Lincoln in the World (15 page)

As the New Year approached, Weed traveled to Springfield—at least partly to try to impress upon Lincoln the wisdom of the Crittenden Compromise. But Weed’s was a hopeless mission. The
president-elect believed the Crittenden measure would likely defuse the crisis in the short term. Still, Lincoln was sure that the debate would ultimately flare up again in the near future, when Southern sympathizers attempted to seize Mexico. Lincoln responded to the Dictator’s pleas with “undisguised hostility,” the
New York Herald
reported. “I will be inflexible on the territorial question,” Lincoln explained, adding that he believed any compromise would offer an invitation to filibusters. Weed found the president-elect “at ease and undisturbed” during their all-day meeting at Lincoln’s home. Ultimately, though, the political operative’s mission failed. Lincoln sent Weed back east with his own set of compromise resolutions that would prevent the extension of slavery. The president-elect suggested that Seward should introduce the resolutions himself.
⁸⁴

While Weed worked on Lincoln in Springfield, Seward brazenly tested new ideas. During one trip from his home in upstate New York to Washington, Seward stopped at the Astor House Hotel in Manhattan and gave an impromptu speech to a boisterous dinner of the New England Society. The future secretary of state arrived late in the night, and cracked jokes to the liquor- and cigar-fueled audience. Seward may have gotten carried away. At one point he seemed to intimate that a war with a foreign power could help to unify the United States. “I am very sure,” Seward said, “that if anybody was to make a descent upon New York tomorrow—whether Louis Napoleon, or the Prince of Wales, or his mother, or the Emperor of Russia or Austria—if either of them were to make a descent upon the City of New York tomorrow, I believe all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population to the rescue of New York.” The crowd, according to a newspaper reporter who was present, responded with loud cheering and “every demonstrable evidence of delight.” Historians have long pointed to this speech as confirmation that Seward advocated picking a fight with Europe to head off the domestic crisis. Yet, when read in context, it seems unlikely that he genuinely desired a war with a distant foe.
⁸⁵

Seward eventually fell in line, voting against the Crittenden
Compromise and accepting Lincoln’s invitation to join the cabinet. But the New Yorker refused to stop angling for a deal. On January 12, 1861, Seward appeared in the Senate chamber and delivered one of his most memorable addresses, urging concessions to avert the crisis. “Hours before the Senate met,” the
Chicago Tribune
reported, “the galleries were full to crushing and fainting. The lobbies and cloakrooms were literally packed with an anxious throng.” Spectators included the “whole diplomatic corps,” which “gave the deepest attention to every word.”

Seward enumerated a list of potential compromises designed to placate the South. Yet the speech is most notable as a window onto Seward’s approach to politics and foreign affairs. Lincoln’s future secretary of state struck his favorite theme about the importance of maintaining U.S. prestige in the wider world. “The American man-of-war is a noble spectacle,” Seward told the Senate in his husky monotone. “I have seen it enter an ancient port in the Mediterranean. All the world wondered at it, and talked of it. Salvos of artillery, from forts and shipping in the harbor, saluted its flag. Princes and princesses and merchants paid it homage, and all the people blessed it as a harbinger of hope for their own ultimate freedom. I imagine now the same noble vessel again entering the same haven. The flag of thirty-three stars and thirteen stripes has been hauled down, and in its place a signal is run up, which flaunts the device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. Men ask, ‘Who is the stranger that thus steals into our waters?’ The answer contemptuously given is, ‘She comes from one of the obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.’ ”

Avoiding such an ignoble fate, Seward believed, would demand a flexible and pragmatic approach to the secession crisis. “I learned early from Jefferson that, in political affairs, we cannot always do what seems to us absolutely best,” Seward told the packed chamber. “We must be content to lead when we can; and to follow when we cannot lead; and if we cannot at any time do for our country all the good that we would wish, we must be satisfied with doing for her all the good that we can.” After Seward finished, the assembled
diplomats eagerly quizzed U.S. senators about whether the New Yorker’s counsel would be followed.
⁸⁶

Lincoln was also a pragmatist who reined in the most radical elements of his party. But Seward’s freelancing aggravated him. The president-elect was “not overpleased with Seward’s speech,” one acquaintance reported. Lincoln complained that his secretary of state designate was making his remarks without getting his input. Lincoln’s most strident allies in Illinois marveled at the compromises of the man they once viewed as a leading antislavery agitator. “What do you think of Seward?” one of Lincoln’s supporters asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power.” Seward felt that he was doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. “Distraction rules the hour,” he wrote home to his family. “I hope what I have done will bring some good fruits.” Yet even Seward’s outspoken wife replied by complaining of her husband’s “concessions.”
⁸⁷

For weeks Seward had been urging Lincoln to leave Springfield and come to Washington early. The capital, he explained, was full of “a feverish excitement” that “awakens all kind of apprehensions of popular disturbance and disorders.” Seward suggested that Lincoln plan to arrive in Washington by early February. The president-elect’s presence would be “reassuring and soothing,” he explained. The following day Seward reiterated his plea for Lincoln to arrive “earlier than you otherwise would” and come in “by surprise.” Yet Lincoln took his time, instead holding court in Springfield.
⁸⁸

In the meantime President James Buchanan and his secretary of state, Jeremiah S. Black, fumblingly tried to salvage America’s reputation abroad. Buchanan, who had served overseas as the U.S. minister in London, declared secession unconstitutional, but he also maintained that the federal government could not prevent it. Eventually, however, Black issued a circular urging his diplomats to guard against European overtures to the Confederacy. “If the independence of the ‘Confederated States’ should be acknowledged by the great powers of Europe,” Black wrote, “it would tend to disturb the
friendly relations, diplomatic and commercial, now existing between those powers and the United States.”
⁸⁹

Lincoln’s allies, however, complained that Buchanan’s diplomatic corps was dangerously subversive. Missouri congressman Francis P. Blair Jr. wrote to the president-elect cautioning that the existing foreign envoys were as “traitorous” as Buchanan’s cabinet. Blair worried that the American emissaries were using “all their art and power to persuade the Courts to which they are accredited that the
separation
of the states was a fixed fact.” Blair urged Lincoln to swiftly appoint “men of tact and ability” with “some European reputation” to “counteract the impressions made by those now in Europe.”
⁹⁰

In Springfield, meanwhile, the president-elect received a visit in late January from Matías Romero, the twenty-three-year-old Mexican envoy to Washington. The two men discussed Mexican affairs, and Lincoln asked about the dismal conditions of the peons—the involuntary servants who worked as planters in Mexican fields. Romero reported home to his government that the president-elect “did not appear to be well-informed on Mexican affairs.” Still, Romero was impressed with Lincoln’s sincerity—a welcome change from the cynical envoys he was used to dealing with. The Mexican representative praised the president-elect as a “simple and honest man.” His conversation with Lincoln, Romero told his superiors, was refreshingly free of the “pompous and empty phrases used by persons educated in the school of false pretenses who have the habit of promising much but doing nothing.”
⁹¹

By early February, the president-elect was more convinced than ever that caving in on expansion would place Mexico at the mercy of Southern filibusters. He wrote to Seward emphasizing that he remained “inflexible” on the “territorial question.” Lincoln explained that he would reject any “compromise which
assists
or
permits
the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.” Furthermore, he added, “any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as
obnoxious as any other.” Such schemes, Lincoln insisted, would only place the United States on “the high road to a slave empire.”
⁹²

Seward recognized that Lincoln’s inflexible stance would likely lead to war with the South. With his attempts at conciliation failing, the future secretary of state apparently began looking for another way out of the crisis. In late January, Seward warned a foreign diplomat that the only solution may be to pick a fight with Europe. “If the Lord would only give the United States an excuse for a war with England, France, or Spain,” he told Rudolf Schleiden, Bremen’s envoy to Washington, “that would be the best means of reestablishing internal peace.” Two weeks later Seward complained again to Schleiden that he could find no excuse for a foreign war.
⁹³

While Seward blustered in Washington, Lincoln holed himself up in the back room of a general store in Springfield, and began writing his first inaugural. For inspiration, Lincoln asked Herndon to fetch Henry Clay’s address on the sectional crisis of 1850, the text of the U.S. Constitution, and Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against nullification. Herndon brought the requested materials to the “dingy, dusty, and neglected back room” where his partner was working. Lincoln also wanted a copy of Washington’s farewell address—the seminal foreign-policy statement that Lincoln had read as a boy. When Lincoln was finished, he sent a draft to Seward, who was stunned by the uncompromising document. On February 24, Seward wrote Lincoln warning that if he delivered his bold address as it was, “the dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration.”
⁹⁴
He urged the president-elect to tone down the most strident passages.

By the time he left for Washington, Lincoln was already weary. A friend observed in January that the president-elect appeared “care worn and more haggard and more stooped than I ever saw him.” Shortly before his departure, Lincoln asked to meet his law partner at their office. Lincoln told Herndon to leave the sign hanging out front. They would resume their practice when his term was up. The pressure of the office already seemed to be weighing on Lincoln. The
president-elect, Herndon recalled, “threw himself down on the old office sofa,” and spent several moments silently staring at the ceiling. Later, as the two men walked out of the office together, Lincoln confided to his partner that he was “sick of office-holding already.” He told Herndon that he shuddered to “think of the tasks that are still ahead.”
⁹⁵

In the days before their departure, the Lincolns threw a huge party at their Springfield home. Hundreds of revelers packed into the house. “Such a crowd,” one guest reported, “I seldom, or ever saw at a private house.” Guests waited for twenty minutes just to get into the front hall. Finding the exits at the end of the night was no easier. The Lincolns navigated the crowd good-naturedly. Mary wore a dress made of “white moiré antique silk, with a small French lace collar.” At one point, a guest recalled seeing Lincoln’s son Robert approach his father, playfully extend his hand, and exclaim, “Good evening,
Mr. Lincoln
!” The president-elect gave his son “a gentle slap in the face.”
⁹⁶

After twelve years, the Lincoln family was finally returning to the capital. After the president-elect packed up his belongings, he labeled his baggage with a succinct tag. It read simply:
A. LINCOLN, WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
⁹⁷

The First Trick

The tensions of the secession winter obscured the fundamental similarities in the worldviews of Lincoln and his chief diplomat. Both men wanted to preserve a united nation that guaranteed all its citizens upward mobility and the freedom to expand into new territory. Both men remained eager to promote American commerce with the wider world. Lincoln and Seward simply held a difference of opinion about the best way to pursue that goal. Seward believed the best strategy was to punt—striking a bargain with Southerners while maintaining a fragile unity. Lincoln did not see the virtue in
postponing what he considered the inevitable. If a war was the only remedy, then it was better to face it now than later.
⁹⁸

The two men did, however, possess radically different temperaments. Lincoln was a humble man who maintained a healthy appreciation of the limits of his own power. Seward, on the other hand, almost maniacally attempted to shape the world around him. Wiry and diminutive—at five foot six, he was an inch shorter than his wife—Seward was endlessly seeking opportunities to enhance his stature. As governor of New York, the ceremonial head of the state militia, he spent the modern equivalent of $5,300 of his own money on a bespoke uniform including an ostentatious sash and epaulets. He was so vain that he would sometimes tip his hat to strangers on the street “who looked as though they might recognize him.” After he eventually lost the nomination to Lincoln, Seward compared himself to Moses—leading his people to the Promised Land, but forbidden to enter it himself. Seward, observes one recent Lincoln biographer, displayed “a massive savior complex.”
⁹⁹

Seward overslept on the morning of February 23, when Lincoln finally arrived in Washington. He had planned to meet the president-elect at the train station at six a.m. but never made it. Seward rushed to Willard’s Hotel, the busy Washington power center where Lincoln had booked a suite in the days leading up to the inauguration. To one witness who saw Seward there on the calm, cloudy morning, the New Yorker appeared “much out of breath and somewhat chagrined.” It is easy to imagine the secretary of state designate, dressed in his usual rumpled black uniform, his white hair a hopeless mess, panting through the hotel lobby. To Henry Adams, son of Lincoln’s minister to Britain, Seward presented “a slouching, slender figure” with a “head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar.”
¹⁰⁰