Is it really true that he had nobody else? The American Civil War was a wholly new experience, much larger than the Mexican War or any other American war, and many reputations would be established in the event. Lincoln himself surely did find and elevate new people: Montgomery Meigs in the Powhatan affair, for one of many examples.
But a defender of Lincoln might say that the command of a giant army is a particularly demanding job, different from lesser jobs. The scantiness of the alternatives available to Lincoln is suggested by the performance of those whom he would appoint to replace McClellan. Burnside protested that he was not competent to lead such an army and in the battle of Fredericksburg would give devastating proof that he was right. The egregious “Fighting Joe” Hooker would withdraw from fighting at Chancellorsville in such a way as to rouse in some a desire to get McClellan back. John Pope was now blamed, whether justly or not, for the defeat at Second Bull Run. George Meade would lead the army to victory in the crucial battle at Gettysburg, but then while others were rejoicing in the victory, Lincoln was dismayed that Meade allowed Lee’s army to get back over the Potomac.
So we come to Lincoln’s second reason: McClellan was an unusually able military leader in certain regards—in shaping an army and giving it morale. This second reason had a twist in its tail that linked it back to the first. Bruce Catton formulates the large point: “[T]he most compelling reason for removing General McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac was precisely the reason that made his removal impossible. The gravest charge against him was at the same time his greatest asset…McClellan had turned the Army of the Potomac into his own personal instrument…the Army actually would not fight for anyone else.”
And it did fight bravely, however poorly it was commanded, on September 17 at Antietam, and that heavily qualified victory was, just barely, a vindication of Lincoln’s decision. The victory, such as it was, punctured any reviving European inclination to recognize the Confederacy, and it served Lincoln as the occasion for his most important initiative, the Emancipation Proclamation. The realistic politician Abraham Lincoln said to John Hay, when he returned McClellan to the command of the Army of the Potomac, “We must use what tools we have.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Trent and a Decent Respect for the Opinions of Mankind
IN NOVEMBER 1861 the larger world abruptly intruded into the American Civil War and required from the American president a brief foray into that utterly realistic and putatively amoral arena, politics among nations: realpolitik, national interest, reasons of state, balances of power. Allegedly there is no intrusion of moral ideals into this realm.
Lincoln, from the start of the rebellion, had had to watch out of the corner of an eye the reaction of nations abroad, Britain and France particularly. Rebel leaders had hopes that the old nations of Europe would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation—which would have been devastating to the Union cause. Even the Declaration of Neutrality by his great good friend Queen Victoria back in May had been worrisome. But what came to be known as the Trent affair threatened, for a brief moment, a far more catastrophic result: not merely recognition of the Confederacy but Great Britain at war with the Union, which, as Lincoln quickly perceived, was one more war than it could handle. He expressed his policy with unvarnished clarity: one war at a time.
The episode featured contrapuntal outbursts of passionate nationalism, first on the part of the Americans, then on the part of the British. Fortunately, communication was slow enough that these two outbursts did not coincide.
The circumstances were these. A swashbuckling captain, Charles Wilkes, of an American warship, the San Jacinto, had learned in Havana that two Confederate emissaries and their secretaries had booked passage on the British mail steamer Trent to take them to the Danish island of St. Thomas, where they were to make connections for Europe. Wilkes on his own initiative sailed ahead, laid ambush in the Bahama Channel, and on November 8 intercepted the Trent. He sent a team of marines to board the mail packet and to extract the Confederate emissaries; he then took them to Fort Monroe, arriving on November 15. The news of the seizure was immediately trumpeted across the North and brought an eruption of jubilant chauvinism. The Northern public was starved for something to cheer. Throughout 1861, since the war began in April, most of the big public news had been bad—the rout at Bull Run, the botch at Ball’s Bluff, the killing of Lyon and the loss at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri—and then George McClellan, with his huge Army of the Potomac, seemed to do more parading than fighting. Suddenly there came this satisfying stroke of forthright, overt action, Captain Wilkes reaching out and snatching these emissaries of treason.
The identities of the two added to the satisfaction. James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana had been among the most objectionable of articulate proslavery, prosecession senators in the turmoil of the 1850s: “Probably no two men in the entire South were more obnoxious to those of the Union side,” wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “than Mason and Slidell.” That it was their mission that was thwarted intensified Northern glee. They had been on their way to Europe, Mason to England, Slidell to France, to seek support for the Confederacy. That they had been snatched from a British vessel may have added juice to the American jubilation in the first unthinking moment: although England was the mother country and perhaps the nation’s first friend, she might also be said to have been the first enemy, against whom the Americans had fought two wars and almost fought another in 1841, the country whose Tory classes looked down at the vulgar American democracy and whose Times of London thundered in favor of the Confederacy. Furthermore, particularly since their own abolition of slavery in the West Indies in 1833, British opinion had been laced with lofty disapproval of the slaveholding republic across the seas. And at the same time—such condescension notwithstanding—since the Civil War broke out, the British in the large had not sprung to the support of the Union, in its battle with real slaveholders.
But the great point was, here at last was action, a victory for the Union over traitors. Captain Charles Wilkes was an instant hero: editorials in the Northern press praised him, and Massachusetts governor Andrew gave a public dinner in his honor in Boston. Within Lincoln’s own cabinet, Secretary of the Navy Welles wrote him a letter of approval, and when Congress convened in early December, the House of Representatives voted to give him a gold medal. The celebration of Wilkes’s deed was extravagant, bipartisan, and ubiquitous and included astonishing statements of approval made by leading lawyers, editorialists, and intellectuals—and alleged experts in international law.*36
Fortunately at that time, in 1861, communication across the Atlantic was blessedly slow. The transatlantic cable had not yet been laid, and the ships that carried messages crossed the great ocean at a stately pace. Captain Wilkes had struck his daring blow for the Republic on November 8. He had brought his prisoners to Fort Monroe, as noted, on November 15, whereupon, as the telegraph did stretch across the American North and the unbuttoned press of that day flung itself upon the story, a tumult of American jubilation erupted. The joy continued, with an important sobering interruption, until the end of the affair on December 26. But the British did not know, at the start of this period, either about the seizure or about the American rejoicing; they learned about it all on November 27 with the arrival of some passengers who had been on the Trent and had transferred at St. Thomas to a ship that went on to dock in Southampton. The British then promptly began their own firestorm, not of glee but of fury.
As they saw it, a ship of a neutral power, pursuing a lawful, innocent, and peaceful voyage from one neutral port to another, with Her Majesty’s mails on board, had been forcibly stopped by shots across the bow from an American man-of-war and had been boarded by “a large armed guard of marines” (there are two insults already—the shots and the boarding), and four passengers (Mason and Slidell and their secretaries), who had been traveling “under the protection of the British flag,” were forcibly removed. This was “an a
ffront to the British flag and a violation of international law.” All segments of British opinion, including those that supported the Union, exploded in indignation; editorials in papers of all stripes condemned the insult. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, said to the cabinet, “You may stand for this but damned if I will!” The ministry ordered eight thousand troops to prepare for transfer to Canada with a supply of munitions. It was even rumored that as one regiment embarked, its band played “Dixie.”
Now comes another contribution by the blessed slowness of communication: Americans in their turn did not learn about the British uproar until a ship called the Hansa arrived in New York on December 12. For almost a full month—from November 15 until December 12—Americans had been able to revel, if they wanted to, in Wilkes’s deed without the unpleasant distraction of the British fury. Before December 12 a little moral imagination might have suggested the meaning that the event was likely to have in Great Britain; after that date no imagination was required—the newspapers performed that service. The British were irate, and now at last the Americans knew it.
At the center of the American government as it confronted this outburst from across the seas (and at the same time the sharply contrasting eruption at home, not yet contained) was a new president who had never once been outside his native country, who spoke no foreign language, who had no personal friend abroad, and who had no experience in world politics. All the key participants in the Trent affair—the British ambassador Lord Lyons, the British foreign secretary Lord John Russell, the American secretary of state William Seward, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Charles Sumner, the American ambassador to London Charles Francis Adams—had at one time or another expressed severe reservations about this man’s capacity to cope with world politics at its highest level. Seward, who had far more experience abroad and in world politics than most American politicians, had explained at the outset of the Lincoln administration that because of “the utter absence of any acquaintance with the subject in the chief [executive], his [Seward’s] would be the guiding hand in Union diplomacy.”
ALTHOUGH HE DID indeed cede much of the foreign relations of the administration to Seward, Lincoln had already, well before the Trent affair, made pivotal interventions. He had quietly ignored the cockamamie notion in Seward’s April Fool’s Day memorandum that the way to bring peace to the United States was to bring war to the world: to unite North and South in battle against a foreign power. The shared nationalism, so Seward thought, would override the ideologies of the sections, and South Carolina would be the belligerent companion of Massachusetts in the war against—somebody.
One did not need to have long years of experience in the highest levels of diplomacy to recognize that that was not a good idea. As his opposition as a congressman to Polk’s Mexican War had demonstrated, Lincoln did not believe in American presidents deliberately provoking wars or to war-making on trumped-up charges. And now as president himself he had considerations not only of principle but of elementary prudence: the likelier scenario in early April 1861 was not that South Carolina firebrands would wheel around and join Massachusetts abolitionists in fighting an American war against another country—Great Britain? Russia? Spain? France?*37 —but that some of these nations would give recognition and aid to the Confederacy. For Washington to provoke a war with any of them, thinking that Montgomery (or soon Richmond) would join in that war, would surely be folly of the highest order.
Between April 12 and April 15 Sumter was attacked and “reduced,” and Lincoln called out the militia; on April 17 Jefferson Davis endorsed privateering on Union shipping; on April 19 Lincoln, in response, ordered a blockade of Confederate ports. The problem about a blockade was that it is an act of war between sovereign states, which if effective is, in international law, to be recognized by other states. But Lincoln and the Union did not grant that the Confederacy was a state. So there was an ambiguity, a problem. On May 13 the British government promulgated Queen Victoria’s proclamation that her government would be “neutral” in this American fracas, and France soon followed her example. If Kentucky’s “neutrality” was one kind of problem, Great Britain’s “neutrality” was another. It meant at least that they gave the Confederacy the status of a “belligerent power.” It was dangerous ground.
On May 21 Seward completed a draft of a dispatch of instructions to the American ambassador Charles Francis Adams, who had just arrived in London to take up his post. Seward’s draft, responding to the British Declaration of Neutrality, was laced with truculent injections and signs of annoyance at what the British had done. Seward read the draft to the president, who, for all his alleged inexperience, managed to detect some things in it that shouldn’t be said. Lincoln kept a copy and read it over. So here was the “rough farmer,” the “child of nature” with his “comprehensive ignorance” and his “utter absence of any acquaintance with the subject,” sitting there reading and editing this key document, his first intervention in world affairs. He made several small changes, all in the direction of making it less truculent and aggrieved. He spotted the most belligerent of Seward’s flourishes, the rhetorically high-charged claim that “British recognition” of the pretended new state “would be British intervention to create within our own territory a hostile state by overthrowing this republic itself.” And Seward had finished with a drumbeat echo of the Declaration of Independence: “When this act of intervention is distinctly performed, 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.” Lincoln said, Leave that out.
Lincoln also said to drop two long rhetorical paragraphs, a peroration with memories of the prose and events of 1776, with which Seward had ended the dispatch. As rousing as that prose might be to an American, an English reader, particularly a responsible official in the British government, would have found it rousing in a different way: 1776, and Jefferson’s ringing apostrophes, would represent not inspiration but menace. “We see how,” Seward had written, “upon the result of the debate we are now engaged, a war may ensue between the United States and one, two, or even more European nations”—again he grandly multiplied prospective imaginary wars. “[I]f it comes it will be fully seen that it results from the action of Great Britain, not our own, that Great Britain had decided to fraternize with our domestic enemy.” Seward then made explicit the echoes he heard from the War for Independence: “A war not unlike it between the same parties occurred at the close of the last century. Europe atoned by forty years of suffering for the error that Great Britain committed in provoking that contest.” If “that nation shall now repeat the same great error,” there will be social convulsions, but afterward it will not be the United States “that will come out of them with its precious constitution altered or its honestly obtained dominion in any degree altered.” If you were a British diplomat trained to detect implicit meanings, you would have detected Seward’s hint of a threat: go to war with us, and we will take over Canada. Seward finished with more trumpet-sounding American pride and another echo of Jefferson. Jefferson had referred to the “last stab of agonized affection” for “our unfeeling brethren.” Seward’s version spoke of Britain now losing “forever…the sympathies and the affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”
Lincoln said, Cut all that out.
And then Lincoln adopted a better idea. Although technically this dispatch consisted of instructions to Ambassador Adams, Seward had also directed that a copy be delivered to the British Foreign Office, without elaboration. (Seward plainly had not been composing these sentences just for Adams’s edification; his implied readers throughout were the British leaders.) Lincoln countermanded that instruction. After striking the last long paragraph, he substituted this sentence, which plainly is addressed just to the American ambassador: “This paper is for your own guidance, and not to be read or shown to any one.” That solved it all. If the British Foreign Office had been pre
sented with Seward’s unqualified paper in its original form, without comment, they would have been required to take the kind of dark counterthreatening posture that diplomats representing the pride and interest of a nation must take. But Lincoln scotched that.
The situation was exacerbated by the memory of the performance of the garrulous Seward in the period leading up to the war. In the spring of 1860 he had made rather a practice of dropping anti-British remarks, and these of course came to be known in England. He had responded aggressively to signs of English acceptance of, or favor toward, the Confederacy. The Confederate government, now moved to Richmond, had in May sent as head of a delegation to London the hottest of fire-eaters, William L. Yancey, not—one would have thought—a very good choice for a sensitive diplomatic post. Seward was understandably upset when Lord Russell granted Yancey and his crew two meetings: from the American Union’s point of view those men were insurgents, traitors, being granted an audience with the foreign secretary of an allegedly friendly nation. And then came the queen’s Declaration of Neutrality. So Seward was irritated as he composed the electric dispatch to Adams that Lincoln quietly unplugged.
Lincoln’s revision of his instruction left the skillful Adams room to be diplomatic in the way he conveyed to the British government American unhappiness about any British palaver with the American rebels. Although Lincoln may not have fully appreciated how good an ambassador Charles Francis Adams was, and although Adams certainly did not appreciate how good a president Lincoln was, the Union’s relationship to Great Britain seems nevertheless to have been handled rather well, both in London and in Washington, given the disasters that might have happened.
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