Lincoln in the World (18 page)

Seward argued that the president should declare a blockade. Such a course would prove far more acceptable to Europe, the secretary of state believed, since it would only slow trade with Europe—not halt it altogether. The strategy carried risks. A blockade would offer an acknowledgment that North and South were at war—which could spur European intervention in itself. Lincoln’s naval secretary, Gideon Welles, and several other members of the cabinet opposed Seward’s suggestion. Yet Lincoln ultimately shared his secretary of state’s view, which seemed less likely to antagonize Europe. “We could not afford,” the president explained to an April 15 meeting of his cabinet, “to have two wars on our hands at once.”
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Lincoln disingenuously pleaded ignorance when challenged by opponents of the blockade. “I don’t know anything about the law of nations,” Lincoln protested to one critic. “I’m a good enough lawyer in a western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the law of nations up there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left it to him. But it’s done now and can’t be helped, so we must get along as well as we can.”
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Lincoln recognized the gravity of his decision, which came while Congress had not yet convened. The president was known for the lighthearted poems he sometimes composed when asked to sign autograph books. Yet on April 19, 1861, the day he announced his intention to blockade, he scribbled a single grim sentence in the book of one autograph hunter. “Whoever in later times shall see this,” he wrote, “and look at the date, will readily excuse the writer for not having indulged in sentiment, or poetry.”
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Almost immediately after Lincoln’s decision to blockade, Britain proclaimed its neutrality in the conflict. “God damn them, I’ll
give them hell,” Seward erupted. The crown’s announcement did not mean London considered the Confederacy an independent nation—but Northern leaders believed it was a step in that direction. The British decision was based on a complicated calculus and carried some important advantages for the South. Neutrality, for example, would allow the Confederate government to buy weapons and borrow money from Europe. (Under international law, the proclamation meant both sides were considered “belligerents.”) In reality, however, British leaders were doing their best to steer clear of the American chaos. Neutrality technically prohibited British subjects from equipping warships for use in the conflict.

Still, Seward growled “like a caged tiger” when he heard the news. Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that the secretary of state’s anger “had a curious effect on his face; his nose appeared twisted and almost corvine.” But there was also a certain logic to Seward’s bluster. He told his daughter that he was concerned that “Great Britain and France have lost their fear, and with it their respect for this country, in a good degree.” Seward designed his threats to put the great powers back on guard. The secretary of state composed a belligerent dispatch warning London that further provocative moves could lead to conflict with the United States. American diplomats marveled at Seward’s apparent impetuosity. The whole thing was “shallow madness,” Henry Adams complained. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who arrived in Washington while the crisis was unfolding, found “the president and every one else under the apprehension of an immediate rupture with England and France proceeding from suggestions of Mr. Seward.”
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Lincoln wisely toned down his secretary of state’s dispatch before authorizing a sanitized version. The president peppered Seward’s draft with the admonition “Leave out.” Lincoln challenged Seward’s value judgments—replacing, for example, his secretary of state’s accusation that British efforts were “wrongful” with the milder “hurtful.” The president removed passages that seemed to threaten war. Seward had written that if Europe intervened in the American conflict, then
“we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and (become once more, as we have twice before been), be forced to [become] enemies of Great Britain.” Lincoln softened his secretary of state’s bellicose rhetoric significantly.
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Lincoln demonstrated that he was perfectly willing to rein in his secretary of state when necessary. And yet, as the years passed, the president eventually grew to trust Seward, delegating many quotidian duties to his chief diplomat. By the end of his first term, Lincoln signed off on some of his dispatches without even reading them. Seward’s enemies thought the secretary of state had become Lincoln’s “evil genius.” Chicago newspaper editor Joseph Medill complained that Seward “kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.” The president laughed at the notion that his secretary of state was rolling him. While his critics “seemed to believe in my honesty,” Lincoln observed, “they also appeared to think that when I had in me any good purpose or intention Seward contrived to suck it out of me unperceived.” Actually, Lincoln cleverly managed his secretary of state.
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“Seward,” the president once remarked, “knows that I am his master!”
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The two men provided each other with a critical gut check and sounding board. Each acted as the other’s “sober second thought.”
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Their lifelong shared approach to foreign policy kept either man from ranging too far afield.
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Seward, like Lincoln, recognized that the patient and peaceful pursuit of commerce—not wild land grabs—would ultimately do the most to strengthen America’s empire. Unnecessary foreign wars could slow the achievement of that goal.
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By the summer of 1861, one U.S. senator observed, Seward had grown surprisingly “mild and gentle.” Lincoln’s secretary of state ultimately came to deeply respect his boss. “Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities,” he wrote his wife. “The President is the best of us; but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”
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As for the crisis that prompted Seward’s “foreign war panacea”—the Spanish reoccupation of Santo Domingo—Lincoln’s patient approach ultimately paid off. Shortly after the arrival of its troops, Spain
voted to annex its former colony and continued to dominate Dominican politics for many months. Yet the European nation’s transatlantic attempts to control the Caribbean eventually faltered even without interference from the Union. Revolts broke out among those protesting Spanish rule. The Dominican rebellion presented Lincoln with a dilemma. On the one hand, if the Union openly supported the Dominicans, it would risk aggravating tensions with Spain—an un-needed headache. On the other hand, failing to support the protesters against their imperial overlords would look to some like a hypocritical abandonment of the principles elucidated in the Monroe Doctrine.

When Seward raised the conundrum with the president, Lincoln answered by telling one of his famous stories. Once upon a time, he began, a man in Tennessee had been consulting with his preacher. The clergyman was not very encouraging. There were two potential roads before his parishioner, he explained. One went “straight to hell”; the other went “right to damnation.” The advice seeker, Lincoln continued, then opened his eyes wide and told the preacher that given those options, he would blaze a third path: “I shall go through the woods.” The president compared himself to the sinner in the story. “I am not willing,” Lincoln told Seward, “to assume any new troubles or responsibility at this time.” And so, he concluded, he would “take to the woods. We will maintain an honest and strict neutrality.”
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It was classic Lincoln—a foreign-policy approach that the president applied with formidable patience as the disheartening first year of the conflict ground on. For a young but growing nation, a Hamiltonian strategy in international affairs demanded tremendous forbearance on the president’s part. “The virtue of patience,” John Hay later observed, was “one of the cardinal elements of his character.” Lincoln recognized that the Union would first need to survive the rebellion, avoiding giving the European powers any pretext for intervention. Only then could the economic forces that both Lincoln and Seward placed so much faith in propel America to world power.
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In the meantime, Lincoln did his best to assuage the qualms of the diplomatic corps about the continuing chaos in the New World.
At a dinner for the foreign diplomats in June 1861, Lincoln calmly pressed the Union case with his ornately costumed audience. The White House staff tried to reinforce a sense of normalcy. Fresh-cut flowers filled vases in the Blue Room, and the elegant chandeliers were “gracefully festooned with wreaths.” The dinner-table conversation occasionally grew heated. The Danish chargé d’affaires groused to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Todd Grimsley about the dangers of American sectionalism. “What is there to bind you together?” the diplomat asked. In Lincoln’s own speech to the dinner guests, the president reassured them that European powers had nothing to fear from the American tumult. “Time,” Lincoln declared, “would make all things right.”
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And yet in at least one sense, neither Lincoln nor Seward left their country’s future in the hands of time and fate. They feverishly worked to build a Union navy—virtually from scratch—that could successfully enforce the blockade. In the U.S. Constitution, the power to raise an army (and a navy) is vested by the Framers in Congress. Lincoln, in general, respected and valued that separation of powers. Yet in the weeks between the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the start of a special session of Congress on July 4, necessity demanded swift executive action. As the sectional crisis intensified, Lincoln issued a presidential order adding eighteen thousand men to the federal navy.

The president justified this and other early presidential directives with a vivid analogy. “Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution?” he asked. “By general law life
and
limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through preservation of the nation.”
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Citing his own presidential “war power”—a concept he had invented—the president insisted that his blockade was “strictly legal.” Lincoln, however, ultimately sought congressional approval for his
newly minted sailors when the body finally reconvened. (The legislature rubber-stamped the measure in August.) Nevertheless, Lincoln’s executive action bolstering the federal navy represents an important precedent for later presidents who have sought greater authority and maneuverability in their disputes with foreign powers.
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American Whigs had long obsessed over naval affairs. They viewed naval expansion as a peaceful project that would help to bolster foreign trade. Whigs had been the biggest boosters of Commodore Perry’s mission to Japan in the 1850s, and their elder statesmen had been drooling for decades over the vast Asian export markets. Still, as American vessels began to swarm over the seas, they also risked clashing with the ships of the world’s greatest naval power, Britain. The tensions came to a head one fateful morning in the balmy Bahama Channel, 250 miles off the coast of Cuba.
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Lincoln vs. Palmerston

T
HE FEDERAL NAVY WAS THE ONLY BRANCH OF THE MILITARY THAT BROUGHT LINCOLN MUCH JOY IN THE SECOND HALF OF 1861. ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE JULY, THE PRESIDENT
invited his old friend Orville Browning to the Executive Mansion for dinner. The two men spent several hours chatting about the progress of the war. Browning found Lincoln “very melancholy.” The president acknowledged that he was depressed, but claimed there was “no special cause for it.” Actually, there were plenty of good reasons for distress. A week earlier the rebel army had embarrassed Lincoln’s bluecoats at Bull Run, killing more than 600, taking 1,200 prisoners, and sending the rest pouring back into Washington covered in mud, rain, and shame. Lincoln acknowledged that the whole thing looked “
damned bad
.”
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The Union defeat at Bull Run appeared even more disturbing when viewed against the backdrop of the international stage. On the one hand, the president was eager to demonstrate to Europe that he could subdue the rebellion. All spring he had been urging his military commanders to strike. When his officers protested that the new Northern troops were still unprepared, Lincoln had responded: “You are green, it is true; but they are green, also; you are green alike.” The sooner Lincoln’s Federals could show their strength, the
president believed, the less likely the European powers would be to throw in their lot with the Confederacy.
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And yet, as the disaster at Bull Run quickly made clear, that strategy had the potential to backfire. Now Lincoln’s forces simply looked incompetent in European eyes. “Our prestige in Europe [is] gone,” Carl Schurz wrote home to Lincoln from Spain in the wake of Bull Run. “All our efforts abroad will be of no avail if we are beaten at home.” Schurz complained that the “public press all over Europe is treating us with sneering contempt or granting us the small boon of a little pitiful sympathy.” The whole episode, the diplomat told Lincoln, was “bitter and humiliating in the extreme.” Only military success would be capable of changing European minds. “Nowhere,” Schurz concluded, “can this disgrace be washed off but on the battlefields of America.”
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