Lincoln in the World (16 page)

When Seward finally caught up with Lincoln, the future secretary of state “virtually kidnapped” the president-elect, dragging him from meeting to meeting throughout the capital. The two men
visited President James Buchanan at the White House and attended a service at Seward’s Episcopal church. (Lincoln liked to needle Seward good-naturedly about his faith. The president once told a carriage driver, “I thought you must be an Episcopalian, because you swear just like Governor Seward, who is a churchwarden.”) Shortly after the president-elect’s arrival, Seward hosted a small dinner for Lincoln at his home on Lafayette Square. The secretary of state’s entertaining was legendary. Suppers sometimes ran to eleven courses, with endless arrays of wine and Cuban cigars—all followed by a rubber of whist under the flickering gaslights. (Seward’s idol John Quincy Adams once observed that “the whole science of diplomacy consists of giving dinners.”) Seward wrote home that Lincoln “is very cordial and kind toward me—simple, natural, and agreeable.”
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Washington had changed a great deal since Lincoln’s first visit in 1847. The capital now boasted formidable marble structures housing the nation’s key ministries. Yet there was still a raw, incomplete quality about the place. The Mall was a mess, “a wide arc of swamp grass” dotted with pools of stagnant water and blotches of “evil-smelling mud.” The whole city appeared “unhealthy, unfinished, and crude” to foreign diplomats. “To make a Washington street,” observed one Englishman, “take one marble temple or public office, a dozen good houses of brick, and a dozen of wood, and fill with sheds and fields.”
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And yet, at least some of Lincoln’s young staffers saw potential in the city alongside the debris. On an unseasonably humid March day shortly after arriving in Washington, John Hay climbed to the iron-railed terrace atop the still-unfinished Capitol building and gazed out over the city. Distance, Hay observed, “lends enchantment” to the rugged American metropolis. “Seen from this point,” he wrote, “the city unrolls its dusty magnificences of distance; the stupendous harmonies of its design reveal themselves in broad avenues, which converge upon the capitol as all the roads of the Roman empire converged upon that golden milestone by the Pincian gate.” The city, Hay added, was “a congeries of hovels, inharmoniously sown
with temples, as the Napoleonic tapestries were sown with golden bees.” And yet, “something in the dust, the remoteness, the sunlight, touches them into respectability, if it does not glorify them.”
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Three days before the inauguration, Lincoln and Seward attended a dinner at the home of Rudolf Schleiden, Bremen’s minister in Washington. Schleiden was known around the capital for the quality of his wine cellar. On this night, the European diplomat served an ancient bottle—dating “but four years after the landing of the Pilgrims”—pouring it into tiny glasses. The value of the bottle “at compound interest would more than defray our national debt,” one newspaper reported. Lincoln rarely imbibed. (“I am not a temperance man,” he once remarked, “but I am temperate to this extent: I don’t drink.”) Still, the president-elect impressed his host by cracking jokes amid the gloomy circumstances. After dinner Schleiden quizzed Lincoln about diplomatic matters, presumably hoping to glean some bit of intelligence to report home. Lincoln shrewdly deflected the curious European. “I don’t know anything about diplomacy,” Lincoln said. “I will be very apt to make blunders.”
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Lincoln was adept at indirection. At times he also claimed to know nothing about finance, the navy—and any number of other subjects about which he understood far more than he said.
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Still, the president-elect complained even to friends that he wished he had spent more time “studying up” on foreign affairs. Foreign diplomats took him at his word. “Opinions about Mr. Lincoln are quite diverse—that is to say, about his character, for his mind is generally considered to be mediocre,” the French minister, Henri Mercier, wrote home to his superiors in early March. “He and his wife seem like a real family of western farmers, and even in this country, where one has no right to be fastidious, their common manners and their ways expose them in unfortunate fashion to ridicule.” (The feeling was not mutual; Americans were charmed by the dashing French envoy. Seward’s teenage daughter Fanny breathlessly told her diary that Mercier was “tall, black-haired and quite handsome.”)
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Even the minister from Russia—a nation that steadfastly
supported the Union during the crisis—initially had his doubts about the new American president. “Mr. Lincoln does not seem to possess the talent and energy that his party attributed to him when it named him its candidate for the presidency,” the Russian envoy, Eduard de Stoeckl, reported home as the inauguration approached. “Even his supporters admit that he is a man of unimpeachable integrity but of a poor capacity.” Still, when the diplomat finally met Lincoln at an early White House reception, he found the president more “pleasant and likable” than he expected. “His manners are those of a man who has spent his entire life in a small Western town,” Stoeckl wrote, “but he was polite and considerate to all, and the diplomatic corps in general had nothing but praise for the reception.” Power politics, however, were far more important to Russian leaders than social etiquette. The czar’s house newspaper reported that his regime considered an intact United States a critical counterweight to Britain and France—a nation “necessary to the general equilibrium.”
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The sophisticated and well-traveled Seward understood well the mechanics of the international balance of power. Still, he remained something of a wild card. Two days before the inauguration, Seward sent the president-elect a note withdrawing himself from consideration for the cabinet. Seward’s motivation remains something of a mystery, but he was probably objecting to Lincoln’s other choices of cabinet officers. On the cold, gray morning of Lincoln’s inauguration, as the sharpshooters were taking their places on Washington rooftops (a Baltimore gang known as the Blood Tubs had been plotting to assassinate the president, according to some reports), Lincoln handed one of his secretaries a note for the New Yorker. “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” Lincoln explained. In his note, the president-elect appealed to both the “public interest” and his “personal feelings” in asking Seward to “countermand the withdrawal.”
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With tensions rising across the Atlantic, Lincoln needed a competent secretary of state in place as soon as possible. On inauguration
day the diplomatic corps packed into the Senate chamber in their “brilliant uniforms,” Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Todd Grimsley recalled. The First Lady sat in the diplomatic section with the foreign envoys. The chests full of medals and epaulette-covered shoulders offered a stark reminder that the European powers were carefully observing the new president, watching for any clues about the direction of his foreign policy. The spectators were only too aware, as Grimsley put it, of the Confederates’ “strong conviction that ‘King Cotton’ must control the markets of the world, and thus secure foreign recognition.” Southerners were counting on “that little attenuated cotton thread,” in the words of one Confederate congressman, “which a child can break, but which, nevertheless can hang the world.”

Lincoln must have wondered at times whether the rebels might be right about the power of the crop to sway the policies of distant empires. Mercier, for one, was not reassured by the inaugural spectacle. The “so-called simplicity” and “lack of ceremony” of the event, the French envoy reported home, was “totally out of harmony with the marble and gilt” of the unfinished Capitol building. “It’s as if one wanted to inaugurate a Quaker in a basilica,” he sniped. Lincoln’s speech, the Frenchman added, only reinforced that impression. The new president’s words lacked “that power of initiative which should characterize the hand which holds the helm in such violent circumstances.” French officials were more optimistic about Seward’s competence. The emperor knew the incoming secretary of state from his visit to France two years earlier and sent word through intermediaries that he remembered their “
réception tout exceptionellement amicable.
”
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On the evening after the inauguration, Lincoln finally convinced Seward to join the cabinet after “a long and confidential talk.” With his most important deputy in place, the president attempted to enjoy himself. Shortly before eleven p.m., the Lincolns entered their inaugural ball to the tune of “Hail Columbia.” Mary, wearing a blue gown with a blue feather in her hair, walked in on the arm of Stephen Douglas, crossing the length of the hall and later dancing a quadrille.
The First Lady, one observer reported, would have looked at home among “the queens of the earth.”

Lincoln, on the other hand, still appeared “tired and ill at ease.” To Henry Adams, the president-elect presented a “long, awkward figure” with “a plain, ploughed face.” Adams was struck by the “lack of apparent force” in the Illinois native. “No man living needed so much education as the new president,” Adams later recalled. And yet, “all the education he could get would not be enough.” John Bigelow, whom Lincoln would send to the Paris consulate later that year, agreed that the new president “was destitute of experience and withal lacks superiority of every kind except inches, though a very well disposed person and good enough president for ordinary times.” Less worldly observers were more charitable. A New York clergyman “took heart” as he spotted the president’s “tall form and composed face” at an early White House reception “towering above the compact crowd of foreign ministers.”
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Office hunters seeking diplomatic posts immediately besieged the new president. Foreign-service appointments represented a key component of presidential power. They helped to inspire loyalty among allies, and amounted to one of the few levers of government that Lincoln actually controlled.
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Still, the crush of would-be diplomats overwhelmed the president. Days after the inauguration, Lincoln complained to a newspaper editor that he felt like “a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.” The president grumbled that he had “too many pigs for the tits.” In one letter home shortly after the inauguration, Seward reported that it had become difficult to get in and out of the Executive Mansion because of all the applicants clogging the “grounds, halls, stairways, [and] closets.” Lincoln joked that he was glad that God had not made him a woman, because he had always found it difficult to say no.
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Not all job seekers were motivated by a burning desire to serve their country. Foreign postings in the nineteenth century were often viewed as extended vacations. One Lincoln administration official
recalled the time a visiting delegation had asked the president to appoint its candidate envoy to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). Their man, they insisted, was “in bad health, and a residence in that balmy climate would be of great benefit to him.” Lincoln understandably demurred. “Gentlemen,” he told the petitioners, “I am sorry to say that there are eight other applicants for that place, and they are all sicker than your man.”

The State Department maintained a tradition of assigning artists and writers to European consulates with only “light duties.” The novelist Herman Melville was one of those who besieged Lincoln and Seward hoping to snag a consular post. The author of
Moby-Dick
had dispatched pleading missives to anyone he could think of asking for an assignment to Florence, Italy. On a cool, windy day in late March, Melville finally managed to slip into a White House reception and introduce himself to the president. The novelist was impressed. “There was a great crowd, & a brilliant scene,” the author wrote home to his wife. “Ladies in full dress by the hundred.” Melville waited in line to greet Lincoln. “Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking,” the novelist wrote home. “He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.” The First Lady, too, was “rather good looking” and the whole scene “very fine altogether. Superb furniture—flood of light—magnificent flowers—full band of music & c.” Ultimately, however, the novelist failed to win his plum.
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Lincoln was torn between the necessity of appointing competent diplomats, on the one hand, and the need to repay political debts, on the other. Some of the new president’s closest allies were German-Americans. Seward, however, had initially indicated that no foreign-born candidate would be assigned to an American legation in Europe. The secretary of state, as Carl Schurz later explained it, feared that some of the German activists—who “had been engaged in revolutionary movements in Europe at a comparatively recent period”—might not be “favorably received” at conservative European courts. “This,” Schurz added, “was of importance at a critical
time when we had especial reason for conciliating the goodwill of foreign governments.” The distracting diplomatic tempest filled the gossip columns of Washington newspapers. “Next to the difficulty about Fort Sumter,” the
New York Herald
observed, “the question as to what is to be done with Carl Schurz seems to bother the administration more than anything else.”

Indeed, the secretary of state’s proposal did not sit well with Lincoln, who pressed Seward to consider key German-born allies like Schurz and Gustave Koerner for the diplomatic corps. “What about our German friends?” Lincoln asked the secretary of state in mid-March. Seward’s stance, Koerner told Lincoln, was creating “the most intense sensation amongst the German Republicans all through the country.” The U.S. had long appointed non-native emissaries to its diplomatic corps, Koerner argued. “Albert Gallatin—a Swiss—was our ambassador in London in former times,” he reminded Lincoln, “and [Pierre] Soulé—a Frenchman—in Spain. The latter was a fool, but that was the objection to him, and not his nativity.”