Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. . . . [W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, NOVEMBER 19, 1863
WHILE THE CONFEDERATE HIGH COMMAND WAS PLAYING ITS last cards in Rome, Paris, and London, the Union was honing its appeal to world opinion. Lincoln’s own words were among the Union’s most valuable assets in its public diplomacy campaign abroad. He had an unusual gift for articulating the meaning of the war in universalizing terms that resonated with the international vocabulary of republicanism as much as it did with the American troops and citizens at home. In his speeches and public letters, Lincoln repeatedly referred to the war’s implications for “the whole world,” “the earth,” “the whole family of man.” He spoke, too, of the struggle being “not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.”1
The idea of the war being part of a much larger historic struggle was not Lincoln’s alone; it ran through much of William Seward’s diplomatic communications as well. Their views on the war as an epic clash of fundamental principles also emanated from well-rehearsed Republican Party rhetoric that portrayed the aristocratic Slave Power assailing the will of the common people. It was a romantic drama and one that resonated with foreigners who reframed the national narrative into an international one of popular sovereignty locked in a life-or-death struggle against the advocates of hereditary sovereignty and servitude.
While some Unionists criticized the readiness of European conservatives to see America’s crisis as proof that the republican experiment had failed, Lincoln often seized opportunities to frame the war as a trial of democracy and one with vast consequences for the world’s future. Nowhere did he do this more masterfully than in the “brief remarks” he delivered at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863.
Lincoln opened by linking the Gettysburg battle, and the war itself, to Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 declaration of a nation based on human equality. “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Every schoolchild in America knows the words, and by now most are familiar with the moral journey they signified for the president who once insisted that the war was fought for no higher purpose than to preserve the Union. At Gettysburg that day he proclaimed the nation’s “new birth of freedom.”2
The “new birth” is commonly interpreted as a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, but it carried a broader political meaning as well. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” Lincoln told the Gettysburg crowd, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” The simple phrase “any nation so conceived” imbued America’s war with universal meaning. That point was made emphatic when he closed by saying that the war’s purpose was to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The words and thoughts were quintessential Lincoln, but they connected with the language of international republicanism. His most unforgettable phrase at Gettysburg—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”—bore a familiar ring to European ears. The cadence “of, by, for” the “people, republic, nation” had been employed by other American orators, including Theodore Parker and Daniel Webster, but the phrasing had been popularized much earlier by the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, who in 1833 called on Young Italy to make revolution “in the name of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Mazzini used similar language in 1851 when he explained Italy’s historic mission by asking “what does it mean if not a living Equality, in other words, Republic of the People, by the people, and for the people?”3
Some in the audience at Gettysburg on that cold November day in 1863 could not hear Lincoln’s surprisingly brief remarks. The photographic evidence shows Lincoln engulfed by a sea of soldiers and civilians surrounding the speaker’s platform. His voice may not have reached all of them that day, but in due time his printed words reached a world far beyond the restless crowd in front of him.
Lincoln had modestly asserted that “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” “He was mistaken,” Charles Sumner later noted. “That speech uttered at the field of Gettysburg and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author is a monumental act.” “The world noted at once what he said and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech. Ideas are always more than battles.”4
Goldwin Smith, an Oxford University history professor, commented from England, “Not a sovereign in Europe, however trained from the cradle for state pomps, and however prompted by statesmen and courtiers, could have uttered himself more regally than did Lincoln at Gettysburg.”5
Lincoln’s understanding of the war as a “trial” of democracy and “a new birth of freedom” pervaded the understanding of the war both at home and abroad by the time he stood for reelection in November 1864. The Republican Party deliberately made the election into a national plebiscite on the war and the future of slavery in America. The party platform squarely denounced slavery as the cause of the war and condemned it for being inherently “hostile to the principles of Republican Government.” Emancipation was not to be just a wartime measure; the Republicans called for slavery’s “utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.” Another prominent plank in the Republican platform denounced attempts by European powers to “obtain new footholds for Monarchical Government, sustained by foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States.”6
From Paris on the eve of the election Professor Édouard Laboulaye put his pen to an eloquent public appeal to American voters to uphold the Great Republic in its hour of trial. He deftly differentiated those sustaining a democracy of labor and freedom and those defending an aristocracy of idleness and slavery, and he left no room for compromise. Laboulaye also warned of the world’s stake in the election. “The Presidential election may insure the triumph or ruin of the North,” Laboulaye put it bluntly. “America may regain peace and become the model of free countries, or she may fall into that incurable anarchy which has made the Spanish Republics the prey of wretched despots, the laughing-stock and plaything of Europe.”
“The world is a solidarity, and the cause of America is the cause of Liberty.” All the world would be watching, Laboulaye wanted Americans to know. “So long as there shall be across the Atlantic a society of thirty millions of men, living happily and peacefully under a government of their choice, with laws made by themselves, liberty will cast her rays over Europe like an illuminating pharos.” Then he warned of dire consequence if they failed to keep liberty’s torch aflame. “But should liberty become eclipsed in the new world, it would become night in Europe, and we shall see the work of Washington, of the Franklins, of the Hamiltons, spit upon and trampled under foot by the whole school which believes only in violence and in success.” America’s cause was the cause of all nations, Laboulaye told America and the world.7
Soldiers in the field came to Lincoln’s aid in the election of 1864 by voting for him (three to one) and encouraging family members at home to support him. Lincoln’s victory owed much both to the soldiers’ affection for him and to their apparent ideological zeal for Union and Liberty. One Union marching song captured the spirit of both:
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore. . . .
You have called us, and we’re coming by Richmond’s bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside;
Or from foul treason’s savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.8
THOUGH AMERICAN WOMEN DID NOT HAVE VOTES, THEY BROUGHT their voices to bear on the election of 1864 by endorsing the cause of Union and Liberty. The Women’s National Loyal League, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, fomented a powerful campaign that defined emancipation as the culmination of American republicanism. Angelina Grimké Weld, the daughter of South Carolina slaveholders and a renowned abolitionist, told the assembled women at the inaugural convention in May 1863 that the nation had been founded on “the great doctrine of brotherhood and equality” and that Lincoln’s 1860 election had sounded the clarion call to complete the work of the founding fathers by ending slavery. The Women’s National Loyal League launched a massive mail campaign that left pamphlets and petitions “scattered like snowflakes from Maine to Texas.” In addition, their mammoth petition drive in support of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish “slavery or involuntary servitude” in the United States forever, gained more than four hundred thousand signatures. “Here they are,” the petitioners announced in February 1864, “a mighty army, one hundred thousand strong, without arms or banners; the advance-guard of a yet larger army.” The petition affirmed that slavery was the “guilty origin of the rebellion,” and remains “a national enemy, to be pursued and destroyed as such,” and that “to save the national life, there is no power, in the ample arsenal of self-defense, which Congress may not grasp.”9
LINCOLN HAD GOOD REASON TO INTERPRET HIS REELECTION IN November 1864 as a popular mandate to destroy slavery and “save the national life.” The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure that was necessary but insufficient, for it left slavery intact in areas outside rebel control. The proclamation also remained clouded by legal uncertainty, and Lincoln feared the courts might strike it down or Congress might overturn it, perhaps as a means of luring the Southern states back into the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment had been passed by the Senate in April 1864, but the House of Representatives remained deeply divided over the question. In January 1865 Lincoln, Seward, and a team of lobbyists and politicians, including radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens, began cajoling, inducing, and, when necessary, bribing congressmen to get the necessary two-thirds majority in the House.10
It was in the midst of this furious lobbying campaign that Francis Preston Blair Sr., a venerable Maryland Republican moderate, asked Lincoln for permission to approach his old friend Jefferson Davis and try to bring the South to the peace table. Two of Blair’s sons, Frank and Montgomery, were prominent Republicans, and the latter was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. That must have helped because Lincoln, though he had reason to be skeptical about the Confederacy’s good faith, was willing to grant the senior Blair safe passage to Richmond.
On January 12, 1865, Blair made the grim journey through the lines to Richmond, passing starving soldiers deserting from Robert E. Lee’s army as he went. He met his old friend Davis at his office and, without delay, read to him the “suggestions” he had prepared for peace and reconstruction. Blair’s plan was a half-mad tour de force that sounded remarkably like Seward’s infamous foreign war panacea, repackaged to serve postwar reconciliation. In short, the South would rejoin the Union, and Jefferson Davis, whose military career began in the Mexican War, would lead an invasion of Mexico with legions of Confederate veterans at the vanguard. They would topple Maximilian from his throne, restore Juárez to power, and reunite Americans in a patriotic war for democracy in North America. Blair hinted that Davis might even conquer northern Mexico for the United States and become military dictator there.
It was a bizarre plan, but Blair’s main point was that the Confederate cause of preserving slavery was doomed. Even the Confederacy, Blair told Davis, had now acknowledged that “all the world condemns” slavery. He alluded to the mission of Duncan Kenner, who, he somehow knew, was on his way to Europe to sacrifice slavery and “appeal for succor to European potentates.” They were offering to sacrifice slavery in order to “enslave themselves” to “foreign protection under the rule of monarchy!” The South was aligning itself with the enemies of American democracy, Blair concluded. Thus, the “War against the Union becomes a War for Monarchy.” He went on to excoriate Napoleon III’s despotic designs to make the Latin race supreme in North America. If Davis followed Blair’s proposal, the rebel leader could become the hero of the hour, “the fortunate man” who can counter Napoleon’s “formidable scheme of conquest” and “at the same time deliver his country from the bloody agony now covering it in mourning.”11
Davis was apparently not dazzled by dreams of glory in Mexico, nor would he concede Confederate independence. He told Blair only that he was willing to negotiate peace between “our two countries.” Francis Blair, undaunted, returned to Washington full of optimism that he had opened the path to peace, and he persuaded a skeptical Lincoln that, though Davis was unyielding, there were many in the Confederate leadership he spoke to in Richmond who realized their situation was hopeless and would come to terms. A meeting between unnamed representatives of the warring parties was agreed to for February 3 at Hampton Roads, Virginia.12
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln signed the bill on February 1, but it would not be law until three-quarters of the states ratified the amendment. Would Southern states be able to come back into the Union and block ratification? Might they even dictate the final terms of slavery’s death and possibly secure compensation from an exhausted Union? Radicals were furious at the thought of Lincoln making concessions to the South at this, their hour of triumph over the Slave Power. Blair and his crowd were willing to pardon rebels, restore confiscated property, award compensation for slaves, and return the Southern states to the nation as if they had not led a rebellion against it for four years.13
On February 3 three Confederate commissioners—Vice President Alexander Stephens, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War Robert Campbell—were escorted through Union lines. As they crossed over the no-man’s-land, soldiers from both sides climbed out of their trenches, cheered, and began chanting, “Peace! Peace!”14
There were additional signals that the Confederate commissioners might accept reunion in defiance of their president, and Lincoln therefore decided at the last minute to join Seward at Hampton Roads. The five men met on a steamboat, the River Queen, where Lincoln greeted the Confederate commissioners warmly and joked with his old friend Alexander Stephens as they sat down to talk.
Lincoln opened the discussion by saying that the restoration of the Union was the main prerequisite for peace, and that was the basis for their meeting. Stephens, as head of the commission, was eager to talk about Blair’s plan for a united invasion of Mexico. Lincoln explained that Blair’s proposal was unauthorized, as everyone knew, but Stephens kept returning to the subject and began waxing patriotic about the “sacred” principles of the Monroe Doctrine. He proposed a cease-fire, followed by an allied Union and Confederate invasion of Mexico. Sometime after rescuing Mexico, the Southern states could come to some kind of “settlement” with the Union.
Lincoln had to make it clear, once again: they were there to discuss terms of reunion, not an armistice between two nations. Stephens then asked what was to become of the slaves, the great majority of whom remained unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. That is when Seward pulled out a copy of the recently passed Thirteenth Amendment.
Lincoln said there was some question as to role of the “insurgent states” in ratifying the amendment. If it required three-quarters of all states, the South might defeat the amendment. Lincoln also tempted the Confederate representatives by speaking of the possibility of compensation for slaves if the South agreed to end its rebellion. When Seward protested, Lincoln magnanimously admitted that the North shared in the blame for slavery and must now share in paying for its abolition.15
There was never any real chance for peace at Hampton Roads. Davis had not authorized any terms of peace that involved reunion or emancipation, while Lincoln insisted on an end to armed rebellion, full emancipation, and full restoration of the Union. The Confederate commissioners had no intention of defying Davis. The meeting ended after four hours, and the war continued to its bitter end.16
SHERMAN’S ARMY RESUMED ITS CRUEL MARCH INTO SOUTH CAROLINA that February. Some thought it was in revenge for the false gesture toward peace at Hampton Roads that his army left the state’s capital, Columbia, in smoldering ruins on February 17. One Confederate general likened Sherman’s invading army to that of Julius Caesar for its ravaging speed. Meanwhile, Grant’s army had entrenched around Petersburg. After months of siege, Robert E. Lee’s army was running short of men, as death, disease, and desertion took their grim toll.
Lincoln’s second inaugural address took place one month after Hampton Roads. It is often lauded for its conciliatory offer of “malice toward none, charity for all,” but that came at the end of a much sterner speech. Lincoln reminded people that the rebellion’s purpose was “to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” slavery, and he speculated that the Almighty had brought “this terrible war” as the only way to remove slavery. “If God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” so be it.17
Confederate diplomats in Europe, meanwhile, were preparing to rescue the South by winning foreign intervention, not by accepting peace and reunion. As Lincoln spoke, Slidell was in Paris, James Mason and Duncan Kenner were in London, and Prince Polignac was en route to France from Louisiana, all bearing offers to sacrifice slavery for independence, or so they were instructed.
In Richmond Jefferson Davis resolved to never surrender, to hold out for aid from Europe, and to keep his cabinet intact so that Kenner, Mason, and Slidell would still represent a government that Europe could recognize. But when Lee warned the president that Petersburg was about to fall and Richmond had to be evacuated, Davis wasted little time. On April 2 he and his cabinet officers boarded a train packed with official papers and gold and silver from the Confederate Treasury. Late that night a government in exile, riding in what was called the “Cabinet Car,” pulled out of Richmond. On Davis’s orders Confederate soldiers set off enormous explosions of munitions after the train left. The fires illuminated the city as desperate mobs of people poured into the streets, plundering, drinking whiskey, and looting whatever the flames did not devour.18
Two days later Lincoln traveled by boat to Richmond, the smoke still rising from its ruins. He walked unescorted through the rubble-strewn streets flanked by scorched chimneys, holding the hand of his young son, Tad. Word of his arrival spread quickly through the city, and large crowds formed. Blacks greeted him with awe, some kneeling, kissing his hand and clothing. In an astonishing gesture of equality, Lincoln removed his hat and bowed before one grateful black man. Union soldiers were frightened that someone might assail the president and at one point stepped in with bayonets to keep the crowds back. Lincoln finally made his way to Jefferson Davis’s home, the Confederate White House, and sat at his desk, pondering the end of a long, hard war.19
On Sunday, April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House, marking the effective end of the fighting. That day Lincoln was visiting the troops at City Point, outside the capital. In honor of a visiting French official, the Marquis de Chambrun, Lincoln asked a military band to play “La Marseillaise,” the French republican anthem banned under Napoleon III’s regime. He told Chambrun he had always liked the tune and noted the irony of a Frenchman having to come to America to hear it. Chambrun, a thorough republican in sympathies, appreciated the gesture, and Lincoln had them play it again. Then the president graciously asked the band to play “Dixie,” which the French visitor had never heard. “That tune is now Federal property,” the president joked, but “it is good to show the rebels that,” quite unlike France, “with us they will be free to hear it again.”20
Even after the news from Appomattox finally reached him in Greensboro, North Carolina, on April 13, Jefferson Davis rejected his generals’ advice and refused to surrender. He now led a fugitive government, whose armies were melting away. Davis held on to dreams of a last stand west of the Mississippi River. “The cause is not yet dead,” he told weary Confederate soldiers in Charlotte. “Determination and fortitude” would yet bring victory.21
In Washington a stage actor named John Wilkes Booth was not ready to see the South surrender, either. For weeks he had been conspiring with others, including agents of the Confederate government, to kidnap President Lincoln, hold him hostage in Richmond, and negotiate the return of prisoners. When that plot failed, and some of the conspirators abandoned him, he turned to an assassination plot whose aim was to decapitate the Union government by killing Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State Seward, and even General Grant. Booth wanted to avenge the South and redeem it from humiliation and defeat, but he also hoped to reignite the South’s will to fight.22
Grant and his wife did not join the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre the night of the assassination, and Johnson was spared by a failure of nerve on the part of Booth’s coconspirator. Seward survived only because another assassin’s gun failed, but he was attacked with a knife that left a horrible gash on his face. Booth was the only one to fully carry out his part of the assassination conspiracy that Friday evening, April 14.23
Jefferson Davis was in Charlotte, North Carolina, when he learned of the assassination four days later on April 19. He had just delivered a brief speech to a sullen, war-weary crowd. “The cause is not yet dead,” he told them. “We may still hope for success.” Someone handed him a telegram with the news. Davis did not openly rejoice, as some accused, but he coldly observed that there were a great many others he would sooner have seen assassinated.24
The assassination gave diehard Confederates new hope, just as Booth had intended. Confederate general Wade Hampton of South Carolina, one of the largest slaveholders in the South, pleaded with Davis to lead a last stand in the West. “We are not conquered,” he implored. “If you should propose to cross the Mississippi I can bring many good men to escort you over.” “If Texas will hold out, or will seek the protectorate of Maximilian, we can still make head against the enemy.” “My plan is to collect all the men who will still stick to their colors, and to get to Texas.”25
Davis wrote to his wife, Varina, on April 23 to tell her he was heading for Mexico, where they might “have the world from which to choose.” Francis Blair’s earlier promise of glory in Mexico must have stayed with him, and it was known that Maximilian was welcoming Confederate refugees. Before he was killed, John Wilkes Booth also planned to seek asylum in Mexico.26
Those members of Davis’s government in exile who remained with the fugitive government were reduced to begging shoddy quarters from citizens or camping out in tents. Judah P. Benjamin decided to say farewell to Davis and made his way to Florida, hired a boat to Havana, and from there sailed to England to begin a new life. Davis was finally captured on May 10 in southern Georgia, camped in tents with his wife and a small military guard. Federal troops arrested him as he tried to escape while disguised in a woman’s coat and shawl, a detail that invited merciless ridicule in the press. He was charged with high treason and imprisoned at Fort Monroe, near Washington, DC, to await his fate.27
Meanwhile, the Union was overcome with grief. News of Lincoln’s assassination struck with painful force, all the more for coming at the jubilant moment of hard-earned victory at war’s end. In many quarters his death was instantly transformed into a narrative of Christian martyrdom—the visit to Richmond the previous week, the assassin’s attack on Good Friday, the slow death that came early Saturday morning all sustained a Christian parable of a man chosen by God to die for the nation’s sins so that others could be free. That Easter Sunday hundreds of sermons interpreted the tragedy as God’s plan for America, the price paid for the sin of slavery and the blessings of returning peace and liberty.28
After the assassination Lincoln’s body lay in state underneath the Capitol dome, the coffin open as tens of thousands of grief-stricken citizens filed by. An enormous funeral procession took place in Washington on Wednesday, April 19, a hallowed day in national history marking the beginning of the American Revolution ninety years earlier. A funeral train returned the body to his home in Springfield, following a circuitous route that took nearly two weeks over seventeen hundred miles of track, moving at a glacial pace at times as people stood through the night with torches lit in silent tribute to the fallen leader as the train slowly passed. Citizens dressed in black and wearing black veils or armbands stood in lines for hours to mourn their slain president.29
Walt Whitman captured the mood as only a poet could:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn30
News of the assassination did not arrive in Europe until April 26. Immediately, long lines of mourners formed outside US legations, and in the coming days and weeks hundreds of condolence letters poured into diplomatic posts in all parts of the world. Some were the obligatory obsequies from one government or head of state to another. Not a few government leaders affirmed—not always honestly—their unwavering support of the Union and their faith in its leader.
36. Britannia Sympathises with Columbia, by John Tenniel, for Punch, May 6, 1865. (COURTESY ALLAN T. KOHL, MINNEAPOLIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN)
What impressed American diplomats abroad, however, were the popular demonstrations of grief and support for America that swept through large cities and distant villages. The letters of condolence and public resolutions, coming from all levels of society and from remote corners of the globe, gave remarkable evidence that people everywhere had been closely following events in America all this time. Their letters revealed an intimate knowledge of Lincoln’s life story, his words and ideas. Even seasoned diplomats who had led the Union’s public diplomacy campaign abroad were surprised by the profusion and boldness of demonstrations of sympathy for Lincoln and America.
There were more than one thousand foreign letters of condolence sent to US legations or directly to Washington. The overwhelming majority were from ordinary citizens, ad hoc town assemblies, Masonic lodges, workers’ trade unions, student organizations, women’s groups, and a wide array of antislavery and reform societies. They came largely from the major cities of Europe and Latin America, but also from small rural villages, and not a few arrived from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.31
John Bigelow was overwhelmed by the public reaction in Paris, not least by the demonstration on April 28 when hundreds of students came through the streets in defiance of the police and broke through their cordon to enter Bigelow’s house and express their sorrow and conviction. “I never saw all classes so entirely moved by any occurrence in a foreign country,” he wrote to his old friend Thurlow Weed. “Strange to say,” he went on, “what has astonished people most is the perfect ease and quiet with which Mr. Lincoln was replaced and the utter uselessness of the crime as a political remedy.” Instead of showing popular government as inherently weak and fragile, America’s trial by war, including the assassination, presented the very opposite lesson. “The mysterious power of republican institutions was never so highly estimated here as now, never,” Bigelow added. “They are compelled to admit that we have found a political secret which none of the Old States of Europe possesses.”32
The letters of condolence emerged from a welter of emotions—jubilant celebrations of triumph for republicanism and emancipation, grief and anger over an assassination that foreigners recognized as the familiar instrument of despots and revolutionaries everywhere. They often expressed admiration for America, the Great Republic, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but rather as the vanguard of a universal struggle for equality and popular government. One eulogy in France’s Avenir National avowed that “Lincoln represented the cause of democracy in the largest and the most universal acceptation of the word. That cause is our cause, as much as it is that of the United States.”33
The citizens of Acireale, a small fishing village on the east coast of Sicily, wonderfully expressed a similar idea: “Abraham Lincoln was not yours only—he was also ours, because he was a brother whose great mind and fearless conscience guided a people to union, and courageously uprooted slavery.” “In President Lincoln,” a group of French medical students proclaimed, “we weep for a fellow citizen; for no country is shut up now.” “We are the fellow citizens of John Brown, of Abraham Lincoln, and of Mr. Seward.” “Your history is the same as ours,” the citizens of Abruzzo, Italy, avowed. “From Lincoln and Seward to Garibaldi and Mazzini, the tradition of the great struggle between good and evil, liberty and slavery, civilization and barbarism, national autonomy and the rule of foreign despots, has ever been the same.”34
Political demonstrations were still prohibited in France, but Lincoln’s death provided an exquisite opportunity to cloak political protest as mourning. Lincoln had once considered joining a Masonic lodge in Springfield and then decided against it out of fear it might harm his political fortunes. But that did not bother the Masonic brotherhood of France. Freemasonry had long been a refuge for liberalism and anticlericalism, and the opportunity to mourn a fallen brother across the ocean provided a welcome occasion to give the emperor a thumb in the eye. The French Masons draped their lodges in black crepe, wore black armbands, organized full Masonic funeral processions, fired salvos, and published declarations of sympathy laced with unsubtle digs at the Second Empire.35
“Abraham Lincoln died like a mason, to elevate humanity outraged by slavery,” one lodge proclaimed. Mourning would carry on for months, even years. The Clement Friendship Lodge vowed to fire a “mortuary salvo” at each session during the next three months to honor him “not only as a brother, but as a friend of the whole human race.” None surpassed the Admirers of the Universe lodge, which vowed to fire a salute on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination over the next ten years.36
In late May Bigelow learned from the US consul in Nantes that a popular subscription had been taken up to present a medal to Mrs. Lincoln. It became known as the “two sous’ subscription” because all contributions were limited to ten centimes (two sous under the old monetary system) as a way of broadening public participation. It said as much about the nervous state of Napoleon III’s regime as it did about the enthusiasm of the French that police moved in, banned further fund-raising, and confiscated the money and subscription lists. Bigelow acidly remarked to the consul in Nantes that he was sorry that the police “did not think it safe for the people of his commune to express two sous’ worth of sympathy for the widow of our murdered president.”37
The two sous’ subscription soon became a cause célèbre, and a group of illustrious republicans calling themselves the Committee of the French Democracy, among them exiled novelist Victor Hugo, took up “the people’s subscription.” Over the next several months they secured no fewer than forty thousand pledges and would have gotten many more were it not for continued government harassment. The medal had to be struck in Geneva, Switzerland, and it was not until the end of 1866 that the “most eminent republicans of France” presented the medal to Bigelow.38
37. The French medal for Mrs. Lincoln, presented by the Committee of the French Democracy. (AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF MICHELLE KROWL, ABRAHAM LINCOLN PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
“If France possessed the liberties enjoyed by republican America, it is not by thousands, but by millions that would be counted, with us, the admirers of Lincoln, and the partisans of those opinions to which he devoted his life, and which are consecrated by his death,” the committee’s letter accompanying the medal explained. On behalf of the Committee of the French Democracy, Eugène Pelletan presented the medal to Bigelow in a small purple velvet box and said, “Tell Mrs. Lincoln that in this little box is the heart of France.”39
The medal, now in the Library of Congress, was struck in solid gold, over three inches in diameter and more than a quarter of an inch thick. On one side was a profile of Lincoln with an inscription in French around the edge: “Dedicated by the French democracy to Lincoln, twice elected President of the United States.” On the other side was the image of an African American man and boy and a mourning angel flanking a tombstone that was inscribed, “Lincoln, an honest man, abolished slavery, reestablished the union, saved the Republic without veiling the statue of liberty.” Below was the French revolutionary slogan, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. If the medal represented the heart of France, it also signified the resurgent ideological zeal of French republicanism.40
IN APRIL 1865 JOHN BIGELOW BECAME US MINISTER TO FRANCE. The previous December his predecessor, William Dayton, was found dead, apparently from a stroke, at the Hotel de Louvre in the apartment of a certain Lizzie St. John Eckel, whom Bigelow described as a “rather pretty and decidedly enterprising widow” who had fled an unhappy past in Canada and New York for Paris. There she soon became engaged to a man some eighty years old, “a count of some sort,” Bigelow thought. The American doctor summoned to the scene was a family friend, and he quietly arranged a carriage to secretly transport the corpse back to the US legation. Then, in collusion with Dayton’s son and perhaps his wife, the doctor concocted a story about too much pumpkin pie contributing to a tragic death during a late night at the office. Dayton was never known for his diligence in office, and Madam Eckel’s reputation as an adventuress and the mystery surrounding Dayton’s death naturally fed the Parisian appetite for scandal.
Paris gossipers were not the only curious ones; after Bigelow sent the report on his investigation, Seward pressed him to disclose more about the character of Madam Eckel and the physician’s opinion as to whether anything occurred “by which the apoplexy may have been occasioned.” Bigelow had gone along with the Dayton family story to shield them from embarrassment, but he wrote a highly confidential letter to Seward that he asked him to read and burn. Based on the state of Dayton’s clothing, as Bigelow delicately put it, the doctor had indeed surmised that “something had been going on to which neither party could afford to have witnesses.” Madam Eckel had also confided to Bigelow that Mr. Dayton was “fond of her and in the habit of using endearing language to her when they were together.” The doctor had also told him that she betrayed her misconduct by falling on her knees before the doctor and hysterically begging him to “protect her reputation.” No doubt she was concerned with what her aging fiancé might make of all this. Bigelow reported further that other parts of the Dayton family’s story were false and that the rumors in Paris clubs and at the police station were that “his death was the consequence de faire amour [of making love] too soon after dinner.”41
Bigelow had become accustomed to covering for Dayton’s lapses as a diplomat during the previous four years; now he found himself filling the void entirely. In early April he was appointed to succeed Dayton as US minister to France.
As July 4, 1865, approached, Bigelow decided to make Independence Day a magnificent celebration. He magnanimously offered to stand treat for a giant fête champêtre, an outdoor garden party in the Bois de Boulogne, a grand Parisian park. Every American in Europe that he knew, or even heard of, was invited. So, too, were the entire foreign diplomatic corps in Paris; prominent members of the French government, along with their wives, children, and domestic servants; and any others they might wish to bring. The invitation list exceeded five hundred, and upwards of seven hundred showed up. They crowded into an immense tent festooned with American flags and bunting; inside were banquet tables, a band, and an enormous carpet rolled out for dancing.
In his welcoming remarks Bigelow reveled in the glory of the day. The American Union was safe again, he told the crowd, and “democratic-republican Government is no longer an experiment.” The Fourth of July, he added, had “now acquired an importance in the eyes of mankind which it never possessed before.”
The celebration rounded off with music, entertainment, and dancing into the night. Guests gathered outside the tent to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and watch a stupendous display of fireworks. The grand finale featured an enormous American eagle, with Daniel Webster’s famous words ablaze: “The Union now and forever, one and inseparable.” As Bigelow’s fireworks lit up the sky over Paris, lusty republican cheers went up from the Bois de Boulogne that might have been heard as far as the Tuileries Palace.42