ALSO BY MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
Jefferson’s Demons The Last Patrician
Forge of Empires
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Copyright © 2007 by Michael Beran
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First Free Press hardcover edition October 2007
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beran, Michael Knox.
Forge of empires, 1861-1871: three revolutionary statesmen and
the world they made / Michael Knox Beran.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865—Influence. 2. Bismarck, Otto, Fürst von, 1815-1898—Influence. 3. Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, 1818-1881—Influence. 4. Statesmen—History—19th century. 5. United States—History—1849-1877. 6. Germany—History—1848-1870. 7. Russia—History—Alexander II, 1855-1881. I. Title.
E457.B44 2007
909.81—dc22 2007007021
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7070-0
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7070-0 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7158-2 (eBook)
To my wife
You surely remember that we found pertaining to such a nature courage, grandeur of soul, aptness to learn, remembrance. . . . And it is from men of this type that those spring who do the greatest harm to communities and individuals, and the greatest good . . . but a small nature never does anything great to a man or a city.
—PLATO
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Contents
Note to the Reader
Prologue
THREE DEATHS
Part One
INTO THE PIT
Part Two
THE REVOLUTIONS AT THEIR HEIGHT
Part Three
FREEDOM AND TERROR
Epilogue
THE ORDEAL OF LIBERTY
Abbreviations in Notes and Sources
Notes and Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Note to the Reader
In Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson’s book on the literature of the American Civil War, there is a passage in which Wilson compares Abraham Lincoln to Otto von Bismarck and Vladimir Lenin.
The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century; it has continued to be strong in this; and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. . . . Lincoln and Bismarck and Lenin were all men of unusual intellect and formidable tenacity of character, of historical imagination combined with powerful will. They were all, in their several ways, idealists, who put their ideals before everything else. All three were solitary men, who lived with their concentration of purpose. None liked to deal in demagogy and none cared for official pomp: even Bismarck complained that he could not be a courtier and assured Grant and others—as he must have believed quite sincerely—that he was not really a monarchist but a republican. Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples.
In my attempt to compare three revolutionary statesmen, I have dwelt somewhat more than Wilson on differences in revolutionary characters and revolutionary methods. No doubt I have been influenced by my own (indirect) experience of the revolutions which Lincoln, Bismarck, and Alexander II made. My paternal grandfather was born a subject of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Carl Beran came from a German-Czech-Croat family which, at the beginning of the last century, was living in Croatia in Austria-Hungary. He and his family emigrated to the United States four decades after Austria’s defeat by Bismarck’s Prussians at Sadowa prepared the way for the German statesman’s revolution.
The fate of my grandfather’s cousin, who remained in Europe, testifies to the consequences of that revolution. Father Joseph Beran was a Roman Catholic priest in Prague, seventy miles west of Sadowa. He taught pastoral theology there and in the 1930s became Rector of the Seminary. Beran’s biographer recounts how, one day in 1939, the rumble of German tanks and sound of German jackboots “penetrated the leaden casement windows of the cathedral school.” “Symbol of the Anti-Christ,” Father Beran said quietly, before he resumed his lecture. In June 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and in the autumn of 1942 he was deported to Dachau as Prisoner No. 35844. In his book Memories of Dachau, the Communist leader Vojteck Bincak said that “Dr. Beran was one of the best and noblest characters I knew in the camp.” The emaciated priest, clad in rags, was liberated by American troops—citizens of the Republic Lincoln’s revolution saved—in May 1945. After celebrating a Mass of Thanksgiving, Father Beran returned to Prague, where in December 1946 he was consecrated Archbishop of Prague and Metropolitan Bishop of Bohemia in Saint Vitus Cathedral. He was later persecuted by the Russian Communists—servants of a régime which might never have come into existence had Alexander II’s revolution succeeded. On a family trip to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1978 I saw with my own eyes the bleakness of the dispensation under which Cardinal Beran lived during the latter part of his life. My family was living in London at the time and I had just read Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra. My parents, struck, I suppose, by my curiosity about Russia, took me to see the country for myself.
Very different was the experience of my mother’s family. My mother’s mother’s family comes from Springfield, Illinois. The family’s house at 413 South Seventh Street, though it is no longer in the possession of the Grahams, is around the corner from the Lincoln house at 430 South Eighth Street. My grandmother’s house in Erie, Pennsylvania, was filled with souvenirs of Lincoln, among them the portrait of the President which now hangs in my living room.
Here in a small way is evidence of the different effects produced by different types of statesmanship. My father’s relations were forced to flee their homeland, and my grandfather’s cousin came close to perishing in a concentration camp. My mother’s family prospered in Springfield and Erie, unmolested by authority.
Hundreds of books have analyzed the rise and fall of free states during the modern period, and have described the emergence of the authoritarian régimes: but none, I think, has placed a sufficient emphasis on the revolutions of 1861-1871, a decade which forms one of the most interesting chapters in the annals of human freedom, and which at the same time witnessed the emergence of novel philosophies of terror and coercion.
Prologue
THREE DEATHS
TWO OF THE THREE revolutionary leaders died violently.
The first expired after a .41-caliber bullet pierced the back of his skull. The bullet passed through the soft tissue of the brain before coming to rest near one of the eye sockets, which its force fractured. The American President was carried to a nearby house, where, shortly after seven o’clock on the following morning, he ceased to breathe. A few seconds later his heart stopped beating.
The other leader saw his belly ripped open and his bowels strewed across a city street. Chunks of flesh glistened in the snow as the R
ussian Tsar was placed on a sleigh and taken, by his Cossacks, to his palace to die.
Of the three revolutionary leaders, only the German Chancellor died peacefully in his bed, at the age of eighty-three.
THE CORPSE OF the Russian Tsar was conveyed, in accordance with the forms of the imperial court and the Orthodox Church, to the sepulcher where his ancestors slept. But there were few signs of grief in Saint Petersburg. Alexander II died unloved. The reward for his revolutionary statesmanship was ingratitude, and his funeral was awkward. The embalmer contemplated the Tsar’s body, or what remained of it, and the decision was at last taken to amputate the shattered lower extremities. While the morticians despaired over the corpse, the courtiers were vexed by a different problem, the difficulty of finding accommodation for the horde of foreign dignitaries who descended upon Saint Petersburg in a mass of special trains from Warsaw and Berlin. The German Crown Prince found himself quartered in an art gallery.
A more delicate question was presented by the imperial concubine. Ordinarily the widow of the sovereign would have been recognized as one of the principal mourners; but in this case the arrangements were complicated by the fact that Alexander had, shortly after the death of his first wife, the Empress Mary, married his mistress. The second marriage was performed in secret and was morganatic; the bride could not be countenanced openly by her husband. Doubtless it was hard on Ekaterina Mikhailovna, the young lady in question, to be the disreputable party in a mésalliance, for she was not a courtesan. She was not even an actress. Katya, as she was called, was descended from the ancient nobility of Russia. But she was of noble rather than royal or imperial blood, and what the Tsar’s nephew, Grand Duke Alexander, called “a heartless law” obliged members of the imperial family to marry royalty. It was rumored that Alexander had resolved to break with this tradition; he would reveal his marriage to his people, raise Katya to the throne, and place the crown of an empress on her chestnut locks. But none of this had come to pass when he met his untimely end in a Saint Petersburg street.
Katya was shunted aside as the corpse of her lover was conveyed, past crowds of undemonstrative Russians, to the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the dungeon and crypt of the Russian tsars. The midday sun gleamed on the golden dome of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral as the procession of guards and priests, mitres and chasubles, swords and scepters made its way through the city. But on history’s dial darkness was falling. With the death of Alexander, the dynasty of the Romanovs began to pass into the shadows.
On the day of the interment, Katya, heavily veiled, waited with the rest of the court at the foot of the grand staircase of the Winter Palace. With her were her three children, each of whom had been sired by the late Tsar. There was George, a boy of eight, who was called “Gogo.” Beside him were his little sisters, Olga and Katya. They watched as their stepbrother, the new Tsar, swept down the staircase. Alexander III resembled his father scarcely at all. The dead Tsar had been rather handsome, with intelligent, protruding eyes. Mark Twain, who saw him in the Crimea, thought him “very tall and spare ... a determined-looking man, though a very pleasant-looking one, nevertheless.” Alexander III, by contrast, was oppressively large and mentally limited. By his side was his consort, the new Tsaritsa, Dagmar of Denmark,1. a diminutive brunette. Young and radiant, gliding across a marble floor she seemed scarcely to touch, she had no intimation then that her own destiny was to be darker than Katya’s, and that as an old woman she would sit sobbing in a railway carriage as she watched her eldest son, Nicky, the last of the tsars, led away to captivity and death.
Katya lifted her veils at the approach of their Imperial Majesties. Dagmar, the new Tsaritsa, beheld, for a moment, her tear-stained face. Young and appealing though the face was—Katya, like Dagmar, was in her thirty-fourth year—it was nonetheless the face of a stepmother. The courtiers held their breath. Before his death, Alexander had insisted that Dagmar and the other grand duchesses make Katya the obeisance traditionally accorded a Russian empress. The rôles were now reversed. Dagmar was Empress. If she held out her hand stiffly and formally, it fell to Katya to make the gesture of submissive humility. But the new Tsaritsa did not, just then, insist on her imperial dignity. She acted, not as an empress, but as a woman. She embraced Katya. Some observers leapt to the conclusion that the hearts of the new Tsar and his consort had been softened, and that Katya was henceforth to be regarded as a member of the imperial family. But the new Tsaritsa’s burst of compassion sprang rather from a momentary impulse of humanity than a deliberate decision to recognize the claims of her father-in-law’s seraglio. The imperial family passed out of the palace and climbed into the state coaches. Katya was not invited to ride with them.
A heavy snow fell as the carriages made their way to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. The soldiers who lined the route stood shivering in their greatcoats. The horses struggled to pull their loads of gilt and royalty through the drifting snow. At last the cavalcade reached the fortress. In the chapel, the imperial party found a solemn and gorgeous scene. Sable-mantled monks with lighted tapers in their hands stood chanting passages of Scripture. A flickering light played upon the marble tombs of the Romanovs. But there was no sense of what had been lost. As in life, so in death, Alexander contrived to smother his own poetry.
The new Tsar alone seemed to cherish a desire to linger over the dead Tsar’s remains. When he went to kiss his father’s lifeless hands, Alexander III was seen several times to bend over the corpse. The coffin was then sealed and lowered into the vault, into which the mourners threw sand and leaves, according to an ancient custom.
IN CONTRAST TO the cold formality of the dead Tsar’s obsequies, the murdered President was borne to his tomb with such improvised ceremony as could be arranged, in the hysteria of the moment, to satisfy the somewhat morbid requirements of the citizenry. Many Americans felt the need to be close to the body, and a certain amount of democratic intimacy with the corpse was permitted, or perhaps encouraged, by members of the dead President’s party, who knew that martyrdom is a potent form of publicity. In New York, where Lincoln’s remains were deposited, for a time, in City Hall, the coffin was opened, and some of the mourners, when they entered the chamber, attempted to touch or kiss the face of the deceased magistrate. The corpse, which had already assumed an unnaturally dark hue, turned black with the accumulation of popular grime. An embalmer was several times summoned to wipe the greasy film which coated the President’s features, and to close the sagging jaw, which had so far fallen as to reveal the teeth. It became unseemly.
But the simplicity of the country people redeemed the spectacle. The train bearing the President’s body sped through the countryside, where spring was coming into flower, and at remote crossroads, in isolated villages, on the borders of desolate farms, Americans lined the tracks to salute the murdered leader. Many pressed handkerchiefs to their eyes. Women stood with babies in their arms. Schoolchildren clutched American flags wreathed in black. In gaslit railway stations, groups of maidens gathered to sing hymns; clothed in virginal white, they wore black sashes across their bosoms. Some of the mourners held aloft hand-lettered signs: “HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS DUE.” “THE ILLUSTRIOUS MARTYR.” WASHINGTON, THE FATHER, LINCOLN, THE SAVIOR OF HIS COUNTRY. THOUGH DEAD, HE YET SPEAKETH.”
The railroad car which carried Lincoln’s remains had been specially acquired by the Federal government for the President’s use. In life Lincoln had often traveled in it; it was comfortably furnished and contained a parlor and a bedroom. To receive him in death the car had been robed in black, and black curtains hung at the windows. Accompanying the body were members of the President’s family, an assortment of friends and dignitaries, and reporters from the Associated Press, the New-York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the Chicago Tribune. In the depths of the night, as the train raced across central New York, those aboard were astonished by the size of the crowds that waited to watch the President’s coffin pass. In the little towns of Memphis and Warrens,
mourners stood with flaming torches. At Rochester, at three in the morning, the train was met by the Mayor and a large congregation of citizens.
Soon the dead President was in Illinois. COME HOME,” one sign read. “GO TO THY REST,” said another. After stopping in Chicago, the train cut through the prairie to Springfield, the capital of Illinois and Lincoln’s hometown. His remains were brought to the statehouse, where they lay in state overnight. At noon the next day, under a bright sun, the coffin was carried down the steps to a hearse. Hundreds of mourners began to sing—
Children of the Heavenly King, as ye journey sweetly sing:
Sing your Saviour’s worthy praise, glorious in His works and ways.
We are traveling home to God, in the way the fathers trod:
They are happy now, and we soon their happiness shall see.
The coffin was brought to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where it was laid in a limestone sepulcher.
OF THE THREE revolutionary leaders, the German Chancellor alone escaped a violent death. It was a dubious blessing, for Otto von Bismarck felt to the full the bitterness of his dying. Lincoln and Alexander were cut down in the vigor of power; Bismarck alone outlived his potency, and learned what it was to be cast aside by history. The accession of a new Kaiser spelled the end of his power and pre-eminence. Wilhelm II, who had recently ascended the throne of the Empire Bismarck created, was eager to be rid of his family’s ancient factotum. The young Kaiser’s nervous excitability, his unpredictable desires, his indiscreet lectures—half Lutheran sermon, half Neronian tirade—gave one observer “the impression of a sufferer from hysteria.” Tsar Nicholas II, grandson of the murdered Alexander, was blunter in his assessment of “Cousin Willy.” “He’s raving mad!” exclaimed Nicholas.
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