Lincoln (65 page)

Lincoln’s first State of the Union message, which a clerk read to Congress on December 3, 1861, was a perfunctory document. Cobbling together reports from the various heads of departments, the President made a few interesting recommendations, such as creating a Department of Agriculture (which Congress established the next year). He also urged the recognition of the two black republics of Haiti and Liberia—something inconceivable under previous pro-Southern administrations. It closed with an oddly incongruous disquisition on the relationship between capital and labor in a free society and with the assurance that the struggle in which the Union was engaged was “not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.”

One reason the message was so uncommunicative was that the United States was nearing a diplomatic crisis with Great Britain over the
Trent
affair, which could not be discussed publicly. The President could have summarized the facts succinctly. In October, James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, named ministers plenipotentiary to represent the Confederacy in Great Britain and France, escaped through the blockade to Cuba. There they boarded the British mail packet
Trent.
Without orders from Washington, Captain Charles Wilkes, who commanded the USS
San Jacinto,
stopped and searched the vessel and removed the Confederate envoys, who were eventually imprisoned in Fort Warren in Boston harbor. Overwhelming jubilation greeted Wilkes’s act in the North, but abroad it was viewed as a blatant violation of international law and an insult to the British flag. Lincoln had no advance knowledge of Wilkes’s act.

In general, the President had little to do with foreign affairs. With no knowledge of diplomacy and no personal acquaintances or correspondents
abroad, he willingly entrusted foreign policy to his Secretary of State. The only interest he showed in selecting American diplomatic representatives was to make sure that various claims for patronage were honored. He rewarded Judd’s services by making him minister to Prussia and showed his gratitude to Carl Schurz by naming him to the court at Madrid, where the German-born former revolutionary met with a chilly reception. Cassius M. Clay was appointed minister to Russia, less perhaps as a reward than as a means for getting a troublemaker out of the country. But generally Lincoln accepted Seward’s recommendations without question. When Charles Francis Adams, Seward’s choice for minister to the Court of St. James’s, came to the White House, Lincoln received his thanks for the appointment coolly: “Very kind of you to say so Mr Adams but you are not my choice. You are Seward’s man.” Then, turning to the Secretary of State, the President said in almost the same breath: “Well Seward, I have settled the Chicago Post Office.”

Seward’s bellicose memorandum of April 1, 1861, forced the President to take a more active interest in foreign policy, which increased when he read a warlike dispatch Seward proposed to send to Adams in May. Angered by the decision of the European powers to recognize the Confederates as belligerents—an entirely proper step and one in conformity with the actions of the Lincoln administration in blockading, rather than closing, Southern ports—Seward blustered that British intervention in the American conflict would mean that “we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and become once more, as we have twice before been forced to be, enemies of Great Britain.” Troubled, the President called on Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for advice. With Sumner’s enthusiastic approval he excised the more offensive statements in Seward’s dispatch and then directed that the revised document was for Adams’s information only, not to be read or presented at the British Foreign Office.

From that time Lincoln consulted Sumner on all major questions relating to foreign policy. The two men formed an odd couple. Good-looking, Harvard-trained, and world-traveled, Sumner was the exact opposite of the homely self-educated President. With a decade’s experience in the Senate, Sumner regarded the untried Lincoln as “honest but inexperienced.” A compulsive worker, proud of his prompt and efficient attention to his official duties, the senator thought Lincoln’s “habits of business... irregular” and felt that the President “did not see at once the just proportions of things, and allowed himself to be too much occupied by details.” Sumner was proud of the purity of his diction, and he was pained when the President called secession “rebellion sugar-coated” or said that the Confederates “turned tail and ran.” Lacking a sense of humor, he found conversation with Lincoln “a constant puzzle,” even though the President tried to be solemn and took his feet down from the desk when Sumner entered his office. But these two radically different men came to respect and ultimately to like each other. Lincoln knew the senator was incorruptible, if often irritating; Sumner
found that the President wanted “to do right and to save the country.” Lincoln turned so frequently to the senator for advice on foreign policy that Seward grumbled that there were now too many secretaries of state in Washington.

In the
Trent
affair Lincoln needed all the advice he could get. His initial reaction to the capture of Mason and Slidell was one of pleasure. At a time when Union victories were few, here at last was a success. Every member of the cabinet shared this view except Montgomery Blair, who immediately warned that the captives must be released. After the initial applause for Wilkes’s bold act died down, thoughtful public opinion came around to Blair’s assessment. To remove the Confederate diplomats from a neutral vessel was a clear violation of international law, and it contradicted the long-established American opposition to search and seizure on the high seas. Apart from legalities, Wilkes’s boarding and search of the British mail packet had to be disavowed because it was an insult that no government in London could tolerate.

Greatly preoccupied with other matters, Lincoln did not recognize the seriousness of the
Trent
crisis until Sumner returned to Washington in late November. A regular correspondent of John Bright and Richard Cobden, the great British Liberal leaders, Sumner brought news of the immense anti-American excitement in Great Britain because of Mason and Slidell, and he had a letter from the Duchess of Argyll, whose husband was in Lord Palmerston’s cabinet, calling the seizure of the two envoys “the maddest act that ever was done, and, unless the [United States] government intend to force us to war, utterly inconceivable.” Moved and astonished by these reports, Lincoln began to meet almost daily with the senator to assess the latest news and consider the danger that this disagreement with the British might drift into conflict.

“There will be no war unless England is bent upon having one,” the President assured the senator. Vexed that European governments misunderstood the pacific temper of his foreign policy, he offered to ignore bureaucratic protocol and talk face-to-face with Lord Lyons, the British minister. “If I could see Lord Lyons,” he told Sumner rather wistfully, “I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace.” Sumner warned of the impropriety of such a step but, encouraged by John Bright, asked the President to think of submitting the issue with Great Britain to arbitration, either by the King of Prussia or by a group of learned publicists. Seizing upon Sumner’s idea, Lincoln began drafting such a proposal. He was convinced, he told Browning, “that the question was easily susceptible of a peaceful solution if England was at all disposed to act justly with us.”

But from all sides the President received warnings that there was no time for arbitration. Thurlow Weed, who was working in behalf of the Union cause abroad, told of steps the British government was taking toward war. Eight thousand soldiers were being sent to protect Canada, and an embargo on the shipment of saltpeter and other war materials to the United States
was in place. From France, Minister Dayton reported that the government of Napoleon III would stand by the British in this crisis. When Lord Lyons on December 23 presented the formal British demands for the release of Mason and Slidell and for an apology from the United States government, they were hardly a surprise. Informally the British minister also let Seward know that unless a satisfactory answer was received within seven days he had instructions to close the legation and leave Washington.

With that deadline in mind Lincoln summoned a cabinet meeting on Christmas Day, to which Sumner was invited in order to read the most recent letters he had received from Bright and Cobden urging the release of the Confederate diplomats. All realized that the decision they made on this historic occasion would determine “probably the existance [sic], of the nation.” It was essential, everybody agreed, to avoid war with Great Britain, and the President said he had to avoid the folly of having “two wars on his hands at a time.” Seward, who had finally awakened to the gravity of the crisis, read a paper he was preparing that would explain how Captain Wilkes had violated international law and why therefore Mason and Slidell must be released. The argument was hard for the other cabinet members, except Blair, to swallow. Chase said that it was “gall and wormwood” to him. Even the President resisted giving up the envoys, though he realized that they had become white elephants. The meeting ended without agreement on anything more than that they must meet again the next day.

After the others left, the President said: “Governor Seward, you will go on, of course, preparing your answer, which ... will state the reasons why they ought to be given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at stating the reasons why they ought
not
to be given up. We will compare the points on each side.”

By evening the President gave up on his self-appointed task, and he told Browning that there would be no war with England. The next day when the cabinet reassembled, Seward read his final version of the reply he intended to give to Lord Lyons and it was endorsed with some expressions of regret but without dissent. After the meeting adjourned, the Secretary reminded the President, “You thought you might frame an argument for the other side?”

“I found I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind,” Lincoln replied with a smile, “and that proved to me your ground was the right one.”

With that decision the gravest threat that the American Civil War would become an international conflict was removed.

Lincoln’s domestic crises in the winter of 1861–1862 were almost as severe. Frustrated over the failure of Union armies to advance and angry over mounting expenses, Congress moved rapidly to take charge. On the day the
session opened, even before the President’s message was heard, Trumbull gave notice that he would introduce a bill for the confiscation of the land and slaves of all persons who were in arms against the United States or who aided or abetted the rebellion. The Illinois senator, once Lincoln’s close political ally, was convinced that the President lacked “the
will
necessary in this great emergency” and believed that Congress must take steps to bring the war to a quick end.

Other congressmen tried to move the stalled war effort along through investigating committees, a device that had proved very effective to Republicans in undermining the Buchanan administration. A House committee headed by John F. Potter of Wisconsin had been working all summer to ferret out rebel sympathizers still holding jobs in the government departments, and it performed a needed service in bringing about dismissals and resignations.

The House Judiciary Committee, in its eagerness to investigate alleged “telegraphic censorship of the press,” came perilously close to investigating the White House itself. Despite precautions for security, the
New York Herald
received an advance copy of the President’s State of the Union message and published excerpts before members of Congress heard it. The
Herald’s
source proved to be Henry Wikoff, an unsavory adventurer whom the paper had planted in Washington as its secret reporter. Cosmopolitan and flashy, Wikoff had made a great impression on Mary Lincoln, and he became an intimate in the White House. When the rival
New York Tribune
charged that Mrs. Lincoln had given Wikoff access to her husband’s message, the House Judiciary Committee decided to investigate.

The decision was an easy one because almost nobody in the capital liked Mary Lincoln. Thinking her a renegade to the Southern cause, the dowagers who dominated Washington society condemned everything that she did. The smaller contingent of Northern women in the national capital, knowing that Mary Lincoln came from a Southern state and that some of her brothers had joined the Confederate army, suspected her loyalty to the Union. Murat Halstead of the
Cincinnati Commercial
sneered that she was “a fool—the laughing stock of the town, her vulgarity only the more conspicuous in consequence of her fine carriage and horses and servants in livery and fine dresses, and her damnable airs.” The New York sophisticate John Bigelow ridiculed her pretensions to speak French and claimed that when asked if she could use the language she replied “Tres poo.” Consequently there was much lip-smacking in Washington over the titillating possibilities of this gossip about Mrs. Lincoln and “Chevalier” Wikoff.

There was, it proved, less to the story than met the eye. Wikoff, subpoenaed by the committee, refused to disclose his source and was incarcerated overnight. The next day he agreed to testify, and as the committee members listened avidly, he revealed that he had received a copy of the President’s message not from Mrs. Lincoln but from John Watt, the head White House
gardener. The committee chewed over this information for several days before it decided to drop the investigation.