Lincoln in the World (34 page)

Mary Todd Lincoln had grown up in a Kentucky house adorned with French mahogany furniture and Belgian rugs. She attended a boarding school run by Parisian aristocrats who had fled the country in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Lincoln’s impetuous law partner Billy Herndon complained that his friend was harming himself politically by his opposition to the Mexican War. “I will stake my life,” Lincoln responded, “that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did.”

Lincoln was almost certainly in the audience in Lexington, Kentucky, in November 1847, as an elderly Henry Clay delivered a moving speech opposing the Mexican War.

Lincoln initially worried that he was unprepared to manage foreign affairs. “I don’t know anything about diplomacy,” he told one European envoy. “I will be very apt to make blunders.”

Holograph of Lincoln’s response to Seward’s “foreign war panacea.”

Secretary of State William Henry Seward proved to be a capable statesman—yet he also possessed an outsize ego and a sometimes volatile temperament. “When he was loaded,” recalled the son of one of Lincoln’s diplomats, “his tongue wagged.”

As First Lady, Mary Lincoln meddled in diplomatic appointments. She urged Seward to name her personal choice to a post in the Sandwich Islands and demanded that Lincoln appoint one of her favorite clergymen to a consulship in Scotland.

Lincoln’s minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was an old friend of the First Lady’s. The president came to believe that Clay possessed “a great deal of conceit and very little sense.”

Charles Sumner, the powerful Massachusetts senator who chaired the foreign-relations committee, often tangled with Seward, who complained that there were “too many secretaries of state in Washington.”

Britain’s Lord Palmerston generally opposed intervening in the Civil War. Britain’s “best and true policy,” he wrote his foreign minister in 1861, would be “to keep quite clear of the conflict.”

As a journalist in London, Karl Marx steadfastly supported the Union. The sooner bourgeois America defeated the slaveholding aristocracy, Marx believed, the sooner the proletariat could triumph over both.