Lincoln's Diplomacy

[Don1946]

I also want to recommend Kevin Peraino, _Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power_, which just came out.
Monaghan is criticized for exaggerating Lincoln's involvement in diplomacy. I agree, but he was among the pioneers who pointed to the importance of foreign relations to the Civil War.
Seward was the mastermind behind Union diplomacy, for better and for worse, I would add. He usually serves as a foil for those who treat Lincoln as the ever sagacious wise man, Seward the bellicose, blustering, foolish overreaching "prime minister" ... you can almost see it coming in biographies of Lincoln. Walter Stahr gives Seward a fresh look as Lincoln's indispensable man and an earlier book by John Taylor makes a similar argument for Seward as his right hand man.
The two men began as rivals, as Doris Kearns Goodwin emphasized, but they developed a very close, symbiotic working relationship that really helped steer the Union through its domestic and foreign policy.
Another recent treatment of foreign policy, Union and CSA, is Howard Jones, _Blue and Gray Diplomacy ..._ It is a fine treatment of the diplomatic history of the war.