Lincoln in the World (39 page)

On January 14, 1863, Vallandigham rose in the House of Representatives and urged the warring parties to accept the French offer. The Copperhead congressman insisted that he was not defeatist. America’s emergence as a world power, he believed, was simply contingent on stopping the war. “Union,” he told the chamber, “is empire.” In some ways, Vallandigham’s underlying rationale was not so different from Seward’s own conciliatory position during the secession winter. Yet the Ohioan’s means were vastly different. Vallandigham implored his colleagues to consider Napoleon III’s proposal. “It would be churlish to refuse,” he declared. “As proposed by the Emperor of France, I would accept it at once. Now is the auspicious moment. It is the speediest, easiest, most graceful mode of suspending hostilities.”
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Lincoln, already worn down by the winter’s battlefield defeats, was shaken by Napoleon’s mediation proposal. When he got the news, recalled one newspaper correspondent, the president appeared “so careworn and dejected.” The dispatches coming in from Lincoln’s diplomats in the field did nothing to improve his mood. Henry Sanford reported that talk of a rivalry between the “Latin race” and American republicans was being repeated “
ad nauseam
in Parisian salons.” State Department adviser Edward Everett warned that he
had heard murmurs that France was attempting to wrest control of “a larger Texas” for an imperial possession. Lincoln’s minister in Paris complained that Americans were beginning to “distrust” the emperor. His countrymen, he protested, “do not like to see His Majesty’s hand always in this business.” Alexander Hamilton’s son James wrote Lincoln urging him “to throw a large force without delay into Texas” in order to “admonish the emperor” over “his magnificent designs” on the continent. Such a move, Hamilton argued, “would perhaps shake his throne.” Yet with increasingly desperate battles raging with Southern forces at home, there was little else Lincoln and his diplomats could do.
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Lincoln, meanwhile, once again intensified his efforts to establish overseas colonies of American blacks. After failing to arouse much interest among the European powers for colonization, the president turned instead to Bernard Kock, an American businessman who wanted to establish a colony on the Île à Vache, a small island off the coast of Haiti. Kock told the president that the island was “beautiful, healthy, and fertile” (adding that it was “known to be free from reptiles”). The president was intrigued. Seward suggested delaying the venture in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, but Lincoln ultimately overruled him. Kock, flush with promises of U.S. government funds, set sail in April from Virginia with a band of 453 colonists.

Historians have often viewed Lincoln’s colonization proposals as something of a public-relations ploy. His support for overseas settlements, the thinking goes, was largely an effort to conciliate Northern racists who were angry about emancipation. More recently, however, scholars have questioned this “lullaby thesis.” Evidence suggests that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization long after the Emancipation Proclamation. “Lincoln,” historians Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page observe, “likely saw colonization as one of many avenues to approach an anguishing difficulty that had no simple resolution.” Embarking on a “second wave” of such schemes in 1863, the president met repeatedly over the course of the year with British officials
whom he believed might be convinced to help facilitate new colonies in Central America.
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At home, Lincoln’s men did their best to put a positive spin on the continuing fighting. Seward audaciously compared America’s burgeoning forces to those of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. “Our armies,” the secretary of state declared on the second anniversary of Fort Sumter, “are moving on with a firmer step than those of the Roman Empire or the French Republic ever maintained.” In reality, the situation remained perilous throughout the spring. In May, Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee defeated Lincoln’s army at Chancellorsville, Virginia. The news devastated the president. “Clasping his hands behind his back,” recalled one witness, “he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ” In the process, however, Confederate general Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson had been fatally wounded. Lincoln’s diplomats clung to any sliver of positive news from the battlefield. “The truth is,” Henry Adams wrote from the legation in London, “all depends on the progress of our armies.” Lincoln acknowledged as much to Mexico’s man in Washington, Matías Romero. The Mexican recalled Lincoln once telling him that he “had always believed … that the settlement of Mexico’s present difficulties depended upon the course events would take here [at home].”
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In Mexico, meanwhile, Napoleon’s forces were finally making their own progress. On June 7, 1863, French troops broke through the remaining Mexican defenses and poured into Mexico City. The scene was somewhat reminiscent of the American conquest less than two decades earlier. Officers jumped off their horses near the cathedral and listened to a performance of the Te Deum, the ancient Christian hymn of praise. Supporters threw flowers and affixed posters of the emperor and empress to every wall in the city. Back in Europe, the emperor of the French wept with joy upon hearing news of the conquest.
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For Lincoln, the French occupation of Mexico City could not
have come at a worse time. Lee’s Confederate forces were inching closer to the Federal capital. Lincoln was growing despondent. A former State Department employee who spotted the president walking the streets of the capital in June 1863 reported that he looked “exhausted, care-worn, spiritless, extinct.” A visitor to the White House around the same time described Lincoln’s “drooping eyelids, looking almost swollen; the dark bags beneath the eyes; the deep marks about the large and expressive mouth; the flaccid muscles of the jaws.” In the depths of that summer, Mary Lincoln’s seamstress recalled the president walking with a “slow and heavy” step into the First Lady’s dressing room, collapsing onto the sofa, and then covering his eyes with his hands—“a complete picture of dejection.” He consoled himself by reading the Book of Job. Even Mary began to worry about her husband. “What do you think of Mr. Lincoln?” she asked her half sister as the year wore on. “Do you think he is well?”
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Mary, for her part, did not do much to ease the president’s anxieties. Even as Lincoln fretted over Napoleon’s troops in Mexico, the First Lady was busy taking French lessons and mimicking the empress’s fashions—a particularly expensive taste. Eugénie’s innovation had been to increase the size of the steel hoops supporting her skirts—which also doubled the amount of fabric necessary to make them. Mary was not entirely successful in her attempts to imitate Eugénie. A relative of Napoleon III’s who visited Washington toward the beginning of the war told his diary that Mary had received him “dressed in the French style without any taste.” Nor was Lincoln thrilled with the fashions. Aside from the expense, the dresses could be scandalously low cut. One U.S. senator complained that the First Lady “had her bosom on exhibition” at one reception. She seemed determined, he added, “to exhibit her milking apparatus to public gaze.” The president sometimes told Mary that he wished she would show a little more restraint. “Whew,” Lincoln said on one occasion, “our cat has a long tail tonight. Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in better style.”
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Abraham Rex

As 1863 unfolded, Lincoln finally began to get comfortable in his role as commander in chief of the military. “Some well-meaning newspapers advise the president to keep his fingers out of the military pie,” John Hay wrote to a colleague as the Union war effort gathered momentum. “The truth is, if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess.” Lincoln understood that the war effort at home and the work of his diplomats abroad were intricately linked. European statesmen were closely watching results of key battles as they debated whether to intervene and stop the fighting. Only a steady string of victories would ultimately deter the cold-eyed great powers.
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The president, from the first days of the war, had begun cramming on military affairs. “He gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation,” Hay recalled. “He read a large number of strategical works. He pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge and the keen intelligence of his questions.”
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Back in January, after enduring a string of lackadaisical commanders, Lincoln had decided to elevate the energetic and dynamic General Joe Hooker to command of the Army of the Potomac. With his rust-colored hair, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes, the tall and lean Hooker cut a striking figure. (During his service in the Mexican War, local women referred to Hooker as Handsome Captain.) Lincoln liked Hooker, but he was also wary of the zealous officer. One of the president’s acquaintances recalled that Lincoln loved Hooker “as a father might regard a son who was lame.” The president told his secretary of the navy that he thought “as much as you or any other man of Hooker, but I fear he gets excited.” Lincoln was not afraid to level with the hot-blooded officer, who once declared that he thought the Federal government needed a dictator. “Beware of rashness,” the president wrote Hooker upon his appointment.
“Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”
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The president frequently cabled Hooker and other officers, laying out his vision for a successful Union war effort. In one exchange, in early June, Hooker telegraphed Lincoln, reporting that he saw an opportunity to march on Richmond “at once,” hammering the Confederate capital with a “mortal blow.” Lincoln swiftly responded by reminding Hooker that such a maneuver would not be consistent with the Union strategy: “I think
Lee’s
Army, and not
Richmond
, is your true objective point.” The implication was that territorial gain was far less important than depleting the enemy’s human and material resources. Furthermore, the president understood, “[i]f our army can not fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of intrenched lines into a fortified city.”
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The same point applied to the standoff with Napoleon. Lincoln believed that a determined show of force in Texas might serve as a warning to the French emperor. Yet while Hooker and many of Lincoln’s other generals itched to surge into Mexican territory, the president persisted in wearing down his enemies north of the Rio Grande. The French emperor was far more likely to be deterred by a Union defeat of the Confederacy. A Mexican adventure would divert resources from the main event and offer too many opportunities for something to go wrong. Furthermore, if the United States invaded Mexico, the French public—which had long been skeptical of the emperor’s North American scheme—might decide to rally around its monarch.

In the first days of July, Lincoln’s commanders at long last turned the tide of the war—bolstering Northern diplomatic efforts. After a brutal, three-day battle, Federal forces halted the rebel army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The following day, the Union armies finally took the Mississippi city of Vicksburg as well. The victories deflated the Copperheads, who had been so forcefully pushing the French intervention scheme. They also immediately buoyed
Lincoln’s diplomats in the field. “I wanted to hug the army of the Potomac,” recalled Henry Adams in London. “I wanted to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I wanted to fight some small man and lick him.”
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Lincoln recognized that the successes had reinforced his diplomacy at a key moment. Yet the president and his cabinet remained anxious about the French maneuvering in Mexico. “The Mexican Republic has been extinguished,” naval secretary Gideon Welles told his diary in late July, “and an empire has risen on its ruins.” The supercilious Welles believed that Mexico was “[t]orn by factions, down-trodden by a scheming and designing priesthood, ignorant and vicious,” and “incapable of good government.” He added, however, that “I don’t expect an improvement of their condition under the sway of a ruler imposed upon them by Louis Napoleon.” British aristocrats, too, remained full of “malignant and disgraceful hatred of our government and people,” in Welles’s view. “Palmerston and Louis Napoleon,” he sneered, “are as much our enemies as Jeff Davis.”
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Lincoln shared Welles’s concerns about France, but he believed that war with Britain was actually now unlikely. The victories at home had also encouraged the president. Washington that summer was dull, Hay reported—“dismal as a defaced tombstone.” And yet, Hay told one correspondent, the president was in “fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil. I am growing more and more firmly convinced that the good of the country absolutely demands that he should be kept where he is till this thing is over. There is no man in the country so wise, so gentle and so firm. I believe the hand of God placed him where he is.”

Hay credited Lincoln’s proactive management of the war for the summer’s successes on the battlefield. “The old man,” Hay wrote to Lincoln’s other secretary, John G. Nicolay, in early September, “sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the
machinery of government with a hand equally steady and equally firm.” Hay began referring to the president in his letters as “Abraham Rex.”
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The reinvigorated American president unsettled the chronically insecure French emperor. Maximilian wrote to Napoleon in early August worrying that the revival of Northern fortunes presented a “most serious difficulty” for the French effort. The North, Maximilian believed, was both “bent upon expansion” and “hostile to the monarchical principle.” The archduke argued that only more French troops in Mexico would prevent an American thrust southward. The United States, Maximilian predicted, “will doubtless be unable to await its own internal stabilization before proceeding to the overthrow of the throne erected at its gates.”
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