Lincoln in the World (23 page)

Seward asked Britain’s minister in Washington to withhold his country’s demands for a few days before making the official presentation. The secretary of state wanted more time to formulate a response
before the Brits turned over their seven-day hourglass. The British minister graciously obliged. Seward, meanwhile, reverted to his old blustering ways. On December 16 the secretary of state showed up loaded for bear at a dinner at the Portuguese legation. Looking “haggard and worn,” with his trademark cloud of cigar smoke following him about the room, Seward boasted about the potential American reaction if Britain were to make war. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” Seward cried. The historian George Bancroft reported that Seward “looked dirty, rusty, vulgar, and low; used such words as
hell
, and
damn
, and spoke very loud.” Edward Everett, the Massachusetts statesman who had once filled the difficult job of secretary of state himself, was more forgiving of Seward’s behavior that winter. The New Yorker was “really overworked,” Everett told Cassius Marcellus Clay, “and every allowance must be made for him.” Europe’s diplomats had grown accustomed to Seward’s violent outbursts. “That’s all bugaboo talk,” one guest at the Portuguese party had explained to a British journalist. “When Seward talks that way he means to break down. He is most dangerous and obstinate when he pretends to agree a good deal with you.”
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Lincoln recognized that opening another front would be fatal. But first he would have to convince the public, which was still in no mood to back down. While Seward strutted about Washington’s ministries, the president quietly began reaching out to friendly newspaper editors. He urged John Forney of the
Philadelphia Press
to try to counteract the popular fury. “I want you to sit down and write one of your most careful articles, preparing the American people for the release of Slidell and Mason, and for the statement that Captain Wilkes acted without the authority of his government,” Lincoln told the editor. The president tried to play to the editor’s vanity, adding: “I know this is much to ask of you, but it shows my confidence in you, my friend, when I tell you that I have chosen you because I can trust you, because I think you equal to the task. You will be much abused by our honest and impatient people. But when I tell you that this course is forced upon us by our peculiar position; and that the
good Queen of England is moderating her own angry people, who are as bitter against us as our people are against them, I need say no more.” Forney, who was a personal friend of Wilkes’s, was initially full of “resentment” over the request, he later recalled. Still, “a little reflection and a fuller revelation of facts decided me,” and he agreed to write the piece.
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Lincoln may also have enlisted his personal secretary as a propagandist. John Hay, whose anonymous newspaper reports often seemed to echo Lincoln’s views, wrote that there was “little excitement and no trepidation in Washington,” even after news of the British demands arrived. The capital’s denizens had displayed “no serious apprehensions” about the
Trent
crisis, Hay wrote. Residents blithely strolled the shopping districts in the unseasonably warm weather, wearing their best “silk, feathers and broad cloth.” Hay insisted that cool heads would prevail and war could still be avoided. A “quiet contempt” toward Britain had replaced Americans’ former “intense sensitiveness,” Hay observed. “Having ceased utterly to think anything of them, of course we are entirely indifferent to what they think of us.” Lincoln’s secretary stressed the material consequences of a pointless and destructive war.
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As Lincoln and Seward mulled their response to the British ultimatum, dire reports began pouring in from expats in Europe. Seward’s old kingmaker, Thurlow Weed, had embarked for the Continent earlier that year to try to improve the North’s image abroad. Yet now he warned that the Federals were taking a miserable beating in the French and British press. More troubling, Weed reported, Britain appeared to be preparing for a major conflict. “Everything here is upon a war footing,” he wrote Seward. “Such prompt and gigantic preparations were never known.” Weed advised the White House to simply release Mason and Slidell. The best policy, he insisted, would be to turn “if needs be, even the other cheek rather than smite back at present.” The Confederate envoys, he insisted, “would be a million times less mischievous here than at Fort Warren.” War, he warned, “unless you avert it, is inevitable.”
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Britons were particularly hostile to Seward. The secretary of state, Weed reported, was being “infernally abused” in London drawing rooms and was “wholly misunderstood.” Seward’s poor reputation stemmed at least partly from an offhand comment he made to the Duke of Newcastle during his trip to England in 1859. Seward had remarked that if he should be elected president, he would go out of his way to insult Britain—or so the duke thought he had heard. Throughout the country, Weed told Seward, Britons were “ransacking” the secretary of state’s collected works, looking for “every word against England.” They were convinced that Seward wanted to provoke a foreign war in order to unite North and South. A number of prominent Englishmen told Weed that he should write to Lincoln demanding Seward’s immediate dismissal.
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Meanwhile, liberal Britons like John Bright and Richard Cobden tried to influence Lincoln through other channels. Palmerston was an old antagonist of the two men. “Palmerston prime minister!” Bright had once exclaimed. “What a hoax!” Cobden referred to the prime minister as “the old dodger.” Bright dubbed Palmerston “the hoary imposter.” Bright and Cobden believed commercial ties bound Britain tightly to its former colonies. Palmerston, on the other hand, allowed nothing to bind him. He dismissed Bright and Cobden as unrealistic pacifists. “It would be very delightful,” the prime minister wrote, “if your utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce and would give up fighting and quarrelling altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal.” Conflict, the prime minister insisted, was simply “human nature.”
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Still, both Bright and Cobden also urged Washington to do its part to avoid a conflict. Cobden believed that Charles Sumner possessed “a kind of veto” on Seward’s influence with the president. “At all hazards,” Bright wrote Sumner, “you must not let this matter grow to a war with England, even if you are right and we are wrong.” Bright urged Sumner to be “courteous and conceding to the last possible degree.” He suggested that the American president
might submit the affair to an international arbiter. Sumner, who met almost daily with Lincoln as the
Trent
crisis intensified, shared the letters with the president. Former president Millard Fillmore also wrote Lincoln in mid-December arguing that arbitration was the only way to avoid being “overwhelmed with the double calamities of civil and foreign war at the same time.” Lincoln agreed that arbitration was the way to go. “There will be no war,” the president assured Sumner, “unless England is bent upon having one.”
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A Glutton of Gloom

With no transatlantic telegraph yet working, diplomatic dispatches took a maddening two weeks to cross the ocean by steamship. As Lincoln pondered his response to Britain’s ultimatum, Palmerston waited anxiously. Finally, a dispatch arrived in London from Washington on the evening of December 16 affirming that Wilkes had acted “without instructions and even without the knowledge of the government.” The news cheered some. “We shall not have war with America,” said a relieved Lady Palmerston. The prime minister himself was not so sure. “As to any dispatch written by Seward before he received our demands,” Palmerston told his foreign minister, “I attach very little value to it, and one cannot speculate on the nature of the answer we shall receive. We are doing all we can do on the assumption that we are to have a refusal and that is all we can be expected to do.”
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Lincoln’s diplomats, for their part, found themselves unsure about who was in charge in London. “Where is the master to direct this storm?” Charles Francis Adams asked his son as the crisis intensified. As the
Trent
affair approached its climax, the British prime minister physically broke down. Palmerston, now in his late seventies, had long walked with a stoop and could barely see. Sometimes he simply fell asleep in Parliament. For a statesman with such an outsize public image, Palmerston’s deteriorating body shocked
some visitors. Lord Granville thought the Most English Minister looked like “a retired old
croupier
from Baden.” Now, at a moment of high tension between Britain and the federal states, an attack of gout crippled the prime minister. Rumors flew through London that Palmerston had died.

Adding to the prime minister’s stress, the ailing Prince Albert finally passed away on December 14. Palmerston had often tangled with the prince consort, but Albert had earned a degree of his respect. Palmerston feared that the monarch’s death at the height of an international crisis could complicate an already delicate situation. The prime minister considered it a “calamity” that was “too awful to contemplate.” The entire British nation, he added, had been “plunged … into the deepest affliction” by the news.
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As Palmerston’s health deteriorated, his friends began to worry. The prime minister had always led a vigorous life. In his youth Palmerston had vowed to “make exercise a religion,” and preferred to work at a standing desk rather than sitting in a chair. Even in old age he “ate like a vulture.” Now, however, the prime minister was “
very
far from well,” Lord Clarendon reported. “He overtaxes his strength, and unless he makes some change in that respect, he cannot last long.” Albert’s passing had only made matters worse. “The death of the prince has affected him much,” Lord Granville observed. “I never saw him so low, but there is enough to make him so, coupled with the depression always caused by the gout. Lady Palmerston appeared to me for the first time to be a little anxious about him.”
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The rising tensions and Prince Albert’s death cast a pall over London. The massive church bell at St. Paul’s Cathedral filled the city with “the dull boom of its sad tones.” Merchants shuttered shops, and Londoners wandered the streets wearing black under the gray winter skies. At the American legation, diplomats were instructed to write all dispatches on special black-edged paper in honor of the late prince consort. The atmosphere in London, wrote Henry Adams, the son of the American minister, would have “gorged a glutton of gloom.”
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The American diplomats displayed little faith in their bosses in Washington. Charles Francis Adams complained that Lincoln was “unfit for his place.” Seward, too, received low marks for his statesmanship. The secretary of state had once remarked that he was an enigma to himself. His actions certainly baffled his men overseas. Henry Adams acknowledged that he had no idea what the secretary of state was thinking. If he intended to provoke a war, Adams admitted, or even to “run as close as he can without touching, then I say that Mr. Seward is the greatest criminal we’ve had yet.” The young diplomatic secretary believed Britain was wholly justified in its outrage. If the British navy had stopped an American mail packet in similar circumstances, Adams insisted, he and his countrymen would have “jumped out of our boots.”
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The intentions of British leaders appeared equally opaque. In a letter to Frederick Engels, Karl Marx wondered what Palmerston was really thinking. “If Pam absolutely wants war,” Marx wrote his friend, using the prime minister’s nickname, “he can, of course, bring it about.” But the German émigré did not believe Palmerston genuinely wanted one. In any case, Marx expected Lincoln to back down, removing the pretext for war. The British prime minister’s real goal, Marx speculated, was to put pressure on the Americans to recognize the Declaration of Paris, a treaty guaranteeing the rights of neutrals. Neither side had an interest in a full-scale war. Still, the risk always remained that all the blustering could spin out of control. “It is, of course, possible that the Yankees will not yield,” Marx told Engels, “and then Pam will be compelled to go to war by his preparations and rodomontades so far. Still, I would bet a hundred to one against it.”
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Palmerston, still sick and in bed, believed that Lincoln and Seward were “in a Fool’s Paradise about the
Trent
affair.” The Federals may try to avoid a “direct refusal” of the British demands, he speculated, but he believed that Britain would ultimately be forced to fight. London’s
Morning Post
, which Palmerston was said to control, wondered whether a government “elected but a few months since by the popular choice” and “depending exclusively for existence
on popular support” could resist the clamor for war. “The answer to this question must, we fear, be in the negative.” Palmerston’s foreign minister remained more hopeful. “I still incline to think Lincoln will submit,” he wrote the prime minister, “but not until the clock is 59 minutes past 11.” Palmerston expected “some evasive dodge.” He wondered whether Lincoln might just let the two prisoners slip across the border with Canada or Mexico.
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Palmerston was right in one respect. Lincoln had at first hoped to stall for time. On the afternoon of December 21, the president was visiting with Browning at the White House when the subject of the
Trent
came up again. Lincoln explained that the British minister in Washington—honoring Seward’s plea for time—had still not officially presented the Palmerston ministry’s demands. Still, Lincoln told Browning that “he had an inkling of what they were, and feared trouble.” The president’s old friend argued that it would be best to do everything possible to avoid a “rupture” with Britain, “if it could be done without humiliation and dishonor.” Lincoln said that he agreed completely.

Both men believed that a neutral arbitrator might peacefully defuse the crisis. In early December the president had drafted a memo to British officials proposing arbitration and stating that “this government has intended no affront to the British flag, or to the British nation.” Now, as he visited with Browning, Lincoln pulled out the document and read it to his old friend. In the dispatch, which Lincoln intended to be sent under Seward’s signature, the president reiterated that Wilkes had acted “without orders from, or expectation of, the government.” Although Lincoln added that he wanted to discuss several points that he considered extenuating circumstances, he did write that he would consider a British request for reparations. The text of Lincoln’s document seems to have adopted some of the language of Bright and Cobden, who had been urging Sumner to lobby for such a proposal. Browning later told his diary that Lincoln’s draft displayed “great force and clearness.” Yet with its slippery excuses and its plea for time, the president’s proposed reply would
have been certain to irritate Palmerston. In the end, Lincoln thought better of sending it.
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