James S. Pike: President Lincoln's Minister to the Netherlands

Abstract

BORN and raised in Calais, Maine, James S. Pike became J famous man in the 1850's as one of the fieriest political writers for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. His reward for long career in the antislavery movement came in the troubled spring of 1861 when Abraham Lincoln named him, along with numerous other Republican journalists, to diplomatic post. Pike wanted Brussels. got instead The Hague. From 1861 until 1866 the Downeaster relished the pleasures and trials of European life that was both distant from and yet peculiarly related to the mighty conflict at home. Like the majority of his colleagues from America, Pike possessed few of the talents of the experienced diplomat. In the matter of language, for example, he considered learning Dutch as out of the question. Dutch was not essential, at any rate, since French remained the continental language of diplomacy. Pike's notebooks indicate that he did struggle with French. There are scribbled vocabulary studies and laborious conjugations of trying French verbs. When self-education proved inadequate in the intricacies of French, especially conversational French, Minister Pike consoled himself with the thought that forcing a free born American to learn two or three foreign languages constituted virtual enslavement. reasoned that man's learning foreign languages after reaching the age of fifty resembled that same man's going to gymnasium to acquire acrobatic tricks. He can do it, but the old joints supple themselves slowly.1 Pike managed to clear linguistic hurdles apparently without serious mishap. But there were reasons other than linguistic which caused his dislike of the diplomatic routine. Zealous republican and egalitarian though he might be,