Lincoln in the World (11 page)

Lincoln was still ill on the morning of April 1, 1861, just days after the Spanish invasion, when Seward presented Lincoln with a striking memo. Titled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration,” the secretary of state used the crisis to protest to the president that after a full month in office Lincoln was still “without a policy either foreign or domestic.” Seward suggested that the United States immediately take Madrid to task and “demand explanations.” The secretary of state also counseled sending American agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America, “to rouse a vigorous continental
spirit
of independence
on this continent against European intervention.” If the Spanish failed to offer acceptable explanations for the Santo Domingo maneuver, Seward said he would advise Lincoln to convene Congress and declare war on the invaders.
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Seward saw his opportunity to wrest control from the ailing and overwhelmed commander in chief. Whichever “policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it,” the secretary of state wrote. “For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly.” If Lincoln could not lead the effort, he should assign it to a member of the cabinet. “It is not in my especial province,” Seward concluded, but “I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” The secretary of state ordered his son Frederick to copy over the hastily written, “hardly legible” document, and deliver it directly to Lincoln. Seward, his son later recalled, would trust the sensitive missive to “no other hand.”
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Lincoln must have been stunned by the document. Yet he could not deny that his administration had found itself under a cataract of miserable foreign-affairs news. Rumors flew in Washington that the French might seize Haiti now that the Spanish had made their move on Santo Domingo. On the same day Seward submitted his memo, the
New York Times
, which maintained close ties to the secretary of state, complained that “contemptible schemers” abroad promised to tear the republic apart if it remained “guided by pusillanimity.” The paper warned that if the United States failed to quickly resolve the conflict, European powers would step in. “If the weak man do not govern his household,” the
Times
cautioned, “the strong man will govern it for him.”
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Still, picking another fight now—even with a weak power like Spain—would be madness. The ailing president, who for years had fought periodic battles with a mysterious depressive illness he referred to as the hypo, summoned the strength to write out a reply to his secretary of state in an unusually choppy, uneven hand. Lincoln acknowledged that the seizure of Santo Domingo “certainly brings a new item within the range of our foreign policy.” Yet he assured
Seward that all was “in perfect harmony, without ever a suggestion that we had no foreign policy.” Finally, Lincoln rejected his secretary of state’s suggestion that a member of the cabinet take charge. “I remark that if this must be done,” the president wrote, “
I
must do it.”
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In the end, Lincoln apparently never sent his reply. The president frequently composed sharply worded letters that he ultimately tore up once his anger subsided. In this case, because no copy of Lincoln’s response has been found in the Seward papers, scholars believe the president likely delivered his message orally. However he handled his impulsive secretary of state, Lincoln decided not to publicize the exchange. Seward’s memo remained hidden for decades—and with it one of the most fascinating and baffling episodes in the history of American foreign policy.
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Beyond the Pacific Ocean

What was Seward thinking? The debate over Seward’s “foreign war panacea” has been raging now for more than a century. Charles Sumner, the radical Massachusetts senator and a rival of Seward’s, complained that the secretary of state simply “lost his head.” Others saw the move as the culmination of a decades-long drive to extend American influence. Challenging European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere was nothing new for Seward. He had long advertised his desire to acquire Canada, and he once declared that Mexico City should be the capital of the United States. Seward, said Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, was “almost crazy on the subject of territorial expansion.” Lincoln’s own personal secretaries shared Welles’s assessment. John Hay and John Nicolay, in their ten-volume, nearly five-thousand-page biography of Lincoln, speculate that Seward aimed to ignite “a continental crusade”—“a war of conquest” that would heal America’s internecine rift by rallying both North and South to the same cause. “Who,” Lincoln’s secretaries ask, “shall say that these imperial
dreams did not contemplate the possibility of changing a threatened dismemberment of the Union into the triumphant annexation of Canada, Mexico, and the West Indies?”
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In this case, however, Seward was probably just bluffing, attempting to project a useful “madman image” in an effort to deter the great powers.
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Lincoln’s secretary of state, to be sure, was a vigorous expansionist. “There is no debating,” writes historian George Herring, that Seward “was the key figure in mid-nineteenth-century expansion, the link between the manifest destiny movement of the 1840s and the overseas expansionism of the 1890s.” In the years following the Civil War, Seward would campaign strongly for the purchase of Alaska. (His enemies derided the acquisition as “Seward’s Folly.”) Yet Seward recognized that America’s rise to power was first contingent on healing the bitter divisions at home. Only by staring down the European powers, Seward believed, could the United States fulfill its expansionist destiny.
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Lincoln is not usually remembered as an expansionist at all. Yet Lincoln’s and Seward’s core foreign-affairs philosophies were more similar than is commonly understood.
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The market revolution, beginning in the early nineteenth century, had produced a sea change in the way some statesmen viewed international relations. For millennia, national strength had been measured in terms of military capabilities—by the size of armies, the quantity of frigates, the courage of generals, the morale of troops. By Lincoln’s presidency, at least some world leaders—particularly in the United States and Britain—had come to view power primarily in economic terms. Access to banks, capital, and international markets was a better predictor of future strength than the quantity of guns and soldiers, the thinking went. Lincoln and Seward were both students of this Hamiltonian school of foreign policy, as historian Walter Russell Mead has labeled it. Economic forces—not simply cavalry and cannon—would ultimately boost the United States to world power. Such thinking, Mead observes, amounted to “a radical innovation in the world of great-power diplomacy.”
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Lincoln and Seward’s former Whig Party had served as the vanguard of the antebellum Hamiltonians. John Quincy Adams, one of the party’s founders, had hoped that Whiggery would provide a bulwark against the popularity of Andrew Jackson, whom the Whigs derided as a “military chieftain.” The Whig foreign-affairs program was simple and straightforward. If the federal government directed its energies toward encouraging commercial enterprise and internal improvements, bolstering the whole system with a tariff to protect industry, the country would inevitably emerge as a world power. Lincoln was a true believer. “I have always been an old-line Henry-Clay Whig,” the president remarked in 1861. The fact that Lincoln had long since joined the Republicans did not alter his core Whig principles.
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When asked about his platform during his first political campaign in the 1830s, Lincoln is said to have replied: “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff.” The story is perhaps apocryphal, but the message is true enough. Lincoln, for much of his political career, was actually focused primarily on issues of economic development.
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Military conquest would contribute little to America’s standing in the world if it undermined economic stability. Real predominance would require patient anticipation of what one Lincoln biographer has called “the eventual triumph of the market.”
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Seward, despite his caricature as a land-hungry ogre, also believed that economic development was the key to achieving great-power status. The future secretary of state insisted that it would be folly to “seize with haste, and force the fruit, which ripening in time, will fall of itself into our hands.” The real prize, Seward noted, was “the commerce of the world, which is the empire of the world.” Seward was motivated more by the quest for foreign markets and overseas investment capital. Even when he sought territory, he was most interested in regions that could double as trade entrepôts or coaling bases. “The nation that draws the most materials from the earth,” he declared,
“and fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth.” Commerce, he remarked, was the new “god of boundaries.”
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Lincoln, in his public remarks, tended to focus on the moral perils of slavery more often than he lauded economic expansion. Still, he largely shared Seward’s economic vision. Lincoln was listening as Seward refined his approach to foreign affairs over the course of the 1850s. In the winter of 1854, Seward took the floor of the U.S. Senate and mocked what he derided as “aggrandizing, conquering” warmongers. Only by healing the sectional divide, Seward insisted, would the United States succeed in its drive to achieve world power. In his gruff, monotone voice, he told the chamber that he longed to restore the days when Americans could daydream “with almost rapturous enthusiasm” about “the enlargement of our commerce in the east, and of our political sway throughout the world.” In as little as thirty years, the senator declared, the United States may well find itself occupying a world in which the formidable powers of Britain and China were receding in strength. America, he insisted, needed to be prepared to fill the vacuum—even if that meant extending its influence into lands “beyond the Pacific Ocean.”
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Six weeks after Seward’s speech, a letter arrived on the senator’s desk with a return address from Springfield, Illinois. According to the correspondent, a young man named Billy Herndon, Seward had “a fast and growing popularity out West.” Among the senator’s admirers, Herndon reported, was the lanky, rawboned lawyer who shared his office. “Mr. Lincoln,” Herndon wrote Seward, “my partner and your friend, and formerly member of Congress from our district, thinks your speech most excellent.”
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A Fondness for Foreign Travel

In the early 1830s, while Lincoln was using his flatboat to discover the world outside the Midwest, Seward was ranging even farther
afield. As a boy in his hometown of Florida, New York, Seward had grown up small and shy, with a wild shock of flame-red hair. His father, Samuel, was a wealthy local businessman, but he could also be a martinet. The young Seward sometimes protested against his dad’s iron rule. While in college in upstate New York, he ran away to Georgia after his old man failed to pay his tailor’s bills. Eventually, however, father and son reconciled and Seward returned to New York and settled down to a career in law and politics. By 1833, when the future secretary of state was in his early thirties, Seward’s sixty-five-year-old father offered to take the young lawyer on a voyage across the Atlantic.
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“What a romance was this journey that I was making!” Seward later wrote in his autobiography, as he recalled his first trip to Europe. Like Lincoln, the New Yorker had devoured Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, about a young man seeking escape and redemption abroad. Seward later recalled the trip with a kind of gauzy nostalgia. Railroads were still rare, and steamships had not yet shrunk the oceans. Seward’s voyage, on a packet stuffed with letters addressed to the King of England, took more than two weeks. For a small-town lawyer from upstate New York, the whole experience was the stuff of dreams. On calm days, the young man would dive off the side of the boat for a swim in the Atlantic.
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The cold reality of power politics intruded, however, when Seward finally landed in Liverpool. The contrast between the young republic and the massive British Empire was staggering. To the American traveler, even “the magnificent stone docks” of the English coastline seemed far superior to “the mean, rickety, wooden slips and quays of New York.” Seward roamed around London, visiting Westminster Abbey, climbing to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and gazing out over the sprawling industrial metropolis, smothered in “a dense cloud of fog and coal-smoke.” He found himself impressed as he watched a debate from the galleries of the House of Commons. The British chamber was far more orderly and its members more energetic than the chaotic U.S. House, with its “listless” representatives.
Even the American diplomats in London seemed second-rate. The U.S. legation, Seward noted, was tucked away above a tailor’s shop in the West End.
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And yet despite the obvious disparities in power, the Britons Seward met seemed curiously insecure. The English, he recalled, were “continually disturbed” by fears that they were becoming Americanized. Americans, the future of secretary of state noted, were perfectly justified to be jealous of their more powerful cousins across the Atlantic. But why were the British, securely wrapped in the trappings of empire, so defensive? “It seemed to me then,” Seward observed, “that, little as we loved the English nation, they loved us still less.” The past provided one explanation. The young traveler came across an old issue of a British magazine that referred to the U.S. legislature as the “rebel Congress” and its leaders as “most destitute of principle.” The future offered another answer. With their rapidly growing economy and population, Britain’s former colonies would inevitably soon eclipse their motherland.
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