But how soon it turned to dust and ashes. In the autumn of 1860 the country was gripped by what President Buchanan could only regard as a strange hysteria. An election was on. In the North, paramilitary groups like the Wide Awakes organized torchlit processions in honor of their hero, Abraham Lincoln. Thousands of young men in flowing capes and black helmets carried their flambeaux with an almost religious fervor down the streets of Northern cities. When, in November, Lincoln was elected President, citizens in the cotton and rice counties of the South rose up to denounce his elevation. In South Carolina a flag emblazoned with the palmetto, the image of the state’s patriotic defiance, was hoisted at Charleston, and in December the state declared herself independent of the Union.
President Buchanan, in the White House, lay paralyzed by nervous irresolution. He trembled on the eminence to which his grasping mediocrity had raised him, and even Miss Lane was incapable of rousing him to exertion.
What was he to do?
No state had ever before seceded from the Union. The Secretary of State, old Lewis Cass of Michigan, a hero of the War of 1812, hobbled into the White House with a red nose and a gaudy wig. He implored the President to put down the Carolina insurrection by force of arms. The Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, as vigorously pressed the President not to undertake measures that might kindle the spark of the Carolina revolt into a conflagration. Yet from President Buchanan himself there came neither orders nor actions, only a request for memoranda. Did a state, he asked, possess a right to secede? No, he concluded, it did not. Did the government possess a right to prevent a state from seceding? The light which the precedents threw upon the question was dubious. As the nation edged closer and closer to collapse, the President and his lawyers plunged deeper and deeper into the perplexing mysteries of sovereignty and the Constitution.
The futility of this policy was soon enough apparent. A country on the verge of civil war cannot be saved by barristers, and President Buchanan inclined to despair. The collision, in America, between the institutions of the free state and the philosophy of coercion was bound to be shattering. Here was concentrated, in a pure form, the essence of two antipathetic creeds. In the North, the principal opponents of slavery were, in temper if not dogmatic faith, Puritans, descended from men and women who, however sour might have been their characters, stoutly opposed a succession of tyrants. In the South, the leading planters were, in self-conceit if not hereditary fact, Cavaliers, who traced, or pretended to trace, their ancestry to men and women who sprang from the gentry of England, and who in the New World transmuted the principles of feudal subordination into a justification of human bondage. The characteristics of type must not be exaggerated. The planter, after the fashion of aristocracy, loved his own freedom, though he bought and sold slaves. The Puritan, having obtained liberty for himself, was often careless of that of others. But in the imagination of the Cavalier the idea of freedom slowly withered, while in the conscience of the Puritan it acquired a transforming strength.
Even in the Republic’s Golden Age, when Washington and Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson, bestrode the scene, the leading statesmen saw no way to assimilate the two antagonistic cultures. Unable to reconcile the institution of slavery with the professions of the Declaration of Independence—the faith that all men are created equal—the founders of the American Republic threw onto the future a burden they could not shoulder themselves. The generation that succeeded the founders shrank from the problem their fathers had bequeathed to them. The spirit of the Republic’s second epoch—its Silver Age, the age of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—was the spirit, not of inspired creation, but of cautious compromise, the virtues of which were openly celebrated in the audacious bargaining of Clay, and darkly conceded in the polished orations of Webster.
But the Silver Age was breaking down. In the South, power passed from the tobacco counties of Virginia, where the planters had long assumed, or at least affected, a pose of anguish over their chattels, to the richer soils of Mississippi and Alabama, where a more lucrative crop— cotton—overcame any such fastidious doubts. In 1861 the leading cotton planters looked, not to Virginia, but to South Carolina for a moral and intellectual ideal. In some of South Carolina’s tidewater districts slaves accounted for more than eighty percent of the population. The slave driver there could not be as careless of his bondsmen as the Virginian was or pretended to be, and the intellectuals of the Carolina master class elaborated justifications of coercion grounded in the same paternal theories advanced by grandees in Russia and Germany. Under the tuition of South Carolina, Southern political leaders ceased to be reluctant apologists for slavery; the “Fire Eaters,” as they were called, pronounced their peculiar institution “a good—a positive good.”
Men in the North also hastened towards the precipice. Abolitionists, touched by the light of the old Puritan conscience, demanded the immediate emancipation of the slaves, while partisans of Free Soil repudiated the conciliatory policies of the Silver Age and called for the prohibition of slavery in the virgin territories of the West.
President Buchanan, weak and dispirited though he was, attempted, after the fashion of the Silver Age, to work a compromise between the spirit of revived Puritanism and the ghost of renovated feudalism. The President was himself one of the last of the Silver Age statesmen. He had first entered Congress in 1821, when Jefferson and Adams were living. But the President had outlived his age. The accumulated burden of suspicion and mutual antipathy was by this time so great that it is doubtful whether even the arts of Clay or the oratorical skill of Webster could have effected a compromise between the contending sections and philosophies. And in vigor and ability, in imagination and courage, in all the qualities that make for greatness in politics, Buchanan was far inferior to Clay and Webster. He had, moreover, forfeited any claim to impartial arbitration. Though he came from Pennsylvania, his sympathies lay decidedly with the racial paternalism of the slaveholders and their dream of a Caribbean imperium; he was a true doughface.
Yet he had the strength of his weaknesses. He was by vocation less a leader than a diplomat; and diplomacy, he believed, might yet save the nation. He possessed the charming manners, the fawning graciousness, the half-effeminate politesse sometimes found in men who, through an idiosyncrasy of soul, combine a soft and yielding nature with a yearning for power and authority. Now, in the crisis of his career, James Buchanan comforted himself with the thought that his old suavity might yet save him.
Germany and France, February-March 1861
IT WAS NOT ONLY in Russia and the United States that the new decade began with a heightening of tensions between the advocates of rival conceptions of man’s destiny. Germany also was torn. Some Germans spoke of the need for free constitutions and ministers responsible to elected lawmakers; others exalted an ideal of national power, to be realized in a new and potent German state. Still others wavered between the two contending points of view, and cherished the delusive hope that their country could worship at the twin altars of power and freedom.
Of the two antagonistic parties, the champions of liberty possessed, at the beginning of 1861, the superior organization. They had formed committees, drafted reports, drawn up programs of action. By contrast, those who dreamed of a new German Empire had, at this time, no strategy; they had no plan. But they had something no less vital—they had an inspiration. Revolutions begin, not in plans, but in poetry, and in music4.
“God knows,” Richard Wagner wrote to a friend, “what will come out of this projected Tannhäuser: inwardly I have no faith in it, and that for good reasons.” The composer was, he said, tired—tired “to the very depths” of his soul. He was preparing for the production of his Tannhäuser at the Opéra in Paris, and nothing was going right.
The tenor in particular was a fiasco. Albert Niemann was a young man with a beautiful voice. He was eager to have a success in Paris. This, he feared, would be denied him. He had heard the chatter of the boulevards; Tannhäuser, it was predicted
, would be a failure, and he would be dragged down in its ruin. He avenged himself against the composer, whom he regarded as the author of his misfortunes, by sullenly refusing to cooperate with him during rehearsals.
Wagner’s troubles were not limited to a desponding tenor. The composer was in debt, and he was reduced to humiliating shifts to raise money. “I have enormous losses,” he said, and “no one who helps me!” To one of his loves, Mathilde Wesendonk, Wagner spoke of the tragic fate of the artist—his numerous ordeals, his struggles with the uncomprehending world, the unbridgeable chasm between his inner spiritual purity and the vileness of the philistines who so often thwarted his aesthetic will. “I feel myself pure,” he told Frau Wesendonk. “I know in the innermost depth of me that I have never wrought for myself, but only for others; and my perpetual sufferings are my witnesses.” No one, he said, understood him, though he ventured to express the hope that “some day something at least of my works will meet with understanding.”
As the night of the first performance approached, Wagner was sombre. He was, he said, a German—a German to the core of his being. How could he be expected to make music for Frenchmen?
The fatal night arrived. To the Opéra carriages bearing opulent figures of the Second Empire of the Bonapartes drew up. Ancient generals and grave counselors of state handed down their ladies. Young swells from the Jockey Club, having finished their games of baccarat, came swaggering in, intent on making mischief. At last the Emperor himself came. The audience rose, in a mass of silk and a blaze of tiaras, and Napoleon III, nephew of the great Bonaparte, took his seat in the imperial box.
The fuss over the Emperor’s arrival subsided, and the first strains of the opera sounded, with their note of obscure yearning. Then came a rising, and soon the listener was borne aloft, as to some Alpine height, “into the pure air.” Yet it was not the melody alone that was meant to soar; Wagner intended that his listeners, too, should ascend. He wanted them to leave behind the existing world, so sordid and prosaic, and to help him build a better, loftier one. His weapons, in this battle for men’s souls, were myths, forged in music. Like other romantic poets, he found an inspiration in his people’s oldest songs; he constructed Tannhäuser, he said, out of material with “typically German associations.” “My very blood and nerves were stirred with the greatest excitement as I began to sketch and develop the music of Tannhäuser. My true nature, which out of disgust with the modern world was oriented toward one that was older and nobler, enveloped with ardent embrace the eternal form of my being, and mingled the two in one stream: the highest longing for love.”
The Parisians in the Opéra yawned. Swathed in silks and furs, lapped in the accumulated luxuries of progress and empire, they were unable to see how soon their own repose was to be disturbed by the Sturm und Drang Wagner’s opera betokened. Before the decade was finished, their city would be besieged by German armies, and their temples and houses and hospitals would be smashed by German shells. The waking of Tannhäuser’s soul was a parable of the reawakening of Germany itself, freshly conscious of its strength. But the Parisians did not see it.
Their obtuseness was in some ways understandable, for the revolution in Germany was not, at the beginning of 1861, easy to perceive. The true extent of German power was obscured by the innumerable divisions of the German polity. Observers had, since the time of Tacitus, been astonished by the special qualities of Germany’s genius, its spirit of violent activity. But in March 1861 that genius was wasted in the squabbles of two hostile parties and three dozen petty sovereignties. Those who gave their adhesion to the party of liberty were absorbed in a contentious struggle with those who upheld the dogma of force. The two leading German powers, Prussia and Austria, were locked in a sterile rivalry with one another, and the spirit of a people which, a thousand years before, had subdued much of Europe under the standard of Charlemagne languished under the sway of so many inferior diadems.
During the second act the catcalls began to sound. Not even the presence of the Emperor prevented the young blades of the Jockey Club from caterwauling for their favorite ballerinas, who Wagner in his zeal for artistic purity had banished from the stage. At a signal they raised their white-gloved hands and blew their dog-whistles. “The row was beyond belief,” Niemann, the disaffected tenor, wrote to a friend in Berlin. “Princess Metternich, to whose patronage the production of the opera is mainly due, was compelled to leave the theatre after the second act, the audience continually turning round towards her box and jeering at her at the top of its voice.” On the second night Tannhäuser was again disrupted by the genteel hooligans of the Jockey Club. On the third night Wagner withdrew the opera. Tannhäuser was, Niemann said, “literally hissed off, hooted off, and finally laughed off” the stage.
Wagner himself was graceful in defeat; and after the third and final performance he retired to his rooms in the Rue d’Aumale. There, at two o’clock in the morning, the prophet of the German revolution was to be found quietly drinking tea and smoking his pipe with a small party of friends. He drolly accused one of the party, little Olga Herzen, the daughter of the Russian expatriate writer, of having hissed his opera. Yet at the same time it was noticed that his hand trembled uncontrollably.
France had triumphed over Germany in the Opéra. But Wagner was not wrong in his perception of the future. The slumberers had awakened.
Chapter 2
REBELS BORN
Washington, December 1860-February 1861
WITHIN WEEKS OF the election of Lincoln, committees were appointed by the House and the Senate to determine whether the questions that divided the United States could be settled without violence. To the Senate’s Committee of Thirteen came the foremost parliamentarians which America in that age could show. Chief among the proponents, on the Committee, of a peaceable adjustment of the claims of rival philosophies was old John Crittenden of Kentucky. He was a border state man, and inhabited a middle zone between the mentality of the Puritan and that of the Cavalier. He was as devoted to the cause of sectional conciliation as President Buchanan; but unlike the President, whose feeble policy was now universally despised, he retained the goodwill of men on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
To the Committee of Thirteen came, too, Lazarus Powell, another Kentuckian who, like Crittenden, had been bred up in the Silver Age school of compromise. Powell was an affable lawyer who had risen into power and property. A former governor of Kentucky, he was celebrated by his friends for the passion with which he both chewed tobacco and propounded the doctrines of moderation. He scorned “ambitious fanatical zealots” in the North as well as in the South.
There was another, still more potent voice in favor of compromise on the Committee. Beside the border state squires sat a short, haggard-looking man from the West. Beneath an exterior of coarse joviality, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois concealed one of the cleverest and most resourceful minds of the Silver Age school. An unsuccessful candidate for President in the recent election and the leader of the Northern Democrats, Douglas was a man broken by drink, by debt, by the collapse of his political fortunes, and by the accumulated burdens of a long carouse. But he possessed still a quantity of that force which had made him, for a time, the most formidable man in the Senate.
Senator Crittenden, whose age and experience entitled him to precedence, was placed in the chair. With the assistance of Senator Powell, he proceeded to frame a plan of compromise. The two senators called for the restoration of the old Missouri Compromise line, and proposed that the line be extended across the nation’s Western territories to California. The effect of the proposal would be to make slavery unlawful in all the Western territory north of latitude 36°30’.5 To conciliate the cotton men, Crittenden proposed to guarantee slavery perpetually in all territory “now held, or hereafter acquired” by the United States south of the Compromise line, a concession that would permit the Fire Eaters to realize their dream of a tropical slave empire.
The plan was promising: but such was the procedur
al rule adopted by the Committee that no bargain was possible unless representatives of the two antipathetic philosophies consented to it. The cause of the opponents of territorial slavery was confided to the five Republican senators who took their seats on the Committee. In contrast to the compromisers of the Silver Age, the Republicans were, as a rule, averse to negotiation: they believed that slavery should be made unlawful in all the nation’s territory. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Abraham Lincoln, the leader of the Republicans, wrote in December 1860. “The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.”
Here was a position that the Southern men, represented on the Committee by Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Robert Toombs of Georgia, and Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter of Virginia, could never accept. The question of slavery in the territories was for the slaveholders intimately bound up with the survival of their way of life. They knew that, in the early days of the Republic, the North and the South had been very nearly equal in population. By 1850, however, the population of the North had grown to more than thirteen million. The South’s population had not yet reached ten million. The rapid growth of Northern power terrified men whose prosperity depended on forced labor. If the free labor system of the North prevailed in the immense spaces of the West, the balance of power in the country would shift still more dramatically in favor of the free states. The slaves states would find themselves cornered in the Southeast—a small slice of a vast continent. A loss of political power would necessarily follow. The incorporation, in the Union, of new free states, carved out of the territories of the West, would end Southern parity in the Senate. The paternalist institutions of the South would be doomed.
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