Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  Bismarck, from the Olympian heights of his power, was unable to take the imperial lunatic quite seriously. This was understandable, yet it is dangerous to condescend to a sovereign, especially one as excitable as Wilhelm. Bismarck saw too late the obstinacy of his young master, and all his maneuvers and stratagems were ineffectual. The new Kaiser was self-willed, and he was vain. He gloried in the emblems of Prussian militarism, in the Black Eagles and Death’s-Heads. He possessed another, no less unnerving habit; he liked to fondle the hairs of his guard’s moustache, which turned up cruelly at the ends. But the culture of the barracks formed only a part of Wilhelm’s idiosyncratic mental equipment, and somewhere in that strange intelligence the swaggering soldier yielded pride of place to the quivering lover of beauty. In the rococo light of the palace at Potsdam, the sternness of the parade-ground martinet dissolved, and visitors were startled to find a sensitive young man, one who possessed artistic interests.

  Bismarck had surmounted many difficulties in the course of his life, but the task of managing an aesthete in jackboots proved to be too much even for his superlative finesse. The young Kaiser appeared, one morning, on the doorstep of the chancellery complex in Berlin. He demanded to be informed of Bismarck’s activities. The Chancellor, roused from his bed, came down in an ugly mood. “It was all that Bismarck could do,” Wilhelm said, “to refrain from throwing the inkpot at my head.” Bismarck did not throw the inkpot; he exercised his malice instead by staging one of those little comedies he delighted to contrive. He hurled a dispatch case, then pretended to be anxious lest his imperial master should read one of the papers it contained. It was now Wilhelm’s turn to lose his head. His curiosity got the better of his dignity, and he snatched the paper from the Chancellor’s hand. From it Wilhelm learned that the Russian Tsar had referred to him, in so many words, as a perfidious jackass.

  Bismarck had made his point—but at a cost. A short time later he was ejected from his offices, and in a bitter frame of mind he boarded the train that was to take him from Berlin. “A state funeral with full honours,” he said as he gazed out the window at military plumes and ostrich feathers. He was at first certain that he would be recalled by a desperate government. But time passed, and the summons did not come. The old man dreamt of returning to the Wilhelmstrasse, the center of power in Berlin. He schemed and plotted; but his ambition had lost its force. His last years were spent in fruitless resentment. He was confined to a wheelchair, yet the weakness of his body did not extend to his mind, which remained lucid, and he was able to indulge to the last the one pleasure that remained to him, that of hating. In his final delirium, he thrust out his hand. “That,” he declared, “is impossible, on grounds of raison d’état.” Perhaps the statesman, who in his long career had made and broken so many laws, sought by this fiat to annul his own mortality.

  If so, he failed. Six hours later he was dead.

  THEIR DEATHS WERE DIFFERENT, but the lives of the three leaders were united by a common thread. In the space of a single decade, they liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power.

  Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic.

  Alexander broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia.

  Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation.

  The three men helped to forge the superpowers that during the twentieth century contended for mastery of the earth. They also made an immense contribution to human freedom. Bismarck, the least of the three liberators, swept away an archaic jumble of competing sovereignties—so many duchies and grand bailiwicks—and secured the prosperity of a region that had for a long time languished. The liberating labors of Lincoln and Alexander were as prodigious as any that history records. At the beginning of 1861 there were living, within the confines of the Russian Empire, some twenty-two million serfs. At the same time more than four million men, women, and children in the United States were kept as slaves. By the end of the decade they were free.

  How are free states made, and how are they unmade? Lincoln called his revolution a “new birth of freedom.” Bismarck spoke of a revolution accomplished through an expenditure of “blood and iron.” Alexander implemented what he described as a revolution “from above.” Their revolutions were made in the name of freedom, and were to varying extents consecrated to the freer movement of people, goods, and ideas. They were grounded, in different degrees, in the principles that made England, in the eighteenth century, the freest and most prosperous state then existing. Even Bismarck, who deplored the English theory of freedom, understood the advantages of liberty of trade, though he was very far from being a Free Trader. Under his government industry flourished, and the mines and smokestacks of the Ruhr supplied his régime with the coal and the steel which, even more than blood and iron, underwrote the prosperity of the Reich.

  The new machinery of freedom, though English in design, was universal in scope. At its core was the idea, as yet imperfectly realized, that all human beings are endowed with a fundamental dignity. This was a truth which, Abraham Lincoln believed, was “applicable to all men and all times.” The machinery of freedom promised, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, to be as exportable as the steam engine, the other ingenious device of the age. The faith that all men possess a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the banks of the Rhine, the Neva, and the Potomac as on the Thames.2

  Then something happened.

  In the decade in which three revolutionary statesmen broadened the empire of liberty, one of the trinity revealed himself an enemy to the free state, and another lost heart. It was at this time, the poet Matthew Arnold said, that the cherishers of the free state “lost the future.” What Lincoln called the “germ” of freedom, which was “to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind,” came close to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state against new philosophies of coercion, credos that derived their moral vocabulary, Lincoln said, from “the wolf’s dictionary.” In the same decade which witnessed freedom’s victories, a counterrevolution began, the consequences of which the world still feels.

  This is the story of that decade.

  Part One

  INTO THE PIT

  Chapter 1

  THREE PEOPLES ON THE PRECIPICE

  Saint Petersburg, January 1861

  IN THE WINTER PALACE two court functionaries walked down a long gallery towards a pair of massive bronze doors. They tapped thrice with their wands, ebony batons surmounted with double-headed eagles. The doors were thrown open, and the Tsar of Russia emerged from the seclusion of his private apartments, together with his Tsaritsa.

  As he passed through galleries of his palace, the Tsar acknowledged, with the merest nod of his head, the bows and curtsies of the court. Every so often he would catch the eye of some devoted servant of the state, dressed, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, in silk stockings and a coat heavy with gold embroidery. The happy courtier, his face flushed with pride, would look about to see whether those around him had observed the mark of imperial approbation.

  The Tsar and Tsaritsa proceeded to the Nicholas Hall, blazing with the light of a dozen chandeliers and ten thousand candles. Diamonds and sapphires sparkled on aristocratic bosoms; the cross and star of Alexander Nevsky flashed on glittering uniforms; moiré sashes shimmered. The chevalier guards, specially selected, out of the immensity of Russia, for their good looks, stood to attention in white tunics and polished breastplates. It was a spectacle meant to impress; and it did impress. Foreign visitors struggled to do justice to the triple pomp of guards and grooms and gold-laced grandees that hedged this man whose Empire stretched from Poland to the Pacific, from the snows of Siberia to the vineyards of the Crimea, and encompassed a sixth of the land surface of the earth. Some thought the Winter Pala
ce baroque, others likened it to a northern edition of the Arabian Nights. All sensed in the autocracy of which it was the symbol a refinement of coercion, the most opulent and at the same time most naked form of power. In the world struggle between freedom and oppression, Russia figured as the beau ideal of government by force.

  The Tsar and Tsaritsa opened the ball with a polonaise. When the dance ended, the imperial couple mingled with their guests. Those who had never before attended an imperial ball were startled by the courtesy with which they were received by Their Majesties. A “certain democratic air prevailed,” one diplomat thought. The Tsar was determined to put his guests at ease. His manner was amiable, even gentle. Nevertheless, an invisible veil hung about the person of the autocrat. An English visitor, watching the Tsar converse with an ordinary mortal, was reminded of “the Great Mogul addressing an earthworm.”

  Alexander II was forty-two years old at the beginning of 1861. He had for six years been the supreme ruler of Russia. His upbringing had in many ways fitted him for the exalted station he occupied. His father, Tsar Nicholas I, though of a strong and despotic nature, with acts of blood and cruelty to his name, had nevertheless been a serious and in some directions a large-minded man. The prospect of surpassing other monarchs in the education of an heir had been agreeable to his vanity, and he had taken pains to prepare little Alexander for the throne. The Tsarevitch’s tutor, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, had labored to open the boy’s mind. In a letter to Alexander’s mother, the Empress Alexandra, Zhukovsky described the young Prince as “the beautiful poem on which we are working.” To less sympathetic eyes, Alexander appeared in a different light. There “are times,” one of his teachers said, “when he can spend an hour or more during which not a single thought will enter his head.”

  When, at the age of thirty-six, Alexander ascended the throne of his ancestors, many predicted that he would not prosper. “He does not give the idea of having much strength either of intellect or of character,” Earl Granville wrote to Queen Victoria shortly after the Tsar’s coronation in Moscow. The more superstitious noted how, when Alexander was crowned in the Kremlin, the heavy chain of the Order of Saint Andrew slipped from a pillow and fell to the floor—an evil omen surely3.

  No one knew better than Alexander himself the difficulty of his task. He had inherited from his father power and riches almost fabulous in extent; he was Tsar of all the Russias. But his Empire was troubled. Russia lay at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Over the centuries she had been oppressed by a succession of invaders. Between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries a form of authoritarian government took hold in the land. The government of the nation that in time became Russia was modeled partly on the autocratic rule of the Byzantine despots, and partly on the tyrannical forms of the Mongolian Khans. Russia never knew the mixed constitutions which, in the Middle Ages, restrained the authority of the kings of Europe. The subjects of the tsars regarded themselves as “kholops, that is slaves of their Prince,” and the tsars, in turn, looked upon the state as their personal patrimony.

  Sensible that a nation of slaves will never realize the highest forms of greatness, Peter the Great, who acceded to the throne in 1682, reformed the patrimonial constitution of Russia. But he chose, as his models of civil polity, the régimes which, in France, in Spain, and in Germany, superseded the limited monarchies of the Middle Ages, and erected in their place absolute governments supported by large military establishments. In doing so Peter exchanged one form of despotism for another. Nor was his effort to break with his own patrimonial habits altogether successful. His preferred method was coercion; and in order to break the spirit of those who opposed his reforms, he made liberal use of the ancient implements of despotism, the ax, the wheel, and the stake.

  Catherine the Great, who ascended the throne in 1762, relaxed somewhat the servile régime of Peter. Russia ceased, in the waning years of the eighteenth century, to be a slave state. But she did not become a free state. The country suffered from the contradiction. The decaying autocracy, strong enough to overwhelm men’s energies, was too weak to suppress their hopes. The people were discontented, but they were no longer abjectly afraid. A crisis, it was evident, could not be far off.

  Alexander ascended the throne determined to forestall the catastrophe. But how? Two courses of action presented themselves. One lay in a continuation of the policy of coercion, the other beckoned towards freedom. Free states like England and the United States had, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, liberated their peoples’ energies, and were rapidly outstripping their rivals in trade, in industry, and in the accumulation of capital. Their entrepreneurial creativity produced a series of technological revolutions that were reshaping the world. For a time the institutions of freedom seemed poised to carry all before them. But a countervailing reaction set in. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, in America itself, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a philosophy of coercion designed to protect their power.

  The new philosophy of coercion was founded on two ideas. The first was paternalism, an idea which, in different forms and under various guises, proved to be a potent weapon in the reaction against the free state. Landowners in Russia and in the American South argued that their domestic institutions embodied the paternal principle; the bondsman had, in his master, a compassionate father to look after him, and he was therefore better off than the worker in the cruel world of free labor. In Germany, the most ingenious of the Prussian aristocrats sought to implement a paternal code designed to regulate the masses and make them more subservient to the state. In the new paternal theory of government, the state was to love its subjects as a father loves a child. So Lord Macaulay, the great historian of freedom, wrote. The new paternal régime would “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed. . . .”

  The second idea the grandees lighted on was militant nationalism. Shorn of the romantic rhetoric in which its apologists couched it, this form of nationalism meant the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their will on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamt of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces in a new German Reich. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, romantic nationalists with Pan-Slav sympathies yearned to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium. By creating an enticing jingo-spectacle, the nationalists hoped to divert the imaginations of oppressed populations at home. At the same time, they sought to open new fields of exploitation—what in Germany came to be called Lebensraum (living space). Not least, the nationalists worked to reinforce racial chauvinism, that convenient prop of the oppressor; they argued that certain races (white, German, Slav) were superior to other races. Militant nationalism, like authoritarian paternalism, rested on the premise that all men are not created equal; some men are more equal than others.

  The easiest course for Tsar Alexander would have been to follow the path of coercion. He had only to place himself at the head of the great Slav nation and burnish the messianic eagles Russia had inherited from Byzantium. He could then hope to rout the Turk and seat himself on a golden throne in Sancta Sophia, the jewel of Constantinople. Russia’s problems would be solved in the acquisition of an even vaster empire, and she would become in fact what she had long been in mystical aspiration, the “Third Rome.”

  But the Tsar, breaking with the traditions of his dynasty, chose the more difficult course. At a decisive moment in the gathering world crisis, Alexander decided that the future lay with freedom. He resolved to smash the fetters and liberate his country’s forgotten potential. He did not intend to relinquish his own autocratic power; that would be going too far. But though it is tempting to scoff at the imperial hypocrite, the step the Tsar contemplated was, g
iven the condition of his country and the doubtful stability of his throne, a daring one. He intended to free the serfs.

  Icy winds swept the night as the Tsar, in the warmth of the Winter Palace, made his way from table to table. The northern landscape that lay beyond the double-glazed windows—the snow-bound plazas and stage-prop temples—strangely heightened his authority; only a superhuman authority, it seemed, could contrive to fashion a capital out of this desolate ice-world. Inside, the tables were heaped with rare and delicate dishes, all that extravagance which despotism can command and in which absolute power delights to indulge. At each table Alexander spoke a few gracious words, then raised a glass of champagne to his lips and took up an hors d’oeuvre; his guests might then say that they had dined with the autocrat. At the next table he would, machinelike, repeat the performance. Wherever he turned, he saw faces flushed with dancing, wine, and the intoxicating sense of proximity to power.

  He knew how soon the happy countenances would be changed into frowns and grimaces. The revolution he contemplated would displease many of his guards and courtiers. If conducted with insufficient finesse, it might even drive them into open rebellion. The serf-owning magnificoes of the capital would doubtless embrace a policy of romantic opposition to reform. A revival of the tradition of conquest, the raising of fresh regiments, the avenging of past humiliations—the old guard never could resist the call of a bugle-horn. But would the grandees stand patiently by while the Tsar experimented with freedom, and broke the chains of the vassals who harvested their crops, cooked their meals, and polished their jewels?

  Washington, January 1861

  JAMES BUCHANAN had long aspired to the office of President of the United States. At length, in the twilight of life, he had attained it. He was a curious figure; and not the least curious feature of his character was his relationship with the lady who served as the mistress of his White House. Harriet Lane was the President’s niece. She was also his most intimate companion. Nothing could be stranger than the intensity of the attachment that developed between the tired old bachelor and the strong and beautiful lady; but each was necessary to the other. Miss Lane organized a splendid social calendar for her uncle; she arranged exquisite dinners in the White House, and intimate champagne parties, though the President, weakly accommodating as he was in all the important questions of state, drew the line at card-playing, and he positively forbade dancing. Miss Lane, for her part, was exalted into a sphere far above that to which any young man of her acquaintance could have introduced her. In the afternoons, she would ride out, sidesaddle, on a white horse, with only a single groom in attendance. When she came in from her ride and greeted her uncle, no one who saw the pair could doubt which was the more formidable personage.