Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  The appointment of Hooker, which was generally well received in the North, relieved some of the immediate pressure on the President. Everybody understood that the new commander would require some time to reorganize the Army of the Potomac and to raise the spirits of the demoralized soldiers. The President could, for the moment, turn his attention to other problems.

  II

  Foreign relations did not occupy a great deal of Lincoln’s time. For the most part, he was content to allow the Secretary of State to manage diplomatic affairs—just as he permitted the other cabinet members to conduct the business of their departments with minimal interference. He trusted Seward, and he respected the Secretary’s knowledge of diplomatic protocol.

  With most nations the relations of the United States were entirely amicable, and there were few occasions that called for special exertions by either the Secretary of State or the President. No doubt Lincoln derived some amusement from his correspondence with the King of Siam, who, as a token of his goodwill and friendship for the American people in their present struggle, sent gifts of a photograph of himself, a sword and a scabbard, and a pair of elephant tusks, and offered to supply to the government a stock of breeding elephants. “Our political jurisdiction,” the President replied, in words probably drafted by Seward, “does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”

  From time to time, the eccentric or unauthorized behavior of American diplomats caused minor ripples, as when Theodore Canisius, once Lincoln’s partner in the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger and now American consul to Vienna, initiated, quite on his own, negotiations to offer a command in the Union armies to the great Italian general Garibaldi. Somewhat more serious was the game of musical chairs played with the American ministry to St. Petersburg. The post went first to Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist, as a reward for his strong support for Lincoln in the Chicago nominating convention of 1860. Despite several street brawls, in which Clay demonstrated to startled Russian challengers the merits of the bowie knife, the minister grew bored and sought a more active life in the Union army. Lincoln replaced him with Simon Cameron, thinking St. Petersburg an excellent place to remove his first Secretary of War from the hands of his congressional investigators, hot on the scent of fraud and scandal. Cameron lasted only long enough to present his credentials to the Czar and then asked for a furlough so that he could come back to Pennsylvania and run for the Senate. Meanwhile Clay proved noisy, importunate, and time-consuming with his constant advice to the President on how to conduct all aspects of the war, and Lincoln decided the Union cause would benefit by sending him back to Russia. The Czar was graciously understanding, for his government throughout the war was staunchly pro-Union, and it repeatedly discouraged all suggestions of European intervention in the American conflict.

  Much more sensitive were relations with Great Britain and France, the two powers with major interests at stake in the American conflict. In neither was the government particularly favorable to the Union cause, and in both the upper levels of society looked with scorn combined with fear at the democracy of the North and fancied a kinship to the slaveholding oligarchy of the South. The Union blockade, which cut off the export of Southern cotton, produced real suffering in the textile-manufacturing regions of both Britain and France. Shipbuilders in France and especially in Britain saw the possibility of huge profits in outfitting vessels for the Confederate navy. With so much at stake, the two great powers had early moved to issue proclamations of neutrality, which recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent (though not as an independent nation); these had doubtless been proper, even necessary, under international law, but the actions had struck the Lincoln government as precipitate. British willingness to go to the brink of war over the Trent affair had offered further evidence that the American Civil War could be easily transformed into an international conflict. And the decision of the Emperor Napoleon III to send French troops to Mexico, in order to bolster the shaky regime of his puppet-king Maximilian, was a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and to the Union government.

  Holding firmly to his axiom “One war at a time,” Lincoln allowed Seward to manage the day-to-day relations with the two great powers but when there was a crisis used his personal authority to preserve peace. For instance, early in 1863 when Union blockaders captured the Peterhoff, a British-owned merchant ship carrying goods to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, the British protested this violation of international law, while Secretary Welles defended the navy, claiming the Peterhoff was carrying contraband intended for the Confederacy. The mails aboard the Peterhoff posed a specially touchy issue, because they might prove the vessel was really a blockade-runner. The British, whose position was strongly backed by Seward, insisted that under international law mails were inviolate, while Welles, whose views were endorsed by Sumner, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that only the courts could decide whether they had been lawfully seized. This controversy, which was in reality a minor affair though it had the potential for becoming an explosive issue, occupied much of the time of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy until the middle of May, and Lincoln gave respectful hearing to both sides. In the end, the President sided with Seward and released the mails, reminding his cabinet members that “we were in no condition to plunge into a foreign war on a subject of so little importance in comparison with the terrible consequences which must follow our act.”

  Lincoln demonstrated the same caution in dealing with the larger issues of international relations. It was perhaps well that neither he nor Seward realized how close Great Britain and France came to intervening in the American conflict in the summer and fall of 1862, when a long succession of Confederate victories seemed to prove W. E. Gladstone’s assertion that Jefferson Davis had made a nation of the Confederacy. Economic hardship, disruption in the patterns of trade, and unwillingness to see a debilitating conflict further protracted moved Napoleon to suggest joint intervention to the British government, and both Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, and Earl Russell, the Foreign Secretary, looked favorably on the French plan. Only after an angry debate in the British cabinet, in which defenders of the Union were strengthened by the news of McClellan’s success at Antietam and of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, was intervention rejected.

  Washington knew of these ominous developments only through rumor, and Lincoln was not, of course, obliged to take any official notice of them. But in early 1863 he could not ignore another scheme for foreign intervention in the war. Horace Greeley, the unpredictable editor of the New York Tribune, concluding that the war was hopeless, announced in his influential editorials that the North was ready to restore “the Union as it was.” That was tantamount to saying that the Emancipation Proclamation, which the editor had so vigorously urged on the President, should be dropped and that mediation by England, France, or even Switzerland, if offered “in a conciliatory spirit,” would be welcomed. Greeley had come under the influence of an unstable mining speculator, William Cornell (“Colorado”) Jewett, just back from France with a mediation proposal from Napoleon III, and, flushed with enthusiasm, the editor dashed off to Washington to enlist the French minister, Henri Mercier, in his cause. He found the President noncommittal, and Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the Union armies needed another chance for victory. But Greeley was not discouraged, and he told his fellow editor, Henry J. Raymond, of the New York Times, that he intended to bring the war to a close by mediation. When Raymond asked what the President had to say about his scheme, he replied: “You’ll see ... that I’ll drive Lincoln into it.”

  Greeley’s attempt at peacemaking was so heavy-handed that Seward threatened to prosecute him under the Logan Act, which prohibited American citizens from negotiating with foreign representatives. Lincoln joked
that the editor, had probably done more “to aid in the successful prosecution of the war than he could have done in any other way,” because his overearnest advocacy of peace had, “on the principles of antagonism, made the opposition urge on the war.” Certainly Greeley’s activities did much to blunt the impact of the formal proposal made by Napoleon’s government suggesting that the Union and the Confederacy appoint delegates to meet at some neutral place to explore the possibilities of reunion or permanent division of the United States. With Lincoln’s entire approval, Seward promptly rejected the proposal. Virtually all American newspapers commended the government’s course, and the often critical New York Herald praised not merely “the masterly diplomacy of our sagacious Secretary of State” but also Lincoln’s “sagacity, consistency and steadiness of purpose” in sustaining him.

  The mediation crisis alerted the President to the importance of influencing public opinion abroad in favor of the Union cause. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, and William L. Dayton, the minister to France, were both doing excellent work, but their scope was necessarily restricted by their official positions and duties. To reach a wider public in Great Britain and France, Lincoln’s administration encouraged informal missions by American businessmen like the shipping magnate John Murray Forbes and the railroad tycoon William H. Aspinwall, by clergymen like Catholic Archbishop John J. Hughes and Episcopal Bishop Charles P. Mcllvaine, and by worldly-wise politicians like Thurlow Weed, who could explain and defend their government’s actions.

  At the same time, Lincoln himself began a campaign to win popular support in Great Britain, where, with some hidden subvention from American funds, numerous public meetings were held to voice support for the Union cause and especially for the emancipation of the slaves. With the help of Charles Sumner, the American who had perhaps the widest circle of acquaintances abroad, the President drafted shrewdly crafted messages to the workingmen of Manchester and London voicing sympathy for their suffering in unemployment and skillfully blaming the cotton shortage not on the Union blockade of the South but on “the actions of our disloyal citizens.” Lavishly he praised the ardent Unionism of British workingmen, whose self-interest would have dictated support of the Confederacy. They offered, the President said, “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

  In these messages to British workingmen Lincoln oversimplified the complex American struggle. Ignoring the fact that his government had for nearly two years firmly refused to make emancipation a Union war aim, he now claimed that the conflict was a test “whether a government, established on the principles of human freedom, can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage.” Once the American Civil War was so understood, he was convinced that there could be no doubt where British sympathies would lie. In the hope of putting the issue even more forcefully, he drafted a statement that he asked Sumner to present to British friends of the Union, pointing out that the fundamental objective of the rebellion was “to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery,” and resolving that “no such embryo State [such as the Confederacy] should ever be recognized by, or admitted into, the family of christian and civilized nations.”

  The 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. It was a practice he could in the future use to good effect at home.

  III

  Greeley was not alone in advocating mediation by foreign powers. Heartened by their successes in the recent fall elections, Democrats made mediation by the French Emperor part of the broad assault they launched upon the Lincoln administration. In December, on the first day of the session, Representative S. S. (“Sunset”) Cox of Ohio began the attack with a resolution demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners and charging that arbitrary arrests were “unwarranted by the Constitution and laws of the United States, and... a usurpation of power never given up by the people to their rulers.” In January, as the military situation deteriorated, Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, whose dark, scowling face made him look like a chained mastiff, lamented that the President treated the abridgment of civil liberties “with jocular and criminal indifference,” and he warned that the recently issued final Emancipation Proclamation “would light their author to dishonor through all future generations.” More important was the full-scale address Representative Clement L. Vallandigham made on January 14 in the House of Representatives. Handsome, plausible, and articulate, the Ohio congressman denounced Lincoln’s effort to restore the Union by war as an “utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure.” Claiming that the President by “repeated and persistent arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of freedom of the mails, of the private house, of the press and of speech, and all the other multiplied wrongs and outrages upon public liberty and private right” had converted the United States into “one of the worst despotisms on earth,” Vallandigham sought the intervention of a friendly foreign power to bring about “an informal, practical recognition” of the Confederacy.

  Vallandigham did not speak for the entire Democratic party. War Democrats, who consistently supported Lincoln’s efforts to subdue the Confederacy, sustained his administration in all measures they considered constitutional. But many other Democrats throughout the country, weary of the bloodshed, were ready to end the war through negotiation and compromise. At a mass meeting in New York City, for instance, the former mayor, the unsavory and duplicitous Fernando Wood, spoke for these Peace Democrats when he urged the President to cease hostilities, call a conference with the Confederates, and “restore the Union without further loss of blood.” Extreme opponents of the administration favored peace at any price; some favored subverting the Lincoln administration and a few of these were in contact with Southern authorities. Republicans called them “Copperheads,” probably after the poisonous snake that attacks without notice.

  Discontent was strongest and most dangerous in the Middle West. When the war broke out, Westerners had quickly rallied to the colors, and these recruits made up the powerful Union armies that operated in the Mississippi Valley. They had suffered uncounted losses during the first two years of the war, and many were growing angry and disillusioned. After volunteering almost stopped during the winter of 1862–1863, the Lincoln administration put its weight behind a new conscription act, signed by the President on March 3. It promised further hardship for Western farms and families.

  Western dissatisfaction was the greater because that region had only imperfectly shared in the general prosperity that the war brought to the North. As long as the Confederacy controlled the Mississippi River, the main Western trade outlet was blocked, and Westerners were forced to pay prohibitively high freight rates to send their produce east by canal and rail. At the same time, Republican tariff legislation protected Northeastern manufacturers at the expense of Western consumers.

  But the greatest cause of disaffection in the West was Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Few Westerners were abolitionists. Those who had joined the Republican party in the 1850s were, like Lincoln himself, more concerned with the expansion of slavery into the national territories than with its eradication. A considerable majority of Westerners, especially those in the lower parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where ties of family and commerce to the South were strong, were Democrats of the Stephen A. Douglas stripe, devoted to the preservation of the Union but indifferent to the future of slavery. For these, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the character of the war. Democratic leaders in the Western states now
told their followers: “We told you so. The war is solely an abolition war. We are for putting down Rebellion, but not for making it an anti-slavery crusade!”

  Fear that emancipation would lead to a heavy immigration of freedmen from the South strengthened Western hostility toward the administration. “Ohio,” it was predicted, “will be overrun with negroes, they will compete with you and bring down your wages, you will have to work with them, eat with them, your wives and children must associate with theirs and you and your families will be degraded to their level.” This fear was not wholly irrational; Stanton in September had ordered the “contrabands” assembled at Cairo, Illinois, sent north to replace farm laborers who had joined the army. Anxiety on this subject was pervasive enough that Lincoln felt obliged to devote several pages of his December 1862 message to Congress to refuting this “largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious” objection to emancipation. Cleverly he tried to turn it into an argument for the colonization of the freedmen “in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race.” But Westerners were not convinced and many believed that the effect of the President’s emancipation policy would be to establish Negro equality.

  In the West discontent manifested itself in sporadic outbreaks of violence. In several counties there was resistance to the arrest of deserters from the Union armies; on occasion Union men or soldiers at home on furlough were murdered; there were demonstrations and armed parades against continuing the war. Ugly racism was often evident in these outbreaks. In a Detroit race riot many blacks were beaten and some thirty-five houses were burned.

  Numerous mass meetings and county conventions announced “that the Union can never be restored by force of arms,” protested the conversion of the war into an abolition crusade, challenged the impending conscription legislation as unconstitutional, and called for a cease-fire. Many of these meetings favored summoning a national convention, to be held at Louisville on the first Tuesday in April, in order “to obtain an armistice and cessation of hostilities.” So strong was antiwar sentiment that the Times of London believed that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had “proved a solvent which has loosened the federal bond in the North itself” and predicted the imminent secession of the Western states from what remained of the Union.