Lincoln in the World (3 page)

Foreign affairs, at least in some quarters, have often been considered best left to a brotherhood of well-bred and well-connected “wise men.” The rough-and-tumble of American popular government is frequently seen as a hindrance to the long-term planning, efficient decision making, and patient state building that a sturdy foreign policy demands. “I do not hesitate to say that it is especially in their conduct of foreign relations that democracies appear to be decidedly inferior to other governments,” Alexis de Tocqueville observes in
Democracy in America
. “Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient.”
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Lincoln was certainly neither well bred nor well connected internationally. And yet, as I hope to show in the following pages, he should be considered one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents—a worthy model for students of global affairs. My argument is not simply that the plain-talking Railsplitter, through his common sense and good judgment, was somehow more adept at the arts of diplomacy than the polished and gold-braided envoys of Europe—although that was sometimes the case. “Where men bred in courts, accustomed to the world, or versed in diplomacy, would use some subterfuge, or would make a polite speech, or give a shrug of the shoulders as the means of getting out of an embarrassing position,” observed one British journalist, “Mr. Lincoln raises a laugh by some bold west-country anecdote, and moves off in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke.” Lincoln’s warm chuckle—which one observer compared to “the neigh of a wild horse”—served him well in the high-stakes game of transatlantic brinksmanship.
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Yet the more important point is that Lincoln during the Civil
War boldly tested the versatility of American democracy itself—Tocqueville’s original foreign-affairs bugbear. The Founding Fathers, eager to avoid the pitfalls of Old World monarchies, had wisely—but also somewhat schizophrenically—divided the power to conduct foreign policy between the executive and legislative branches of government. Lincoln, a former Whig congressman, possessed a deep reverence for America’s national lawmaking bodies. Yet he also discovered over the course of his presidency that acute international crises often demanded the firm hand of a chief executive and the steady keel of his State Department. “Necessity,” he once remarked, “knows no law.” Although Lincoln considered many of his innovations temporary war measures, historians of the twentieth century’s “imperial presidency” have identified lasting precedents in his handling of foreign affairs. All the while, Lincoln and his party worked assiduously to build a centralized American state—a critical prerequisite to America’s later rise to power.
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It would be flat wrong, of course, to label Lincoln an imperialist. He wore his power well, and had a keen sense of international justice and the limits of American influence. He displayed many of the characteristics of great diplomats.
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He was comfortable with the give-and-take of negotiation. He was cool and courteous as he pursued the national interest. Britain’s Lord Palmerston once observed that the practice of foreign affairs is not “an occult science.” It simply demands “plain dealing” and “a regard to justice.” Lincoln had read and reread George Washington’s farewell address—one of America’s bedrock international-relations texts. A wise foreign policy, according to Washington, demands the pursuit of “our interest guided by justice.” Lincoln adopted that sound advice as his virtual motto, once suggesting that Americans should celebrate the first president’s birthday by rereading the “immortal” document.
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Even Lincoln’s antislavery position was colored by his vision of America’s place in the wider world. The sixteenth president was born only thirty-three years after the Declaration of Independence. The rights of black Americans, Lincoln believed, were guaranteed
by the same principle that justified the nation’s freedom from British domination. “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth,” Lincoln wrote one correspondent in 1855. “But now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—for burning fire-crackers!!!”
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Viewed against the backdrop of the global arena, then, our grade-school portrait of the sixteenth president morphs into something pleasantly exotic. One of the unexpected joys of studying Lincoln in the twenty-first century is how much astonishing new material about him has come to light. In recent years, scholars led by Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame have sifted through not just the traditional letters, diaries, and other primary sources in an effort to uncover fresh material about Lincoln, but they have also combed through the archived papers of past biographers and historians, searching for valuable and revealing snippets that have somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor. Their efforts have revealed countless examples of previously uncovered details that have helped to draw a more accurate picture of Lincoln and his presidency.
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For this book I have taken a similar approach, revisiting not only the memoirs and dispatches of Lincoln’s diplomats, but also searching the unpublished archives of previous Lincoln biographers for clues to his foreign policy. The papers of the imperialist senator and Lincoln biographer Albert J. Beveridge, housed at the Library of Congress, include stacks of transcripts of useful Mexican War–era newspaper clippings. In the personal collection of Mary Lincoln biographer Ruth Randall, we learn that a disgruntled former State Department employee liked to refer to the First Lady as “that ‘Springfield bitch’ ”—a small but revealing detail omitted from Randall’s own sympathetic treatment of her subject.
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The uncataloged files of Lincoln biographer William H. Townsend—stored in a dark corner of a labyrinthine basement in Lexington, Kentucky—include
fascinating photographs, newspaper clippings, and other material about Lincoln’s colorful minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay.

Even the archives of minor diplomatic clerks can shed light on Lincoln and his foreign-policy team. A contemporary account in the papers of Edward Lee Plumb, a businessman and State Department aide, describes a glittering White House reception at which an exhausted but cheery Lincoln mingles with the diplomatic corps in the wake of the
Trent
affair—a valuable fly-on-the-wall perspective. In another collection, the personal correspondence of Lincoln’s minister in the Netherlands, we find a missive to a friend in the Senate deriding the “pusillanimity” of the administration’s Mexico policy—a telling peek at just how difficult it could be to keep America’s strong-willed foreign envoys on the same song sheet. Taken together with the shelves of diplomatic memoirs and letter books of official dispatches, a textured and surprising portrait emerges of a diplomat in chief whose presidency helped point the way to America’s rise to power.
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It would be folly, of course, to turn Lincoln into a plaster Richelieu. His foreign policies also included some turkeys. Lincoln clung relentlessly to the misguided idea of colonizing freed slaves to Africa or Latin America. He persistently urged his military commanders to fortify the Mexican border to deter the French army to its south—a fateful decision that led to a military fiasco. (General William Tecumseh Sherman famously derided that campaign as “one damn blunder from beginning to end.”) Even the U.S. consul in Paris, who was an admirer of the president, later recalled that Lincoln had made some “great blunders” in international affairs in addition to his inspired choices. “No one,” the diplomat concluded, “is wise and cool enough to make no blunders” in a conflict as unpredictable and unprecedented as the American Civil War.

Still, it is well worth studying Lincoln’s lapses in judgment along with his masterstrokes. Our cardinal sin in international relations, as Walter Lippmann once chided American utopians, is the “error of forgetting that we are men and of thinking that we are gods. We are
not gods.… We are mere mortals with limited power and little universal wisdom.” As Lincoln pursues his diplomacy, we are reminded of perhaps the most important lesson in modern foreign affairs: that we are human after all.
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Lincoln’s foreign-affairs education began in the fall of 1847, as columns of American soldiers were hurtling into Mexico City. The Mexican War, which had been raging for more than a year, was America’s first full-scale foreign conflict. Haggard-looking veterans had been flooding back to Springfield for months, parading through the streets waving captured flags and drawing huge crowds. The newspapers were plastered with the army’s exploits. Americans were thrilled by the excitement. The country, a young Herman Melville marveled, had been thrown into “a state of delirium” by the war.
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As triumphant American troops patrolled the Mexican capital, Lincoln and his family clambered into a stagecoach and set out from muddy Springfield on their first trip to Washington. The Illinoisan, who had just been elected to his first term in Congress, was full of anticipation. For years he had been relentlessly lobbying for this post, sending a flurry of letters to anyone who would listen. Mary, one of Lincoln’s friends observed, wanted “to loom largely” in the capital. Lincoln’s neighbors were skeptical. It would be impossible to turn the disheveled, six-foot-four giant into a gentleman, they sniped.
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It is easy to imagine the Illinois lawyer and his young family as they traveled east through the blazing fall foliage of the Indiana woods, into the crisp, cold Kentucky hills—and then on to Washington. By the fall of 1847, Lincoln had come to question the wisdom of the Mexican War, but he was not immune to ambition or flights of fancy. Foreign affairs, for better or worse, are a spectacle of power and romance—a relentlessly human endeavor. A week or so after he arrived in the nation’s capital, the young congressman scratched out a letter to his Springfield law partner, Billy Herndon. “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself,” Lincoln wrote, “I have concluded to do so, before long.”
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Lincoln vs. Herndon

A
BRAHAM LINCOLN WAS NERVOUS. THE FLOOR OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN THE 1840S WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY PLEASANT PLACE TO GIVE A SPEECH—ESPECIALLY THE FIRST
major effort of a freshman congressman’s career. The chamber was designed to resemble the Roman Pantheon, framed by marble pillars and crimson drapes, but it reminded more than one visitor of an unruly schoolhouse. Members kicked their heels up on the mahogany desks, hollered at the speaker, rustled newspapers, puffed on cigars, and spat tobacco juice on the filthy carpet. The noise, amplified by a cavernous, sixty-foot ceiling, reminded one visitor of “a hundred swarms of bees.” One of Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisans complained that he “would prefer speaking in a pig pen with 500 hogs squealing” or talking “to a mob when a fight is going on” than trying to keep the attention of his colleagues. It was, he recalled, “the most stupid place generally I was ever in.”
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Lincoln was accustomed to speaking before juries, but he could never completely suppress the butterflies. Thirty-eight years old, a “rail in broadcloth,” the gentleman from Illinois presented an arresting figure. His suits, more often than not, were rumpled, and his pants tended to hover above his ankles. His law partner at the time, William Herndon, described Lincoln as a “sinewy, grisly” character,
with a wild shock of hair that “lay floating where the fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random.” Regardless of his appearance, Lincoln knew on this day that he was likely to get the House’s attention. He had decided to pick a fight over the origins of the Mexican War, the two-year-old conflict that promised—or threatened—to remake the American West.
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Lincoln had been laying the groundwork for his speech for weeks. He had voted for fellow representative George Ashmun’s resolution condemning the 1846 American invasion of Mexico as unnecessary and unconstitutional. President James K. Polk claimed that the conflict was a war of self-defense, retaliation for attacks by Mexican guerrillas. Lincoln wasn’t buying. He demanded to know “the particular spot of soil” where American blood had been shed, insisting that U.S. troops had provoked the war by aggressively pushing into contested land.
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In the red-and-gold House chamber, with its plaster statue of
Liberty
and its large portraits of Washington and Lafayette, Lincoln went on the attack. He insisted in his high-pitched tenor that his “first impulse” regarding Mexico had been to “remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended.” Yet he finally determined that “I can not be silent, if I would.” Lincoln compared Polk to a shifty lawyer trying to defend a hopeless case. The president “is deeply conscious of being in the wrong,” Lincoln told the chamber. He “feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” Young Hickory, as Polk was known, had been deluded by dreams of military glory: “that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” The freshman congressman’s attacks quickly grew uncomfortably personal. The president, he boomed, was “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man,” whose “mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface.” Polk’s justifications were nothing more than “the half-insane mumbling of a fever dream.”
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