Lincoln in the World (22 page)

Send On Your Burial Cases

Lincoln could be a melancholy man. He often expected the worst. As the autumn of 1861 unfolded, he had good reason for concern. An old Illinois acquaintance, Senator Lyman Trumbull, warned that if the Northern army did not strike decisively by winter, foreign governments would be certain to recognize the Confederacy. “Action, action, is what we want and must have,” Trumbull wrote. Yet when Lincoln’s army finally did move, in late October, the results were disastrous. Confederate troops crushed the Federals at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, sending the president’s men retreating down a ravine toward a river at its base. Many of the Union troops simply drowned. Among the casualties: Lincoln’s old Springfield friend, the English-born Edward D. Baker. Lincoln was devastated. The president sobbed when he learned of Baker’s death. He walked home from the telegraph office where he got the news with his head bowed, tears streaming down his pale face. When a sentinel saluted as he passed, Lincoln just ignored him.
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After a brutal year, the
Trent
seizure must have initially seemed like redemption to Lincoln. The president desperately needed military victories in order to convince a skeptical Europe that the North
could win the war. Furthermore, in accordance with international law, the Union blockade would be considered valid by the European powers only if it proved to be effective. Now Lincoln’s growing navy was finally making him proud. The
New York Herald
reported shortly after the seizure that the president would insist on keeping the captives. Lincoln had “declared emphatically,” the paper’s correspondent wrote, that Mason and Slidell “should not be surrendered by this government, even if their detention should cost a war with Great Britain.” The same day the president wrote to one expert on international law exultantly lauding “the capture of Mason & Slidell!” Years later Seward recalled (perhaps self-servingly) that Lincoln had “said very decidedly that he would not give [Mason and Slidell] up.”
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Lincoln’s enthusiasm did not last long. What first appeared as a rare naval victory was quickly becoming a serious crisis. After Lincoln got over his initial euphoria, he developed grave “doubts, misgivings, and regrets,” reported Gideon Welles. If the
Trent
seizure inflamed British opinion, the benefits of appearing strong would be canceled out. Almost as troubling for the former prairie lawyer, British statesmen appeared to be justified in their outrage. At a cabinet meeting soon after the incident, the president worried that international law was actually on Britain’s side, adding that he favored the diplomats’ release. Lincoln ultimately explained that he was determined to avoid having “two wars on his hands at a time.”
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And yet despite Lincoln’s best judgment, it would be near impossible to simply set the captives free. Public opinion, Lincoln had once remarked, “is everything in this country.” Now that amorphous force was running strongly in favor of keeping the Confederate envoys. The president fretted to Welles about the American public’s “overwhelming” hostility toward Mason and Slidell. It would be difficult, under the circumstances, to resist their calls to harshly punish the Confederate envoys, he said. The Russian minister in Washington wrote home to his government that Lincoln wanted to release the men and issue an apology. Still, the American president desperately needed the support of his constituents if he was going to continue to
maintain the war effort at home. The Russian minister complained that “demagogues” in Washington “intoxicated” by recent naval victories were urging Lincoln to hold on to the Confederate envoys.
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Lincoln found himself boxed in by his own subordinates. Soldiers bivouacked at Willard’s Hotel, around the corner from the White House, threatened to quit the Union army if the president released Mason and Slidell. Welles wrote to Wilkes approving his actions, making the capture that much more difficult for Lincoln to disavow. The captain’s conduct, Lincoln’s naval secretary wrote, had the administration’s “emphatic approval.” State Department adviser Edward Everett, a former minister to Britain and secretary of state, began giving public speeches in support of Wilkes. “The detention,” he cried, “was perfectly lawful, the capture was perfectly lawful, their confinement in Fort Warren will be perfectly lawful.” A few weeks later Everett published his views of the incident in the widely read
New York Tribune
. Another State Department employee, according to a report in the
New York Times
, argued forcefully that British leaders would “not take exception to [Wilkes’s] act” since international law classified both weapons and diplomatic personnel the same way—“sandwiching Mason and Slidell [together] as contraband of war.”
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Faced with a no-win decision, Lincoln tried to punt. Such a strategy would place the ball in Palmerston’s hands, and allow the American president to maintain some measure of freedom of action in the meantime. It would also give passions time to cool. While the British prime minister mulled his response, Lincoln could quietly work to prepare public opinion for the envoys’ release.

The consequences of a rash decision on the president’s part were too serious to ignore. Lincoln, toward the end of the war, would sometimes dream that the White House had burned down. In the winter of 1861, it was not such a fanciful prospect. All Americans who had lived through the War of 1812 could imagine the powerful British navy surging up the Potomac and laying siege to the Northern capital.
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As the crisis reached its climax, New York mayor George Opdyke wrote Lincoln complaining about “the exposed condition of
this city.” He worried that “a fleet of [British] steamers might readily pass the exposed defenses of our harbor and hold this city at their mercy.”
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Allies abroad repeatedly remonstrated with the president to release the Confederate diplomats. French author Agénor-Étienne de Gasparin implored Lincoln in a letter “to give England immediately the full satisfaction that she demands.” The Frenchman acknowledged that Wilkes had a right to search the British packet, but marveled at the commander’s poor judgment in seizing the diplomats. “To rouse the opinion of England and all of Europe against you! To run the risk of a new war! … Your wisdom will have recognized that whatever the subtleties of the law may be, it is not necessary to advance the affairs of the Richmond government. That would be suicide.”
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Lincoln did his best to assure visiting officials that he wanted to avoid a war. In early December, the Canadian finance minister, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, met with the president at the White House to discuss the rising tensions between Britain and the United States. Lincoln reassured Galt that the
Trent
affair “could be arranged, and [he] intimated that no cause of quarrel would grow out of that.” Galt left the White House convinced of the U.S. president’s good intentions. Still, the Canadian wrote in a memo shortly after the meeting, “I cannot … divest my mind of the impression that the policy of the American government is so subject to popular impulses that no assurance can be, or ought to be, relied on under present circumstances. The temper of the public mind toward England is certainly of doubtful character.” Galt mentioned that “the vast military preparations of the North” made him uneasy.
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In reality, the North had done very little to prepare for a major conflict with Britain—one more detail that has inclined some modern historians to accept Charles Sumner’s contention that Lincoln was “essentially pacific” during the
Trent
crisis. When a delegation of Quakers visited the president at the White House in early December, Lincoln reiterated his desire to see the whole flap resolved peacefully
Standing in his office in the heat emanating from his marble fireplace, the president listened as the Quakers reminded him that there were Britons like Bright who were sympathetic to the United States. Lincoln, whose “sad, yet strong countenance” had initially struck the visitors, was buoyed by the report. “These,” he told the group, “are the first words of cheer and encouragement we have had from across the water.”
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As late as a month after the
Trent
incident, Lincoln still seemed to hope that the crisis would simply go away. At a wedding on the evening of December 10, he told Orville Browning that he had heard through French officials that British experts had concluded that the seizure was legal. Lincoln predicted that there “would probably be no trouble about it.” The president later suggested that if he could just meet face-to-face with the British representative in Washington, “I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace.” Still, at a memorial for Baker at the Capitol the following day, the president appeared wary and old. When Lincoln entered the packed Senate chamber, he looked unusually gaunt, with deep lines around his mouth. Snowflakes dotted his hair from the flurries outside. Taking his place behind the speaker’s podium, John Hay observed, the president sat quietly, “leaning his shaggy leonine head upon his black-gloved hand, with more utter unconsciousness of attitude than I ever saw in a man accustomed to being stared at.”
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Lincoln tried to put on a brave face. The
Trent
crisis did not temper the president’s enthusiasm for his burgeoning navy. A week earlier, in his annual message to Congress, he had boasted that “it may almost be said a navy has been created and brought into service since our difficulties commenced.” He added that “squadrons larger than ever before assembled under our flag have been put afloat and performed deeds which have increased our naval renown.” The president cited a report by his secretary of the navy suggesting that the Union was prepared for battle if necessary. The federal government, Lincoln asserted, could “show the world, that while engaged in quelling disturbances at home we are able to protect ourselves from abroad.”

The president, trying to calm passions, did not mention the
Trent
tension specifically in his message. “One thing is pretty certain,” observed a correspondent for the
Baltimore Sun
later that month, “to wit: that the Senate is not to be consulted on the question.” Lincoln’s cursory remarks to Congress were one more hint of his evolving view that foreign-affairs crises often demanded executive discretion. “There is little evidence,” notes one distinguished Lincoln biographer, “that the participation of Congress in this task of international adjustment would have been helpful. Heroically to take a stand, or to deliver a resounding stump speech in the form of a legislative resolution, was hardly calculated to improve the situation.” Lincoln, during the
Trent
affair, confined his correspondence with Capitol Hill to “innocuous and collateral aspects” of the crisis, such as forwarding copies of the State Department’s dispatches to peripheral powers like Austria and Italy.
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There was one particular senator, however, on whom the president relied heavily. After Seward’s string of unpredictable outbursts earlier that spring, Lincoln had begun consulting regularly with Charles Sumner, the patrician chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The pretentious senator, Lincoln once remarked, represented “my idea of a bishop.” (To needle the stiff Bostonian, Lincoln sometimes asked to stand back-to-back with Sumner to compare their heights.) The Massachusetts senator, who maintained a frequent correspondence with liberal Britons like Bright and the Duchess of Argyll, was convinced that war with the Palmerston ministry would be anathema. He raised his case for conciliation with Lincoln frequently as the crisis intensified. Sumner maintained a deep suspicion of the volatile Seward. “You must watch him,” the senator urged Lincoln, “and overrule him.” Seward, for his part, complained that there were “too many secretaries of state in Washington.”
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As December unfolded, the president’s men filled the news vacuum with hot air. “I do not think we can be bullied into a war,” Hay told readers of the
Missouri Republican
in one anonymous dispatch. “But if I understand the old gentleman who at present lives in
the Executive Mansion, there will be no sacrifice of honor or principle even to avoid a war with the swaggering bully of the United Islands.” If Britain demanded the release of Mason and Slidell, Hay brazenly insisted, “Mr. Seward will probably reply, ‘Send on your burial cases.’ ”
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Indeed, Seward thought a new front increasingly likely as the fall wore on. Shortly before Wilkes seized the Confederate envoys, the secretary of state wrote home about his own “intense anxiety.” Seward worried that the pressure Southern agents were placing on European statesmen was beginning to win sympathies. It was “doubtful,” he told his family, “whether we can escape the yet deeper and darker abyss of foreign war. The responsibility resting upon me is overwhelming.” Like Lincoln, the
Trent
news seems to have cheered Seward initially. According to Gideon Welles, “no man was more elated or jubilant over the capture of the emissaries than Mr. Seward.” The secretary of state, Welles recalled, “made no attempt to conceal his gratification.”
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Seward’s mood darkened again, however, on December 15, when the British demands finally reached Washington. Lincoln was having tea with Orville Browning at the White House when Seward swept in with the news. Browning reacted with indignation. “We will fight her to the death,” he vowed. But he did not really expect a war. Lincoln, on the other hand, recognized the unpredictability of a transatlantic game of chicken. Slidell’s wife had been telling people that Wilkes’s executive officer, after boarding the
Trent
, had declared: “Oh, John Bull would do as he had done before, he would bark, but not bite.” Lincoln was more cautious. He told a story about an aggressive bulldog he had known in Springfield. Everyone said the dog was friendly—but was he, really? “I know the bulldog will not bite,” Lincoln said. “You know he will not bite, but does the bulldog know he will not bite?”
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