Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  PROLOGUE

  1. For Mary Lincoln’s temper see, for example, Jesse Weik interview with Margaret Ryan, Oct. 27, 1886, Weik Papers, box 2, memo book 1, ALPLM. The most complete collection of Mary Lincoln’s outbursts is in Burlingame, “The Lincolns’ Marriage,” Inner World, p. 277. For Mary’s desire to visit Europe, see Mary Lincoln to Emilie Todd Helm, Sept. 20, [1857,] in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 49–50.

  2. Lincoln’s promises to take his wife abroad are in Noyes W. Miner, “Personal Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln,” p. 54, Miner Papers, ALPLM; and William Henry Herndon interview with Mary Todd Lincoln, [Sept. 1866,] in HI, p. 359. See also Bradford, “The Wife of Abraham Lincoln,” Harper’s, pp. 496–97; Bryan, Great American Myth, p. 177; Goodwin, p. 733; White, A. Lincoln, p. 673; Donald, Lincoln, p. 570.

  3. Mary Lincoln interview with Herndon, [Sept. 1866,] HI, p. 357; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, p. xx; French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 497 (“airs of an empress”); John Lothrop Motley to his wife, June 20, 1861, in Curtis, ed., The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, p. 387 (“sir”); John Bigelow Diary, v. 35, entry for July 9, 1861, John Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library (“Tres poo”). See also Burlingame, “The Lincolns’ Marriage,” p. 270; Baker, pp. 41–42; ALAL, v. 2, p. 259.

  4. Herndon to Jesse Weik, Jan. 12, 1886, HW, LOC (“toothache”). For Lincoln’s desire to travel abroad, see Weik Papers, box 2, memo book 2, ALPLM; Wilson, “Recollections of Lincoln,” Putnam’s Magazine, v. 5, no. 5, Feb. 1909, p. 517; Reminiscences of George Hartley, Chicago Daily News, Jan. 28, 1909, cited in ALAL-DC, ch. 1, pp. 2–3. The quote about “a great empire” is in Lincoln’s “Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan,” Aug. 27, 1856, CWL, v. 2, p. 364. On the conflict’s global importance see Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 268; and Hay, Diary, p. 20, entry for May 7, 1861.

  5. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 179–181; McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 816; Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 1; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 12, 1865, in White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, p. 196; Van Deusen, p. 360; Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, v. 2, p. 239n1 (“despotic ferocity”).

  6. For eyewitness accounts of the assassination, see “Major Rathbone’s Affidavit,” in J. E. Buckingham Sr., Reminiscences and Souvenirs of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, p. 73; Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,” Century, p. 634; Charles A. Leale to Benjamin Butler, July 20, 1867, in Good, ed., We Saw Lincoln Shot, p. 60; Horatio Nelson Taft Diary, entry for Apr. 30, 1865, LOC. See also Brooks, “ ‘The Deep Damnation of His Taking-Off,’ ” in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed, p. 190; Helm, Mary, Wife of Lincoln, pp. 257–58; Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 382; Goodwin, p. 738; Donald, Lincoln, p. 595–96; ALAL, v. 2, p. 809–810, 816–819; White, A. Lincoln, pp. 673–74; Baker, p. 248; Oates, With Malice Toward None, locs. 8490–8502.

  7. Notable exceptions include the work of Jay Monaghan, whose 1945 classic, A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers, emphasizes Lincoln’s command of foreign policy. Though Monaghan’s account exaggerates Lincoln’s role, it is still the best jumping-off point for examining Lincoln’s involvement in Civil War diplomacy. After decades of revisionism de-emphasizing Lincoln’s role as a diplomat, more recent studies by Howard Jones and Dean Mahin treat Lincoln as a diplomat by nature. Mahin’s study finds that “Lincoln set the major foreign policy goals of the Union government, determined U.S. responses to a series of diplomatic developments and crises, and made a number of other presidential decisions designed to reduce the chance of war with England or France.” And yet, as Jones notes, Lincoln the human being tends to get lost in Mahin’s comprehensive survey of Civil War diplomacy. Jones’s own excellent studies argue that Lincoln “personified a diplomat, as shown in his appointments, his realization that international (and domestic) law became flexible in wartime, and his ability to make meaningful public pronouncements.” Jones’s work, however, is not intended to be a holistic portrait of Lincoln. See Mahin, p. 3 and passim; Jones, “Forgotten ‘Near War’: Lincoln’s Civil War Diplomacy,” American Diplomacy, v. 6, no. 1, 2001; and Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 322. For more on Lincoln’s diplomatic role, see Jones, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom, and Jones’s introduction to the 1997 Bison Books edition of A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers. George Herring, in his magisterial history of American foreign policy, From Colony to Superpower, also admires Lincoln’s “uniquely American brand of practical idealism.” See Herring, pp. 5, 228, and 963.

  8. Lincoln visited Canada on a trip to Niagara Falls. See Mary Lincoln to Emilie Todd Helm, Sept. 20, [1857,] in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 49–50. See also Lincoln Lore, No. 319, May 20, 1935 (copy in Ruth Painter Randall Papers, LOC); Herring, p. 228; Monaghan, p. 13. On Lincoln’s lack of European friends, see Lincoln to Forney, July 28, 1864, in CWL, v. 7, p. 468. See also Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell, Dec. 20, 1859, CWL, v. 3, p. 511 (“wizzard”); Barlow A. Ulrich to William Henry Herndon, Sept. 21, 1866, in HI, p. 352 (immigrant voters); ALAL, v. 1, p. 584 (“Beans”). For the Colombian diplomatic post see Bullard, “When John F. Stuart Sought to Send Lincoln to South America,” p. 21. See also Ninian W. Edwards interview with William Henry Herndon, Sept. 22, 1865, in HI, p. 133 (“crazy”).

  9. Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 36, entry for Mar. 27, 1861 (“effect of a smack”); Hay, Diary, p. 14, entry for Apr. 30, 1861 (“When go back Iowa?”); Nordholt, “The Civil War Letters of the Dutch Ambassador,” p. 361 (“laughs uproariously”); Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 168–69 (“glittered grand”); Lutz, “Rudolph Schleiden and the Visit to Richmond, April 25, 1861,” p. 210 (“apt to make blunders”).

  10. On the character of Lincoln’s diplomatic corps, see Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 29; ALAL, v. 2, pp. 93–95; Monaghan, p. 68. Both Monaghan and Jones point out that there was also a logic in appointing abolitionists to foreign posts: it sent a message to European countries that the U.S shared their antislavery sympathies. See also Foner, Fiery Trial, p. 193. The “sot/rake/swindler” quote is from the New York World, Mar. 12, 1861. See also Adams Jr., Autobiography, p. 62 (“wagged”). Adams adds, however, that despite Seward’s loose lips, he never saw the New Yorker “approaching drunkenness.”

  11. Hay, Missouri Republican, Nov. 17, 1861, in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 140 (“Hottentot” etc.); Perkins, History of the Monroe Doctrine, pp. 125–26 (“public business”); Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, p. 637 (“not his wife”); Bigelow, Retrospections, v. 2, pp. 234–35; Hay, Diary, p. 8, entry for Apr. 22, 1861, and p. 116, entry for Nov. 22, 1863 (“wonderful ass”); Pease and Randall, eds., Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, v. 1, p. 595, entry for Dec. 12, 1862 (“little sense”).

  12. For a nuanced, if slightly dated, treatment of European attitudes toward the war, see Nevins, The War for the Union, v. 2, pp. 242–74. Nevins notes that “the danger of Anglo-French involvement did not arise from Machiavellianism in high places. It arose, fundamentally, from the fact that when the supposedly short war of 1861 was converted into the patently long war of 1862, without any grand moral purpose to justify it, without any prospect that either side could rationally impose its will on the other, and with steadily increasing hardship to other lands, impatience inevitably seized foreign peoples and leaders.” Nevins, The War for the Union, v. 2, p. 272. See also Lord Palmerston to Lord John Russell, Jan. 19, 1862, Russell Papers, BNA. The London Times, Norman Ferris suggests, offered “echoes of English aristocratic thought” in its editorials, arguing, “Instead of a great, united, irresistible nation, they [the North and South] will be two jealous States watching each other.” (London Times, Sept. 18 and 19, 1861, quoted in Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy, p. 132.) Still, there’s a subtle nuance between simple Schadenfreude and actively working toward the dismemberment of the republic. As D. P. Crook and others have noted, it is a “cliché” and speculative to conclude that Britain in general (and even Palmerston, at other times) necessarily wanted “a breakup of the Union for realpolitik reasons, to destroy
a rival in the hemisphere” (Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, p. 374). Howard Jones points out that Palmerston “could not see how England could derive the same commercial profits from a divided North and South as from a unified nation” (Jones, Union in Peril, p. 85). On Bagehot see Economist, Mar. 2, 1861, quoted in Crook, Diplomacy During the American Civil War, p. 32 (expected North to win); Economist, Jan. 19, 1861, quoted in Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 32 (“less irritable”). The final quote is from LaFeber, The American Age, p. 150 (“a single … mistake”).

  13. Mencken, H. L. Prejudices: Third Series, pp. 172–73; Brooks, Noah, “The Final Estimate of Lincoln,” in New York Times, Feb. 12, 1898, quoted in Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, p. 97. See also Peterson, p. 196.

  14. Hughes is quoted in Peterson, p. 197. On the “great age of European realpolitik,” see Herring, p. 229. “Aristocratic, antirevolutionary, and self-interested, whether economic or imperial, these two powerful European figures [Napoleon III and Palmerston] sought to restore the halcyon days when iron rule assured international order,” notes Howard Jones (Jones, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 2–3). “While not yet the age in Europe of blood and iron,” D.P. Crook writes, “it was an age of muscular patriotism” (Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, p. 73). See also Bell, v. 1, p. 97; Ridley, Palmerston, p. 334; Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 96, 129 (Bismarck); Ridley, Napoleon III, p. 309.

  15. William Henry Herndon to Jesse Weik, Nov. 17, 1885, HW, LOC (chess); Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” Jan. 27, 1838, CWL, v. 1, p. 115 (“reason”); HL, p. 264 (“realist”) and pp. 352–53 (“precise shape”). For a fascinating discussion of Lincoln’s “depressive realism,” see Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy, pp. 133–35, 171. The final quote is from Swett to William Henry Herndon, Jan. 17, 1866, in HI, p. 162.

  16. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. xxi, 73, 197; Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 803. Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 The Post-American World is an analysis of the modern multipolar international arena. The quote is from Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 810.

  17. Herring, pp. 225 and 920. Herring, citing Norman E. Saul, Distant Friends, p. 329, notes the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century nationalism and globalization: “The steamship, telegraph, and trade brought nations closer at the same time nationalism was highlighting differences and provoking conflict.… Americans were more aware of events elsewhere because of increased immigration, faster and cheaper communication, growing literacy, and mass-circulation newspapers.” For the nexus of liberalism, nationalism, and journalism, see also McDougall, Throes of Democracy, pp. 398–99; and Carwardine and Sexton, eds., Global Lincoln, p. 6. The literature on the nineteenth-century information age and transportation revolution is voluminous. See Blackett, Divided Hearts, pp. 142–43; Carwardine, Lincoln, p. ix–x; Carwardine, “Lincoln and the Fourth Estate,” p. 2; Crook, Diplomacy During the American Civil War, p. 69; Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, pp. 22–24; Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect, pp. 3, 7, 33–4; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, passim; Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 220; Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 160; McDougall, Throes of Democracy, pp. 154–55, 357; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 12–13; Monaghan, p. 47; Mott, American Journalism, p. 216; Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, p. 386; Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 164; Vidal, “Vidal’s Lincoln: An Exchange,” p. 34; White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, p. 186. Richard Carwardine adds a fascinating twist to this story, noting that “the dissemination of Lincoln’s story at times tells us as much about networks of communication, transnational movements, and geopolitics as it does about the man himself.” Carwardine, “Lincoln’s Horizons,” in The Global Lincoln, p. 21; see also pp. 16–17. Despite the revolutionary developments, some scholars also highlight the relatively slow speed and unreliability of nineteenth-century communications. See Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, pp. 110, 303; Jones, Union in Peril, p. 83; Mahin, pp. 25–6 and 115.

  18. Harold Holzer has noted that the “scrutiny” Lincoln faced during the secession winter “was no less intense during this age of politically motivated broadsheet newspapers than it is in today’s world of all-day broadcast news and Internet blogs.” On the telegraph, Holzer recommends Tom Wheeler’s Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (New York, 2006). See Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect, pp. 3, 501. See also LaFeber, The American Age, pp. 136–37 (Japan); McDougall, Throes of Democracy, p. 154 (periodical stats); Hay, Missouri Republican, Oct. 19, 1861, in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 108 (“enthralled by newspapers”); Carwardine, “Abraham Lincoln and the Fourth Estate,” pp. 1–2; Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 599 (“sheet lightning”); Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in ibid., p. 477 (“immensely facilitated”); ibid., p. 488 (“vanishing”); Empress Eugénie to the Empress Charlotte, undated, 1864, in Corti, v. 2, p. 834 (“no secrets”); Howe, What Hath God Wrought, p. 2.

  19. Harold Holzer argues that “Lincoln was the first campaigner and President to be aware of the potential of mass communications” (Holzer, “If I Had Another Face, Do You Think I’d Wear This One?” p. 57). David Herbert Donald notes that “[t]he effectiveness of the President’s personal propaganda warfare could not be measured, for it was not so much public statements or popular rallies as the internal dynamics of British and French politics, plus fears of ultimate American reprisal, that determined a course of neutrality for the two major European powers. But for Lincoln the opportunity to use the White House as a pulpit, to speak out over the dissonant voices of foreign leaders to the common people, daringly broadened the powers of the Presidency.” See Donald, Lincoln, p. 416. Michael Burlingame writes that Lincoln also likely used his personal secretaries as propagandists (Burlingame, “Lincoln Spins the Press,” p. 65). See also Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, p. 322; Monaghan, pp. 274–94.

  20. John Bigelow to Hippolyte Taine, Oct. 19, 1864, in Bigelow, Retrospections, v. 2, pp. 222–23. See also Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, pp. 29–30; Crook, Diplomacy During the American Civil War, p. 18 (PR value).

  21. William H. Herndon to [?], Nov. 24, 1882, printed in the Washington Post, Feb. 4, 1883 (copy in the Barbee Papers, Georgetown University); Harper, Lincoln and the Press, p. 97 (“escape of gas”); Nye, Soft Power, p. 30 (“less coercive”); Paludan, p. xvi (“everything in this country”).

  22. For an insightful and thorough comprehensive history of Union and Confederate foreign relations, see Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy (Chapel Hill, 2010). For a panoramic and vivid recent account of the British role in the war, see Foreman, A World on Fire (New York, 2011).

  23. Randall, Lincoln the President, v. 2, p. 29, quoted in Current, “Comment,” p. 47.

  24. McKee, Story (New York, 1997), p. 101.

  25. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 17. Kennedy adds that “[i]ndividuals still counted” as late as the twentieth century, “but they counted in power politics only because they were able to control and reorganize the productive forces of a great state.” See p. 197. On America’s rising economic strength in the Civil War era see also pp. 149 and 179.

  26. LaFeber, The New Empire, pp. 1, 60; and Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy, p. 3; Davis and Wilson, eds., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 47 (“not generally opposed”). Gabor Boritt argues that this statement is “meaningless,” because there was no more territory that could be honestly had. See Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, p. 140. See also McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 97 (expansionist measures); Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, pp. 27, 312, 316. Mark Neely Jr. writes that Lincoln “did not share … the Whig party’s concerns about expansion” and “did not oppose expansion properly achieved” (Neely, “Lincoln and the Mexican War,” pp. 13–15). Boritt, on the other hand, contends that Lincoln’s economic outlook “sharply clashed with expansionism” but then adds, “Perhaps he was not as much again
st territorial expansion per se, as he was in favor of concentrating the people’s energies within the country, to make it flower, to build it up.” See Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, pp. 138–39. See also Herring, p. 238; CWL, Supplement 1832–1865, p. 45; Foner, Fiery Trial, p. 117 (“go to escape”); Lincoln, “Speech in the U.S. House of Representatives on Internal Improvements,” June 20, 1848, CWL, v. 1, p. 483 (“nothing else”).

  27. Hay to John G. Nicolay, Sept. 11, 1863, in Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side, p. 54 (“backwoods Jupiter”); Donald, Lincoln, p. 310; and Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men,” p. 187 (shoguns); Hay, “Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln,” in Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side, pp. 139–40 (“great rapidity”).

  28. On Lincoln’s guilt see, for example, the analysis of Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition, pp. 171–73, and cf. Burlingame, Inner World, pp. 254–55; Hay, Diary, pp. 75–76, entry for Aug. 23, 1863 (drifted off to sleep); Lincoln to James H. Hackett, Aug. 17, 1863, in CWL, v. 6, p. 392; Hay, “Life in the White House,” in At Lincoln’s Side, p. 137 (“death of kings”); Chambrun, “Personal Recollections,” Scribner’s, p. 35 (“envy the sleep”). See also Donald, Lincoln, p. 569; Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, pp. 317–18, 329; and Carwardine and Sexton, eds., Global Lincoln, pp. 35–36.