Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  In late 1898, McKinley appointed Hay secretary of state, bringing him home to Washington. From the windows of Hay’s large, bright office, he could gaze out onto the Ellipse and the Washington Monument. He had come a long way from the uncertain hours of the Civil War. Now the Union was not only safe—it was in a position to challenge the greatest powers in the world. Still, Hay could not entirely bring himself to breathe easily. Lincoln had once remarked that when he had finally fulfilled his deepest ambitions, he had discovered that power consisted of only “ashes and blood.” Now Hay acknowledged the same. “Like many another better man before me,” he wrote one correspondent, “I find power and place when it comes late in life, not much more than dust and ashes.”27

  As secretary of state, Hay moved quickly to shore up U.S. commercial interests. Hay’s foreign-policy mentors had long coveted Asian export markets. Seward had once dreamed of a commercial empire extending “beyond the Pacific Ocean.” Lincoln, too, had strongly supported naval expansion. Now, with the acquisition of the Philippines, the East seemed more accessible than ever. Hay believed China held “the key to world politics for the next five centuries.”

  And yet even as the United States was beginning to make its presence felt in Asia, Hay found that the European powers were also scrambling to carve out “spheres of influence” on the continent. In response, Hay issued his Open Door notes in 1899, condemning the heavy-handed behavior of the powers. The new statement of policy maintained that all countries must have equal access to Chinese markets. Historians debate the ultimate effectiveness of the notes. Yet they did provide a vivid illustration that the Hamiltonian foreign policy of Lincoln and Seward was alive and well in Hay. It is possible to draw a straight line from the commercial reciprocity policies favored by Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay and other Whigs to the Open Door notes of the McKinley era.28

  Despite the paroxysm of violence unleashed by the Spanish-American War, the devout McKinley actually preferred to advance American interests by peaceful expansion. “There is nothing in this world,” the president declared in 1901, “that so much promotes the universal brotherhood of man as commerce.” (McKinley knew the horrors of battle firsthand. As a young Union soldier during the Civil War, he had driven a sandwich cart on the battlefield at Antietam.) Hay recognized that support for America’s burgeoning industry also demanded “a stabilization of the existing political order,” in the words of one historian. As secretary of state, he worked carefully to bring the great powers into what Henry Adams later described as “a combine of intelligent equilibrium.”29

  To many, such a scheme—starting with closer U.S. ties to Britain—seemed suspiciously like an acceptance of the balance-of-power system of alliances and treaties that so many past American diplomats had rebelled against. America had become a great power on a vast wave of economic growth—but had the old republican values that Lincoln had nurtured in Hay vanished in the process? Before 1899, Hay’s biographer Tyler Dennett notes, “the United States had been less interested in the status quo of European Powers than in the spread of republican principles.” The same, of course, had once been true of Hay. Now, as McKinley’s secretary of state, Hay seemed to be inverting his old republican faith. “In ‘McKinleyism,’ ” writes Dennett, “there was no place for crusading.” America’s new world role startled even those closest to Hay. “History,” wrote Henry Adams, “broke in halves.”30

  On September 6, 1901, an assassin shot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. A little more than a week later, the president died, propelling Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to the nation’s highest office. Roosevelt retained Hay as secretary of state, and on the surface at least, they seemed to get along well. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, Hay had written to Roosevelt admitting that the Rough Rider had been right after all about Cuba. Hay, who was old enough to be Roosevelt’s father, would regale the new president with stories of Lincoln reading Shakespeare to him as he drifted off to sleep. Roosevelt once described the charming Hay as “the most delightful man to talk to I ever met.” After Roosevelt was elected president in 1904, Hay gave the president a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair encased inside. Roosevelt wore it proudly at his inauguration.31

  Hay deferred to Roosevelt when necessary and helped the president to gain control over the modern-day Panama Canal Zone. Yet Hay actually preferred McKinley’s careful diplomacy to the belligerent style of the new president. Roosevelt made little effort to help Hay push commercial reciprocity treaties through the intransigent Senate. The new president also encouraged Hay to take a harder line with Britain in a dispute over the Canadian boundary, and he ultimately sent troops to Alaska to drive home his message. Hay complained privately that there was “no comfort” in trying to reason with Roosevelt face-to-face. “When McKinley sent for me,” he told his wife, “he gave me all his time till we got through; but I always find T.R. engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.” Roosevelt later complained that Hay was not “a strong or brave man.”32

  Hay simply had a different conception of strength. Like his mentors Lincoln and Seward, Hay believed the roots of American power lay in a healthy economy and a brisk trade. The proliferating new media also had the ability to shape the environment in which statesmen maneuvered. Toward the end of his life, Hay gave a speech in St. Louis to a group of journalists called “The Press and Modern Progress.” Every day, Hay told his audience, he did business with the most influential men in the world. And yet all of them recognized that “behind the rulers we represent, there stands the vast, irresistible power of public opinion.” No single human—or even a political party—could resist the impersonal elements that defined an age. Hay referred to such forces as the “cosmic tendency.”33

  And yet as a survivor of the Civil War, Hay also understood that cosmic tendencies could be maddeningly hard to read. He knew well, from his careful study of the classics, that empires rise and fall, glories fade and vanish. These were lessons he had learned not from visions of the future, but from echoes of the past. “Men make their own history,” Karl Marx had once written in an essay about Napoleon III, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.”34

  Hay knew that every decision he made as secretary of state was circumscribed by the past—by economic influences he could not fully control, by a public with myths and minds of its own. Luckily for Lincoln’s former secretary, the spirits of the past also included some benevolent souls. By the summer of 1905, Hay had become chronically ill. He was sixty-six, and with each day he appeared a little thinner and grayer. His doctors recommended that he take a leave of absence from the State Department and travel to Europe to restore his health. He took their advice, returning to the United States by steamship in early June. In his cabin aboard the RMS Baltic, Hay slipped in and out of consciousness. One evening he had a dream that he had been called to the White House by the president. The commander in chief in his dream was “kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness,” the secretary of state told his diary. The president gently assigned Hay a bit of menial work, perhaps to make him feel important. The whole episode left Hay haunted by a feeling of “overpowering melancholy.” He had dreamed that the president was Abraham Lincoln again.35

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a special debt to the distinguished scholars of the Civil War and American foreign policy who read early versions of this manuscript (some of them twice) or offered guidance and encouragement, especially Michael Burlingame, James Cornelius, Norman Ferris, Amanda Foreman, George Herring, Howard Jon
es, James McPherson, and Frank Williams.

  I am also deeply fortunate to have been able to work closely with some of the country’s finest biographers and foreign-policy thinkers during my time at Newsweek. Jon Meacham, the magazine’s top editor during several of my years there, has been a longtime booster of my work. I am grateful for his suggestions and encouragement on this project. I am indebted also to Jon’s predecessor as editor, Mark Whitaker, and Mark’s then-deputies Mark Miller and Marcus Mabry, for agreeing to send a green twenty-six-year-old off to cover the world. Evan Thomas, perhaps the single best writer I know, has been reading and critiquing my work for years and has been a steady source of sage counsel. I have learned an enormous amount about telling true stories from Evan’s advice and example.

  My thinking about U.S. foreign policy was shaped by years of working with dozens of accomplished current and former editors and foreign correspondents at Newsweek, including Jeffrey Bartholet, Joanna Chen, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Deidre Depke, Christopher Dickey, Tony Emerson, Dan Ephron, Alexis Gelber, Arlene Getz, Nisid Hajari, Joshua Hammer, Michael Hastings, Michael Hirsh, Scott Johnson, Larry Kaplow, Daniel Klaidman, Adam Kushner, Melinda Liu, Nuha Musleh, Andrew Nagorski, Rod Nordland, Debra Rosenberg, Steven Strasser, Jonathan Tepperman, Tom Watson, Lally Weymouth, and Fareed Zakaria.

  I began this project while working as a foreign correspondent posted in Jerusalem. Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus, where I did some early research, holds a formidable collection of books in English on U.S. and European history. I am grateful to the staff of the interlibrary loan office there, especially Jenny Chahanovski and Gila Emanuel, who cheerfully assisted me in borrowing a number of books from the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University. While posted overseas I also benefited greatly from Internet Archive (archive.org), an invaluable resource that provides user-friendly access to an enormous selection of nineteenth-century memoirs, diaries, and reminiscences.

  Once back in Washington, D.C., where my family and I moved in early 2012, my home base became Gelman Library at George Washington University. I am grateful to the good people of the Foggy Bottom Association, particularly Asher Corson and John Woodward, for facilitating my membership in their neighborhood organization, which made my research at GW possible. Thanks also to Joey Fones at Gelman for helping to arrange admission during my period of transition to the U.S. from abroad.

  At the Library of Congress, the wonderful Michelle Krowl offered a number of useful suggestions and helped me to navigate the Lincoln Papers. During research trips to Springfield, Illinois, I enjoyed getting to know the superb staff at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, including James Cornelius, Debbie Hamm, Eileen Mackevich, Mary Michals, Jan Perone, Patrick Russell, Cheryl Schnirring, and Glenna Schroeder-Lein. Lori Birrell at the University of Rochester, Anna Cook at the Massachusetts Historical Society, B. J. Gooch at Transylvania University, and Holly Snyder at Brown University skillfully helped me with their respective collections. I am particularly grateful to Desiree Butterfield-Nagy at the University of Maine, Orono; Juanita Walker at Prairie View A&M University; and Michelle Ganz at Lincoln Memorial University—who went out of their way to send me copies of materials when I could not visit their libraries myself.

  My family and friends have been reliable sources of inspiration, reassurance—and occasionally research. My brother Jim, a graduate student in architecture, took time from his busy schedule to plunge deep into the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library to look for a decaying pamphlet on free trade written by William Herndon. My brother-in-law Tony Ninan let me stay at his apartment during early trips to the Library of Congress. My brother-in-law Joe Musumeci somehow found time to read and critique my manuscript despite the pleasant distraction of twin baby girls at home. (Joe saved me from an alarming tendency to overuse semicolons; although in my defense, Lincoln once remarked, “I have a great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap.”) Thanks also to Joanna Musumeci, Mathew and Molly Ninan, Seena Ninan, Sean Cassels, Jeremy Saks, Mike and Laura Faga, Jonathan Carpenter and Caroline Nolan, Kevin and Nassrin Flower, and David and Jori Meyer, who, each in their own way, have been sources of support and inspiration over the years. Finally, I am lucky to have a large extended family that has provided willing readers since I was a boy.

  Chad Frazier, a talented doctoral student in the Georgetown University history department, assisted me in running down sources and checking citations. Chad’s thoughtful suggestions, scrupulousness, and attention to detail made this a far better book. My thanks also to Karen Needles, director of the Lincoln Archives Digital Project, who read an early draft of the manuscript. Aviel Roshwald at Georgetown and Tyler Anbinder at GW also each provided useful recommendations as I prepared to begin the fact-checking process.

  My original editor, Sean Desmond, is one of the stars of the book-publishing world. His sharp eye and creative mind significantly improved this book, and he made the whole process a pleasure. When Sean took another job in early 2013, Vanessa Mobley stepped in. Smart, funny, and a tireless advocate, Vanessa is every author’s dream. Thanks also to Sarah Breivogel, Danielle Crabtree, Stephanie Knapp, Maya Mavjee, Claire Potter, Annsley Rosner, Jay Sones, Molly Stern, and the rest of the team at Crown.

  My agent, Amanda Urban, is a font of wise counsel and encouragement. I feel truly lucky for the opportunity to work with Binky, who offered her unerringly shrewd guidance and warm fellowship throughout this project. I am grateful also to the staff of ICM Partners, including Liz Farrell and Colin Graham, for their assistance.

  My parents, Sam and Donna Peraino, have nurtured my desire to write since about the first grade. They have patiently tolerated my interest in foreign affairs, even when it meant reporting from dangerous places—a form of devotion that I am only beginning to appreciate now that I am a father myself. I am endlessly grateful to them.

  My most important debt is to my wife, Reena. Researching a book is a time-consuming process, and the work has sometimes taken me away to dusty archives when I would have preferred to be at home. Reena’s patience and encouragement have been the bedrock upon which this book was built. I love her more than I can say.

  Both my children, Jack and Kate, were born during the research and writing of this book. It is almost impossible to believe that Jack is now old enough to recognize photos of Lincoln (whom he cheekily refers to as “Old Babe”). Kate, I fear, is not far behind. My interest in foreign affairs, at its most basic, is driven by the hope of a better world in their lifetimes.

  SOURCE NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AKM Archiv Kaiser Maximilians von Mexiko, Haus-, Hof-und Staatsarchiv (Vienna, Austria). The Library of Congress holds selected photostatic copies from this archive.

  ALP Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  ALPLM Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  BNA British National Archives, Kew, England.

  CG Congressional Globe. The Library of Congress provides online access to the volumes at http://memory.​loc.​gov/​ammem/​amlaw/​lwcg.​html.

  CWL Basler, Roy P., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1973).

  FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States. The series is listed in the bibliography under its nineteenth-century title, Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs.

  Hay, Diary Burlingame, Michael, and John R. Turner Ettlinger eds. Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).

  HI Wilson, Douglas L., and Rodney O. Davis, eds. Herndon’s Informants (Urbana and Chicago, 1998).

  HL Wilson, Douglas L., and Rodney O. Davis, eds. Herndon’s Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago, 2006).

  HW Herndon-Weik Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  KMIR McLellan, David, ed. Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (Totowa, N.J., 1981).

  ALAL Burlingame, Michael. Abraham
Lincoln: A Life. 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008). For the “director’s cut” of Burlingame’s work, available on the website of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College (www.​knox.​edu/​lincolnstudies.​xml), I have used the abbreviation ALAL-DC.

  LOC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  MECW Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (New York, 1975).

  NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

  MAC Padover, Saul K., ed. Karl Marx on America and the Civil War (New York, 1972).

  RW Fehrenbacher, Don E., and Virginia Fehrenbacher. Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif., 1996).

  Welles, Diary Beale, Howard K., ed. Diary of Gideon Welles. 3 vols. (New York, 1960).

  I have also identified the following sources in the notes by the author’s last name only: BAKER, Jean, Mary Todd Lincoln (New York, 1987); BANCROFT, Frederic, The Life of William H. Seward, 2 vols. (New York, 1900); BAUER, Karl Jack, The Mexican War (New York, 1974); BELL, Herbert, Lord Palmerston (London, 1966); BEVERIDGE, Albert J., Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, 4 vols. (Boston, 1928); CORTI, Count Egon Caesar, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico (Archon Books, 1999); GABRIEL, Mary, Love and Capital (New York, 2011); GOODWIN, Doris Kearns, Team of Rivals (New York, 2005); HANNA AND HANNA, Napoleon III and Mexico (Chapel Hill, 1971); HERRING, George C., From Colony to Superpower (New York, 2008); JENKINs, Brian, Britain and the War for the Union (Montreal, 1974); JERROLD, Blanchard, Life of Napoleon III (London, 1874); MAHIN, Dean, One War at a Time (Washington, 1999); MERRY, Robert W., A Country of Vast Designs (New York, 2009); MONAGHAN, Jay, A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (Lincoln, 1997); PALUDAN, Phillip Shaw, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence, 1994); VAN DEUSEN, Glyndon, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967); WARREN, Gordon H., Fountain of Discontent (Boston, 1981); and WHEEN, Frances, Karl Marx (New York, 1999).