Peraino - Lincoln in the World

Copyright 2013 by Kevin Peraino

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peraino, Kevin.
Lincoln in the world : the making of a statesman and the dawn of American power / Kevin Peraino.First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. United StatesForeign relations18611865. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865. I. Title.
E469.P47 2013
973.7092dc23 2013022550

ISBN 978-0-307-88720-7
eISBN 978-0-307-88722-1

Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket images: John Parrot/Stocktrec Images/Getty Images

C REDITS FOR P HOTO I NSERT
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Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum: .
Massachusetts Historical Society: .
International Institute of Social History: .
Getty Images: .
Brown University Library: .

v3.1

To my parents,

Sam and Donna Peraino

If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall counsel.

G EORGE W ASHINGTON , 1796

Westward the star of empire takes its way;

The girls link-on to Lincoln, as their mothers did to Clay.

L INCOLN CAMPAIGN BANNER , 1858

Prologue

I N THE COLD, DIM BALCONY OF FORD S THEATRE, MARY LINCOLN RESTED A HAND ON HER HUSBAND S KNEE, THEN HUDDLED CLOSER TO HIS SIDE . S HE WAS NOT ALWAYS SUCH A TENDER WIFE . During spells of anger, she had been known to batter her husband with broomsticks, books, timber, and very poorly pitched potatoesat least once drawing blood from his nose. Mary, whom a White House secretary had nicknamed Hellcat, was at her worst when she felt trapped. The sight of transatlantic steamers preparing to cross the ocean could touch off a storm of self-pity. How I long to go to Europe, she would complain. Mary mercilessly taunted her husband that for her next marriage, she would make sure to choose a man who could afford the price of passage.

Mary might not have considered her husband wealthy, but tonightfinallyshe could not deny that he was powerful. When the couple had entered the theater, a half hour late, the entire performance came to a halt. The orchestra brayed Hail to the Chief over the unyielding roar of the crowd. The First Lady, battling a headache, had not wanted to go out at all. The president, too, appeared stooped, exhausted, and sad. Actually, though, Lincoln had good news for his wife. They would finally travel to Europe. When his term was over, he told Mary, he wanted to do some exploring, to

Mary had always been the more cosmopolitan of the two. As a girl in Lexington, Kentucky, she had attended a boarding school where students spoke French, run by Parisian aristocrats who had fled the Reign of Terror. The great American diplomat Henry Clay was a neighbor and close family friend; a young Mary once stopped by his estate to parade her new pony. As an adult, there was something slightly pathetic about her pining. A White House staff member complained that the First Lady put on the airs of an Empress. Her affectations grated on Lincolns diplomats. She overused the word siras if you were a royal personage, one of them griped. When asked if she spoke French, the First Lady replied: Trs poo.

Mary was like a toothache, Lincolns law partner once remarked, keeping her husband awake night and day to political opportunities. When it came to foreign affairs, however, Lincoln had become his own man. The Illinoisan had been telling friends for years that he wanted to visit Britain, the land of his forebears and his favorite writers, Shakespeare, Byron, and Burns. As the Civil War erupted and intensified, the president repeatedly underlined the conflicts global importance, arguing that the central idea behind the Union effort was to prove to the world that popular government is not an absurdity. He had long since come to terms with Americas rise to power. We are a great empire, he told a Michigan crowd as early as 1856. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world.

Now Americas army had grown to the largest on the planet, and its massive new navy threatened the Continents outdated fleets. Hyperventilating European newspaper correspondents worried that the American president might send a fleet of gunboats sailing up the Seine or his million-man army marching through Hyde Park. At the start of the Civil War, cartoons in Britains popular Punch magazine had portrayed Lincoln as a silly-faced buffoon. By the end,

As Lincoln sat in the dark of the theater, his ambitious wife gripping his hand, the nights entertainment must have seemed somehow appropriate. The play, a lighthearted tale of an American trying to collect his inheritance in Europe, had the audience in hysterics. And then, in an instant, the laughter ended and the screaming began. Mary Lincoln saw the sickening flash accompanied by the report of a pistol. She felt a body dash past, brushing against her shawl, and watched her husbands head slump onto his chest. In another moment a distant voice cried out, Thus ever to tyrants! in a foreign tongue from ages past.

Abraham Lincoln is not often remembered as a great foreign-policy president.

In the White House, Lincolns attempts at diplomatic finesse could seem comically inept. His efforts to bow elegantly to visiting diplomats were so prodigiously violent that they had almost the effect of a smack in their rapidity and abruptness. On one occasion,

Nor, at least at first glance, did the American presidents foreign-policy team seem very promising. The tiny diplomatic corps in the midnineteenth century was still a dumping ground for political enemies and inconvenient radicals. There is hardly a court in Europe which has not had some specimen of the American character in its worst forma sot, or rake, or swindler, the New York World warned as Lincoln took office. Lincolns choice for secretary of state, William Henry Seward, was actually a capable diplomat who had traveled widely. Yet he could also be vain and impetuous. He tended to drink heavily at dinner parties and issue idle threats of war from behind a cloud of cigar smoke. When he was loaded, recalled the son of Lincolns minister to Britain, his tongue wagged.

Lincolns men in the field could be just as volatile. The presidents personal secretary John Hay noted that while Lincolns envoys were generally men of ability, they were not always of that particular style of education which fits men for diplomacy. At the American legation in Paris, French is a language as unknown as Hottentot, Hay observed, adding acidly that the posts secretary will have to postpone his French studies till he acquires enough English to enable him to make a decent appearance in society. Lincolns minister in the French capitala gentleman not remarkable for his alertness or undeviating attention to the public business, in the words of one historianended up dying in the Paris apartment of a woman not