Lincoln in the World (40 page)

By midsummer Lincoln was pushing hard to challenge Napoleon—even if he was not willing to send American troops all the way into Mexico. Lincoln’s allies were alarmed by rumors of French designs on Texas. Considering the “movements of France in Mexico,” Francis P. Blair Sr. implored Lincoln, it was “of vast importance” to get an army down to Texas as soon as possible. Lincoln had already begun quietly advocating the same course. “Can we not renew the effort to organize a force to go to Western Texas?” the president asked his secretary of war on July 29. “Please think of it. I believe no local object is now more desirable.” Two days later, Lincoln called a meeting of his inner circle to discuss the matter further. The president ultimately ordered one of his favorite officers, General Nathaniel Banks, to begin the planning. “Recent events in Mexico, I think, render early action in Texas more important than ever,” Lincoln wrote the general. The president made the same point to whomever he could get to listen that August. “I am greatly impressed,” Lincoln wrote to Grant on Aug. 9, “with the importance of re-establishing the national authority in Western Texas as soon as possible.”
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For the first time in months, Lincoln seemed to be cheering up. Mary and the kids had fled the hot, dry Washington summer, leaving Lincoln alone with his staff at the White House. Lincoln’s
family—particularly Mary—sometimes drove the president to distraction. Still, he missed them when they were away. Even as Lincoln was mulling a show of force along the Mexican border, he found the time to write Mary an affectionate letter with news of their son Tad’s pet goat, Nanny. The boy was known for terrorizing the White House staff with the animal, disrupting state dinners and parading her through the grounds. Now, Lincoln reported, the goat had gone missing. “This,” the president wrote Mary, “is the last we know of poor ‘Nanny.’ ”
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“With Mary out of town,” Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, “Lincoln found John Hay a ready companion.” Hay was almost like an adopted child—“far more intimately connected to the president than his own eldest son.” Both John Hay and John Nicolay would go on to work in the foreign service in overseas postings in the years following the Civil War. Hay, in particular, distinguished himself as a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Britain and secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. As a foreign-policy education, it was hard to beat the crucible of the American Civil War. From Seward, Hay learned about the hard realities of international politics at the elbow of one of America’s greatest diplomats. From Lincoln, the president’s young secretary learned something more subtle but just as critical—how to wield great power with grace.
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That was certainly easier when things were going well. By late summer, Hay told his diary, Lincoln was “in very good spirits. He thinks the rebel power is at last beginning to disintegrate—that they will break to pieces if we only stand firm now.” One Sunday afternoon in August, the president took Hay to Alexander Gardner’s photo studio to have their picture taken together. Even on Sabbath outings, the president remained obsessed with the French emperor’s plotting. Hay reported that Lincoln was “very anxious that Texas should be occupied and firmly held in view of French possibilities.” The president, his secretary recorded, believed that mission even more important than efforts to subdue Mobile, Alabama—a move
that some of Lincoln’s generals were advocating instead. Any attack on Mobile would have to wait until “the Texas matter is safe,” Lincoln believed.
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The president, however, remained opposed to a full invasion of Mexico. “I’m not exactly ‘skeered,’ ” one of Lincoln’s military commanders later recalled the president saying about the French intervention, “but [I] don’t like the looks of the thing.… My policy is, attend to only one trouble at a time. If we get well out of our present difficulties and restore the Union, I propose to notify Louis Napoleon that it is about time to take his army out of Mexico. When that army is gone, the Mexicans will take care of Maximilian.” Lincoln repeated his favorite old story about the man on his deathbed who was feuding with a friend. Since he was already ill, he agreed to reconcile. But, went the punch line, “I want it distinctly understood that if I get well the old grudge stands.”
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At least some of Lincoln’s commanders proposed more radical remedies. Hooker, for one, was eager to take the war south of the Rio Grande. In Washington on September 9, Hooker dined with Hay and other Lincoln administration officials. The general, Lincoln’s secretary told his diary, “was in a fine flow” during the meal. Hooker bragged about the quickly growing Federal army. It was, the general insisted, “the finest on the planet,” Hay recalled. “He would like to see it fighting with foreigners.” The general quizzed Hay “very anxiously about our relations with France. He seems very eager to raise an army on the Pacific coast for a fight with a foreign nation. His eye brightened as he talked of it.” Lincoln’s secretary noted that although Hooker did not drink much at the dinner, “what little he drank made his cheek hot and red and his eye brighter.”
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The following night, Hooker seemed even more determined to pick a fight with a foreign power. The general dined again with Hay and naval official Gustavus Fox, this time at Wormley’s, a Washington watering hole on I Street that would become renowned during the Gilded Age for its wine cellar. Whatever the men were drinking sparked a raucous conversation about foreign affairs. Fox stated that
Britain would have to atone for all the “insults and wrongs” she had committed during the war—“of ports closed to us and opened to the enemy—of flags dipped to them and insultingly immovable to us—of courtesies ostentatiously shown them and brutally denied us—that will make the blood of every American boil in his brain-pan. We shall have men enough when this thing is over.”
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Hooker agreed. “We will be the greatest military power on earth,” the general told the table, “greatest in numbers, in capability, in dash, in spirit, in intelligence of the soldiery. These fine fellows who have gotten a taste of campaigning in the last three years will not go back to plowing, and spinning and trading, and hewing wood and drawing water. They are spoiled for that and shaped for better work.” Hooker said that if there were no domestic war, the men would look abroad for their next conflict. Before the dinner broke up, the men reminisced a little, sharing stories about their Mexican War adventures. The young Hay was clearly caught up in the romance. As Hooker was preparing to return to the field from Washington later that month, Hay scrawled in his diary, “I wish to God I was able to go with him.”
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Cooler heads in the Lincoln administration counseled a less belligerent approach to Mexico. While Hooker was crowing about raising an army of invasion, Seward wrote to his consul in Paris, John Bigelow, admitting that Napoleon’s troops were not really such a threat. The secretary of state told Bigelow that the Federal government was too busy trying to put down the rebels to pick a fight with France. Seward suggested that he thought Napoleon probably also had his hands full trying to subdue Mexico. In the meantime, the emperor would be unable to cause much trouble for the Union. “I may be wrong in the latter view,” the secretary of state told Bigelow. “But, if I am, there is likely to be time enough for us to change our course after discovering the error.”

Seward was so eager to reassure French policy makers that he hinted to French minister Henri Mercier that the United States might be willing to distance itself from Mexican republicans. In
mid-September, the secretary of state dragged the French minister to the White House for an audience with Lincoln, during which the president “reiterated very cordially the assurance of his government’s neutrality.” The president, Hay and Lincoln’s other personal secretary, John G. Nicolay, later recalled in their joint biography, “if he erred at all,” was determined “to err on the side of strict neutrality.”
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Washington was full of rumors that France sought to seize parts of Texas and the Mississippi River. In the event of a “rupture with France,” argued Frank Blair, the son of Francis P. Blair Sr. and the brother of Lincoln’s postmaster general, “it may be necessary to march into Mexico and relieve that country.” Blair asked his brother to lobby Lincoln to send him to Texas and place fifty regiments under his command. (Lincoln declined.) Some diplomats whispered that Maximilian’s representatives were plotting with Confederate agents. Lincoln tried to turn a deaf ear to the gossip. “He does not allow himself to be disturbed by suspicions so unjust to France and so unreasonable in themselves,” Seward explained to one correspondent, “but he knows, also, that such suspicions will be entertained more or less extensively by this country, and magnified in other countries equally unfriendly to France and to America; and he knows also that it is out of such suspicions that the fatal web of national animosity is most frequently woven.”
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Secretly, however, some Americans with ties to the State Department were quietly working outside standard channels to aid the Mexican liberals. At the request of Mexican minister Matías Romero, American Mexico expert Edward Lee Plumb reached out that autumn to what he later described to Romero as “various gentlemen of great wealth and of very high position … gentlemen whose names I am not at liberty to mention in this letter, but who are known to you by reputation.” Plumb urged the men, “whose capital would enable them to act swiftly and secretly,” to sponsor between 25,000 and 50,000 mercenaries that could be slipped into Mexico to assist the liberals. The businessmen, however, thought the operation would be too expensive, and “the final decision was
unfavorable,” Plumb explained. Still, the episode reveals the lengths to which opponents of Lincoln’s conciliatory foreign policy were willing to go.
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Napoleon, meanwhile, was concerned that anarchy in Mexico was already threatening his North American project. He urged Maximilian not to worry so much about an American invasion. Lincoln and Seward fully understood that France was backing the venture, the emperor reminded him. The United States could not send its armies south into Mexico “without at once making an enemy of us.” In the meantime, Napoleon urged Maximilian to begin thinking about how he might bring greater order to chaotic Mexico. He said the project would require a firm hand. “A state which is sunk in anarchy is not to be regenerated by parliamentary liberty,” Napoleon wrote. “What is wanted in Mexico is a
liberal
dictatorship.”
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Meanwhile, Lincoln’s efforts to make a show of force near the Mexican border ran into trouble. In early September, a flotilla of four Federal gunboats attempted a landing near Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line. The Confederate post, manned by only about fifty troops with six light guns, was highly vulnerable. Yet the invasion immediately foundered. Southern gunners quickly shot out the boiler in one of the Union vessels. A second gunboat washed up in shallow water—making an easy target for the Confederate guns. By the time Lincoln anxiously wrote to Banks late that month expressing his “strong hope that you have the old flag flying in Texas by this time,” the invading force had long since retreated. It was not until November that Banks’s seven thousand troopers finally took Brownsville, Texas, and established a foothold just north of the Mexican boundary. “The importance of Texas,” Banks later wrote to Lincoln, “will be felt if we imagine it to be in possession of the French.” In that event, Banks argued, the territory might become “a nucleus for all the enemies of the country.”
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Lincoln needed—and got—a break that autumn, when a group of six Russian warships showed up off the Atlantic coast. The ships’ arrival looked to the world like a show of solidarity with the Union
cause—and a not-so-veiled threat to the French, their old antagonists in the Crimean War. Actually, Russian commanders had ordered the fleet into open waters for its own protection. If rising tensions in eastern Europe should erupt into all-out hostilities, the ships would be safely out of the line of fire. Yet the Russian strategy was poorly understood at the time. French officials had long been wary of any potential U.S.-Russian alliance. Decades before the Civil War, Alexis de Tocqueville had warned that the United States and Russia seemed “to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” Napoleon III shared that view, rightly believing that the two countries would rise to dominate the world stage by the twentieth century.
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Lincoln and Seward did their best to spin the arrival of the Russian fleet to their advantage. Northerners welcomed the Russian sailors with huge rallies and elegant balls. In New York, the seamen paraded down Broadway as cheering spectators thronged the surrounding streets and rooftops. “The moving pageant,” the
Times
reported, “rolled in a glittering stream down the broad thoroughfare between banks of upturned human faces, the trappings of the equipages, the gold and silver epaulets of the Muscovite guests and the sabers, helmets, and bayonets of the escort reflecting back in unnumbered dazzling lines the glory of the evening sun.” Mary Lincoln, who was visiting New York that fall, climbed aboard a Russian frigate to welcome the visitors. Surrounded on the quarterdeck by a crowd of sailors braced by Turkish cigarettes and Italian wines, she offered a toast to Czar Alexander II.

At a ball in honor of the officers at the New York Academy of Music, champagne corks popped as women dressed in velvet and crinoline spun the diminutive Russian sailors around a hall decked out in Russian and American flags. The whole place was flickering with diamonds. The night’s caterer, Delmonico’s, had constructed portraits of Lincoln and Alexander out of confectionary sugar. It was almost possible to forget that a devastating war was still raging in the American heartland. “The good feeling of the people of Russia,”
Cassius Marcellus Clay reported home from St. Petersburg, had been “greatly heightened by the cordial reception given by our countrymen to the Russian officers.”
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