A captivating look at how Abraham Lincoln
evolved into one of our seminal foreign-policy
presidents—and helped point the way to America’s rise to
world power. This is the story of one
of the most breathtaking feats in the annals of American
foreign policy—performed by one of the most unlikely
figures. Abraham Lincoln is not often remembered as a
great foreign-policy president. He had never traveled
overseas and spoke no foreign languages. And yet, during
the Civil War, Lincoln and his team skillfully managed
to stare down the Continent’s great powers—deftly
avoiding European intervention on the side of the
Confederacy. In the process, the United States emerged
as a world power in its own right.
Engaging, insightful, and highly
original, Lincoln in the World is a tale set at
the intersection of personal character and national
power. The narrative focuses tightly on five distinct,
intensely human conflicts that helped define Lincoln’s
approach to foreign affairs—from his debate, as a young
congressman, with his law partner over the conduct of
the Mexican War, to his deadlock with Napoleon III over
the French occupation of Mexico. Bursting with colorful
characters like Lincoln’s bowie-knife-wielding minister
to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay; the cunning French
empress, Eugénie; and the hapless Mexican monarch
Maximilian—Lincoln in the World draws a finely
wrought portrait of a president and his team at the dawn
of American power. In the Age of Lincoln,
we see shadows of our own world. The international arena
in the 1860s could be a merciless moral vacuum.
Lincoln’s times demanded the cold, realistic pursuit of
national interest, and, in important ways, resembled our
own increasingly multipolar world. And yet, like ours,
Lincoln’s era was also an information age, a period of
rapid globalization. Steamships, telegraph wires, and
proliferating new media were transforming the world.
Global influence required the use of “soft power” as
well as hard. Anchored by meticulous
research into overlooked archives, Lincoln in the
World reveals the sixteenth president to be one of
America’s indispensable diplomats—and a key architect of
America’s emergence as a global superpower. Much has
been written about how Lincoln saved the Union,
but Lincoln in the World highlights the
lesser-known—yet equally vital—role he played on the
world stage during those tumultuous years of war and
division.
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