Lincoln in the World (19 page)

Yet the same military strategy that Lincoln was employing to defeat the Confederacy had the potential to strain transatlantic ties. Lincoln’s top general, the Mexican War hero Winfield Scott, had conceived a strategy known as the Anaconda Plan, which aimed in part to use the federal navy to strangle the Confederacy like a snake coiled around the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Still, Scott’s design also risked angering European merchants and their monarchs, who depended on cotton from the South.
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Now, at the White House, Browning asked Lincoln if he worried that European nations might be dragged into the war. The president admitted that he was concerned about the blockade’s effect on Britain and France. If those nations chose to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy, Scott’s Anaconda would be far less effective. The only thing worse than alienating the great powers would be if the small Federal navy—around forty ships at the start of the war—also failed altogether in its attempts to blockade the Southern coast. That would be like showing weakness to an already angry dog. Furthermore, the key European powers considered an ineffective “paper blockade” illegal under international law. The only solution, Lincoln had decided during one sleepless night in the wake of Bull Run, was
to beef up the fleet. Browning recalled Lincoln saying that “we had better increase the navy as fast as we could and blockade such ports as our force would enable us to, and say nothing about the rest.”
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August brought some good news from the high seas. While Lincoln’s generals were still agonizing over Bull Run, the navy scored a decisive victory. Sailors patrolling the Atlantic coast off North Carolina had grown increasingly concerned about the steady flow of blockade runners launching from Hatteras Inlet. Federal commanders put together a strike force of seven ships with 141 guns to assault the Confederate stronghold. When naval officials woke Lincoln up late one night to give him the news that Hatteras had been subdued, the president was ecstatic. Wearing only a nightshirt, Lincoln wrapped one assistant secretary in a bear hug. The two men “flew around the room once or twice,” recalled one witness, “and the night shirt was considerably agitated.” In the wake of the naval triumph, Seward told an acquaintance that he believed the danger of European intervention was now “pretty well over.”
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Lincoln insisted that he was ignorant about naval matters. “I know but little about ships,” he told his secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, at the beginning of the conflict. In fact, Lincoln, the former flatboat and steamboat pilot, knew plenty. In 1849 he applied for a patent for a device he had invented for lifting steamboats and other vessels over shoals. Lincoln actively pushed for innovations in the navy, signing a bill that would allow the service to develop a fleet of ironclads. That autumn a New York iron manufacturer approached Seward with a novel design. The secretary of state quickly brought it to Lincoln’s attention. Some naval officers ridiculed the vessel, which resembled “a cheese box on a raft.” Lincoln, however, was impressed with the design’s simplicity. At one development meeting, the president hoisted a small pasteboard model of the odd-looking craft. “All I have to say,” Lincoln remarked, “is what the girl said when she stuck her foot into the stocking: ‘It strikes me there is something in it.’ ”
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Still, the slow job of building the navy frustrated Lincoln. In October one of the president’s secretaries found him “pale and
careworn, as if the perpetual wear-and-tear of the load which presses upon him were becoming too much even for his iron frame and elastic mind.” As Lincoln and his team awaited completion of the ironclads, they were forced to rely on the navy’s existing fleet—and its old heroes. That fall Captain Charles Wilkes, a sixty-two-year-old former Antarctic explorer, was assigned a routine mission to travel to the coast of Africa, recover the screw sloop USS
San Jacinto
, and deliver her to the Philadelphia naval yard. Wilkes was nearing the end of his career and had earned a reputation for immoderation. One naval official complained that the captain, who once burned a Fijian village to punish the theft of his crew’s property, possessed “a superabundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment.” Naval secretary Gideon Welles agreed that the old sailor had “abilities but not good judgment in all respects,” and observed that it was “pretty evident that he will be likely to cause trouble.” He was, Welles added, not “as obedient as he should be.”
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Wilkes decided to make one last stab at glory before his retirement. He disobeyed his orders, diverting the
San Jacinto
toward the Caribbean in order to hunt for Confederate blockade runners. While in port at Cienfuegos, in southern Cuba, Wilkes and his crew discovered that two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, were scheduled to sail from Havana on November 8, heading to Europe to take up diplomatic posts in London and Paris. The Southrons made no efforts to hide their plans. Most well-informed Habañeros knew of their impending departure. Wilkes ordered his crew to position their sloop in the middle of the Bahama Channel. Then he waited for his prey.
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Wilkes’s executive officer warned his captain that seizing the mail packet, the HMS
Trent
, might violate international law. But the aging Wilkes could not resist the opportunity. On November 8, the captain told his diary that the day was “one of the most important in my naval life.” Shortly before noon, Wilkes climbed onto the deck of the
San Jacinto
and peered through a telescope. He spotted the
Trent
in the distance. Wilkes ordered his crew on deck, armed
with rifles and bayonets. Then someone shouted the fateful order to fire. A cannonball soared across the bow of the British packet, dropping into the water some distance from its target. When the
Trent
continued on its course, Wilkes’s men fired another shell—this one landing closer. After the British ship finally slowed to a stop, Wilkes ordered his men onto the English vessel to seize Mason and Slidell, dubbing them the “embodiment of dispatches.” After a brief struggle, Wilkes’s sailors hauled the Confederate diplomats back to the
San Jacinto
. The
Trent
was permitted to continue on its course—but Wilkes had his captives.
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And Lincoln had a mess. Northerners, at least at first, did not seem to recognize the dangers. A British journalist traveling in the United States noted the “storm of exultation sweeping over the land” when the news of the capture arrived. “The whole country now rings with applause,” the
New York Times
reported. “We do not believe the American heart ever thrilled with more genuine delight.… As for Commodore Wilkes and his command, let the handsome thing be done. Consecrate another Fourth of July to him. Load him down with services of plate and swords of the cunningest and costliest art.” Crowded theater audiences honored Wilkes with echoing ovations when he returned to shore. P. T. Barnum personally invited the captain to visit his museum. Wilkes, the
Boston Transcript
gushed, had “dealt a heavy blow” to “the very vitals of the conspiracy threatening our national existence.” The U.S. Congress passed a resolution lauding the new American hero “for his brave, adroit and patriotic conduct.” Americans were so eager to congratulate Wilkes that the captain’s hands began to blister from too much shaking.
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Both Lincoln and Seward initially seemed inclined to defend Wilkes. As the early euphoria faded, however, the president and his secretary of state began to express second thoughts. “If Commodore Wilkes acted under orders,” the
Richmond Inquirer
noted perceptively, “we do not see how Lincoln can possibly escape the most serious complications with the English government.” Lincoln acknowledged in November that Wilkes “had no right to turn his
quarter-deck into a prize court,” and complained that he was losing sleep over the incident. “I fear,” Lincoln told another visitor in November, “the traitors may prove to be white elephants.” A State Department employee told his diary that from early on in the crisis Lincoln favored releasing the “traitors.”
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Britons erupted when they read the initial reports of the
Trent
seizure. Londoners, reported one American in the city, were “frantic with rage, and were the country polled, I fear 999 out of 1,000 would declare for immediate war.” Britain’s prime minister, the irascible Lord Palmerston, called an emergency meeting of his cabinet. “I don’t know whether you are going to stand this,” he is said to have thundered as he threw his hat on the table, “but I’ll be damned if I do!” The prime minister threatened to dispatch a fleet of gunboats to U.S. waters, and asked his war department to reconsider recent spending cuts. “Relations with Seward and Lincoln,” he wrote, “are so precarious that it seems to me that it would be inadvisable to make any reduction in the amount of our military force.” Palmerston demanded a halt to gunpowder and ammunition exports to the federal government, and ordered more than ten thousand redcoats to Canada. By early December, the British prime minister confidently assured his monarch that the country was well prepared for war. “Great Britain,” Palmerston reported to Queen Victoria, “is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon, and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”
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God Wouldn’t Trust Them in the Dark

Lincoln sometimes liked to needle Britons, whom he considered stuffy and self-important. He told a favorite joke about an Englishman who hung a portrait of George Washington in his outhouse. The punch line: “There is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.” Another favorite knee-slapper starred an old Indian chief from the West. “He
was visited by an Englishman,” Lincoln explained, “who tried to impress him with the greatness of England. ‘Why,’ said he to the chief, ‘the sun never sets on England.’ ‘Humph!’ said the Indian. ‘I suppose it’s because God wouldn’t trust them in the dark.’ ”
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“Nothing can be more virulent than the hatred that exists between the Americans of the United States and the English,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed two decades before the Civil War. “But in spite of those hostile feelings,” he noted, “the Americans derive most of their manufactured commodities from England”—a dynamic that fueled both economies. By the midnineteenth century, American interests were best served by a healthy relationship with John Bull. London held $444 million worth of American stocks and bonds, making it by far the United States’ largest creditor. Lord Byron, whose poetry Lincoln admired, liked to insist that the Baring brothers and the Rothschild banking houses were “the true lords of Europe.” Yet in America’s case, because of the breakneck speed of economic growth, the debt figures were not particularly oppressive.
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Lincoln had mixed feelings about carrying debt. On the one hand, he shared the Hamiltonian view that a debt could be a “national blessing” if it helped to fund development projects and bring the country together. He had long favored a state bank in Illinois, and once jumped out a window in Springfield to avoid a vote that would put it in danger. Yet Lincoln had also experienced crushing personal obligations firsthand. As a young man, after one investment in a local dry-goods store went bad, Lincoln complained to friends about his own “national debt.” On another occasion, according to a close friend, Lincoln visited a prostitute. After he “stript off and went to bed” with the young woman, the gawky Illinoisan discovered that he did not have enough cash. Lincoln dressed and called off the encounter. “I do not wish,” the future president explained, “to go on credit.”
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Or so the story is told.

By the time Lincoln occupied the Executive Mansion, however, transatlantic financial and commercial ties left little room for disagreement about a wise foreign policy. A war between Britain and the
United States would likely prove disastrous to both economies. “The financial needs of the United States provided a powerful incentive for American statesmen to pursue a conciliatory foreign policy,” notes the Oxford diplomatic scholar Jay Sexton. “The creditor-debtor relationship of Britain and the United States bonded the two nations together and gave them the common interest of avoiding war.” Succumbing to momentary passions or old grudges would prove counterproductive.
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For Lincoln, the
Trent
crisis in the winter of 1861 was a high-stakes, real-world test of his lifelong belief that rational self-interest—“guided by justice”—should be the overriding principle in American foreign affairs. Lincoln believed that selfishness lay at the bottom of all human motivation. When Herndon sometimes argued that man could act disinterestedly, Lincoln ridiculed his law partner. Ultimately, the future president liked to say, “the snaky tongue of selfishness will wag out.” Lincoln believed that human beings possessed little, if any, free will, and were motivated instead by what he called “the fuel of
interest
.” Freedom and progress emerged only from the clash of those interests—whether at home or among the nations of the world.
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What about the “better angels of our nature”—Lincoln’s most often quoted phrase? Even those words, spoken in his first inaugural, were a nod to human imperfection. In an early draft of the address, which had been revised by Seward, the New Yorker had urged Lincoln to appeal to “the guardian angel of our nation.” Lincoln could be an idealist, but he had little time for self-righteous crusading. The president-elect revised Seward’s words, preferring a more qualified version. Lincoln believed deeply in the virtues of the American example, and he once referred to the United States as God’s “almost chosen people.” Yet he could never quite bring himself to slip completely into the role of national cheerleader.

Instead, Lincoln considered a kind of inexact justice the highest good. He believed that only “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” could overcome the “basest principles of our nature.” He admired British utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart
Mill. Careful study of the classics also shaped Lincoln’s approach to foreign policy. As a young lawyer, Lincoln pored over the works of Euclid, mastering the Greek mathematician’s theories of geometry by candlelight, his long legs poking out from beneath his bedcovers. Justice, Lincoln believed, was “nothing else but the best reason of wise men” applied to human affairs. For all Lincoln’s genuine, almost religious faith in the power of America’s republican example to reshape the world, his foreign policies also paid great heed to the Old World concept of international equilibrium. Lincoln “was always just,” Herndon observed, “before he was generous.”
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