Lincoln in the World (32 page)

Now, two days after issuing the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln called another meeting of the cabinet to discuss colonization once again. Welles still opposed such a move, as did Seward. “I am always,” the secretary of state explained, “for bringing men and states
into
this Union, never for taking any out.” Seward’s longtime secretary, George Baker, later explained that colonization was the only substantive issue on which Lincoln and Seward strongly disagreed. Still, at Lincoln’s request, the secretary of state canvassed diplomats in France, Britain, and the Netherlands to determine whether the European powers might possess suitable territories in the Caribbean for colonies of free blacks. Lincoln, meanwhile, asked Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would fund potential colonies. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” Lincoln said, “that I strongly favor colonization.”
⁹⁴

Even as Lincoln tried to refine such ambitious projects, nettle-some smaller diplomatic flaps distracted him. In October, Charles Sumner wrote Lincoln urging him to fire his envoys in the Sandwich Islands. The local government had been complaining about the “intemperate habits” and inability to focus of David L. Gregg—an old friend of Lincoln’s who was now advising King Kamehameha IV. Close trade ties with the Sandwich Islands were particularly important to the northeastern merchants that Sumner represented. Union leaders also worried that Confederate agents might use the islands to outfit privateers. To make matters worse, French forces were rumored to be working to enhance their clout on the archipelago. “Our influence in the Sandwich Islands,” Sumner told Lincoln, “is seriously impaired by the character of our representatives there.… For the sake of our good name and of our just influence there, and especially of those commercial interests in which Massachusetts has so large a share, I trust that the present commissioner will be recalled.”

Lincoln’s old friend Gregg tried to shift the blame onto Thomas J. Dryer, the American commissioner on the islands. “He is rude, rough and repulsive to genteel society,” Gregg complained to Lincoln. Dryer’s “backwoods style” might be “appreciated at County Court gatherings, where whiskey more than reason is the convincing argument,” Gregg said. But Dryer’s behavior the last time he was invited to the palace was so disruptive that he would not be invited again. “I do not deem it necessary to mention particulars,” Gregg told the president. “They are almost too bad to mention.… Pray send us a gentleman who will not disgrace his character or give countenance to the idea that we are inferior … to the rest of the world in our diplomacy.” Lincoln ultimately replaced Dryer in January, admonishing Seward to appoint “a tip-top man there next time.”
⁹⁵

As Lincoln sought to reform the diplomatic corps abroad, he also pushed for a more aggressive strategy on the battlefield at home. The president finally tired of McClellan’s cautious war making. For a year and a half, Lincoln had patiently tolerated the general’s inaction. He barely protested when McClellan—who privately referred to his commander in chief as “the original gorilla”—insulted him. Lincoln complained that McClellan had the “slows.” But the president had always indulged the pompous officer. McClellan, a Democrat who opposed abolition, had complained to his wife that he would not fight for a slave revolt. He had been warning Lincoln that abolition would alienate European decision makers. Now Lincoln decided that he had heard enough from his insubordinate general. The day after the 1862 election, Lincoln dismissed McClellan. To Marx, who was convinced of the cautious general’s “mediocrity,” the decision amounted to another promising step toward “the
revolutionary
waging of war.”
⁹⁶

That is precisely what worried Europeans. On October 7, the British Liberal William Gladstone gave a speech to a raucous mass meeting in England in which he seemed to recognize the legitimacy of Confederate independence. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” Gladstone declared, “we may be for or against the South;
but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation.” Throughout the fall, British interventionists appeared to be making headway in convincing Palmerston to take action. A few days after the chancellor of the exchequer’s speech, Palmerston remarked that Gladstone was “not far wrong in pronouncing by anticipation the National Independence of the South.” Only days later, however, the prime minister backtracked once again. By October 22, Palmerston wrote that he had “very much come back to our original view of the matter.” British statesmen, he concluded, “must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.” By November, the likelihood of European intervention had lessened considerably.
⁹⁷

As the New Year approached, however, the pressure on Lincoln only increased. The defeat at Fredericksburg in mid-December shattered Northern morale. Radicals, emboldened by Lincoln’s decision to issue the proclamation, made a determined effort to oust the cautious Seward. The president found himself besieged by Congress, his own cabinet, and the press. “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln complained, “I am in it.”
⁹⁸

Greeley’s minions, meanwhile, worked feverishly to gin up support for emancipation. In early December, Sumner wrote Greeley’s deputy in New York urging abolitionists to help strengthen public opinion “by argument, persuasion, appeal[s] of all kinds.” Two days later, in a
Tribune
editorial, Greeley downplayed the notion that emancipation could induce a European intervention. With tensions rising in Italy, Austria, and Poland, the Continental powers had too much on their plates already. “The greater the danger of collision among themselves,” Greeley wrote, “the less European governments will feel an inclination to meddle in transatlantic strife.” The
Tribune
editor’s analysis, for once, was dead-on.
⁹⁹

For all the winter tensions, by December, Lincoln and Seward actually had reason for optimism when it came to international
relations. “A year ago,” Seward wrote to Lincoln’s emissary in Paris, “it seemed that any foreign nation might assail and destroy us at a blow. I am sure that no one foreign nation would now conceive such an attempt, while combination of several powers for that purpose is impossible.” According to Seward, the president was the most content with foreign affairs that he had ever seen him. The secretary of state reported that the continued “warnings of danger” from U.S. diplomats in the field embarrassed Lincoln, who was otherwise “disposed to take a more cheering view of our foreign relations, at this time, than he has allowed himself to indulge at any previous period since the Civil War commenced.”
¹⁰⁰

Part of the reason for Lincoln’s optimism may have been that the president finally had an opportunity to reconcile his realism with his idealism. Even as Lincoln pursued America’s national interest, he also appealed to what Thomas Jefferson had dubbed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” With the burgeoning mass media shrinking the world, such considerations were more important than ever. At the suggestion of his treasury secretary, Lincoln added a line to the Emancipation Proclamation invoking “the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” (Charles Sumner wrote one correspondent shortly after the New Year arguing that while the “last sentence was actually framed by Chase … I believe I first suggested it to him and to the President. I urged that he should close with ‘something about
justice
and
God
.’ ”)
¹⁰¹

In his annual message to Congress, Lincoln acknowledged that American foreign relations remained tenuous but claimed they were not as bad as might be expected considering how “unhappily distracted” the country appeared to Europeans. In any case, Lincoln believed that he was about to unleash a potent new weapon. With the looming Emancipation Proclamation, the president would attempt to bridge the Atlantic and speak directly to British workers. If Americans could only finish the job at home, Lincoln told Congress, the result would resonate across the globe.

“Fellow-citizens,” the president declared, “
we
cannot escape
history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We
say
we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even
we here
—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In
giving
freedom to the
slave
, we
assure
freedom to the
free
—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”
¹⁰²

The Labor Kings of London

The American press, led by the
New York Tribune
, had helped set the stage for emancipation. Newspapers printed editorials lauding abolition. Fiery orators like Wendell Phillips riled up huge crowds. The whole dynamic fed on itself. The papers reported on the speeches, the public debated the editorials—and soon the entire country had become a massive echo chamber. Lincoln raised his own megaphone at key moments, writing public letters and corresponding with influential editors. Yet in the new art of public relations, the old laws of power did not neatly apply.
¹⁰³

Marx had long recognized that power politics had taken on new rules. The novel technologies of the telegraph and the steam press had helped fuel the European revolutions a decade earlier. One of Marx’s earliest editorials as a young journalist had been an analysis of press freedoms in Prussia. Yet despite the proliferation of new media, he remained frustrated by the failure of Britain’s working classes to revolt. Part of the problem, he was convinced, was that the nation’s newspapers remained in the hands of venal tycoons. Marx considered
the London
Times
—dubbed the Thunderer by Britons—the worst offender. He derided the paper’s editors as “public opinion-mongers” and their reports as “paid sophistry.”
¹⁰⁴

Marx found it difficult to control even smaller newspapers that catered to Britain’s working classes. One of them, the
Bee-Hive
, persistently abused Lincoln and the Union in the early years of the Civil War. The American president, the newspaper’s editors insisted, was a “mindless man.” His cabinet consisted of “atrocious jobbers, who live better by hostilities than they ever do in peace.” Even in the wake of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—which was intended, after all, partly to shift the opinions of British workers—the
Bee-Hive
remained antagonistic. How could Marx successfully spread “correct views” in America and on the Continent, he must have wondered, if he could not even shape public opinion in his own backyard?
¹⁰⁵

Frustrated by the hard line of the labor movement’s house organs, labor leaders in Britain’s industrial districts began looking for other methods of expressing their support for the Union. One solution was to organize “monster meetings” of workers. Prominent speakers would laud the Northern cause, and the raucous audiences could then vote on resolutions of support. Newspapers—even hostile ones—would be forced to cover the meetings. The organization of mass gatherings, therefore, offered one novel means of co-opting Britain’s conservative media. Marx, for one, appreciated the new tool. Monster meetings, he wrote to Engels the day after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, “cost nothing” but “bring in a great deal ‘internationally.’ ”
¹⁰⁶

Starting in November 1862, a cascade of popular demonstrations rolled across Britain. Over the following two years, British workers held more than a hundred such gatherings. The Emancipation Proclamation, Charles Francis Adams observed, had “rallied the sympathies of the working classes.” The London
Times
sniped that the crowds consisted of “nobodies.” But Lincoln’s diplomats reported home that the meetings were actually organized by a combination of
religious dissenters and middle-class agitators. In London, huge halls were packed to capacity. Swarms of demonstrators spilled out into the streets. Inside, the mere mention of Lincoln’s name inspired euphoric whelps. “I think in every town in the Kingdom,” John Bright wrote to Sumner in January, “a public meeting would go by an overwhelming majority in favor of President Lincoln and of the North.”
¹⁰⁷

Marx wrote newspaper dispatches about the meetings, helping to bolster the impression that popular enthusiasm was building. He believed that such demonstrations were the key to wresting concessions from Britain’s ruling class. “No important innovation,” he wrote, “no decisive measure, has ever been carried out in this country without pressure from without.” The new burst of working-class energy was a positive omen. Marx saw the meetings as “a splendid new proof of the indestructible soundness of the English popular masses.” Still, if the workers wanted change, he insisted, they would have to remain visible on the national stage.
¹⁰⁸

Lincoln, too, did his best to encourage the demonstrators. Any sympathy he might win from ordinary Britons and Frenchmen, he believed, could help to exert pressure on European decision makers to support the North—or at least stay out of the war. The resolutions passed in at least some of the gatherings had actually been carefully crafted by Lincoln and his team. The messages contained a decidedly moral appeal. In one example, Lincoln’s men offered a resolution declaring that no slaveholding nation should be recognized by “the family of Christian and civilized nations.” Sumner shipped the text across the Atlantic to Bright. In some cases, the Lincoln government actually sent secret payments to help fund the meetings, which the president believed could help convince British statesmen that intervention would be an unpopular policy.