Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  104. Seward to Bigelow, May 5, 1864, “Confidential,” no. 128, copy in Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Dept. of State (Paris), v. 457, NARA; Bancroft, v. 2, p. 429n.

  105. Steere, Wilderness Campaign, p. 1 (tangled vines); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 724 (pine trees etc.), 742 (casualties).

  106. Carpenter, Inner Life, pp. 30–31 (rings under eyes etc.), 217 (“tired spot,” dinner upstairs); Oates, With Malice Toward None, locs. 7608–20 (“kill me”).

  107. Welles, Diary, v. 2, p. 35, entry for May 20, 1864; Seward to Bigelow, May 21, 1864, John Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library.

  108. Lincoln to Salmon P. Chase and Edwin M. Stanton, May 5, 1864, CWL, v. 7, p. 331 (order re: horses); Ridley, Napoleon III, p. 238 (on horseback).

  109. Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, May 29, 1864 (“Parisian attire”); Springfield Republican, Jun. 7, 1875, clipping in Ruth Randall Papers, LOC; Boston Transcript, n.d., in Moore, ed., Rebellion Record, v. 11, p. 22; Jane G. Swisshelm letter, n.d., Chicago Journal, copied in “Mrs. Lincoln and Foreign Goods,” New York World, May 3, 1864.

  110. Haslip, Crown of Mexico, pp. 242–44.

  111. Ibid., p. 245 (beauty, roads); Corti, v. 2, pp. 417–20, 422. See especially Charlotte to Eugénie, June 18, 1864, v. 2, p. 422.

  112. Haslip, Crown of Mexico, pp. 251 (flowers, sombreros, etc.), 262 (west of Mexico City); Corti, v. 2, pp. 429 (views, trees, birds, scents), 431 (“basalt crag”), 435 (beautiful women), 437 (gardens), 836 (“as in Europe”).

  113. Rice, ed., Reminiscences, p. 390 (“gnawing”); Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, v. 7, p. 421 (GOP resolution). See also Mahin, p. 233.

  114. Lincoln to William Dennison and Others, June 27, 1864, CWL, v. 7, p. 411. See also Monaghan, p. 370.

  115. Sandburg, The Prairie Years and the War Years, p. 518 (rationale for Johnson); Savage, Life and Public Services of Andrew Johnson, p. 297 (speech). See also Mahin, p. 234.

  116. Lincoln, “Speech at Great Central Sanitary Fair,” June 16, 1864, CWL, v. 7, pp. 395–96.

  117. Milton Lyman Henry Jr., “Henry Winter Davis and the Radical Republican Use of Foreign Policy,” unpublished paper in Harold Hyman Collection, Prairie View, Texas; Schoonover, Dollars Over Dominion, pp. 122–23; Hay, Diary, p. 211, entry for June 24, 1864.

  118. Foreman, World on Fire, p. 645 (“mental overwork”); Hay, Diary, p. 247, entry for Nov. 11, 1864.

  119. Romero dispatch, July 31, 1864, in Schoonover, ed., Mexican Lobby, pp. 46–47.

  120. James Shepherd Pike to Seward, Nov. 2, 1864, FRUS 1864, v. 3, p. 326.

  121. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 775 (comparisons to Napoleon); Goodwin, p. 655 (Seward in Auburn).

  122. Seward to Maj. Gen. E. R. S. Canby, Sept. 30, 1864, FRUS 1864, v. 3, p. 155. See also Mahin, p. 227; and Lincoln to Napoleon III, Sept. 12, 1864, CWL, v. 7, p. 550 (“Your Good Friend”).

  123. Hay, Diary, pp. 243–46, entry for Nov. 8, 1864; White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, p. 47.

  124. Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time, pp. 200–201; Brooks, in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed, p. 145; Lincoln, “Response to a Serenade by the OH Del.,” June 9, 1864, CWL, v. 7, p. 384; Lincoln to Andrew McCallen, June 19, 1858, CWL, v. 2, p. 469 (dreaded serenades); Lincoln, “Response to a Serenade,” Nov. 10, 1864, ALP, LOC.

  125. Lincoln, “Response to a Serenade,” Nov. 10, 1864, ALP, LOC; ALAL, v. 2, p. 724–25; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, v. 9, pp. 379–80 (“weightiest and wisest”).

  126. Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to President Lincoln,” in MAC, pp. 236–37; Marx to Lion Philips, Nov. 29, 1864, in MAC, p. 272 (“gigantic transformation”); Motley to Lincoln, Nov. 28, 1864, ALP, LOC.

  127. Sherman to Grant, Nov. 6, 1864, in Hart, Sherman, p. 328; Lincoln to Sherman, Dec. 28, 1864, CWL, v. 8, p. 181 (“anxious, if not fearful”).

  128. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 488 (red clay, “John Brown’s Body”); Sandburg, The Prairie Years and the War Years, pp. 623–24; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., Dec. 16, 1864, in Ford, ed., Cycle of Adams Letters, v. 2, pp. 232–33.

  129. Napoleon III to Maximilian, Nov. 16, 1864, in Corti, v. 2, p. 449; Charlotte to Eugénie, Jan. 26, 1865, in ibid., pp. 873–74 (“grave crisis” and “big battalions”); Charlotte to Eugénie, Dec. 27, 1864, in ibid., p. 865 (“much hampered”).

  130. ALAL, v. 2, p. 752.

  131. Laugel, The United States During the Civil War, pp. xi–xii, 311–14.

  132. Ibid., pp. 321–23.

  133. Napoleon quoted in Perkins, History of the Monroe Doctrine, p. 137 (“What I really want”); Napoleon III, Oeuvres, V, pp. 227–28, quoted in Smith, Napoleon III, p. 180.

  134. Napoleon III to Maximilian, Mar. 1, 1865, in Corti, v. 2, p. 887.

  135. Maximilian to Karl Ludwig, Feb. 24, 1865, in Corti, v. 2, p. 465.

  136. Joshua F. Speed to Herndon, Jan. 12, 1866, in HI, pp. 156–57 (“very unwell”); Paludan, p. 295.

  137. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, pp. 31 (weather), 34 (Capitol dome), 41 (glasses), 42 (sun), 48 (703 words), 50 (foolscap); Chicago Tribune, Mar. 22, 1865 (“skeleton-like”); Goodwin, p. 697 (“gold lace”); Donald, Lincoln, p. 565 (“gewgaws”).

  138. Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1865, CWL, v. 8, p. 333.

  139. Niebuhr, The Christian Century, quoted in White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, pp. 118–19.

  140. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, p. 196 (Tribune quote); Bigelow to Seward, Mar. 21, 1865, in Bigelow, Retrospections, v. 2, p. 427.

  141. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, p. 190 (Herald quote); Lincoln to Thurlow Weed, Mar. 15, 1865, CWL, v. 8, p. 356.

  142. “Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions,” Apr. 1865; Mary Lincoln to Abram Wakeman, Mar. 20, 1865, copied in the Washington Star, Jan. 19, 1930. Both clippings in the Ruth Randall Papers, LOC.

  143. Charlotte to Eugénie, Mar. 29, 1865, in Corti, v. 2, pp. 894–95; Wydenbruck correspondence, Mar. 31, 1865, in ibid., pp. 496–97.

  144. Lincoln to Stanton, Mar. 30, 1865, CWL, v. 8, p. 377; Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes, p. 294. See also McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 845–47; and ALAL, v. 2, pp. 788–92.

  145. In later years Mary would turn on the French. In 1880, when she was living in exile in France, she complained to one correspondent that the French were “[t]he most unprincipled, heartless, avaricious people, on the face of the earth. With the exception of a very few, I detest them all” (Mary to Edward Lewis Baker Jr., June 12, 1880, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 698–99).

  146. Chambrun, “Personal Recollections,” pp. 27, 31, 32, 34; Mary Lincoln to Charles Sumner, Apr. 10, 1865, and Apr. 11, 1865, in Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 216–17. See also ALAL, v. 2, pp. 795, 797–98.

  147. Fanny Seward Diary, entry for Apr. 5, 1865, Seward Papers, University of Rochester; Seward, Seward at Washington, 1861–1872, pp. 270–71. See also Bancroft, v. 2, p. 415; Van Deusen, p. 411; and Goodwin, pp. 720–21.

  148. Seward, Seward at Washington, 1861–1872, pp. 271. See also Goodwin, pp. 724–25.

  149. For two excellent recent studies of the Lincoln-Seward relationship, see Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York, 2005) and Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men” (New York, 2003).

  150. Fanny Seward Diary, entries for Apr. 10, 1865, and Apr. 13, 1865, Seward Papers, University of Rochester (euphoric revelers); Mary Lincoln interview with Herndon, Sept. 1866, in HI, p. 357; Noyes W. Miner, “Personal Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln,” p. 54, Miner Papers, ALPLM. See also Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, p. 434; and Donald, Lincoln, p. 570.

  151. Goodwin, pp. 609–10; Oates, With Malice Toward None, loc. 4909; Monaghan, p. 189. Allen Guelzo, in his brilliant Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999), notes that some of Lincoln’s supporters disapproved of this type of escapism. “Both evangelical Protestants and even many secular Whigs were deeply suspicious of th
e theater,” Guelzo writes, “since they understood all too well that actors in nineteenth-century America were the principal rivals of preachers in setting out and legitimizing culture” (Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, p. 315).

  152. Ward Hill Lamon to Lincoln, Dec. 10, 1864, in Lamon, Recollections, p. 275; A. H. Flanders to John G. Nicolay, Jan. 27, 1861, ALP, LOC (special coat). See also Donald, Lincoln, p. 569 (on Shakespeare); Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary, pp. 59–60; and Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect, p. 285.

  153. There is controversy about who actually bored the hole. Some historians insist Booth carved it himself. Others cite the recollection of Frank Ford, son of theater owner Harry Clay Ford; in the 1960s, Frank insisted that his father had always maintained that he had ordered the hole carved himself. (Frank Ford to Dr. George J. Olszewski, Apr. 13, 1962, in Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours [Columbia, 1987], pp. 73–75.)

  154. Bryan, Great American Myth, p. 167; Donald, Lincoln, p. 596; ALAL, v. 2, p. 817; Goodwin, p. 738.

  155. Pendel, Thirty-Six Years in the White House, pp. 41–43; Dennett, John Hay, p. 36 (Spanish). See also Goodwin, p. 741; Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men,” p. 211; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, pp. 215–16; O’Toole, Five of Hearts, p. 40.

  156. Hay, Diary, p. 195, entry for May 13, 1864 (dismissed); ALAL, v. 2, pp. 817–18; Donald, Lincoln, pp. 598–99 (Stanton quote).

  157. This account of the attempted assassination of Seward draws primarily on Seward, Seward at Washington, 1861–1872, pp. 276–77.

  158. Seward, Seward at Washington, 1861–1872, pp. 278–81; Francis Carpenter reminiscence in Perkins, The Picture and the Men, pp. 131–32; Monaghan, p. 422; Bancroft, v. 2, p. 417; Goodwin, pp. 737, 744–45.

  159. Hay to Charles Edward Hay, Mar. 31, 1865, in Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side, p. 103.

  160. Hay to Robert Lincoln, Aug. 26, 1865, Hay Papers, Brown University.

  161. Grace Bigelow Diary, entry for July 4, 1865, Bigelow Family Papers, New York Public Library.

  162. Hay to Francis Carpenter, Jan. 22, [1866,] Hay Papers, Brown University; Hay to Robert Lincoln, Aug. 26, [1865,] Hay Papers, Brown University.

  163. Hay to his brother, Aug. 4, [1865,] Hay Papers, Brown University (“not in a state”); Ridley, Napoleon III, p. 520 (demobilization, eight times, senior generals, quote); Bancroft, v. 2, pp. 433 (soldiers joining republicans, Grant quote), 436n (Seward to Bigelow, July 14, 1865); Hanna and Hanna, pp. 238–39 (fifty thousand troops, smuggling muskets); Sheridan, Personal Memoirs, v. 2, pp. 219–28; Welles, Diary, v. 2, p. 317, entry for June 16, 1865; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, v. 7, p. 423 (Hay on Seward).

  164. Napoleon III to Maximilian, Aug. 29, 1865, in Corti, v. 2, p. 541; Eugénie to Charlotte, Sept. 28, 1865, in ibid., p. 920 (“discourteous” etc).

  165. Palmerston to Maximilian, July 17, 1865, Palmerston Papers, British Library; Mahin, p. 270; Corti, v. 2, p. 552. See also Ridley, Palmerston, pp. 547, 584 (“gone!” and Bright); Bell, v. 2, p. 418; Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. xxiii (relative economic decline).

  166. Bigelow to Seward, Dec. 26, 1865, in Bigelow, Retrospections, v. 3, pp. 298–301.

  167. Hay to his mother, Jan. 16, 1866, Hay Papers, Brown University; O’Toole, Five of Hearts, p. 69 (Hay’s height).

  168. Eugénie to Anna Murat, Aug. 10, 1866, quoted in Barker, Distaff Diplomacy, p. 158 (“bolt”); Charlotte to Maximilian, Aug. 1866, in Corti, v. 2, pp. 671–72.

  169. Hay to “My Dear Sir,” Aug. 17, 1866, Hay Papers, Brown University (French assurances); Hay to “My Dear Sir,” Aug. 28, 1866, Hay Papers, Brown University (other confidants).

  170. Napoleon III to Maximilian, Aug. 29, 1866, in Corti, v. 2, p. 945.

  171. Corti, v. 2, pp. 780 (leaves for Queretaro), 794 (dead bodies), 808 (convent), 820–21 (execution); Ridley, Maximilian and Juarez, pp. 276–77 (execution detail, six bullets, etc.). See also Hanna and Hanna, p. 300.

  CHAPTER SIX: LINCOLN VS. LINCOLN

  1. Hay to Seward, Jan. 18, 1868, in Hay, ed., Letters of John Hay, v. 1, pp. 347–48.

  2. Hay Diary No. 7, July 1867, Hay Papers, Brown University; McPherson, “ ‘The Whole Family of Man’: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad,” in May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, p. 147. McPherson does note, however, that “[i]t is an oversimplification to attribute [the success of the Reform Bill] mainly to Union victory in the Civil War.”

  3. Washington quoted in McPherson, “ ‘The Whole Family of Man’: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad,” in May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, p. 133; Lincoln, “Message to Congress in Special Session,” July 4, 1861, CWL, v. 4, p. 426.

  4. Historian Anne Hummel Sherrill, who has compared Lincoln’s republicanism to a kind of religious faith, argues that the triumph of democratic principles “was not a lesson deducible from the facts” during the Civil War, “for the facts proved the point either way.” (Sherrill, John Hay: Shield of Union, p. 25). See also Clymer, John Hay, pp. 92–93, 96; and Carwardine and Sexton, eds., Global Lincoln, p. 31. The final quote is from Hay to Herndon, Sept. 5, 1866, in Hertz, Hidden Lincoln, p. 307.

  5. Herring, p. 250. For the growth figures, see LaFeber, American Age, pp. 160–61, and Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 242. See also Hay to Roosevelt, July 27, 1898, in Thayer, John Hay, vol. 2, p. 337 (“splendid little war”).

  6. See, for example, the insightful discussion of the tension between “Lincoln the unifier and Lincoln the liberator” in “Interchange: The Global Lincoln,” Journal of American History, v. 96, no. 2, pp. 493–95. Adam I. P. Smith, however, adds in the same discussion that “supporters of Lincoln the nationalist would not … [necessarily] have seen any contradiction between Lincoln the spokesman for democracy and Lincoln the embodiment of national integration—the one justified the other in their minds.” The debate about Lincoln’s contradictory nature could fill a book of its own. Some historians and commentators, imagining Lincoln’s reaction to the Gilded Age, have portrayed the sixteenth president as a tragic figure. “Had he lived to seventy,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948, “he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build oppressive business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man.” Hofstadter pitted the president’s expansionist economic policies against his moral sense. “He himself presided over the social revolution that destroyed the simple equalitarian order of the 1840’s, corrupted what remained of its values, and caricatured its ideals,” Hofstadter concluded. “Booth’s bullet, indeed, saved him from something worse than embroilment with the radicals over Reconstruction. It confined his life to the happier age that Lincoln understood—which unwittingly he helped to destroy” (Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, pp. 137–38). The iconoclast Edmund Wilson took a version of this notion one step further in 1962, limning Lincoln as a kind of masochist. He suggested that the president had figuratively “foreseen and accepted his doom; he knew it was part of the drama.” Wilson considered it “morally and dramatically inevitable that this prophet who had crushed opposition and sent thousands of men to their deaths should finally attest his good faith by laying down his own life with theirs.” In recent years the writer and essayist Gore Vidal has dramatically—and controversially—reimagined the Lincoln of Hofstadter and Wilson. The final act of Vidal’s 1984 novel, Lincoln, is a scene of John Hay after the assassination musing about whether Lincoln had somehow willed his own murder. More recent scholars have questioned whether Lincoln would have really been so appalled by the Gilded Age. Gabor Boritt, who made “the development of the double image of Lincoln” between “man and god” a central theme of an eloquent historiographical essay, takes a more benign view of Lincoln’s nationalism. In contrast to European state builders like Cavour and Bismarck, Boritt notes, “Lincoln’s Dream helped lead America to the nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.�
� (Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, pp. 275–311. Quote is on p. 281.) Allen Guelzo has observed that “the tension between his Calvinistic ‘melancholy’ and bourgeois assertiveness” had actually acted as a kind of “mutual restraint.” In Guelzo’s view, this dynamic spawned a “depth and resiliency” that became Lincoln’s “most valuable character assets” (Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, p. 463).

  7. Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” Oct. 4, 1854, CWL, v. 2, p. 255. See also Jones, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom, passim; and McPherson, Tried by War, p. 132 (re: new birth).

  8. Wilson, Patriotic Gore, pp. xxxi–xxxii; McDougall, Throes of Democracy, p. 400.

  9. Fulbright quoted in McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 206. McDougall’s survey of the American foreign-policy tradition is an eloquent analysis of the battle between the competing visions of America as beacon and crusader. Reinhold Niebuhr has also trenchantly described the tension between love and justice in foreign affairs: “A rational ethic aims at justice,” Niebuhr explains, “and a religious ethic makes love the ideal.” (Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 57).

  10. Herndon, “Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln,” p. 347 (Herndon quote).

  11. Donald, “A Whig in the White House,” in Lincoln Reconsidered, p. 133 (“peculiar paradox”).

  12. Thayer, John Hay, v. 1, p. 57.

  13. O’Toole, Five of Hearts, pp. 155–56 (house description, size of dining room); Gilder and Gilder, eds., Authors at Home, pp. 140–44. See also Dennett, John Hay, p. 146.

  14. Gilder and Gilder, eds., Authors at Home, p. 141 (Seward’s house); Adams, Education of Henry Adams, pp. 325–26 (“would suddenly break off”); O’Toole, Five of Hearts, p. 216 (lullabies).

  15. Burlingame, ed., Abraham Lincoln: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, p. 1 (1886 excerpts).

  16. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, v. 1, pp. 216 (“young, bright”), 232–33 (Texas), 273 (“obstinately obtuse”).

  17. Norman Ferris has analyzed the effects of Nicolay and Hay’s biography on Seward’s reputation in his essay “Lincoln and Seward in Civil War Diplomacy,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, v. 12, no. 1 (1991).