Lincoln in the World (35 page)

Foreign observers were baffled by the inscrutable French emperor Napoleon III. One Lincoln aide dubbed him the Sphinx of the Tuileries. Otto von Bismarck described the French monarch as “a great unfathomed capacity.”

The influential French empress Eugénie was troubled by the rise of the United States. “Sooner or later,” she said, “we shall have to declare war on America.”

Tall, blue-eyed General Joseph Hooker—nicknamed Handsome Captain by local women during the Mexican War—longed to invade Mexico again. The general, recalled one contemporary, was “very eager to raise an army on the Pacific coast for a fight with a foreign nation.”

Radical Republicans such as Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis urged Lincoln to take a harder line over the French occupation of Mexico. Davis used the issue—unsuccessfully—to try to unseat the president during the 1864 campaign.

Napoleon III installed Austrian archduke Maximilian on the Mexican throne. Locals referred to the new emperor as Featherhead, for his poor judgment.

Lincoln’s glib young personal secretary John Hay thought the president’s foreign envoys were “generally men of ability,” but also “not always of that particular style of education which fits men for diplomacy.”

More than thirty years after Lincoln’s assassination, Hay was appointed secretary of state—a position he held under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay once gave Roosevelt a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair encased in it.

As the war drew to a close, Lincoln’s demeanor alternated between relief and melancholy. “There has been war enough,” the president told a reporter who wondered whether the Union and Confederacy would now unite to invade Mexico.

Lincoln vs. Napoleon

A
S THE CIVIL WAR ENTERED ITS FINAL DAYS, MARY LINCOLN WORRIED THAT HER HUSBAND WAS BEGINNING TO LOOK
“
SO BROKEN-HEARTED, SO COMPLETELY WORN OUT
.”
IT WAS A
judgment that many visitors shared during those last months of the president’s life. When the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher dropped in on Lincoln at the Executive Mansion in late winter 1865, he found the exhausted president alone in his receiving room. Lincoln’s hair was shooting up “every way for Sunday,” the minister recalled. “It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble field.” The president wore a pair of slippers, and his suit vest flapped free. Lincoln welcomed the minister, and then sank into his chair. The president, Beecher later recalled, “looked as though every limb wanted to drop off his body.”
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In one sense, Lincoln had little reason to be weary. For a year and a half now, his armies had been relentlessly on the offensive. The early days of tentative war making were long past. The president had replaced hesitating figures like George B. McClellan with effective new generals like Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Within one week in July 1863, Union forces had bested their Southern foes at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg, decisively shifting the war’s momentum. Fierce fighting continued for more than a year
in the wastes of northern Virginia. Yet by the last months of the war, Union success appeared all but inevitable. Lincoln’s army, led by the irascible Sherman, finally captured both Atlanta and Savannah in late 1864. As the New Year dawned, Sherman’s troops were still on the move, cutting a devastating path through the American South.

By the start of 1865, the president had also subdued the most dangerous of his personal critics. Throughout the previous year, Lincoln’s antagonists—including members of his own party and cabinet—had been angling to defeat him in his bid for reelection. Even some of Lincoln’s diplomats in Europe threatened to come home and campaign against him. Buoyed by the success of his armies in the weeks leading up to the election, however, Lincoln had ultimately won a second term by a huge margin. Grant forwarded a message of congratulations to the victorious candidate saying that in Europe, Lincoln’s reelection would be “worth more to the country than a battle won.” The “importance of this event, in its influence upon the reputation of the nation,” agreed Charles Francis Adams in London, “would be difficult to overestimate.”
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Meanwhile, a series of crises on the Continent unrelated to the Civil War were preoccupying the great powers. In early 1863, Polish rebels had revolted against Russian domination of their country, begging in vain for British and French assistance. The following year, Prussian and Austrian armies had invaded the Danish-controlled duchies of Schleswig and Holstein—a move that shocked European liberals and threatened to upset the region’s fragile balance of power. Palmerston had once vowed to defend the territories against aggressors. Yet in the final calculus, he determined that it would be wiser to stand aside. The whole drama undermined the Anglo-French relationship and exposed the surprising weakness of the world’s most powerful nation. By the early months of 1865, the threat of British intervention in the American Civil War had vanished.
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And yet, the French emperor, Napoleon III, remained one lingering cause for anxiety. The Confederacy, he warned Lincoln’s representative in Paris, would be too “difficult to subdue.” The emperor
believed that North and South “would never come together again.” Napoleon had been working steadily, almost since the start of the American conflict, to extend French influence into North America. As the Union and Confederate armies began to clash, he convinced British and Spanish policy makers to join a three-way intervention in Mexico, advertised as a mission to recover unpaid debts. Actually, Napoleon’s scheme was an ambitious project to restore France’s imperial prestige, improve its economy, and bolster its geopolitical position.

Within months Britain and Spain cooled on the adventure and withdrew their forces. Napoleon, on the other hand, decided to double down on Mexico. Even as the Polish and Danish crises simmered, he continued to send troops across the Atlantic. Ultimately the emperor installed his puppet, the Austrian archduke Maximilian, on the Mexican throne. “No more sinister project, in terms of American interest, American influence, and American ideas,” writes historian Dexter Perkins, “has ever been conceived in the history of the Monroe Doctrine.”
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