Lincoln in the World (41 page)

For a time, the whole Northeast was “seized with a Russian mania,” the
New York Herald
reported. The sailors eventually made their way south to Washington, where Lincoln’s cabinet officers made sure to flaunt them as conspicuously as possible. The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, threw an event for the Russians in early December. John Hay noted that the sailors “have vast absorbent powers and are fiendishly ugly.” The following night, Hay spotted the Russians at the theater. The men, he told his diary, “were disgustingly tight and demonstrative.”

Members of Lincoln’s inner circle were initially unsure about what impression the visit would make on French statesmen. Welles told his diary that there was “something significant” in the maneuver, but added that its “effect on France and the French policy we shall learn in due time. It may moderate; it may exasperate.” Still, he exulted: “God bless the Russians.” The sailors’ presence, along with the North’s continuing good fortunes on the battlefield, eventually seemed to work a kind of magic on foreign diplomats in Washington. The French minister, Henri Mercier, appeared to be gaining a grudging respect for Seward. “
Il est très sage
,” Mercier was heard saying of Seward—“He is very clever.” Hay noted that by mid-December the diplomats had “stopped blackguarding and abusing” the secretary of state. Even those who still did not like Seward, Hay noted, had been “forced to respect.”
⁸⁴

Napoleon, too, was beginning to respect the burgeoning power of the North. “I realize that I have got myself into a tight place,” he admitted as winter approached. He complained, according to one visitor, about the “great mistakes” that had been made in the North American project. The French emperor acknowledged privately that he could no longer maintain control of Mexico. “The affair,” he insisted, “has got to be liquidated.” The emperor hoped to withdraw most French troops, while at the same time training Mexicans to
fill the foreigners’ role. Napoleon’s “Mexicanization” plan, one historian has noted, bears eerie similarities to Vietnamization plans of the 1970s—and, it should be said, modern American efforts to train the Iraqi and Afghan militaries.
⁸⁵

With Banks’s troops camped out along the Mexican border, the risk of miscalculation on both sides posed a serious threat. “If raids were to take place on Mexico from Texas,” Napoleon worried to Maximilian, “I might suddenly find myself at war with the Americans—a war which would spell disaster to the interests of France and would have no possible object.”

Lincoln and Seward shared the French emperor’s fears. In late November, the American consul in Matamoros—the Mexican town just across the border from Banks’s men in Brownsville—asked the American commander for protection. Banks trained his guns on the Mexican castle just opposite his encampment. An exasperated Seward later briefed the president on the incident. “Firing on the town,” the secretary of state complained to Lincoln, “would involve us in a war with the Lord knows who.”

“Or rather,” the president shot back, “the Lord knows who not.”
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The Imperial Cat’s Paw

On December 3, 1863, horses attached to ropes and pulleys hoisted Thomas Crawford’s bronze statue
Freedom
to the top of the just-completed Capitol dome in Washington. Cannon from all the Union forts surrounding the city rumbled in tribute. As a symbolic gesture of the Federal government’s rising strength, the ceremony was hard to top. The president, meanwhile, was finally beginning to win the respect he sought from foreign powers. New Jersey politician James Scovel wrote Lincoln from London reporting that British liberal Richard Cobden had been speaking “most warmly in praise of you,” lauding the American president’s “coolness and forecast at the time of the
Trent
affair. He highly approves of your policy of ‘one
war at a time.’ ” Scovel, who had traveled Britain that autumn speaking at mass meetings, told the president that his audiences “always applauded at the mention of Abraham Lincoln’s name.”
⁸⁷

On December 8, five days after the Capitol dome was completed, Lincoln sent his annual message to Congress. The section on foreign affairs made note of the North’s improving fortunes. The Union alone now possessed more “armored vessels” than “any other power,” according to the message. American iron and timber supplies were also “superior to any other nation.” As recently as the last session of Congress, Europeans had looked upon the war-torn United States with “pity.” Now, however, the “tone of public sentiment” abroad was “much improved.” Naval secretary Gideon Welles observed in his diary that autumn that the American ironclads and “heavy ordnance” were having “a tranquilizing effect” on the “tone and temper” of British and French statesmen.
⁸⁸

And yet the French presence in Mexico continued to trouble the president and his inner circle. Even Sumner, who went out of his way to placate the French emperor, found himself tangling with Napoleon’s representative in Washington. When Mercier argued to the Massachusetts senator around Christmastime that “a division of the Union is inevitable,” Sumner “snapped his fingers at” Mercier and “told him he knew not our case,” Welles wrote in his diary. “Palmerston and Louis Napoleon,” the naval secretary scribbled, “are the two bad men in this matter. The latter is quite belligerent in his feelings, but fears to be insolent towards us unless England is also engaged.”
⁸⁹

Lincoln, too, remained preoccupied with Mexico. On New Year’s Day 1864, the president held his annual reception at the White House. A former State Department employee recorded in his diary that Lincoln quietly quizzed the Mexican minister about his country’s affairs as the receiving line wound its way through the ground floor. The entire exchange was accomplished “stealthily and
sotto voce
,” the diarist observed, “in a manner as if Lincoln was afraid of the other diplomats.” The Mexican, who supported the republican
forces that were fighting to oust the French, explained to the president that the rebels were making good progress. “Oh, I am very glad,” Lincoln replied, somewhat undiplomatically. “I wish you may have the best of the invaders.”
⁹⁰

Some hawks in Congress, however, were determined to launch an invasion of their own. In January 1864, they renewed their efforts to pass a resolution calling for Napoleon’s expulsion from Mexico. James A. McDougall, a California senator and old acquaintance of Lincoln’s from his days as a lawyer on the Illinois circuit, authored a motion condemning the Mexican venture. The French emperor, McDougall insisted, should be immediately ordered to withdraw his forces. If he refused, “on or before the 15th day of March next it will become the duty of the Congress of the United States of America to declare war against the Government of France.”
⁹¹

McDougall was not one of the Senate’s shining lights. Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning once recalled watching the California Democrat stumble “quite drunk” onto the chamber floor. A correspondent for the
Sacramento Daily Union
reported that McDougall “has only been in the Senate a few times this winter, then drunk, booted like a dragoon and spurred like a Spanish
vaquero
. He falls drunk from his horse on Pennsylvania Avenue. In a word, he is the first drunkard in Washington.” A dedicated expansionist, for months McDougall had been challenging Lincoln to take on Napoleon in Mexico. He warned that French forces could easily establish a foothold on the Colorado River and then swiftly conquer San Diego. “We have nothing of value to lose by a French war,” McDougall declared in a speech on the Senate floor. “We have everything to gain, and for one I am unwilling to avoid it.”
⁹²

Even if McDougall was only “little more than a drunken clown,” as one historian puts it, his blustering unnerved French diplomats. Seward was forced to dispatch a stream of letters to the American representatives in Paris emphasizing that Lincoln did not share Congress’s belligerent stance. The congressional resolutions, the secretary of state told his minister in France, were “not in harmony with
the policy of neutrality, forbearance, and conciliation which the president has so faithfully pursued.” A few weeks later, he again warned his men in the field that there would be a “legislative demonstration” against the French project in Mexico. Seward insisted that only “executive moderation” was managing to restrain the popular animosity toward Napoleon.
⁹³

In some cases, however, even members of Lincoln’s own diplomatic corps had been urging Congress to take a harder line. The previous autumn James Shepherd Pike, Lincoln’s envoy to the Netherlands, had written home to a Maine senator complaining about the submissive tone “which seems to be taken in the United States over the suppression of Mexican independence and the erection of an empire upon its ruins.” In late January, Edward Lee Plumb, the businessman who sometimes worked as a State Department translator, urged Charles Sumner to “let it be known to the world that the people of the United States have not abandoned the Monroe Doctrine, that they do not and cannot look with favor or indifference on the attempt of a European power to overthrow republican institutions and introduce a European form of government into their neighborhood and sister republic.”
⁹⁴

Lincoln and Seward did their best to hold a firm line against the hawks in Congress, the State Department, and elsewhere. Sumner backed them up. “Sir,” Sumner complained to one hard-liner, “have we not war enough already on our hands, without needlessly and wantonly provoking another?” He managed to kill McDougall’s resolution, complaining that there was “madness in the proposition” of taking on Napoleon while still fighting a war at home. Mexican envoy Matías Romero, meanwhile, was growing increasingly impatient with the Lincoln administration’s refusal to take on Napoleon. He groused to his superiors that Sumner’s “fear of France makes him as condescending with that nation as Seward.”
⁹⁵

The tug-of-war over Mexico wore Lincoln down. To one journalist, Noah Brooks, the president complained that the senators trying to gin up a war with France sapped his strength. Lincoln imagined
himself as the target of a pack of hungry predators. The president told Brooks that he dreaded the encounters, in which pushy senators “darted at me with thumb and finger, picked out their especial piece of my vitality, and carried it off.”
⁹⁶

Lincoln’s scheme for colonization off the coast of Haiti gave Congress more ammunition to attack the president. Lincoln had authorized U.S. funds for Kock’s adventure on the Île à Vache but had not paid much attention to the details of the contract. As it turned out, conditions on the island were miserable. Colonists, attacked by disease-carrying bugs, begged to come home; many of them died on the island. The rest forced Kock to flee. Lincoln eventually had to order a Union ship to the Caribbean to clean up the bungled operation. Congress, already on Lincoln’s case over Mexico, pounced. The body eventually launched an investigation and froze further funds for colonization amid a frenzied round of bureaucratic politics.
⁹⁷

Still, newspaper correspondents in the capital marveled at the way Lincoln personally seemed to escape from the most strident criticisms. More often, Seward found himself taking the blame for the administration. While Lincoln and Seward crafted their foreign policies together, a writer for the
Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch
observed, “President Lincoln is not held responsible” when plans unfolded badly. Part of the reason, the reporter speculated, was Lincoln’s clever style of meeting individually with Seward or other cabinet ministers, rather than in large councils: “This way of doing business is not relished by the old fogies; but it relieves the administration, and, consequently, the president. It was not Lincoln’s administration, but Seward, who let the French set aside the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico”—or so the thinking went, which probably suited the president just fine.
⁹⁸

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the French emperor was preparing to begin the next stage of his Mexican operation. Maximilian and Charlotte had remained in Europe—at their castle in Miramar, along the Adriatic coast of present-day Italy—while French forces worked to pacify Mexico. Now, just as Napoleon was losing interest
in the project, they finally prepared to depart and claim their thrones in the New World. Maximilian’s father-in-law, King Leopold of Belgium, warned the Austrian archduke that the mission was looking increasingly perilous. Napoleon, Leopold cautioned, was “bent upon withdrawing his troops from Mexico, for if things go badly, then he is exonerated.” Leopold urged his son-in-law to get a promise “officially and in writing” from the emperor confirming French support for the venture. Otherwise, Leopold warned, Maximilian would simply be acting as the imperial “cat’s-paw.”
⁹⁹

Maximilian, perhaps convinced by his father-in-law’s warning, began to get cold feet. Napoleon no longer seemed committed to maintaining the French military presence. The Austrian government, meanwhile, was also growing wary of the project. Maximilian’s family told the archduke that if he proceeded to Mexico, he would have to renounce his place in line for the Austrian throne. Wags on both sides of the Atlantic began referring to Maximilian as the Archdupe.

Maximilian wrote to Napoleon and tried to back out. The French emperor, however, viewed the Austrian archduke as his best hope for sloughing off the project. Napoleon scolded Maximilian that it was now “impossible” for him to give up on the mission. “Your Imperial Highness,” the emperor wrote to Maximilian in March, “has entered into engagements which you are no longer free to break. What would you really think of me, if, when Your Imperial Highness had already reached Mexico, I were suddenly to say that I can no longer fulfill the conditions to which I have set my signature!”

Finally, in mid-April, Maximilian agreed to renounce the Austrian throne and depart for Mexico. On April 14, 1864, he prepared to board the Austrian vessel
Novara
and sail for the New World. Crowds thronged the streets in Miramar, and a hundred porters carted the imperial baggage onto the ship. Women threw flowers and a band played the Mexican imperial anthem as Maximilian and Charlotte strode under an elegant red-and-gold sunshade and onto the
Novara
. For the imperial couple, it was an emotional parting. As their
boat slipped away from the shore, past a flotilla of tiny fishing boats, Charlotte cried out, “Look at poor Max! How he is weeping!”
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