Lincoln in the World (26 page)

Lincoln vs. Marx

O
N THE SUNNY, COOL MORNING OF JANUARY 1, 1863
,
A LINE OF FOREIGN DIPLOMATS PARADED INTO THE WHITE HOUSE
“
ARRAYED IN GOLD LACE, FEATHERS, AND OTHER TRAPPINGS
.” The envoys, one journalist remarked, presented “a truly gorgeous appearance.” Seward’s daughter Fanny marveled at the diplomats’ “full court dress.” The whole reception, she told her diary, was “very brilliant.” After the foreign representatives had entered, sentries opened the gates to the general public. A chaotic mob pushed its way through the north portico. Inside, Mary Lincoln hovered in a black velvet dress with lozenge trimming. The president stood in the corner of the Blue Room, stiffly shaking each hand as the receiving line passed.
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The president was exhausted. He had not slept at all the night before. Over the past several weeks, Lincoln had sunk into a deep depression. “His hair is grizzled,” reported one journalist who met Lincoln that winter, “his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.”

The Union’s continuing military setbacks weighed heavily on the commander in chief. In mid-December the Army of the Potomac had launched an ill-advised assault on a dug-in Confederate position near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Southern forces, occupying the high
ground and bristling with more than three hundred pieces of artillery, drove back repeated Union charges. During two days of battle, the Confederate defenders killed or wounded 12,653 Union men. (The Southern forces lost less than half the Federal tally.) The rest of the Northern troops fell into a panicked retreat under a driving rain. Lincoln was disconsolate. “We are now on the brink of destruction,” the president told an old friend after the battle. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.”
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There was, however, one bright spot on this New Year’s afternoon. After Lincoln retired to the White House residence, Seward arrived with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation for Lincoln’s signature, unrolling the document onto a table. Lincoln dipped a pen in ink—but then he hesitated. He had been greeting guests and shaking hands since early that morning. Now the president found that his arm was numb. The signature, he worried, would be carefully scrutinized. “If they find my hand trembled,” he said, “they will say ‘he had some compunctions.’ ” Lincoln waited for a moment for the shaking to subside. Then he swept the pen firmly across the paper. “That will do,” he said with a smile.
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The president had long opposed slavery, which he considered “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” As the Civil War unfolded, he also began to view antislavery as a tool of foreign relations. The Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln believed, “would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.” It was aimed particularly at England’s textile workers, who were the most likely to be affected by the cotton shortages produced by the war—and also the most likely to respond to a moral appeal. The popular energy produced by the proclamation, he believed, could help to apply pressure on Britain’s aristocratic ruling class, many of whom supported the Confederacy. After Lincoln signed the proclamation, Seward’s State Department quickly printed copies and shipped them abroad to the diplomatic corps.
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Presidents before Lincoln had long been reluctant to use the office as a platform to influence public opinion. They considered it
undignified to engage in the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics once in high office. But the telegraph and other innovations in communication had changed the world dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Our government,” Lincoln told a Chicago banquet in 1856, “rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government.” Two years later the future president was even more emphatic. “In this age, and this country, public sentiment is every thing,” he wrote. “
With
it, nothing can fail;
against
it, nothing can succeed.” Billy Herndon later recalled that his law partner “made efforts at all times to modify and change public opinion.” As a new force in foreign affairs, “soft power” had arrived.
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And yet, soft power was a volatile thing. In the globalizing world it was a weapon that could be wielded by skillful individuals and like-minded groups—not just heads of state. Karl Marx, a bohemian German philosopher living in exile in London, was one of those feverishly dabbling in the nineteenth century’s new mass media. Marx spent much of his time in the decade before the Civil War squirreled away in the British Museum reading room working on his economic treatises. Yet philosophy alone left the agitator unsatisfied. “The philosophers of the past,” Marx once wrote, “merely interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Marx thought writing for the world’s quickly proliferating newspapers could help effect political change. The world’s most powerful statesmen, Marx insisted, would only respond to what he called “pressure from without.” Starting in the early 1850s, Marx took a job writing regular dispatches for the
New York Tribune
—the world’s largest newspaper.
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Over the course of the decade, Marx grew to become one of the paper’s most respected correspondents. Marx and the
Tribune
shared elements of a common vision. The newspaper’s nickname was the Great Moral Organ, and its editors pushed an ambitious slate of reformist policies. Lincoln had carefully pored over the
Tribune
for years. The president considered its editor, Horace Greeley, so important that he kept a special mail slot in his desk to hold correspondence
with the mercurial newspaperman. With more than two hundred thousand readers, the
Tribune
’s role in “the particular drama which ended with the Emancipation Proclamation” was “as great as any statesman’s save Lincoln,” notes Allan Nevins, the distinguished scholar of the Civil War. Lincoln appreciated the influence of Greeley and his newspaper. “In print,” the president once remarked, “every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.”
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Marx sometimes complained that his bosses on the foreign desk of the
Tribune
were “impudent” and complained that they represented “the industrial bourgeoisie of America.” Yet he ultimately bragged to friends about writing for “the foremost English-language American newspaper.” Both the paper and its special correspondent in London aggressively lobbied to end slavery in America. When the artist Francis Carpenter painted his famous scene of Lincoln and his cabinet issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Carpenter considered the role of the
Tribune
so important that he included an issue of the newspaper in the portrait. Marx declared that the Civil War was the first stage in a worldwide working-class revolution. “As the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class,” he predicted, “so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working-classes.”
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Diplomacy and Imagination

Karl Marx was certainly not a player in the diplomacy of the Civil War in the same sense that men like Seward and Palmerston were. Lincoln had never met Marx, and they corresponded only indirectly. And yet, observing the two men side by side does reveal something important about the international arena in the midnineteenth century. In the years immediately following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, a tight-knit fraternity of highly conventional elites had come to dominate European statecraft. Stability in the international arena meant adhering to a
common set of moral principles that would prevent any one nation from upsetting the balance of power. Foreign envoys refined an elaborate system of etiquette. Revolutionary change was frowned upon. Diplomacy had become a game for the orthodox.

By the Civil War, however, that system had broken down. After the outbreak of the Crimean War in the mid 1850s, nations began to act increasingly as free radicals—common moral principles be damned. Scientific progress and new theories of evolution seemed to justify a brutal competition for power and resources. And yet morality had not really disappeared from the international arena. It had simply fractured, diffused, and changed shape. Operating in such a global context required leaders who could make sense of the world for their followers, who could pick up the pieces and craft new narratives that would provide purpose and meaning. Survival, above all, demanded imagination.
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Lincoln and Marx were both creative geniuses who understood better than most that the old rules of foreign affairs were changing. (The word
genius
has a proactive, slightly spiritual connotation. The Latin root word,
gignere
, means “to beget”; the French version,
génie
, evokes its own type of otherworldly presence.) Marx, of course, is known for his materialistic conception of history. Lincoln, too, was a careful student of the concrete elements of power. Yet neither man could ultimately afford to ignore the less tangible elements in foreign affairs. Both enlisted the media of their times to help strengthen the resolve of their acolytes. Each ultimately managed to create a measure of order from the chaos of a changing world.
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Lincoln and Marx, in some ways, were temperamentally similar. Both could be fun-loving and warm; both sometimes sunk into bouts of gloom and pique. Focused on the activity between their ears, both sometimes neglected outside appearances. The prairie lawyer stored important documents in his stovepipe hat; the bohemian intellectual occupied an office covered with dust and tobacco ash. Above all, both men were revolutionaries who believed in the power of money and markets to reshape the world.

Lincoln, however, saw bourgeois life as a guarantor of social mobility; Marx viewed it as a prison. For the U.S. president, a Northern victory in the Civil War would redeem the American promise. The country’s free-labor system, Lincoln believed, was partly what differentiated the United States from the Old World. For Marx, on the other hand, the Union’s success represented the first step toward the revolution’s final stage: proletarian revolt. In the newly interconnected world, the American Civil War had the potential to rally European workers. The sooner middle-class America triumphed over the country’s Southern aristocrats, Marx believed, the sooner the world’s workers could triumph over both. “Labor in white skin,” Marx explained, “cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin.”
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In the near term, however, the aims of Lincoln and Marx were the same. Both sought the defeat of the Confederate States of America, even if the two men disagreed strongly over philosophy and strategy. Marx believed that the North held a key (and underutilized) advantage that had nothing to do with its material resources: the moral high ground. He recommended that Lincoln should use every means at his disposal—including the abolition of slavery—to win global sympathies. Only “the
revolutionary
waging of war,” Marx believed, would give the Union war effort the ideological consistency it needed to carry the day.

That, of course, was easy for Marx to say from his journalistic perch safely across the Atlantic. Lincoln was the one with the near-impossible task of actually managing the revolution. In the war’s first days, the Union’s enemies seemed dangerously close to home. Secessionists in northern Virginia appeared poised to strike Washington. For all Lincoln knew, Kentuckians might be next. If the president wanted to placate border-state slaveholders, he would need a strategy that was far more subtle and pragmatic than Marx’s prescription. Lincoln decided to save the moralizing for a later date. “The President
wanted
God on his side,” observed one contemporary, “but he
must
have Kentucky.” To accomplish that aim, Lincoln originally
maintained that the North was fighting to preserve the Union—not to eradicate slavery.
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Lincoln’s early strategy had not impressed the German dissident. The American president was “a man without intellectual brilliance,” Marx lamented—one of the New World’s “mediocrities of merely local influence.” His cautious war making angered the philosopher. Marx complained that the president was always “hesitant, resistant, unwilling.” Lincoln lacked originality, the journalist believed. Only a public outcry was likely to shift his stance. “Lincoln,” Marx observed as the debate over slavery intensified, “yields only hesitantly and cautiously to this pressure from without.”
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Actually, Lincoln and Marx were headed in the same direction. They were just taking different paths. Lincoln believed that it would have been counterproductive to issue a proclamation freeing the slaves if ordinary Americans were not yet “educated up to it,” as he put it. By early 1862, however, he had come to recognize that the Northern effort needed a morale boost. Although the Union armies had won some major victories—the Battle of Shiloh, in April, was one example—the death tolls on both sides were growing to horrifying proportions. Northern and Southern forces had each lost more than 10,000 men at Shiloh—almost seven times the casualties at Bull Run. Shiloh, notes one historian, was the battlefield on which Americans’ “Romanticism expired.” The Union war effort desperately needed a leader to make sense out of the carnage.
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