Lincoln in the World (31 page)

The president had good reason for concern. In Europe the cotton shortages produced by the blockade were finally beginning to take their toll on workers. The livelihoods of more than two hundred thousand Frenchmen and a million Britons were tied up with the industry. In the early months of the war, British and French textile manufacturers had been able to draw on existing cotton surpluses and additional supplies from countries like India. Yet by September cotton stocks had plunged to crisis levels. Roughly three quarters of British textile workers were unemployed or underemployed. The
New York Times
reported that English laborers were pawning their clothes and blankets to survive. In London, Charles Francis Adams tried to remain sanguine. He was “inclined to believe,” he wrote home to the State Department, “that we are at the crisis of the difficulty, and from this time things will rather mend than grow worse.” Just days later, however, Adams was forced to revise his estimate, sheepishly informing Washington that “the distress in the manufacturing districts is rather on the increase.”
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As the crisis deepened, Britain’s Lord Palmerston began to question the wisdom of nonintervention. The prime minister had long been reluctant to get involved. Yet momentum in the conflict seemed to be shifting. The Federal troops “got a very complete smashing” at Manassas, Palmerston wrote to his foreign minister in September. The British prime minister thought a mediation proposal that would settle the conflict by separating the combatants might finally be a good idea. France would go along if Britain took
the lead, Palmerston predicted. If the North lost one more battle, the prime minister wrote, “the iron should be struck while it is hot.” If the Federal troops managed to eke out some more victories, on the other hand, the prime minister was willing to take a wait-and-see approach.
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Lincoln’s men seem to have at least dimly perceived the impending peril. John Hay boasted that, despite the Confederate troops on Washington’s doorstep, the capital remained safe. Hay attributed the city’s lack of alarm to the “truculent-looking” fleet of Northern gunboats protecting the Potomac. Still, Hay recognized that if Confederate forces did manage to capture Washington, European intervention was sure to follow. “We would find the whole world about our ears,” Hay wrote. Such a turn of events, Hay believed, would amount to a death blow for the nation.
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On September 13 a delegation representing “Chicago Christians of All Denominations” visited Lincoln at the White House. The men presented the president with a petition favoring emancipation that had resulted from a meeting of Chicago abolitionists a week earlier. The clergymen argued that a proclamation abolishing slavery “would secure the sympathy of Europe and the whole civilized world.… No other step would be so potent to prevent foreign intervention.” Lincoln conceded the point. Still, he wanted to make sure that any such proclamation was taken seriously. “I do not,” the president protested, “want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!”
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And yet only four days later, Lincoln changed his mind. Near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, Union and Confederate armies clashed in an epic fourteen-hour battle that produced more than twenty thousand casualties. Lincoln recognized that a Union victory was critical. If the Federals had been driven back, the president later recalled, Lincoln would have found himself “in a bad row of stumps.” Northern generals spun the battle as a triumph for their cause. McClellan believed that he had produced “a masterpiece of
art.” Seward dashed off a letter to Charles Francis Adams in London lauding the “renewed and reinvigorated forces of the Union.” The battle at Antietam Creek was indeed a Union victory. Yet McClellan’s men ultimately allowed the Confederate troops to escape rather than pursuing them and inflicting a crushing blow. The outcome, however, was good enough for Lincoln. He believed he had finally found an excuse to issue his proclamation.
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Lincoln misjudged European reactions to Antietam. The president believed that the battle would weaken the interventionist camp across the Atlantic. In fact, as the diplomatic scholar Howard Jones has convincingly shown, in the short term it did nothing of the kind. European statesmen were indeed carefully awaiting the battle’s results, but they were less impressed by the outcome than Lincoln. When Palmerston got the news, he dashed off a letter to his foreign minister. The prime minister considered the battle “just the case for the stepping in of friends. One thing must be admitted and that is that both sides have fought like bulldogs.” Still, just days later, Palmerston reverted to his prior vacillation. “The whole matter is full of difficulty,” he wrote his foreign minister. An armistice now, Palmerston argued, “would only be like the breathing time allowed to boxers between the rounds of a fight, to enable them to get fresh wind.” More decisive battles would be needed to change his mind.
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Karl Marx, on the other hand, shared Lincoln’s view that Antietam represented a “decisive” moment in the conflict. “The brief campaign in Maryland,” Marx told the readers of
Die Presse
, “has decided the fate of the American Civil War.” The German émigré had no love for McClellan, whom he derided as a “military incompetent.” Yet Marx remained unshaken by the setbacks of 1862. No single commander could ruin the Northern war effort. The Federals still possessed far greater resources than the Confederacy. Marx repeatedly assured Engels that the North would prevail. The philosopher would “wager my head” on the prospect, he wrote to his collaborator. “In world history,” Marx insisted, “reason does conquer.”
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The Last, Best Hope of Earth

Five days after Antietam, on September 22, Lincoln sent his cabinet an urgent message instructing them to report to the Executive Mansion. The men were given only a few hours’ notice. When they arrived, Lincoln began by reading a comedic sketch by one of his favorite writers, Artemus Ward. Then he got down to business. The president told the men that he was ready to issue a preliminary proclamation announcing that slaves in the Confederacy would be freed within a matter of months. “I think the time has come now,” Lincoln said. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition.” He acknowledged that the result of Antietam was not “quite what I should have best liked.” Still, Lincoln felt that he had to do something. The president appeared a little superstitious to some members of his cabinet. “I made the promise to myself,” Lincoln told the men—and then, after hesitating a little, he added, “and … to my Maker.”
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Lincoln’s cabinet was giddy after the meeting broke up. The men joked around, calling one another abolitionists. John Hay noted in his diary that the cabinet officers “seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.” Seward, falling in line behind his boss, quickly sent copies of the preliminary proclamation to his diplomats in the field. “The interests of humanity have now become identified with the cause of our country,” he told his minister in London. Yet the secretary of state was still not completely convinced of the wisdom of emancipation. He wrote to his daughter wondering whether the proclamation might be premature. Seward lamented the “confused” state of American foreign relations. Even Lincoln later conceded that he had serious doubts about the timing.
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Abolitionists responded with an outpouring of emotion. “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation,” Greeley exulted in the
Tribune
. “God bless Abraham Lincoln.” The following day the newspaperman wrote that the proclamation took a nation “sunk in the semi-barbarism of a medieval
age to the light and civilization of the Nineteenth Christian Century.” On the night of September 24, a huge crowd arrived at the White House and spilled onto the front lawn. John Hay looked on as revelers hurdled the iron gates and “filled every nook and corner of the ground entrance as quietly and instantly as molten metal fills a mold.” To Hay, the mass of elated merrymakers appeared “lucid and diaphanous in the clear obscure like the architecture of a dream.” When Lincoln appeared at the window over the north portico, he appeared unusually dignified, Hay reported. The president obliged the crowd with a few brief remarks. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment” on the proclamation, Lincoln told the demonstrators, “and, may be, take action upon it.”
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The president would not sign the final version of the document until New Year’s Day, 1863—a hundred-day interval that was intended partly to give Confederate states the opportunity to return to the Union fold before the proclamation was final.

Lincoln, meanwhile, was making other plans to try to simultaneously sway public opinion in Europe. In late September he repeatedly summoned Edward Everett, the cosmopolitan former secretary of state and minister to Britain, to the Executive Mansion. The president’s allies had been urging him to send Everett to Europe as an unofficial envoy “to exercise a salutary influence to discourage hostile intervention.” The former diplomat was not a big advocate of Lincoln’s emancipation proposal. “The matter,” Everett wrote Charles Francis Adams in London, “stood better without any proclamation.… It raises many troublesome theoretical questions and augments the difficulties under which Union men already labor in the Border States.” Nevertheless, Everett was a strong supporter of the president and the Union war effort. At the White House, the former secretary of state found Lincoln still grumbling about Antietam. The president acknowledged the campaign was well fought, but complained that “he did not know why McClellan did not follow up his advantage,” as Everett later described the meeting in his diary.
Lincoln told the former secretary of state that he was doing his best to maintain a “good temper” nonetheless.

The president explained to Everett that he wanted to send him to Europe—but the appointment would be tricky. If Lincoln named the distinguished former diplomat to an official post as special envoy, the president’s regular men in the field might balk. On the other hand, if he gave Everett an unofficial role, Seward—who was already complaining about the freelancing of Sumner and others—might feel slighted. Lincoln tried to walk a thin line, ultimately drafting an “excessively non-committal and curiously characteristic” letter of introduction, and making an effort to keep Seward in the loop. Everett, however, ultimately declined the appointment, arguing that he was not the right man for the job.
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Lincoln badly needed help explaining his policy to Europeans. The continent’s ruling classes reacted warily to the preliminary proclamation. Palmerston complained that the document was a piece of “trash.” The London
Times
wrote that Lincoln was acting like some sort of “moral American pope.” The president, the paper proclaimed, was like “a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy.” The British newspaper published increasingly lurid and provocative editorials suggesting that Lincoln sought to unleash a slave revolt. “He will appeal to the black blood of the African,” the paper warned, “he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”
Blackwood’s
magazine sniped that the document was “monstrous, reckless, devilish.”
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Lincoln was infuriated by European reactions to his proposal. The president’s son Robert later recalled that “what chiefly astonished and grieved” Lincoln during the war was that “the organs of English opinion which had censured Americans for slavery, turned round and condemned them when actual steps were taken for putting
it down.” The hypocrisy of it all, Robert added, seriously undermined American respect for the island nation.
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Still, the president listened when allies urged him to tweak his draft to make it more palatable to Europeans. The language of Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation worried Marx’s old editor at the
Tribune
, Charles A. Dana. Dana told Seward that the document could be read as if it encouraged slave revolts. The phrasing, he wrote the secretary of state, “
jars
on me like a
wrong tone in music
.… This is the only ‘bad egg’ I see in ‘that pudding’—and I fear may go far to make it less palatable than it deserves to be.” In the final draft, the president ultimately altered the text to address the qualms of Dana and others.
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If Marx had similar concerns, they have not been recorded. He wrote to Engels that October lauding the “world transforming” turn of events across the Atlantic. There was “nothing more disgusting,” he told Engels, than the outcry among British elites over the preliminary proclamation. If anything, Marx thought the American president seemed too timid. “All Lincoln’s acts,” he insisted, “seem like the mean, pettifogging conditions that one lawyer puts to his opponent.” Still, Marx added, “this does not change their historic content.”
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The proclamation prompted the president to intensify his efforts to establish overseas colonies of American blacks. If slaves were going to be freed, Lincoln believed, they needed somewhere to go. The president had told a delegation of black activists earlier that year that he considered it “selfish” of them to remain in the United States after emancipation. Separation and colonization, he explained, would be “better for us both.” Shortly after taking office, Lincoln had dispatched his brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, to investigate one potential site in what is now Colombia. Edwards, in his report to the president, stressed the economic and geopolitical advantages of the site. It offered a strategically located lagoon that might “save whole squadrons” of American ships in need of refuge. Edwards also lauded the “inexhaustible” coal supply and “vast saving” that the venture
might bring the U.S. government. Yet after some members of Lincoln’s cabinet—including his naval secretary, Gideon Welles—had objected to the plans, Lincoln had temporarily set the project aside.
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