Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (34 page)

Simmering resentment continued to mark relations between the two countries for the next six months, boiling into a diplomatic crisis in December over the celebrated
Trent
affair. The Union navy’s seizure from a British mail packet of two Confederate commissioners bound for diplomatic service in Europe became the occasion of wild, patriotic rejoicing at home and white-hot indignation in Britain. Generally regarded as an ocean bully, long disdainful of neutral rights, Britain now found itself in the unaccustomed role of victim. The technicalities of Captain Charles Wilkes’s action in removing James M. Mason and John Slidell from the
Trent
were far from clear-cut, though the balance of legal advantage lay with the British: by removing the commissioners in a search-and-seize operation, without taking the vessel to a prize court for adjudication, the Americans seemed to be in breach of international law. But it was the affront to the Union Jack and injured pride, as much as points of law, that moved Palmerston and Russell to rattle their sabers.

Only slowly, while Britain ordered naval and military reinforcements to Canada and the western Atlantic, did Lincoln come to appreciate the depth of the crisis. Once more he benefited from regular discussions with Sumner, whose friendship with the English Liberal reformers John Bright and Richard Cobden made the senator a barometer of British opinion. There was real risk, Sumner knew, that the hysteria of the “Rule Britannia” political class might force Palmerston to act in defense of British honor. Seward’s alter ego and government agent, Thurlow Weed, was also in Britain taking the political temperature, and urged forbearance on Lincoln. The president’s preferred escape route, one which would have had the merit of cooling passions on both sides and making the prisoners’ release more palatable to American public opinion, was arbitration by an international third party. He composed a draft dispatch which proposed settling the immediate affair by these means, on the understanding that whatever the arbiters determined should settle “the law for all future analogous cases, between Great Britain and the United States”: in other words, by yielding now America would at least protect its own neutral rights in the years ahead. He was evidently still serious about an initiative along these lines when he privately read his draft to an approving Orville Browning on December 21; both men “agreed that the question was susceptible of a peaceful solution if England was at all disposed to act justly with us.”
⁹²

Lincoln’s intended approach was put in question two days later, however, when the British minister to Washington, Lord Lyons, presented the British government’s formal demand for an apology and for the release of the envoys within a week. In the sobering knowledge that France would side with Britain, the president called his cabinet together on Christmas Day. Seward—“loaded to the muzzle” with international law—took the lead in arguing the case for releasing the Confederate envoys, on the technical grounds that Wilkes had had every right to detain and search the
Trent,
but that he should have taken the vessel to a prize court. Sumner, present at Lincoln’s invitation, read out letters from Cobden and Bright to a similar purpose. Chase, too, tasting wormwood and gall as he did so, conceded the justice of the secretary of state’s argument. Bates, though unimpressed by the legal arguments (he had initially judged the seizure of the diplomats wholly lawful), did see the force of necessity: “We cannot hope for success in a super added war with England, backed by the assent and countenance of France.”
⁹³

There was, however, no immediate agreement. After four hours the cabinet adjourned. According to the attorney general, Lincoln, along with some others, showed a “great reluctance” to acknowledge that “to go to war with England now, is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.” It is certainly true that as the meeting broke up Lincoln told Seward that he would put together a case for not releasing the envoys, and asked the secretary of state to press ahead with a concessive answer for Lord Lyons: the reconvened cabinet could then compare the cases the next day. But this did not mean that Lincoln was prepared to risk war, or that he had failed to understand the undoubtedly ruinous consequences of a conflict with Britain. Rather, he seems to have been using debate, as he did with big issues at other times, to test the very ground on which he intended to stand. In the event, he offered no counterargument to Seward’s, telling Seward that he had found it impossible to construct one. That evening he assured Browning that there would be no conflict, just as he had told Sumner two days earlier: “There will be no war unless England is bent on having one.”
⁹⁴
Lincoln’s chief anxiety had for some time ceased to be whether to release the envoys; rather, as his arbitration proposal suggested, it had become how to do so with the least damage to national dignity. Seward gave his colleagues a way out by producing a legal rationale for backing down. On December 26 the reconvened cabinet swallowed the bitter pill and agreed to surrender the Confederate prisoners. The next day Seward informed Lyons that the United States—delighted that Britain now embraced the freedom of the seas and respect for the rights of neutrals—would free the captives and make reparation for Wilkes’s illegal act, but would offer no apology for a deed not authorized by the administration. Honor had been maintained, at least in part.

Hindsight suggests that the rhetorical smoke and thunder of the
Trent
affair obscured a cold, sharp calculation of national advantage in both the Union and the British governments. It was in the strategic interests of neither to be swept into war. But rational action follows only from rational thought, and for that the decision-makers on both sides can take credit. Of these, none was more responsible than Lincoln for the preservation of a wary peace. Throughout he was a restraining influence, dampening rather than stoking the fires of chauvinism. Sensibly, in his annual message to Congress, he avoided all reference to the brewing crisis. He readily listened and deferred to those from whom he could learn, notably Sumner and a now statesmanlike Seward, who well knew when and when not to be bellicose, and who enjoyed good personal relations with Lord Lyons. However attached Lincoln might have been to his own arbitration proposal, he chose not to press it when circumstances moved on. By these means he charted a course through stormy seas to calmer but still choppy waters beyond. Other perils lay ahead in the Union’s international relations, especially relating to the blockade, to the construction of Confederate raiders in European shipyards, and to British and French efforts at mediation. But Lincoln had navigated past the greatest point of danger, determined that he would not have “two wars on his hands at a time.”
⁹⁵

“WHAT SHALL I DO? THE PEOPLE ARE IMPATIENT . . .”

Throughout these tumultuous months from his election to the end of 1861, Lincoln was constantly engaged in what came naturally to him: judging public sentiment. The habits and democratic sensitivities of Lincoln the peacetime politician would become essential elements of his wartime leadership. Never the prisoner of opinion, he nonetheless took his major decisions with at least one eye on popular feeling. Thus Lincoln’s public silence after his election was a calculated response to his reading of southern opinion and the needs of the Republican majority. Convinced that determined Unionism ran broad and strong, he took an unyielding stand over the forts in March and April. He was ready to defy the broad-based support for Frémont’s proclamation, not out of disdain for public sentiment, but because he attached greater strategic importance to local opinion in the pivotal border regions. During the
Trent
affair he was as concerned to resolve the crisis as to avoid, in Bates’s words, “the displeasure of our own people—lest they should accuse us of timidly truckling to the power of England.”
⁹⁶

In the event, the
Trent
crisis inflicted only limited popular damage, but, given the broader picture, Lincoln’s anxiety was well justified. By the end of 1861 the Union public had had little to cheer. Apart from some successful incursions at the margins of the Confederacy—notably Hatteras Inlet and Port Royal Sound—Union forces had as yet made little discernible progress by land or sea. July’s traumatic rout at Bull Run had prompted what Greeley described to Lincoln as “sullen, scowling, black despair” and a sober realization that this was to be no easy or short-lived conflict. It brought changes in the high command, a flood of new recruits, the spur to an antiwar party, and a gradual revival of hope as the new leader of the Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan, brought his remarkable energy and managerial skills to constructing a disciplined, powerful force from the three-year volunteers. Yet six months later the few martial landmarks in the public memory were moments of disappointment, such as Grant’s inconclusive engagement at Belmont, or occasions of sickening ineptness, notably at Ball’s Bluff.
⁹⁷

But inglorious defeat at least intimated some sort of energy. What was more troubling to the Union’s loyal citizenry was the sense that, for all the signs of preparation for war, their political and military leaders lacked either the appetite or the capacity for purposeful action. Under Simon Cameron, the War Department appeared to be proficient in venality but little else. As the tiny War Department of early 1861 ballooned to face the demands of equipping and organizing an army of half a million men, instances of unbusinesslike contracts and profiteering multiplied. If the secretary was not himself guilty of corruption—the weight of opinion is in his favor—he was widely perceived as such. He was certainly, as the president came to recognize, ignorant, lax, and incompetent. Lincoln faced earnest demands for his removal and suggestions that Joseph Holt, a staunch pro-war Democrat, replace him.
⁹⁸
Of course, the enormous challenge Cameron faced was in part structural: it was no easy matter to bring centralized federal order to an operation in which proud states kept control over raising troops and commissioning regimental officers, where the administration lacked systematic, comprehensive information, and where private recruiters further complicated matters. But a secretary of war with the same vision, system, and grasp of detail that Welles brought to the Navy Department could have shored up public confidence and would not have swollen Lincoln’s mailbag with demands that he be replaced. Lincoln, however, continued uneasily to tolerate Cameron’s incompetence. Only in mid-January 1862 did he replace Cameron—not with Holt, but with another backboned Democrat, the formidable Edwin M. Stanton.

Dishonest contracting, fraud, and ineptness also characterized military administration in the West. Frémont, as commander of that department, could fairly accuse Washington of a myopic preoccupation with the eastern arena and of starving him of the equipment and funds he needed to subdue Missouri and move down the Mississippi. But he was also the author of many of his own difficulties, for he lacked both administrative method and the political shrewdness needed for the chessboard of western intrigue. He lost the confidence of many officers and foolishly fell out with his patrons, the Blairs, who badgered Lincoln for his removal. By mid-October the president was in possession of a clutch of adverse firsthand reports on the western commander from the secretary of war and a pack of watchdog generals. One of them, Samuel R. Curtis, advised Lincoln that the only real question was the timing and manner of Frémont’s departure, to be judged with special regard to public opinion, “an element of war which must not be neglected.”
⁹⁹

From this lesson in the obvious Lincoln might have drawn the opposite conclusion, namely that he should leave Frémont in place. As rumors spread of the commander’s likely removal, he was deluged with the fiercest torrent of mail of his first year in office. “I do Beg of you for Gods Sake for Humanitys Sake for our Western Countrys Sake Keep John C. Frémont in his present Position,” pleaded a fellow Illinoisan. Writer after writer represented the West, excepting only extreme Negrophobes and “rabid democrats,” as united in its faith in Frémont as the man destined to “sweep rebellion from the Valley of the Mississippi.” His removal would be “a catastrophe,” “bad business,” and “a suicidal policy”: it would, Lincoln learned, paralyze the army; alienate the German and Irish population, from whom a high proportion of his troops were drawn; freeze voluntary enlistments; and prompt desertion or even mutiny. If the more extreme predictions of “a fire in the rear,” a political coup, and making Frémont a military dictator cut little ice in Washington, Lincoln could be in little doubt of the damage that his dismissal would do to popular morale and to the standing of the administration. As John Hay noted, it was not easy to act when it was widely believed, East and West, that all opposition to Frémont arose from his emancipation proclamation and “thus assumes the form of a persecution for righteousness sake.” Frémont himself, by reissuing his proclamation and working successfully to cultivate the western press, hoped—so Frank Blair believed—to “make public opinion . . . overawe the President and his Administration.”
¹⁰⁰

In the event, Lincoln followed the advice of Blair, Curtis, and others who insisted that retaining Frémont would prove militarily disastrous and risk losing Missouri, but who also advised delay. “The time may come when it would be safe to . . . [act],” one wrote in early October: “It may be in a few weeks. But it is not now!” A little over three weeks later, on November 2, Lincoln grasped the nettle and removed his western commander. Wails of public outrage followed—from St. Louis, to which Frémont returned as a hero and antislavery martyr, to New England. According to the
Cincinnati Gazette,
sober loyalists “of all political parties” could be seen “pulling from their walls and trampling underfoot the portrait of the President.”
¹⁰¹

In part this anger derived from a sense that the administration had moved against the wrong commander. East of the mountains, the summer’s tributes to McClellan for creating a well-drilled army and fortifying the capital gave way as autumn advanced to mounting public impatience over battlefield inactivity; once he had engineered the removal of the ailing Scott and, on November 1, been appointed general-in-chief, he became personally more exposed to criticism. Incredulous editors and congressmen were perplexed to see an army of some 200,000 men standing immobile during the fine weather of late fall. Hearing the rumblings of public disquiet and prodded by those radicals whom Hay called “the Jacobin club,” the new session of Congress established the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to ginger up military operations. In view of McClellan’s studied deafness to popular clamor and his deep-rooted caution, it is bizarre and ironic that some blamed Lincoln and cabinet conservatives for holding him back.
¹⁰²