Lincoln in the World (13 page)

Rich Wines, Golden Chains, and Diamond Rings

Friendship and power, commerce and war—Europe presented a continent of contrasts when Seward finally returned in 1859, twenty-six years after his first voyage with his father. This time Seward found that all strata of British society were eager to meet him—from the royal family to the London bankers to the working classes of the country’s industrial heartland. Seward’s reputation had grown significantly over the course of the 1850s. Britons believed they were likely meeting the next president of the United States. In letters home, Seward boasted of the “great and titled visitors” who eagerly called on him. He was introduced, one after another, to quarters that he had once “regarded as forever inaccessible to me.” The world, Seward wrote home, seemed smaller than ever.
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Britain’s orderly elegance impressed Seward. At a concert one night at Buckingham Palace, he marveled at the massive concert hall filled with tiers of crimson-cushioned chairs. The room, he wrote home, appeared “larger than our church.” As Queen Victoria entered, the crowd fluttered with graceful bows. After the performance, Victoria stopped by the diplomatic section and greeted Seward. She mentioned that Britain must have changed a great deal since his last visit. “All is changed, Madam,” he replied. “It is improved?” the
queen asked. “Vastly improved,” Seward said. The two discussed the profound changes wrought in both Britain and the United States by the railroads, steamships, and the telegraph. “Do you think the improvement will go on?” the queen asked. “I trust so,” Seward replied, “if we can preserve peace between the two branches of one great family.”
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Still, as Seward traveled throughout Europe, he was struck by the powerful—and unpredictable—forces reshaping the continent. The source of Britain’s strength, Seward recognized, was not simply in its military but in the economic underpinnings of its society. As Seward traveled north from London, into industrial Lancashire and then up to Scotland, he passed a wilderness of chimneys belching flame and thick, black coal smoke. In Glasgow, Seward observed, “for a distance of fifteen or twenty miles around it, forges, furnaces, and other huge structures fill up the scene, not merely crowding the valleys, but climbing the hills on all sides. There seemed to be no green earth. But everywhere multitudes of men and engines were tearing up the ground to its very foundations, and melting them, or dissipating them into ashes, in ten thousand fires that climbed to the sky, amid wreaths of heavy and impenetrable smoke, which blackened the earth below.” Seward credited the growth to the forty years of peace that Europe had enjoyed in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Now, he concluded, Britain had succeeded in making the whole world “tributary to her work-shops.”
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And yet Seward believed he saw a key irony in the outward symbols of British strength. Britain was becoming more and more like the United States, which he viewed as the prototype of middle-class society. Even as Seward strolled through the massive English country estates—with their wafting scents of honeysuckle and jasmine, their arching fountains, and their deer and pheasant wandering the grounds—he recognized that the common people would ultimately gain control of the nobility’s old treasures. “How distinctly I see the transition of society indicated in these massive, modern industrial structures, towering over the dilapidated walls of baronial castles,”
he wrote home. “These immense estates must ultimately become prizes to the active and industrious classes.” The transition may be a “slow process,” but the “plebians wax stronger every day.” The overall dynamic, he observed, amounted to a “revolution” that would “assimilate them to us.” The “younger members of the family,” Seward declared, were “really its leaders.”
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When he crossed the English Channel to France, Seward found that nation also vastly changed—but not in the same ways. The tiny, winding streets that he had observed in 1833 had been transformed into magnificent boulevards and sprawling gardens under the leadership of Napoleon III. And yet the same grand avenues were infused with a martial spirit he had not observed in Britain. The army, Seward noted, “is everywhere” in Paris. He was struck by the “egotism” of French nationalism. Still, the future secretary of state was ultimately impressed by the emperor when the two men met at Napoleon’s retreat in Compiègne. “It seemed difficult to find a subject on which we could differ, or which he did not discuss wisely,” Seward later recalled. The empress struck Lincoln’s future secretary of state as “graceful and pensively beautiful.”

The contrasts among France, Britain, and the United States presented themselves even more sharply when he toured the Belgian battlefield at Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington’s armies had ultimately defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. As he stood on the same ground as the renowned generals, Seward found himself slightly conflicted. On the one hand, he admired Napoleon’s efforts to improve “the material and moral conditions” of his country. In retrospect, however, the French emperor’s reckless daring doomed him to defeat at the hands of his British adversary—that patient “nation of shopkeepers.”
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The intersection of trade, commerce, and nationalism—all rising forces in the midnineteenth century—presented Seward with a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand, the industrial and market revolutions were clearly reshaping the world. At times, they seemed to promise closer ties among nations and growing harmony among men. At other
moments, however, the same economic forces seemed to reinforce nationalism, adding fuel to new and ancient enmities. On board his steamer across the Atlantic, Seward listened as American residents boasted about “seizing and annexing Cuba.” On another occasion, a fight broke out among passengers—“coats stripped, knives drawn”—in the steerage compartment. It would be folly, Seward observed, to assume that economic progress necessarily marched hand in hand with peace. “When will war-making kings and emperors lack for armies to fight?” Seward asked. “Not in our day, I ween.”
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Seward tried to find a middle path through this thicket. He worked ceaselessly to improve American trade and commerce. But he wanted to make sure that the fruits of economic development benefitted Americans—not “some foreign monopoly,” as he put it. “I can understand the proposition of free-trade,” Seward once acknowledged. “It is an intelligible theory, and at some future period down the vista of years, it is probable that the world will come to understand that universal free-trade is the wisest and most beneficent system of fiscal administration for any government and for all governments.” In his own time, Seward embraced selected reciprocal trade agreements. In the mid 1850s he voted for a major treaty that would lower tariffs with Canada. Yet Seward also believed that if the U.S. government did not intervene to protect American industries, young domestic manufacturers would find themselves overwhelmed by more powerful foreign competitors like Britain and France.
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Lincoln shared Seward’s approach to trade. Like the New Yorker, Lincoln had long advocated material improvements—roads, canals, railroads—that would help get American products to world markets. Yet the New World would not win its independence from Europe simply by aping the Old World’s fashions and institutions. Lincoln liked to mock fellow citizens obsessed with “foreign luxuries—fine cloths, fine silks, rich wines, golden chains, and diamond rings.” He ridiculed those who felt the need to “strut in British cloaks.”
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Like Seward, Lincoln thought untrammeled free trade premature. America, Lincoln believed, would need to blaze its own path.

The Terror of the World

In the midnineteenth century, it was still considered poor form to actively seek the presidential nomination. So in the spring of 1860, when an acquaintance asked Lincoln about his thoughts on the upcoming race, the Illinoisan hesitated a little. Seward, the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination, could not win in a contest against Democrat Stephen Douglas, Lincoln told his correspondent. Then again, Lincoln admitted, his opinions were colored by his own ambitions. “The taste
is
in my mouth a little,” Lincoln confided, adding: “Let no eye but your own see this—not that there is anything wrong, or even ungenerous, in it; but it would be misconstrued.”
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Like Lincoln’s past campaign against Douglas, in 1858, the current race was certain to address the central foreign-policy question of the day—namely, American expansion. The 1850s had witnessed the growth of a movement spearheaded by Douglas that sought to assert American power abroad. Calling itself Young America, it represented the latest evolution of the Manifest Destiny phenomenon of the Mexican War era. Young Americans shared the romantic spirit of the previous decade. They crowed about supporting fellow republicans abroad—and converting any autocratic holdouts. They believed that the United States was destined to become, as Douglas once put it, “the admiration and terror of the world.” They meant it in a good way.

As Lincoln contemplated a presidential run, he took direct aim at the Democratic foreign-policy platform. At a speaking engagement in Springfield, he trotted out an old lecture, “Discoveries and Inventions,” in which he mocked Democrats, Douglas, and Young America.
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The speech, which Lincoln delivered on several occasions throughout the late 1850s, was not one of his most compelling efforts. Billy Herndon derided it as “a cold flat thing,” and it seemed to bore audiences. And yet, as a window onto Lincoln’s thinking about the intersection of commerce and foreign policy, it is a critical document. On this day, in April 1860, Lincoln’s audience included
John Hay—the young Illinois native who, as secretary of state to presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, would ultimately carry a Hamiltonian approach to foreign policy into the Gilded Age.
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The speech is actually one of Lincoln’s more thoughtful meditations on the relationship between power and character. In the opening of his address, he surveyed the technological progress of the past decades. Lincoln gushed about the growth of the railroads—the “iron horse” that was “panting” impatiently across the country. He marveled at the communications revolution led by the telegraph—“the lightening” that “stands ready harnessed” to carry the news across the globe “in a trifle less than no time.” The modern world had showered Americans with material gifts: “cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell; flax-linen from Ireland; wool-cloth from [Spain;] silk from France; furs from the Arctic regions.” American dinner tables, Lincoln declared, were covered with “coffee and fruit from the tropics; salt from Turk’s Island; fish from New-foundland; tea from China, and spices from the Indies.”

And yet, Lincoln believed, unchecked expansion threatened to undermine the American character. Lincoln mocked the hypocrisy of “conceited,” “arrogant,” land-hungry Democrats. They own “a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of
wanting
it, and
intending
to have it,” Lincoln said. Young America, he continued, displayed an unseemly “ ‘longing after’ territory,” sarcastically adding that its “desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom.” Douglas and the Democrats, he said, his words dripping with irony, were “very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land.” Lincoln did his best to highlight the perils of untrammeled territorial expansion. Economic growth, Lincoln believed, should be channeled toward assuring American freedom from the Old World. Instead, Lincoln worried, the Democrats’ hunger for land would reduce Americans to slaves of their own appetites.
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On the most immediate foreign-policy issue in the 1860
campaign—the proposed annexation of Cuba—both Lincoln and Seward essentially walked in lockstep with their party. In 1859 the U.S. Senate had issued a report advocating the purchase of the Caribbean island. Seward had long coveted Cuba, and once argued that the island represented a natural extension of American territory. “Every rock and every grain of sand in that island,” he had declared, was “drifted and washed out from American soil by the floods of the Mississippi, and the other estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico.” Still, by the late 1850s, Seward opposed annexation. Lincoln, too, apparently counseled against absorbing the island. A September 1860 editorial in the Whig
Illinois State Journal
, which scholars believe may have been written by Lincoln, argues against annexation and needles Douglas and the Democrats for their designs on Cuba.
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Foreign policy, however, was largely a sideshow to the overriding issue of the 1860 campaign: slavery and the possibility of Southern secession. Seward was experienced and well traveled, and his high profile made him an apparent shoo-in for the Republican nomination. Lincoln recognized his long odds. “Everybody knows them,” Lincoln remarked of Seward and his other competition. “Nobody, scarcely, outside of Illinois, knows me.” Seward could also boast the backing of Thurlow Weed, one of the country’s shrewdest and most ruthless political operatives. Lincoln boosters counseled the Illinois lawyer to imitate his opponent. “Do like Seward does,” Chicago mayor John Wentworth advised Lincoln in the spring of 1860. “Get someone to
run
you.”
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In late May, Republicans gathered in Chicago at the “Wigwam”—a makeshift hall on the corner of Lake and Market streets that had been built for the 1860 convention. It was, one reporter recalled, “a gorgeous pavilion aflame with color and all aflutter with pennants and streamers.” Delegates debated the prospective GOP platform, ultimately approving expansionist planks like support for a transcontinental railroad and laws that would encourage western migration. Meanwhile, Weed—whom Republicans referred to as Lord Thurlow or the Dictator—had arrived in Chicago on a thirteen-car train
from New York, carrying $100,000 cash, accompanied by a posse of whisky-swilling pro-Seward operatives. He worked the delegations, amid the flags and red-white-and-blue bunting, with motions “as rapid as a rope-dancer’s.”
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