Lincoln in the World (46 page)

Lincoln vs. Lincoln

J
OHN HAY WAS IN VIENNA ON THE DAY OF MAXIMILIAN’S FUNERAL, IN JANUARY 1868. THE FORMER HAPSBURG PRINCE HAD BEEN VIRTUALLY DISOWNED BY AUSTRIA’S ROYAL FAMILY AFTER
he accepted the throne of Mexico. Now, however, ordinary Austrians respectfully welcomed home his lifeless body, lining the route as the solemn cortege carrying the former archduke’s corpse wound its way to its crypt. “All the streets and adjoining squares were filled with a vast crowd of citizens and strangers,” Hay wrote home to Seward. Lincoln’s former secretary was struck by the “genuine and touching” sympathy for Maximilian that spilled into the streets. Still, despite the nationwide mourning, Hay told Seward that he considered the whole affair a vindication of republican principles—“a sensible blow at the prestige of kings.”
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In the years following the Civil War, Hay was uniquely positioned to observe the conflict’s international fallout. After his stint in Paris, the young Illinoisan took diplomatic posts in both Madrid and Vienna. Along the way, he stopped in London to watch the wrangling in the British Parliament over the Reform Bill of 1867—a measure that would ultimately double the number of Britons eligible to vote. Hay sat spellbound in the gallery as legendary figures like William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli debated the legislation.
The bill had been inspired by far more than just the Civil War. Still, the redemption of the world’s most prominent democracy had indeed chastened many English aristocrats and softened their resistance to reforms. “It is probably no exaggeration,” notes the scholar James McPherson, “to say that if the North had lost the war, thereby confirming Tory opinions of democracy and confounding the liberals, the Reform Bill would have been delayed for years.”
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Lincoln had believed strongly in the power of America’s example. In the years following the American Revolution, the president’s idol George Washington had once warned his countrymen that “the eyes of the whole world” were “turned upon them.” The nation’s first president believed that the republican experiment in North America was being carefully observed by both autocrats and liberals across the globe. “With our fate,” Washington had declared in 1783, “will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” Lincoln took that message to heart. The outcome of the Civil War, he told Congress in his first address to the body in July 1861, “embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether … a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”
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During the Civil War, embracing that faith in democratic government had required the suspension of disbelief. In the midnineteenth century, reasoned observation alone did not necessarily suggest that democracy was on the march. Lincoln, as the crisis deepened, had found himself making an almost mystical appeal to his countrymen. Hay, for one, found himself eagerly worshipping at the side of the new high priest of freedom. “I consider Lincoln Republicanism incarnate, with all its faults and all its virtues,” he wrote in a letter to Billy Herndon shortly after Lincoln’s assassination. “As, in spite of some evidences, Republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.”
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Lincoln’s presidency and the outcome of the Civil War had resoundingly affirmed American ideals. They also positioned the
nation for a dramatic leap onto the world stage. The country’s astonishing expansion in the postwar years—helped along, at least in part, by economic policies crafted by Lincoln, Seward, and their allies—soon placed the United States amid the ranks of the world’s largest and wealthiest countries. In the years between 1860 and 1900, the U.S. population doubled. By 1874 the nation began to export more than it imported—a dynamic that lasted for almost the next century. Annual crude oil production ballooned from 3 million barrels in 1865 to over 55 million barrels in 1898, and the country saw a more than fivefold increase in the production of steel rails. “The figures,” President William McKinley declared in 1901, “are almost appalling.”

As the economy surged, Hay began to advocate a greater world role for the United States. More than thirty years after the end of the Civil War, he would help to preside over the birth of American imperialism. In late 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, McKinley chose Hay to be his secretary of state. By then, the United States had become an unquestioned economic and political colossus. Power and prosperity sometimes seemed to turn American idealism on its head. Hay, in one letter to Theodore Roosevelt, described the conflict with Spain as “a splendid little war.” Lincoln’s former secretary had traveled a long way from the “terrible war” that his boss had once lamented.
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There is, then, a natural tension embedded in a Lincolnian foreign policy.
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On the one hand, Lincoln’s moral vision represented American idealism at its best. The Railsplitter, who had never been overseas, understood better than most of his countrymen how slavery undermined the nation’s prestige in the international arena. “I hate [slavery],” Lincoln told one Springfield audience long before he became president, “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.” Lincoln’s later justification of the war in his Gettysburg Address rings with reformist overtones. Only
through a cleansing “new birth of freedom,” he declared, would the United States take its rightful place on the world stage.
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Yet the Union victory also left a more disconcerting imprint on American foreign policy. In the decades that followed, blind faith in American ideals would sometimes come to inspire intolerance and dogmatism. In his 1962 classic,
Patriotic Gore
, the iconoclast Edmund Wilson acidly derides the “insufferable moral attitudes” spawned by the War Between the States. The outcome of the conflict, notes one modern diplomatic scholar, “purged some old myths only to fuse nationalism even more inextricably with a cult of material progress disguised as a holy calling. That coalescence of Union and creed, power and faith, rendered Americans ever since uniquely immune to cynicism and uniquely prone to sanctimony.”
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The American foreign-policy tradition is riven by this identity crisis. The mercurial nature of the U.S. approach to diplomacy, former senator William Fulbright has observed, “is not an accident but an expression of two distinct sides of the American character. Both are characterized by a kind of moralism, but one is the morality of decent instincts tempered by the knowledge of human imperfection and the other is the morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading spirit.”
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Lincoln, on his best days and at his most mature, was the personification of the former type. He infused his moralism with a highly disciplined sense of justice. He was not constitutionally prone to emotional crusades. While his countrymen crowed about regenerating the world, from Mexico to Hungary, Lincoln took a more reasoned, pragmatic approach. “Did Mr. Lincoln rule himself by the
head
or heart?” Billy Herndon once asked rhetorically. “He was great in the
head
and ruled and lived there.” Lincoln’s patience and sense of human frailty usually prevented his democratic sympathies from sounding sententious.
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Lincoln’s foreign-affairs legacy is marked by one other “peculiar paradox,” as the scholar David Donald has labeled it. Lincoln and Seward were both shapers and products of the Whig ethos, which
historically had defined itself in opposition to presidential excess. And yet amid the national emergency of the Civil War, Lincoln and his secretary of state firmly—if temporarily—enlarged the powers of the executive to direct global affairs. The president swiftly proclaimed a blockade and expanded the navy by executive order. After his ships clashed with Britain’s on the high seas, he confined Congress’s role in the
Trent
affair to private consultations with key members. As the conflict intensified, Lincoln used his bully pulpit to speak directly to the British and French publics. In the war’s final days, he resolutely defied hawks in Congress who were eager to invade Mexico. Yet at the same time, the president steadfastly supported congressional measures like the Legal Tender Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act, which worked to strengthen the bonds that united the state. Those legislative reforms, combined with Lincoln’s executive innovations, ultimately helped to boost the country to greater global prominence.
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Hay found himself caught between the competing traditions that Lincoln’s presidency had helped to inspire. On the one hand, Lincoln’s former secretary had once proclaimed himself “a republican until I die,” strongly dedicated to a belief in popular government. And yet he also plunged into the heady expansionist currents of the late nineteenth century, marrying the daughter of a business tycoon and lusting after what he once called “the pole-star of humanity, $!” As secretary of state, he was a firm advocate of executive power, tangling repeatedly with Congress over foreign policy. Hay’s life was defined by the tension between the individual conscience that Lincoln had helped to shape and the rise to global power that the president had helped to touch off. In the life of his secretary, Lincoln did battle with himself.
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After his diplomatic travels in the wake of the Civil War, Hay returned to the United States in 1870. He eventually settled in a massive, brick-and-mahogany mansion on Lafayette Square, just
across from the White House. Hay’s new home soon became a gathering place for the city’s power brokers. (His dining room was larger than the one at the White House.) He filled his oak-paneled library with souvenirs from his days as Lincoln’s secretary. Hay particularly liked to show off two different bronze life masks of Lincoln’s face that he kept in the library—one made in 1860 and the other in 1865. Lincoln’s former secretary pointed out to visitors how much his boss had aged during his time in office.
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From the windows of his home, Hay could see both his old bedroom at the White House and Seward’s former place on Lafayette Square. Henry Adams later recalled an aging and wistful Hay gazing out his windows at the Civil War–era officers walking in the park. Lincoln’s former secretary “would break off suddenly the thread of his talk,” Adams recalled, “as he looked out of the window on Lafayette Square, to notice an old corps commander or admiral of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or his cocktail: ‘There is old Dash who broke the rebel lines at Blankburg! Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!’ ” For his children, Hay would turn old Civil War songs into lullabies, sending them off to bed amid the strains of Federal battle hymns.
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Hay eventually made a name for himself as a writer, first for the
New York Tribune
—the same “Great Moral Organ” that had employed Karl Marx—and later as a poet, novelist, and historian. His most ambitious literary undertaking was the ten-volume biography of Lincoln that Hay produced with the former president’s other secretary, John G. Nicolay. The serialized version began to appear in
Century
magazine in 1886. The whole venture gave Hay the opportunity to reexamine and reevaluate the key episodes in Lincoln’s foreign policy—sometimes in light of surprising new documents unearthed in the president’s private papers.
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Writing at the height of the Gilded Age, Hay and Nicolay were not reflexively opposed to American expansion. In their section covering the annexation of Texas, Lincoln’s former secretaries suggested
that the absorption of the territory was probably inevitable. “Here was a great empire offering itself to us,” they wrote. “It may be doubted whether there is a government on the face of the earth, which, under similar circumstances, would not have yielded to the same temptation.”

Yet at the same time, Hay and his coauthor lauded Lincoln’s Mexican War stance for its prudence. In the process, Lincoln’s former secretaries kneecapped Billy Herndon, who happened to be at work on his own Lincoln biography. Hay and his coauthor criticized the president’s former law partner for his overemotional defense of the war. Herndon was “young, bright, and enthusiastic,” Hay wrote, but in his letters to Lincoln during the Mexican War, he had also displayed “more heart than learning, more feeling for the flag than for international justice.” Lincoln had repeatedly tried to convince Herndon of “the difference between approving the war and voting supplies to the soldiers,” they wrote. Yet Lincoln’s law partner had remained “obstinately obtuse.”
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Perhaps the book’s most important contribution to understanding the foreign policy of the Civil War was its section on Seward’s “foreign-war panacea.”
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Nicolay and Hay had discovered Seward’s April 1, 1861, memo, “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” buried in the cache of papers provided by Robert Lincoln. Seward’s influence on Hay was arguably as important as Lincoln’s, and Lincoln’s former secretary owed much of his diplomatic career to the New Yorker. Yet Seward’s April Fool’s power play clearly startled Hay. Lincoln’s former secretaries described Seward’s memo as an “extraordinary state paper,” and suggested that the secretary of state intended to “heal a provincial quarrel in the zeal and fervor of a continental crusade.” Still, they added, Seward quickly understood “how serious a fault he had committed.” In any event, the president magnanimously let the episode pass.
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