Lincoln in the World.

• Author: Brown, John H.

Title: Lincoln in the World

Author: John H. Brown

Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power by Kevin Peraino, New York: Crown Publishers, 2013 ISBN 978-0-307-88720-7, eISBN 978-0-307-88722-1, Hardcover, 419 pp., $26.00 (hardcover), $15.00 (trade paperback).

Diplomacy isn't as American as apple pie. "The Founding Fathers," veteran foreign affairs correspondent Kevin Peraino tells us in the book under review, "derided the art of diplomacy itself." Thomas Jefferson characterized Old World diplomacy as "the pest of the peace of the world." And Horace Greeley, the influential mid-19th century New York editor, condemned "the unprincipled egotism that is the soul of European diplomacy."

On the other side of the pond, the political elite was by no means admiring of U.S. diplomacy. The aristocratic but mostly sympathetic observer of American democratic life, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it this way: "I do not hesitate to say that it is especially in their conduct of foreign relations that democracies appear to be decidedly inferior to other governments."

Honest Abe Lincoln--the president who saved the Union--never travelled outside the USA. Born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, the closest he "ever came to immersing himself in a foreign culture" was when he went to New Orleans as a young man, according to the historian Richard Campanella. In the Rail Splitter's 1860 presidential campaign, Peraino notes, foreign policy was "largely a sideshow to the overriding issue: slavery and the possibility of Southern secession."

After his election, Lincoln told one foreign envoy (in a statement twice quoted by Peraino) "I don't know anything about diplomacy." And, in 1861, when severe tensions developed between the United States and Great Britain over the seizure off the Cuban coast of two Confederate diplomats on a British ship (the HMS Trent) by a U.S. navy vessel, Lincoln observed to a critic that "I don't know anything about the law of nations. I'm a good enough lawyer in a western law court, I suppose, but we don't practice the law of nations up there."

So, some would say, Lincoln, because of his provincial origins and self-effacing comments about his lack of international expertise, was a foreign policy naif who depended on the cosmopolitan Secretary of State from an eastern state (New York), William Henry Seward, to handle diplomacy during the country's greatest domestic crisis, the Civil War.

Peraino's book is, in...