Why Bismarck Loved Lincoln

[hank scorpio]

Interesting Op-ed to start the day.

Why Bismarck Loved Lincoln

We usually think of the Civil War as a uniquely American event, a war unlike any other fought in the Western world during the 19th century. And of course that’s true, strictly speaking: no other country saw itself split in two over slavery. But that’s not the only way to think of the war. Put a different way, the Civil War was just one of several wars for national unification — including fighting in Italy and Germany — on both sides of the Atlantic during the mid-19th century.

While countries like Britain and France were concentrating on expansion through colonization, the United States, Germany and others were focused inward, developing — intentionally or not — the centralizing powers that have defined the modern state ever since. What seems like a particularly American event was really part of a much larger, and much more significant, historical trend.

As a war of national unification, the Civil War represented a sharp historical break, a moment of crisis that would define the country’s course for decades to come. Beforehand, the notions of national unification and expansion had been indivisible: just 15 years prior, the United States defeated Mexico in a bloody war that brought vast territories under occupation and destroyed the delicate balance between slave and free states. Some people predicted the worst. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1846, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Ulysses S. Grant went so far as to declare the Civil War divine punishment for the Mexican conflict.

Indeed, the Mexican War fueled an ongoing debate about how large the country should get. Canada, or parts of Canada, had been sought by eager expansionists virtually since the two parts of British North America went their separate ways in 1776; spreading the plantation economy to Mexico and beyond — the so-called purple dream — had long animated the Southern imagination.

Even as the Civil War began, Mexico continued to fester and tempt interventionists. It announced in mid-July 1861 that it could not service its debts, having just ended its own civil war (called the War of the Reform), and so suspended payments to its European creditors. This was not unusual, but this time the country’s creditors did more than reiterate demands for payment: the British, French and Spanish governments joined forces in October to compel Mexico to pay; by the end of the year the city of Vera Cruz was occupied.


The British and the Spanish soon reversed course, but Napoleon III of France, in league with Mexican reactionaries, persevered: he sought nothing less than a new Catholic empire in the Western Hemisphere under his auspices (thence the term “Latin” America). French troops occupied Mexico City and installed a Hapsburg archduke, Maximilian, as emperor. He lasted until 1867 when, having lost the war against his opponents and even the backing of Napoleon, he was executed by a Mexican firing squad.

Here, then, was a major challenge to Washington, an act of aggression in the Western Hemisphere by European countries and thus a direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Some in Abraham Lincoln’s administration may have urged him to strike, to invade Mexico and push the Europeans out before they dug in. But Lincoln rejected any such advice.

In part it was a matter of expediency; the Union had more pressing matters to its south to deal with. But it was also a resetting of the course of the American state. As Lincoln saw it, “older” powers like Britain, France and Russia could go on to see imperial archipelagos flourish, but “younger” states should opt for geographic and political consolidation and centralization at home. Lincoln thus rebuffed the idea of conquering and colonizing Canadians and Mexicans in favor of building a new nation to the Pacific. It’s no surprise that Lincoln would prefer this path: as a Midwesterner, his mental map extended more horizontally than vertically — east to west rather than north to south. But first he had to stop the American South from going its own way.

Lincoln wasn’t alone in prioritizing centralization. Giuseppe Garibaldi and his fellow campaigners for Italy’s unification — which had just been proclaimed in March — would have understood this, as would nationalists (sometimes called “unitarios”) elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, notably in Argentina, Colombia and Canada, whose confederation debate got going at about the same time. As a matter of fact, Lincoln authorized a commission for Garibaldi in the Union Army. Garibaldi turned it down — evidently because freeing the slaves was not yet sufficiently high on the list of the Union’s war aims — yet Lincoln’s offer underscores the fellowship between America’s war of unification and those taking place in other parts of the world.

Perhaps no one was more in tune with Lincoln than Otto von Bismarck, the minister-president of Prussia. Beginning in 1862, Bismarck unified Germany, but he explicitly rejected the idea of a “Großdeutschland,” or “Greater Germany,” incorporating Austria, in favor of a “kleindeutsche Lösung,” or “Little German Solution,” that preferred centralization over maximum territorial expansion. This may have been one reason why, after the Civil War ended, Bismarck reportedly sounded out Washington on an alliance. It made sense: Europe’s rising industrial and military power seeking common cause with an American counterpart that seemed destined for the same.

Unifying states needed more than just will; they needed propitious events and conditions. In Germany’s case, it was the Crimean War — triggered, incidentally, by Napoleon III, following his 1851 coup — that made unification possible by putting an end to the Anglo-Russian condominium underpinning the European, and therefore global, balance of power. In the United States it was the country’s “free” security (provided in large measure by the British Navy) that allowed for its territorial expansion and consolidation.

And so the old order gave way to a new, contested one on both sides of the Atlantic; unification would come in both places by force. If the Crimean War had set the stage for the wars of unification in Germany and Italy, and the Mexican War did so for the war of unification in the United States, then it’s worth asking: if there had been no Crimean War, might there still have been an American Civil War? Probably so; civil wars by definition happen largely for internal reasons. But without the conflict in Europe, the American war would not have been the nationalist achievement of world-historical import, as Lincoln, Bismarck and later generations understood it.

In other words, the Civil War — as significant as it is for American history — is even more important when viewed through a comparative, transatlantic lens. The fight for internal unification rather than expansion meant that never again would the United States seek to conquer and annex its neighbors. It would, along with Bismarck’s Germany, be a new kind of state: centralized, rationalized and mobilized to dominate the coming century.

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[Ivytalk]

It was a very interesting article, but the historical parallel between the unified Germany and the unified USA ended no later than August 1914.

[GannonFan]

Kind of a blah-blah article though. It conjectures that some in the Lincoln administration seriously talked about taking on Britain, France, and Spain for their incursions into Mexico, which didn't even start until the middle of 1861? Come on, Bull Run happened in the summer of 1861, and the entire Confederacy had seceeded long before then. Lincoln didn't turn to consolidating internally as some decision to do that or expand, he came into office into a nation that was already fractured. Colonization had been receeding as a means of expanding power for most of the previous century, and even more so in the Northern Hemisphere. The question of Canada was basically settled by the War of 1812 and by the Oregon Treaty 25 years later. And we had taken all that we were going to get from Mexico when we ended up getting Texas, California, and the rest of our current Southwest from them after the Mexican War. Expansion by conquest had already run it's course so it's not like it was still a really viable option for us. And besides, if it was, you could argue that the Spanish American War ran counter to this article as we did expand our power again, apparently against the course of world history.

It's not a terribly written article, but I don't see the evidence that Lincoln was taking any kind of world view with regards to our Civil War and how it played against the backdrop of worlwide momentum. Lincoln's task was far more immediate and focused, i.e. save the nation.

[Ibanez]

Very interesting. It's neat to see how these things occur and cause other events. Like the American Revolution and the French Revolution. GOod read.

[BigSkyBears]

My last class in college was a course on 19th Cent Europe. I really like it. I thought it was interesting and one of my favorite classes.