Lincoln in the World (38 page)

Maximilian saw the Mexican venture as a personal opportunity. At the start of the Civil War, the Austrian archduke was “29 and jobless,” as one account puts it. His prospects were not promising. The young man was “extravagant and ever in debt”—hardly the ideal savior for insolvent Mexico. Maximilian also suffered from a number of illnesses, many of them probably psychosomatic. When he finally arrived in Mexico, locals gave the slender, bearded European the nickname Featherhead, for his poor judgment. Maximilian had married Princess Charlotte, the pretty daughter of Belgium’s King Leopold. Both young Europeans quickly began to see themselves as the leaders of a divine mission. As European troops set out for Mexico, Charlotte wrote to Eugénie lauding the operation as a “holy one.” The French empress, Charlotte continued, had been “marked out by Providence” to revive Catholicism in North America.
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Spanish troops began arriving in Mexico in early December 1861, followed by French and British reinforcements in January. The joint operation was a critical step forward in Franco-British relations. Despite a rapprochement between Palmerston and Napoleon III in the 1850s, mistrust still lingered from the era of the Napoleonic Wars. Even after Waterloo, France remained “a considerable power” in
Europe for decades, the historian Paul Kennedy has noted. Innocuous celebratory gunfire in British port towns could still spark a panic that the French armies were about to invade. The French, too, remained wary of disrupting the continental balance of power.
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Napoleon sought to constrain the growth of the United States—but that is not the same as wanting the Union dismembered. America’s rising influence provided Napoleon with a critical counterweight to Britain’s naval predominance. It was all a delicate balancing act. “We are interested in seeing the United States powerful and prosperous,” the emperor told one of his generals in mid-1862, “but we have no interest in seeing that republic acquire the whole of the Gulf of Mexico, dominate from this vantage-point the Antilles and South America, and become the sole dispenser of the products of the New World.” Still, the safest thing for Napoleon would be to first win British support for any potential foreign-policy schemes.
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Marx observed that the French emperor preferred to carry out “his overseas adventures under English aegis.” Napoleon himself used a homey metaphor to describe the relationship. “I regard England as my wife,” the emperor remarked, “and the others as mistresses.” Palmerston was wary. “Our good friend and ally in Paris may mean well and keep quiet,” he had written one correspondent as the Civil War loomed, “but there is an awkward leer in his eye which forbids overconfidence and his ears are a little laid back as if to forewarn a kick or a bite.”
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As news of the scheme filtered through London society, Marx told readers of the
New York Tribune
that he considered the operation “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.” The philosopher blamed Palmerston for the expedition. Still, Marx added that the plan’s “insanity of purpose” and “imbecility of … means” seemed out of character for “the old schemer.” Marx considered the Most English Minister basically competent, even if he was also venal. Napoleon, on the other hand, was simply a political charlatan, lashing out in an effort to keep his public amused.
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Lincoln was understandably troubled when reports of the French-led operation in Mexico reached the White House. The whole matter, Seward wrote the American minister in Paris, had “awakened some anxiety on his part.” Since the first days of his administration, Lincoln had been struggling to manage the delicate relationships with other European powers like Spain and Britain. First he had been confronted with the Spanish reoccupation of Santo Domingo. Then he had been faced with Britain’s declaration of neutrality and the tensions that his blockade had spawned. Now the French emperor, too, seemed to be threatening to overthrow the balance of power in the New World.

Union loyalists feared that the operation might be a prelude to full-scale foreign intervention in the Civil War. A Parisian newspaper report, picked up and reprinted in the
New York Times
, warned that the French maneuvering was only “a pretext for getting into the American waters a large force, ready to act in liberating cotton when the time comes.” Lincoln administration officials did their best to prevent that outcome. They “spoke the language of the Monroe Doctrine,” as one historian puts it—without ever using the loaded phrase itself. “In the president’s opinion,” Seward wrote his envoy in Paris in March, “the emancipation of this continent from European control has been the principal feature of its history during the last century.”
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Matías Romero, the charming and well-connected young emissary who represented Mexico’s government in Washington, cleverly reinforced Lincoln’s views on hemispheric independence. The Mexican diplomat declared that the principles of the Monroe Doctrine “seem to be written for the present occasion.” Early in Lincoln’s term Romero had visited the new president at the Executive Mansion to give the Illinoisan a primer on Mexican affairs. The Mexican diplomat explained that there were two main factions in his country—a “liberal” party that aimed “to imitate the United States,” as Romero put it; and a “reactionary” wing “composed of the clergy, the demoralized part of the old army, some moneychangers, and a
few other illusionaries and fanatics who collectively are in an evident minority.” Napoleon, Romero told Lincoln, would seek to ally himself with the latter faction; the United States, he argued, should work closely with the former.

The American president listened quietly with “marked attention,” Romero told his superiors, and assured the Mexican that he considered the country a priority. Yet he offered no practical proposal for keeping France out of Mexico. Lincoln, Romero noted, seemed to “lack confidence” that he could do much of anything abroad with a war already raging at home. Privately, Lincoln and Seward were even more nonplussed by the Mexican turmoil than they let on. “The actual condition of affairs in Mexico,” Seward had written to Thomas Corwin, the Union minister to the country, “is so imperfectly understood here that the President finds it very difficult to give you particular and practical directions for the regulation of your conduct during your mission.”
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An American invasion of Mexico was out of the question, particularly at such an early stage in the war. The president’s forces had demonstrated at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, and other early skirmishes that they could not defeat a band of Confederate rebels, much less the military of one of the world’s great powers. “Since the United States, for the present, must allow no foreign complication to interfere with their war for the Union,” wrote Marx, “all they can do is to
protest
.” Any serious response to the French-led operation would have to wait until Lincoln’s armies had made more headway against their domestic foes. “Upon the settlement of this family quarrel,” the
New York Times
promised, “the case of Mexico will be attended to.”
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In the meantime, the White House lodged a perfunctory complaint with the Tuileries. “We cannot look with indifference,” Seward wrote to the U.S. minister in Paris, “upon an armed European intervention for political ends in a country situated so near and connected with us so closely as Mexico.” Lincoln sent Congress a proposal to float a loan to the Mexican government so the country could continue to make payments on its debt. British policymakers,
for their part, were cool to the idea. “A mortgage of Mexico to the United States,” Palmerston believed, “would certainly lead to foreclosing.”

Lincoln’s diplomats countered that Palmerston had it the wrong way around. Corwin argued that if the American aid package was rejected, England would then “own” the country, directing Mexican affairs “as fully as she does the policy of India or Canada.” In that event, Corwin told another correspondent, “England and France will absorb Mexico, and we shall have less to do with it than we have with the African Kingdom of Dahomy.” Lincoln, however, seemed lukewarm about the whole enterprise, and sent word that he “could suggest no plan by which aid could be given to Mexico.” The reluctant U.S. Senate eventually tabled the measure and the loan proposals ultimately went nowhere.
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As the spring unfolded, the news improved for the Lincoln administration. In April, Britain and Spain decided to withdraw their troops from Mexico, leaving Napoleon on his own. Foreign-affairs crises closer to home demanded the attention of the European powers. Meanwhile, yellow fever stalked the French troops who remained behind in Mexico. Napoleon’s army was badly weakened by May 5, when it marched on the Mexican town of Puebla. Though the French soldiers were far better armed, Mexican guerrillas hiding in the town’s baroque churches rained bullets on the invaders. The Mexicans ultimately drove the French forces out of town. (The Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo celebrates the victory at Puebla.) The French army survived to fight another day. Yet the expedition was off to an unimpressive start.
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Nevertheless, Napoleon’s army of thirty-five thousand continued its steady march toward Mexico City. Lincoln’s inner circle grew increasingly alarmed. In July, John Hay published an anonymous article in the
Missouri Republican
arguing that if the United States did not shore up its relationships with Mexican republicans, great powers like France would step into the void. A “grasping European dynasty” on America’s southern border would gravely threaten U.S.
security, Hay insisted. It was “almost impossible,” he wrote, “to overestimate the importance” of keeping the “continent free from the footsteps of European absolutism.” As the New Year approached, with French forces slowly cementing their hold on the country, that prospect looked increasingly unlikely. Meanwhile, Napoleon III was about to present Lincoln with his boldest challenge yet.
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The Sphinx of the Tuileries

Prussia’s iron chancellor, Otto von Bismarck—a future antagonist of Napoleon’s—once described the French emperor as “a great unfathomed capacity.” The French statesman’s contemporaries found it notoriously difficult to make sense of his whims. Even those closest to him found him hard to read. “Had I married him,” recalled one youthful flame, his cousin Mathilde, “I think that I might have broken his head open just to see what was in it.” To Europe’s statesmen, increasingly steeped in the logic of Realpolitik, the French emperor’s romantic scheming seemed baffling. “Ideas proliferated in his head like rabbits in a hutch,” Palmerston complained. Americans, separated by a vast ocean, were even more perplexed by the inscrutable Frenchman. John Hay wrote of the “plots and schemes that lurk in the tortuous brain of the impassive and silent emperor of the French.” Hay called Napoleon the Sphinx of the Tuileries.
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Lincoln had once defended the French emperor against his radical foes—at least rhetorically. In 1858 a band of conspirators led by Italian nationalist Felice Orsini had attempted to assassinate Napoleon III, throwing bombs at the emperor’s coach. Lincoln, in his memorable speech at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860, had compared the attackers to zealous abolitionists like John Brown, who had repeatedly attacked American slaveholders. “Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon,” the Illinoisan told the crowd, “and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same.” Both
crimes, Lincoln explained, had been committed by “an enthusiast” who “imagines himself commissioned by Heaven.”
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By the summer of 1862, however, Napoleon’s meddling in the Americas had begun to grate on Lincoln and his deputies. John Bigelow, the president’s consul in Paris, complained that Napoleon had “lost pretty much all of the little faith he had in our ability to reduce the South to obedience.” The emperor, Bigelow continued, was “hovering over us, like the carrion crow over the body of the sinking traveler, waiting till we are too weak to resist his predatory instincts.” His unpredictability was unsettling. With Europe wracked by its own crises, most of the Continent’s power brokers found it difficult to justify far-flung adventures. Yet just as the other European powers were pulling back their commitments in the New World, Napoleon redoubled his efforts to meddle in the Western Hemisphere. In early January 1863, the French emperor floated an offer to mediate between North and South. To Lincoln, the proposal represented one of the most dangerous moments in the war.
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Part of the problem was that many of Lincoln’s own erstwhile supporters embraced the French offer. The president had always viewed the volubility of his own constituents as one of his weaknesses. Lincoln’s bodyguard once compared the president’s situation to that of the great French statesman Cardinal Richelieu. Lincoln did not see the similarities. Richelieu, the president pointed out, “had a united constituency; I never have had.” Lincoln assumed that any French effort to mediate would end with the division of the United States. As French troops closed in on Mexico City, that prospect seemed particularly troubling.

Still, with Federal armies bogged down in the winter of 1863, many Americans just wanted to stop the bleeding. Horace Greeley argued in the
New York Tribune
that Napoleon III was now “more popular with his people than any other European monarch.” In the past, Greeley had been convinced that the autocratic Napoleon could never be a fair judge of events in republican America. Yet by late January, after intense lobbying efforts from an American businessman,
Greeley suddenly shifted his stance. The emperor, Greeley was now convinced, “is inspired by the most friendly feelings to the Federal Government and the loyal states.” The mercurial editor advocated taking the French emperor up on his offer.
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The French mediation proposal also coincided with a revival in the popularity of peace Democrats, known as Copperheads. (The activists, who got the name from sniping Republicans, cut the figures of Liberty from copper pennies and proudly wore them in their lapels.) The group eagerly sought to end the war, even if it meant the preservation of slavery. The Copperheads’ most charismatic spokesman was Clement Vallandigham, a tall, slender Ohioan with dark hair and skin that accentuated his “light flashing eyes.” In speeches throughout the country, Vallandigham derided the president as a tyrant, railing against “King Lincoln.”
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