In their section covering the annexation of Texas, Lincoln’s former secretaries suggested that the absorption of the territory was probably inevitable. “Here was a great empire offering itself to us,” they wrote. “It may be doubted whether there is a government on the face of the earth, which, under similar circumstances, would not have yielded to the same temptation.”

  Yet at the same time, Hay and his coauthor lauded Lincoln’s Mexican War stance for its prudence. In the process, Lincoln’s former secretaries kneecapped Billy Herndon, who happened to be at work on his own Lincoln biography. Hay and his coauthor criticized the president’s former law partner for his overemotional defense of the war. Herndon was “young, bright, and enthusiastic,” Hay wrote, but in his letters to Lincoln during the Mexican War, he had also displayed “more heart than learning, more feeling for the flag than for international justice.” Lincoln had repeatedly tried to convince Herndon of “the difference between approving the war and voting supplies to the soldiers,” they wrote. Yet Lincoln’s law partner had remained “obstinately obtuse.”16

  Perhaps the book’s most important contribution to understanding the foreign policy of the Civil War was its section on Seward’s “foreign-war panacea.”17 Nicolay and Hay had discovered Seward’s April 1, 1861, memo, “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” buried in the cache of papers provided by Robert Lincoln. Seward’s influence on Hay was arguably as important as Lincoln’s, and Lincoln’s former secretary owed much of his diplomatic career to the New Yorker. Yet Seward’s April Fool’s power play clearly startled Hay. Lincoln’s former secretaries described Seward’s memo as an “extraordinary state paper,” and suggested that the secretary of state intended to “heal a provincial quarrel in the zeal and fervor of a continental crusade.” Still, they added, Seward quickly understood “how serious a fault he had committed.” In any event, the president magnanimously let the episode pass.18

  Hay and Nicolay also wove a slightly subtler foreign-policy message through their book. Lincoln and Hay were both reformers, convinced that democracy was on the march throughout the world. Yet they both also balked when reform appeared too self-righteous. Lincoln had given Hay a signed copy of his second inaugural—that mystical appeal for justice. Now Hay included in his history another document that he had discovered among Lincoln’s papers after his assassination. “In the present civil war,” Lincoln had written in a memo to himself in 1862, “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” Hay gave the fragment the title: “Meditation on the Divine Will.” Applied to the international arena, the document’s message could be understood as an indictment of sanctimonious crusades. There was a difference between, on the one hand, embracing progress and setting an example for “the eyes of the whole world,” as Washington put it, and on the other hand, trying to reshape the globe in one’s image at the point of a gun.19

  Billy Herndon, for his part, derided Hay’s Lincoln biography as “unimportant trash.” Herndon’s own Life of Lincoln, released in 1889, carried a slightly different foreign-policy message. After Lincoln’s death, Herndon had adopted an increasingly liberal worldview—and one often at odds with Lincoln’s Whig reticence. Whereas Lincoln had favored a tariff, Herndon described himself as “a radical free trade man.” Herndon’s global vision was full of millennial overtones. Republicanism, Lincoln’s former law partner told his readers, was “destined to overshadow and remodel every government upon the earth. The glorious brightness of that upper world, as it welcomed [Lincoln’s] faint and bleeding spirit, broke through upon the earth at his exit—it was the dawn of a day growing brighter as the grand army of freedom follows in the march of time.”20

  Herndon died in 1891, “poor as Job’s turkey,” as he once put it. Hay, on the other hand, continued to thrive professionally. Flush with funds from book royalties and investments, he donated large sums of money to Republican political candidates as the nineteenth century came to a close. In 1897, President William McKinley, one of the key beneficiaries of Hay’s largesse, sent Lincoln’s former secretary into the diplomatic swirl once again. McKinley named Hay ambassador to the Court of St. James in London—an increasingly critical post as the United States began to supplant Britain as the world’s preeminent power.21

  Back in December 1861, at the height of the Trent affair, Hay had complained that “the arrogance of England must be distinctly met and tamed, and I think Providence has specially detailed the United States for that particular duty.” Yet by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Hay had come to love and respect Britain. He had traveled to the island nation frequently throughout the 1880s and once even thought of buying a country house there. As he aged, Hay—who had once proclaimed himself full of “democratic bigotry”—now increasingly began to appreciate British elitism. Compared to the wild tumult of American political life, Hay found the stability in Britain comforting. He believed strongly that the world’s shifting power relationships also demanded closer ties with London. American jingoes did not always see things the same way. Theodore Roosevelt complained the year before Hay left for London that Lincoln’s former secretary had become “more English than the English.”22

  Hay recognized that as British power was waning, the United States would need to fill the vacuum. Though Hay had long been somewhat cautious about territorial expansion, he understood that America’s new role would mean extending U.S. influence in ways that would help maintain the worldwide balance of power. By the 1890s, Hay favored annexing the Hawaiian Islands—a position he had opposed earlier in his career. Hay had come to admire Britain’s management of its empire, studying the mechanics of the “Pax Britannica” in places like India and Egypt. The transition to American preeminence, Hay believed, would require a “partnership in beneficence” between Britain and the United States. In one speech at a banquet in London, Hay remarked that there was “a sanction like that of religion” that bound the two nations. “We are joint ministers,” he told his audience, “of the same sacred mission of liberty and progress.” Queen Victoria praised Hay as “the most interesting of all the ambassadors I have known.”23

  Hay was on vacation in Cairo in February 1898 when news arrived that the USS Maine had exploded in Havana Harbor, killing more than 250 American servicemen. American hawks immediately raised a war whoop. Theodore Roosevelt, then an assistant secretary of the navy in the McKinley administration, complained about the president’s sl
ow pace of retaliation. McKinley had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair,” Roosevelt sniped. When war finally erupted in April, the assistant secretary of the navy joined a regiment of American troops and shipped off for Cuba. Hay mocked Roosevelt for enlisting in “a cowboy regiment,” and initially appeared far less eager for a war. Still, Hay wrote home to McKinley, informing him that British opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of a conflict. “The commonest phrase,” Hay reported, “is ‘We wish you would take Cuba and finish up the work.’ ” The American ambassador recognized that a conflict might well draw Britain and the United States even closer together.24

  Hay’s detractors have used his description of the Spanish-American conflict as “a splendid little war” to paint him as a rabid imperialist. Actually, the phrase was in part a plea for moderation. The war, Hay added in the same missive, “is now to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.” Still, by the end of the conflict, Hay had turned into an energetic cheerleader for the American effort. When the war eventually expanded to Southeast Asia, Hay ultimately supported the annexation of the Philippines. Lincoln’s former secretary was primarily attracted by the commercial and strategic advantages of possessing the islands. Yet as he attempted to justify the expansionist policies, he could sometimes be as vigorous a crusader as Herndon. “I cannot for the life of me,” he told one correspondent, “see any contradiction between desiring liberty and peace here and desiring to establish them in the Philippines.”25

  Historians have long found it difficult to neatly categorize Hay’s foreign-policy views. On the one hand, Lincoln’s former secretary could proclaim himself a die-hard republican; on the other, he could laud British elitism. On some days he might plead for international justice; on others he might herald American power. Hay himself recognized that his views were not always coherent. “I do what seems possible every day,” he once wrote Henry Adams, “not caring a hoot for consistency and the Absolute.” At his worst, Hay could appear an unprincipled hypocrite. And yet on his best days, he displayed some of the magic of his one-time mentor—skillfully pursuing American interests while simultaneously appealing to the “considerate judgment of mankind.”26