Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power by Kevin Peraino (review)

Few stones remain unturned within the voluminous historiography on Abraham Lincoln. Until recently, one such stone was the international Lincoln. Within the past decade, Jay Sexton and Richard Carwardine have illuminated the diplomatic and global cultural impact of the sixteenth president during and after his lifetime. Kevin Peraino deepens this burgeoning field in his study of Lincoln as a foreign-policy thinker and actor, Lincoln in the World. Using an impressive array of published and archival sources, Peraino argues that Lincoln was “one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents” (13). Though the Illinoisan spoke no language other than English and never left the United States, his ability to protect the crisis-laden Union and its interests from foreign threats enabled the postwar nation’s global “rise to power” (15).

According to Peraino, Lincoln achieved foreign-policy success because he pursued national interests in clear-eyed fashion. The president, as Peraino portrays him, was both a “principled idealist and a pragmatic realist” (55). Lincoln dreamed of an American economic empire free of European influence that could shape the world in its image. At the same time, however, he understood that idealistic ends required “coldly rational” means (128). In a world where Bismarckian realpolitik had replaced the orthodox moralistic order promulgated by the Concert of Europe, Lincoln believed that “rational self-interest” rather than “self-righteous crusading” should dictate foreign policy (128). He successfully pursued that interest and in the process built the institutions, such as a strong central government and an imperial presidency that would form the core of future American power.

Peraino explores Lincoln’s foreign policy through five chronological vignettes. After a brief first chapter examining then-congressman Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War in the 1840s, Peraino hits his stride discussing Lincoln’s pragmatic foreign policy during the Civil War. His second and third chapters cover the president’s respective conflicts with Secretary of State William Seward and British prime minister Lord Palmerston in 1861 and 1862. Peraino’s discussion of the Trent affair is especially well done. He deftly sketches the president’s strategic chess match against the similarly pragmatic British leader. Peraino champions Lincoln’s choice of compromise with Palmerston in the short term, which avoided European intervention in the Civil War and thus enabled American power in the long term (5).

Peraino’s fourth chapter, his most original, discusses Lincoln’s appreciation of soft power. The president understood that modern tools of communication, such as the telegraph and the daily press, were powerful instruments in international competition. After Lincoln embraced emancipation in 1862—a now-familiar narrative that Peraino spends too much time rehashing—he worked to rally foreign audiences behind his reimagined war aim. Peraino casts Lincoln’s direct and indirect addresses to British workingmen as brilliant acts of political imagination. By communicating “new narratives” about the purpose of the Union war to the British public, the president extinguished the possibility of Anglo-French intervention (174). Peraino concludes with a thorough examination of Lincoln’s prevention of an American invasion of French-occupied Mexico in 1865—another tactical retreat in the face of European power that would, by giving the nation time to reunite, enable its later rise.

Nonetheless, Peraino’s book does have a few shortcomings. The author fails to devote enough space to the origins of the president’s pragmatic worldview. How did Lincoln learn of and embrace realpolitik in the international arena? Peraino does not say, nor does he adequately explain Lincoln’s nationalistic motivations. Perhaps in deference to modern mores, he downplays Lincoln’s American exceptionalism. He analyzes the Second Inaugural Address as a “seminal foreign-policy document” that casts the Union as “one nation among others—not as God’s chosen people on earth” (282). As Carwardine and Gary Gallagher have illustrated, however, Lincoln—and most Americans...