Lincoln in the World (17 page)

Lincoln ultimately overruled Seward and appointed Schurz to the Madrid post. (Koerner himself eventually took over the legation in Spain after Schurz resigned.) “By stiffening Lincoln’s backbone,” the scholar Michael Burlingame observes, Schurz “may have made it easier for the president to stand up to Seward” in later crises. Schurz, in any case, was thrilled. “My vanity,” he later recalled, “was immensely flattered by the thought of returning to Europe clothed in all the dignity of a Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary of the United States only a few years after having left my native land as a political refugee.” To his wife Schurz wrote: “Next to Mexico, Spain is the most important diplomatic post—and it is mine.” The whole episode was a stark reminder that international diplomacy is always a delicate undertaking in a nation of immigrants such as the United States.
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Mary Lincoln presented another hurdle when it came to staffing the foreign service. Her first target was Lincoln’s secretary of state. “Seward in the cabinet!” she cried. “Never!” She cautioned Lincoln
that Seward drew the president “around his finger as if you were a skein of thread.” The First Lady derided the secretary of state as an “abolition sneak” and complained that her husband gave Seward his job only “very reluctantly.” Lincoln admitted that he found it difficult to control his wife. He “constantly” worried that she would do something to “disgrace” him. Lincoln vigorously defended his secretary of state when Mary badmouthed him as an unprincipled hypocrite. “Mother, you are mistaken; your prejudices are so violent that you do not stop to reason,” Lincoln protested. “Seward is an able man, and the country as well as myself can trust him.”
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The First Lady’s dislike of Seward did not stop her from shamelessly harassing him to appoint her allies to key posts. She quickly suggested that he install one of her friends as the new consul in Honolulu. On another occasion, she cornered Lincoln and insisted that he name a favorite Springfield clergyman, the Reverend Dr. James Smith, as the American consul in Dundee, Scotland. An exasperated Lincoln threw his hands in the air and demanded to know the rationale for the appointment. The preacher’s résumé was certainly very thin. Even Billy Herndon, a bit of a scamp himself, later referred to Smith as “a great old rascal.” Smith’s son-in-law had written Lincoln in February arguing for the appointment on the grounds that the preacher “is quite advanced in life and … is poor in this world’s goods and therefore he needs some assistance to enable him and the old lady to support themselves in Scotland.” The president at first tried to steer a middle course by appointing Smith’s son to the post. Still, when the younger man fell ill, the president ultimately relented under the pressure of his wife and Smith’s other allies. “Send your preacher to the Cabinet Room,” Lincoln told Mary. The president made his wife promise that this would be the last time she tried to box him in when it came to diplomatic appointments.
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Mary’s influence on Lincoln’s foreign policy was complex, though ultimately minimal. On the one hand, she operated as a kind of free radical—threatening to tip delicate diplomatic balances in an already unsteady capital. Mary’s “natural want of tact … her blundering
outspokenness, and impolitic disregard for diplomatic considerations,” as one society reporter put it, posed a challenge for the president. She once told her old Kentucky friend Cassius Marcellus Clay, who considered himself “open enemies” with Seward, that she and the president “had no confidence whatever in Mr. Seward’s friendship,” and that Clay “need not fear [Seward’s] influence.” Lincoln, Mary told her friend, “only tolerated [Seward] for political reasons.” For years after the war, Southern sympathizers taunted the First Lady (however unfairly) for her interference with diplomatic patronage. “What opulent presents were made in advance / By seekers of missions to Russia and France,” jeered the Richmond
Southern Opinion
. And yet for all Mary’s meddling, her influence was not entirely negative. Lincoln could sometimes be a homebody. Mary’s cosmopolitan ambitions helped the president to get outside himself—a critical prerequisite for successful diplomats. “If his domestic life had been entirely happy,” John Hay’s uncle Milton once observed, “I dare say he would have stayed at home and not busied himself with distant concerns.”
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Still, for Lincoln, that growth process must have been painful. Mary, in her determination to establish her husband’s authority over Seward, could be maddening. “It is said you are the power behind the throne,” she once told the secretary of state, according to Mary’s sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards. “I’ll show you that Mr. L is president yet.” She even challenged Seward on minor points of diplomatic protocol. Usually it fell to the secretary of state to host the first state dinner of an administration. In this case, however, the First Lady—who once referred to the events as “stupid state dinners”—insisted on hosting it herself.
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If the goal was to impress the diplomatic corps and other distinguished guests, her efforts were not entirely successful. A British journalist who attended the dinner described the First Lady as “of the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the
embonpoint
natural to her years; her features are plain, her nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance homely.” In any event, after Mary’s guests departed for the evening, the First Lady
had the $900 bill for the dinner sent over to Seward. Mary’s power games were starting to irritate the secretary of state and his staff.
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Stress, or spring fever, or some combination of the two, seemed to afflict virtually all members of Lincoln’s inner circle as April approached. As the president fell ill, Seward began to behave erratically. At one dinner party in late March, an agitated—or drunk—secretary of state threatened the representatives of England, France, and Russia, that if their ships were captured leaving Southern ports, the United States would not compensate them. The conversation had begun amiably enough, but it eventually devolved into a shouting match. Sipping whisky and puffing on a cigar, Seward gradually grew “more and more violent and noisy,” the British minister reported home to his government. The American, he recalled, uttered threats that it would have been “more convenient not to have heard.”
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God Damn Them, I’ll Give Them Hell!

As March turned to April, both Lincoln and Seward had reached a breaking point. The president and his cabinet needed to make some critical decisions about how to respond to Southern intransigence—choices that, if poorly handled, risked drawing European powers into the conflict. Confederate leaders had begun to isolate the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, a brick-walled fortress just off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln appeared unsure about whether to send reinforcements to the troops. Confederate leaders made clear that doing so would result in war. Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, warned Lincoln that abandoning the fort would invite recognition of the Confederacy by foreign powers. Yet Seward, trying to remain conciliatory, told Confederate representatives that he doubted Lincoln would choose to provision the garrison. Asked as April dawned whether Lincoln intended to resupply the fort, Seward told one Southern representative: “No, I think not. It is a very irksome thing to him to surrender it. His ears are open to everyone, and
they fill his head with schemes for its supply. I do not think he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”
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Seward was ultimately mistaken about Lincoln’s resolve. To start, the president bought Blair’s argument that abandoning the fort could lead to European recognition of the Confederacy. Retreating from the garrison, Lincoln later explained, “would be utterly ruinous,” going far to ensure the Confederacy “recognition abroad.” Abandoning the fort, he concluded, “would be our national destruction consummated.” Lincoln eventually chose to send supplies (although not weapons) to the fort—a shrewd and fateful compromise that led directly to the first shots of the war and rallied the North around the president’s war effort.
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In some ways, Seward’s restraint in the face of the tremendous public pressure for action is as impressive as Lincoln’s clever solution. Both men, it should be remembered, were being continually badgered by newspapers, political opponents, and their own allies, to stake out a bold position. Each day brought another wave of dire news. Critical border states like Kentucky threatened to slip out of the Union. Confederate forces continued to seize federal arsenals and garrisons, and seemed poised to attack Washington. “For god’s sake do something,” one correspondent urged Seward in late March. “We have been drifting too long already. I repeat for god’s sake do something.”
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Lincoln later recalled the intense pressure he felt as he tried to resolve the secession crisis. “Of all the trials I have had since I came here,” he told his old friend Orville Browning later that year, “none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
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Shortly before the secretary of state presented Lincoln with his notorious April Fools’ Day memo and “foreign war panacea,” Seward complained to his wife that he too was full of “anxieties.” Still, he cautioned, “they must not enter into our correspondence. Dangers and breakers are before us.” Seward was right to worry. His memo to the president certainly might have been viewed as
insubordination—a firing offense. Lincoln, however, chose to take the high road and retain Seward. The president “easily dismissed the incident,” his secretaries later recalled.
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With a series of major foreign-policy decisions looming, the president needed Seward’s counsel. The secretary of state was not the only observer who believed Lincoln was vacillating on international-affairs issues. “Foreign governments seem to take advantage of our difficulties; the Spanish invasion of San Domingo is an indication of what we may expect,” Carl Schurz complained to the president in early April—sounding much like Seward. Schurz lamented the “dissension within and aggression from without” the Union. “It seems to me,” he continued, “there is but one way out of this distressing situation. It is to make short work of the secession movement and then to make front against the world abroad.” Years later, however, when Seward’s April Fools’ memo was revealed, Schurz marveled at the secretary of state’s “incomprehensible” and “utterly delusive … fantastic schemes of foreign war.”
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Spanish officials agreed that the Lincoln administration was too preoccupied to give the Caribbean much attention. Seward’s bombast caused them little concern. Madrid considered Lincoln a weak president with few good options. “The Union is in agony,” the Spanish minister in Washington, Gabriel García y Tassara, reported home as Lincoln prepared to take office, “and our mission is not to delay its death for a moment.” Still, the conservative Spanish diplomat worried that abolitionists might seize control of Union foreign policy—and then push for reforms in Spain’s Caribbean territories. Lincoln and Seward, in this scenario, were actually the moderates. Aggressively challenging the Union government risked strengthening the radicals. The American president, Tassara explained to his superiors, served as a kind of mediator between conservative constituents who valued the “old compromises” and more revolutionary figures who wanted “the complete subjugation of the South.”

Tassara’s analysis was not far from the mark. Expansionists had been urging Lincoln to act from the first days of the administration.
Just a month into the president’s term, Washington wise men and various adventurers had begun pressing Lincoln to consider schemes to establish colonies of black Americans outside the United States—perhaps in the Caribbean or Central America. Lincoln had long been a supporter of colonization proposals, which he viewed as “a middle ground” between uncompromising abolitionists and remorseless slaveholders. Both Lincoln’s idols Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson had also supported colonization. In retrospect the schemes seem wildly impractical. Few black Americans were eager to leave the country where they had been born and raised to set out for a dangerous and untested foreign colony. Still, in the midnineteenth century, as a devastating sectional crisis threatened to tear the country apart, Lincoln honestly believed such projects had the potential to help calm domestic passions.
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They also presented the president with a thicket of complex foreign-policy questions. For starters, any proposals to carve colonies out of Caribbean or South American nations had the potential to alienate Latin Americans, who resented U.S. encroachment. The Lincoln administration could not afford to anger any foreign governments in the midst of a looming conflict at home. Lincoln must have recognized that many of the proposals he was asked to consider displayed a decidedly expansionist cast—a dynamic that had bothered him since his time in the House. Boosters lauded the schemes as a means of projecting American power into the Southern Hemisphere. Colonies might serve as coaling stations for the navy or footholds from which to expand export markets. In 1858, Francis P. Blair Jr. had urged colonization on Congress as a means of exploiting “the untold wealth of the intertropical region.” And yet, despite the expansionist rhetoric, Lincoln was soon meeting with advocates of the ventures and assigning diplomats to look into potential locations for colonies in Guatemala and Honduras.
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While Lincoln was considering the colonization schemes, he also faced an urgent decision about how to handle the Southern cotton trade, which continued to fill Confederate coffers and fuel the
rebellion. Lincoln was presented with two choices. In one scenario, the Federals could proclaim a blockade, enlisting their small navy to attempt to slow seaborne traffic. A second possibility consisted of closing the ports altogether. Any decision was sure to arouse the attention of European powers, which maintained a robust trade with the South. The possibility of decisive European intervention hung on Lincoln’s decision.