Lincoln in the World (47 page)

Hay and Nicolay also wove a slightly subtler foreign-policy message through their book. Lincoln and Hay were both reformers,
convinced that democracy was on the march throughout the world. Yet they both also balked when reform appeared too self-righteous. Lincoln had given Hay a signed copy of his second inaugural—that mystical appeal for justice. Now Hay included in his history another document that he had discovered among Lincoln’s papers after his assassination. “In the present civil war,” Lincoln had written in a memo to himself in 1862, “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” Hay gave the fragment the title: “Meditation on the Divine Will.” Applied to the international arena, the document’s message could be understood as an indictment of sanctimonious crusades. There was a difference between, on the one hand, embracing progress and setting an example for “the eyes of the whole world,” as Washington put it, and on the other hand, trying to reshape the globe in one’s image at the point of a gun.
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Billy Herndon, for his part, derided Hay’s Lincoln biography as “unimportant trash.” Herndon’s own
Life of Lincoln
, released in 1889, carried a slightly different foreign-policy message. After Lincoln’s death, Herndon had adopted an increasingly liberal worldview—and one often at odds with Lincoln’s Whig reticence. Whereas Lincoln had favored a tariff, Herndon described himself as “a radical free trade man.” Herndon’s global vision was full of millennial overtones. Republicanism, Lincoln’s former law partner told his readers, was “destined to overshadow and remodel every government upon the earth. The glorious brightness of that upper world, as it welcomed [Lincoln’s] faint and bleeding spirit, broke through upon the earth at his exit—it was the dawn of a day growing brighter as the grand army of freedom follows in the march of time.”
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Herndon died in 1891, “poor as Job’s turkey,” as he once put it. Hay, on the other hand, continued to thrive professionally. Flush with funds from book royalties and investments, he donated large sums of money to Republican political candidates as the nineteenth
century came to a close. In 1897, President William McKinley, one of the key beneficiaries of Hay’s largesse, sent Lincoln’s former secretary into the diplomatic swirl once again. McKinley named Hay ambassador to the Court of St. James in London—an increasingly critical post as the United States began to supplant Britain as the world’s preeminent power.
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Back in December 1861, at the height of the
Trent
affair, Hay had complained that “the arrogance of England must be distinctly met and tamed, and I think Providence has specially detailed the United States for that particular duty.” Yet by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Hay had come to love and respect Britain. He had traveled to the island nation frequently throughout the 1880s and once even thought of buying a country house there. As he aged, Hay—who had once proclaimed himself full of “democratic bigotry”—now increasingly began to appreciate British elitism. Compared to the wild tumult of American political life, Hay found the stability in Britain comforting. He believed strongly that the world’s shifting power relationships also demanded closer ties with London. American jingoes did not always see things the same way. Theodore Roosevelt complained the year before Hay left for London that Lincoln’s former secretary had become “more English than the English.”
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Hay recognized that as British power was waning, the United States would need to fill the vacuum. Though Hay had long been somewhat cautious about territorial expansion, he understood that America’s new role would mean extending U.S. influence in ways that would help maintain the worldwide balance of power. By the 1890s, Hay favored annexing the Hawaiian Islands—a position he had opposed earlier in his career. Hay had come to admire Britain’s management of its empire, studying the mechanics of the “Pax Britannica” in places like India and Egypt. The transition to American preeminence, Hay believed, would require a “partnership in beneficence” between Britain and the United States. In one speech at a banquet in London, Hay remarked that there was “a sanction like that of religion” that bound the two nations. “We are joint ministers,”
he told his audience, “of the same sacred mission of liberty and progress.” Queen Victoria praised Hay as “the most interesting of all the ambassadors I have known.”
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Hay was on vacation in Cairo in February 1898 when news arrived that the USS
Maine
had exploded in Havana Harbor, killing more than 250 American servicemen. American hawks immediately raised a war whoop. Theodore Roosevelt, then an assistant secretary of the navy in the McKinley administration, complained about the president’s slow pace of retaliation. McKinley had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair,” Roosevelt sniped. When war finally erupted in April, the assistant secretary of the navy joined a regiment of American troops and shipped off for Cuba. Hay mocked Roosevelt for enlisting in “a cowboy regiment,” and initially appeared far less eager for a war. Still, Hay wrote home to McKinley, informing him that British opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of a conflict. “The commonest phrase,” Hay reported, “is ‘We wish you would take Cuba and finish up the work.’ ” The American ambassador recognized that a conflict might well draw Britain and the United States even closer together.
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Hay’s detractors have used his description of the Spanish-American conflict as “a splendid little war” to paint him as a rabid imperialist. Actually, the phrase was in part a plea for moderation. The war, Hay added in the same missive, “is now to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.” Still, by the end of the conflict, Hay had turned into an energetic cheerleader for the American effort. When the war eventually expanded to Southeast Asia, Hay ultimately supported the annexation of the Philippines. Lincoln’s former secretary was primarily attracted by the commercial and strategic advantages of possessing the islands. Yet as he attempted to justify the expansionist policies, he could sometimes be as vigorous a crusader as Herndon. “I cannot for the life of me,” he told one correspondent, “see any contradiction between
desiring liberty and peace here and desiring to establish them in the Philippines.”
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Historians have long found it difficult to neatly categorize Hay’s foreign-policy views. On the one hand, Lincoln’s former secretary could proclaim himself a die-hard republican; on the other, he could laud British elitism. On some days he might plead for international justice; on others he might herald American power. Hay himself recognized that his views were not always coherent. “I do what seems possible every day,” he once wrote Henry Adams, “not caring a hoot for consistency and the Absolute.” At his worst, Hay could appear an unprincipled hypocrite. And yet on his best days, he displayed some of the magic of his one-time mentor—skillfully pursuing American interests while simultaneously appealing to the “considerate judgment of mankind.”
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In late 1898, McKinley appointed Hay secretary of state, bringing him home to Washington. From the windows of Hay’s large, bright office, he could gaze out onto the Ellipse and the Washington Monument. He had come a long way from the uncertain hours of the Civil War. Now the Union was not only safe—it was in a position to challenge the greatest powers in the world. Still, Hay could not entirely bring himself to breathe easily. Lincoln had once remarked that when he had finally fulfilled his deepest ambitions, he had discovered that power consisted of only “ashes and blood.” Now Hay acknowledged the same. “Like many another better man before me,” he wrote one correspondent, “I find power and place when it comes late in life, not much more than dust and ashes.”
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As secretary of state, Hay moved quickly to shore up U.S. commercial interests. Hay’s foreign-policy mentors had long coveted Asian export markets. Seward had once dreamed of a commercial empire extending “beyond the Pacific Ocean.” Lincoln, too, had strongly supported naval expansion. Now, with the acquisition of the Philippines, the East seemed more accessible than ever. Hay believed China held “the key to world politics for the next five centuries.”

And yet even as the United States was beginning to make its presence felt in Asia, Hay found that the European powers were also scrambling to carve out “spheres of influence” on the continent. In response, Hay issued his Open Door notes in 1899, condemning the heavy-handed behavior of the powers. The new statement of policy maintained that all countries must have equal access to Chinese markets. Historians debate the ultimate effectiveness of the notes. Yet they did provide a vivid illustration that the Hamiltonian foreign policy of Lincoln and Seward was alive and well in Hay. It is possible to draw a straight line from the commercial reciprocity policies favored by Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay and other Whigs to the Open Door notes of the McKinley era.
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Despite the paroxysm of violence unleashed by the Spanish-American War, the devout McKinley actually preferred to advance American interests by peaceful expansion. “There is nothing in this world,” the president declared in 1901, “that so much promotes the universal brotherhood of man as commerce.” (McKinley knew the horrors of battle firsthand. As a young Union soldier during the Civil War, he had driven a sandwich cart on the battlefield at Antietam.) Hay recognized that support for America’s burgeoning industry also demanded “a stabilization of the existing political order,” in the words of one historian. As secretary of state, he worked carefully to bring the great powers into what Henry Adams later described as “a combine of intelligent equilibrium.”
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To many, such a scheme—starting with closer U.S. ties to Britain—seemed suspiciously like an acceptance of the balance-of-power system of alliances and treaties that so many past American diplomats had rebelled against. America had become a great power on a vast wave of economic growth—but had the old republican values that Lincoln had nurtured in Hay vanished in the process? Before 1899, Hay’s biographer Tyler Dennett notes, “the United States had been less interested in the
status quo
of European Powers than in the spread of republican principles.” The same, of course, had once been true of Hay. Now, as McKinley’s secretary of state, Hay seemed to be
inverting his old republican faith. “In ‘McKinleyism,’ ” writes Dennett, “there was no place for crusading.” America’s new world role startled even those closest to Hay. “History,” wrote Henry Adams, “broke in halves.”
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On September 6, 1901, an assassin shot President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. A little more than a week later, the president died, propelling Vice President Theodore Roosevelt to the nation’s highest office. Roosevelt retained Hay as secretary of state, and on the surface at least, they seemed to get along well. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, Hay had written to Roosevelt admitting that the Rough Rider had been right after all about Cuba. Hay, who was old enough to be Roosevelt’s father, would regale the new president with stories of Lincoln reading Shakespeare to him as he drifted off to sleep. Roosevelt once described the charming Hay as “the most delightful man to talk to I ever met.” After Roosevelt was elected president in 1904, Hay gave the president a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair encased inside. Roosevelt wore it proudly at his inauguration.
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Hay deferred to Roosevelt when necessary and helped the president to gain control over the modern-day Panama Canal Zone. Yet Hay actually preferred McKinley’s careful diplomacy to the belligerent style of the new president. Roosevelt made little effort to help Hay push commercial reciprocity treaties through the intransigent Senate. The new president also encouraged Hay to take a harder line with Britain in a dispute over the Canadian boundary, and he ultimately sent troops to Alaska to drive home his message. Hay complained privately that there was “no comfort” in trying to reason with Roosevelt face-to-face. “When McKinley sent for me,” he told his wife, “he gave me all his time till we got through; but I always find T.R. engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.” Roosevelt later complained that Hay was not “a strong or brave man.”
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Hay simply had a different conception of strength. Like his
mentors Lincoln and Seward, Hay believed the roots of American power lay in a healthy economy and a brisk trade. The proliferating new media also had the ability to shape the environment in which statesmen maneuvered. Toward the end of his life, Hay gave a speech in St. Louis to a group of journalists called “The Press and Modern Progress.” Every day, Hay told his audience, he did business with the most influential men in the world. And yet all of them recognized that “behind the rulers we represent, there stands the vast, irresistible power of public opinion.” No single human—or even a political party—could resist the impersonal elements that defined an age. Hay referred to such forces as the “cosmic tendency.”
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And yet as a survivor of the Civil War, Hay also understood that cosmic tendencies could be maddeningly hard to read. He knew well, from his careful study of the classics, that empires rise and fall, glories fade and vanish. These were lessons he had learned not from visions of the future, but from echoes of the past. “Men make their own history,” Karl Marx had once written in an essay about Napoleon III, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new … they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.”
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