From the press, from the pulpit, from the public at large came praise for the captain’s forthright action. Congress rushed through a resolution thanking him for his “brave, adroit, and patriotic conduct in the arrest of the traitors,” and voted a gold medal struck in his honor. He was wined and dined and paraded in Boston, and toasts to his boldness were drunk throughout the nation. For the Administration to submit to an ultimatum and apologize for the captain’s action would be to disavow that action and repudiate the hero before the eyes of his adoring public. With the nation already split in half and one tremendous conflict already building toward a climax, no one could say for certain what the result would be if the people were forced to choose between their captain-hero and those who let him down.
Thus—as in 1812, with the roles reversed—the two nations were poised for a war that would surely come unless one, or both, backed down: which was plainly impossible, believing as they did the worst of each other. On one side of the water, the British assumed that the impressment had been performed under government sanction, probably in accordance with instructions. On the other, the Americans, already provoked by the granting of belligerency status to the Confederacy, saw only another instance of England’s avowing her intention to further the rebellion and assist in the dismemberment of a rival in the scramble for world trade.
As if all this was not enough to make war seem inevitable, the British conception of what had fed the roots of the late outrage was reinforced by the aggressive diplomacy—the announced intention, even—of the American Secretary of State, who was known to favor war with England as a means of reuniting his divided countrymen. He had said so repeatedly, in interviews, in correspondence, and in after-dinner talk. If the North became embroiled with a foreign power, Seward believed, the South would drop its States Rights quarrel and hasten to close ranks against invasion: whereupon, with that war over, the two sections could sit down in a glow of mutual pride at having won it, and reconcile past differences without the need or desire for further bloodshed.
In this he was most likely much mistaken, for the main goal of Confederate diplomacy was to draw England into the conflict on the southern side. And yet he was not entirely wrong—at least so far as regarded human nature. Now that the hope seemed about to be fact, the reaction below the Potomac and the Ohio was not unmixed. Exultation was sobered there by the thought of Americans, under whatever flag, submitting to an old-world ultimatum. “As I read the Northern newspapers, the blood rushes to my head,” one diarist wrote. “In the words of the fine fiction writers, my cheek is mantling with shame. Anyhow,” she went on to predict, “down they must go to Old England, knuckle on their marrow bones, to keep her on their side—or barely neutral.” Right or wrong, however, such was Seward’s theory: a foreign war would still domestic strife. And now as if by the bounty of fate, without the slightest effort on his part, Captain Wilkes’s action and England’s reaction presented him with an all-out chance to test it.
Lincoln himself had his doubts about this theory, not only in general but in particular, as it applied to the case in point. He rather agreed with the southern diarist that there would have to be some knuckling done. “I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants,” he remarked when he received word of the seizure of Mason and Slidell. Unfamiliar with diplomacy, he was feeling his way. When a learned visitor explained to him that his blockade declaration had naturally gained for the Confederacy the rights of a belligerent in all the courts of Europe, since a nation did not blockade its own ports, Lincoln replied: “Yes, that’s a fact. I see the point now, but I don’t know anything about the Law of Nations and I thought it was all right.… I’m a good enough lawyer in a western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the Law of Nations out there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it and I left it to him.”
He left it to Seward, but he did not let him go unsupervised. It was as if Lincoln said to him, as he had said to Herndon back in Springfield, “Billy, you’re too rampant.” Seward was called Billy, too—Billy Bowlegs, his enemies dubbed him: a bandy-legged, untidy man with a great deal of personal charm behind the bristling eyebrows, the constant cigar, and the nose of a macaw. Mrs Lincoln detested him outright. “He draws you around his little finger like a skein of thread,” she warned her husband. But when other advisers urged that he drop the New Yorker from the cabinet, Lincoln said: “Seward knows that I am his master.”
Seward knew no such thing, as yet, but he was learning. Though Lincoln liked him, enjoyed his stories, and respected his political astuteness, from Sumter on he watched him and rode herd on him, toning down his overseas dispatches, which in first draft rather demonstrated his theory that a war with Europe would solve the urgent problems here at home. It was characteristic of Seward that, having styled the coming civil war an “irrepressible conflict,” he met it, when it came, with various efforts to repress it. Sumter at least had taught him that Lincoln was more than a prairie bumpkin, for the Secretary informed his wife in early June: “Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities. The President is the best of us, but”—he felt obliged to add—“he needs constant and assiduous coöperation.” The Trent affair removed this final residue of doubt, and at the same time vindicated Lincoln’s decision to keep Seward at his post, despite the clamor of his enemies and the trouble he had made.
Now that the war he thought he wanted was his for the asking—or, indeed, for the not-asking—Seward discovered, perhaps to his profound surprise, that he did not want it at all. He said so, in fact, as soon as the news arrived from Hampton Roads. In the cabinet, while all around them were wild-eyed with praise for the bold captain, only Seward and Montgomery Blair perceived that in turning his quarter-deck into a prize court Wilkes had not only been rash, he had been wrong, and by his illegal action had exposed his country to embarrassment. As Lincoln put it, “We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain [in 1812] for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what Wilkes has done.” Seward agreed. “One war at a time,” Lincoln cautioned, and Seward agreed again.
However, these three alone, Lincoln and Seward and the practical-minded Blair, could not breast the popular current running full-tilt against them; they must wait. In his December 1 message to Congress, the President left the affair unmentioned. “Mr Lincoln forgot it!” someone remarked in shocked surprise at his thus ignoring the burning question of the day. The words were passed along, laughter being added to amazement: “Mr Lincoln forgot it!” And then, perceptibly—whether because of the chilling effect of the laughter or because, as in certain diseases, the fever itself had cured the fit—the excitement ebbed.
Cooler heads took over on both sides of the Atlantic. The British began to consider that Captain Wilkes might have acted without orders from his government, and responsible Americans began to see that the Confederate envoys locked up in Fort Warren—where Slidell was being given his chance to “conspire with the mice against the cat” and Mason was abiding by his oath (though in a manner not intended) never to visit that shore again “except as an ambassador”—were accomplishing more toward the fulfillment of their diplomatic mission than they would be doing if they had continued on their way to Europe.
The first official show of reason came from England. Prince Albert, closeted with the Queen in his last illness—he would be dead before the year was out—toned down Russell’s ultimatum, modifying its phraseology until the demand for an apology became, in effect, a request for an explanation; so that, instead of finding it “dictatorial or menacing,” as he had feared, Seward could pronounce it “courteous and friendly.” It was still an ultimatum, requiring an apology for the insult to the British flag, as well as the surrender of the envoys, but at least it opened the door for a reply in the form of something except a declaration of war. That was much. As for the apology—the one thing Seward could not give—verbal additions to the message indicated that a statement to the effect that Wilkes h
ad acted without instructions would render it superfluous, since a nation could hardly be expected to apologize for something it had not done. Seward already had in mind the terms of his reply, but before it could be sent he would have to win the approval of the rest of the cabinet. In the present state of public furor, with even Lincoln feeling that surrender of the captives was “a pretty bitter pill to swallow,” nothing less than unanimous action would suffice.
For two days Seward remained shut away in his office, composing a reply to the British demand: a reply intended not only for the eyes of the Minister to whom it was addressed, but also for those of the American man-in-the-street, whose sensibilities were the ones considered most in this explanation of his government’s being willing to give up the rebel envoys: so that, though in form and style the document was brilliantly legal, showing Seward at his sparkling best—this was one State Department dispatch Lincoln did not need to doctor—it was not so much designed to stand up under analysis by the Admiralty law lords, as it was to show the writer’s countrymen that their leaders were by no means trembling at the roar of the British lion. Having complied with the basic demands of the ultimatum by 1) admitting that Wilkes had acted without orders and 2) offering to deliver the captives whenever and wherever they were wanted, Seward then wrote for his countrymen’s eyes, with reasoning that was somewhat specious and language that was at times impertinent, what amounted to an indictment of the British point of view, past and present. In other words, under cover of an apology, he gave the lion’s tail a final twist.
Down on the Virginian peninsula that summer, though by the rules of warfare he could not confiscate private property unless it was being used against him, Ben Butler had justified the receiving of slaves into his lines on grounds that their labor for the enemy made them contraband of war. “I’se contraband,” they would say, smiling proudly as they crossed the freedom line, and Butler put them to work on his fortifications. Now Seward took a page from the squint-eyed general’s book, affirming that the envoys and their secretaries were “contraband,” liable to seizure. Wilkes therefore had done right to stop the ship and then to board and search her. His error lay in his leniency; for he should have brought not only the rebel envoys, but also the Trent and all her cargo into port for judgment; in which case, Seward was sure, the ship and everything aboard her, including the four Confederates, would have become the lawful property of the United States. However—and here was where the impertinence came in—the Secretary could appreciate his lordship’s being taken aback, for in impressing passengers from a merchant vessel Wilkes had followed a British, not an American line of conduct. Seward saw the present ultimatum as an admission of past injuries inflicted by the mistress of the seas, and he congratulated Britannia on having come round to the point of view against which she had fought in 1812: “She could in no other way so effectually disavow any such injury, as we think she does, by assuming now as her own the ground upon which we then stood.” Captain Wilkes had been mainly right, but the United States wanted no advantage gained by means of an action which was even partly wrong. Seward was frank to state, however, that if his nation’s safety required it he would still detain the captives; but “the effectual check and waning proportions of the existing insurrection, as well as the comparative unimportance of the captured persons themselves, when dispassionately weighed, happily forbid me from resorting to that defense.… The four persons in question are now held in military custody at Fort Warren, in the State of Massachusetts. They will be cheerfully liberated. Your lordship will please indicate a time and place for receiving them.”
Doubtless Seward had enjoyed those two days he spent locked away in his office, verbally building a straw man, straw by straw, then verbally demolishing him, handful by handful. When he emerged, however, prepared to receive the applause of his fellow cabinet members, he received instead cold looks and hot objections. They could appreciate the brilliance of his performance, but it did not obscure the fact that they were being asked to yield—which most of them had sworn not to do. It took him, in fact, as long to win their indorsement of the document as he had spent composing it, and the latter two days were far more hectic than the former.
Christmas morning the ministers assembled. When they adjourned that afternoon, to spend what was left of the holiday with their families, there had been no agreement. What Lincoln called “a pretty bitter pill” was for the cabinet, one member said, “downright gall and wormwood.” The war was one year old that night, the anniversary of Anderson’s removal of his eighty-odd men from Moultrie to Fort Sumter. Next morning the ministers reassembled; the discussion was resumed. It went hard, being asked to go down on their marrow bones against all their oaths and boasts, with only Seward’s flimsy curtain of paradox and impertinence to hide them from the public and each other. In the end, however, as one of them wrote, “all yielded to the necessity, and unanimously concurred.”
Mason and Slidell were handed over on New Year’s Day to continue their roundabout journey, the latter being twenty days late for the appointment he had made with his wife when he told her on parting, “My dear, we shall meet in Paris in sixty days.” The public reaction to the outcome of the crisis was considerably less violent than the cabinet members had feared. Though the anti-British press continued to fulminate according to tradition, in general there was a sigh of relief at having to fight only “one war at a time.” When Captain Wilkes, still wearing his laurels, was sent about his business, to be supervised more closely in the future, the public did not even feel let down. Poker was not the national game for nothing; the people understood that their leaders had bowed, not to the British, but to expediency.
Only within one group was there despondency that the rebels had been freed. “Everybody here is satisfied with their surrender,” Lincoln heard from a friend in Indiana, “except the secession sympathizers, who are wonderfully hurt at the idea that our national honor is tarnished.”
On this diplomatic note, which opened shrill, then broke into falsetto, the first year of the conflict reached a close. Politically and militarily speaking, its laurels belonged to those who had established a nation within its span and defended that establishment successfully in battle, meeting and turning back attacks against both flanks of their thousand-mile frontier and staving off an advance against the center. McClellan’s gains in western Virginia and the Federal navy’s trident amphibious lunge did something to redress the defeats along Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek, but when those checks were emphasized, east and west, by the rout at Ball’s Bluff and the repulse at Belmont, there was a distinct public impression, North and South, at home and abroad, of failure by the Unionist government to deal with the Confederate bid for independence.
One side called this bid a revolution. The other insisted that it was a rebellion. Whichever it was, it was plainly a fact, and both sides saw clearly now that the contest between northern power and southern élan was not going to be the ninety-day affair they had predicted at the outset.
Realization that this was so had grown until it was unmistakable, at which point violent objections were sounded on both sides by the extremists who had been foremost in predicting that the conflict would be short and decisive. Southerners were all bluster and would not fight if their bluff was called, the abolitionists had declared, and when one fire-eater had offered to wipe up with his handkerchief all the blood that would be shed, a less squeamish colleague had backed him up by offering to drink it. Now that blood had dripped and flowed beyond their power to drink or wipe, they waxed bitterly accusative, North and South, against those who held the reins. Chagrined that the war they had done so much to bring about had been taken out of their hands when it arrived, the two groups still insisted that their prediction had turned out false only because their aims had been betrayed. It could still be rendered valid, they affirmed, provided the war was fought the way they wanted. Each favored an all-out invasion, with fire and sword and the hangman’s noose, and each blamed its leader for an o
bvious lack of vigor in his thinking and in his actions.
“Jeff Davis is conceited, wrong-headed, wranglesome, obstinate—a traitor,” Edmund Rhett declared, while back in Springfield the northern President’s erstwhile law partner complained that Lincoln was attempting to “squelch out this huge rebellion by popguns filled with rose water. He ought to hang somebody and get up a name for will or decision—for character,” Herndon wrote, and added scornfully: “Let him hang some child or woman if he has not the courage to hang a man.”
Between these two extremes, while the anti-Davis and anti-Lincoln cliques were respectively consolidating their opposition and sharpening their barbs, the mass of men who would do the actual fighting, and the women who would wait for them at home, took what came with a general determination to measure up to what was expected of them. It was their good fortune, or else their misery, to belong to a generation in which every individual would be given a chance to discover and expose his worth, down to the final ounce of strength and nerve. For the most part, therefore, despite the clamor of extremists north and south of the new frontier, each side accepted its leader as a condition of the tournament, and counted itself fortunate to have the man it had and not the other. Seen from opposite banks of the Ohio and the Potomac, both seemed creatures fit for frightening children into quick obedience. On the one hand there was Davis, “ambitious as Lucifer,” with his baleful eyes and bloodless mouth, cerebral and lizard-cold, plotting malevolence into the small hours of the night. On the other there was Lincoln, “the original gorilla,” with his shambling walk and sooty face, an ignorant rail-splitter catapulted by long-shot politics into an office for which he had neither the experience nor the dignity required.