The territories of the West were the first battlefields of the Civil War. The halls of Congress were the second. In Kansas pro-slavery men murdered free-state men and raised the red flag of Southern Rights at Lawrence. Free-state men led by John Brown murdered pro-slavery men near Pottawatomie Creek. In the Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts denounced the pro-slavery faction’s “Crime Against Kansas.” Preston Brooks of South Carolina, aided by fellow Southerners Laurence Keitt and Henry Edmondson, fell upon Sumner on the Senate floor, and Brooks beat him senseless with a cane. The free-state men eventually triumphed in Kansas; but the victory was rendered pyrrhic by the United States Supreme Court, which in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford held that under the Constitution slaveholders were entitled to bring their slaves into all of the nation’s territories.
Three of the five Republicans on the Committee of Thirteen, Collamer of Vermont, Doolittle of Wisconsin, and Grimes of Iowa, could all be expected to remain faithful to the uncompromising territorial policy laid down by Lincoln. The only question pertaining to the fourth, Benjamin “Bluff Ben” Wade of Ohio, was whether, in his intercourse with Fire Eaters and border state squires, he could be persuaded to conduct himself with a civility becoming his office, or whether he would insist, like Preston Brooks and Laurence Keitt, on leaving blood on the Senate floor. “Bluff Ben” was a well-built Ohioan with long white hair and black staring eyes. Like many Westerners notable for their zeal in the anti-slavery cause, he was descended from old New England stock, and he regarded compromisers with the same antipathy with which he regarded slave-driving oligarchs. The man who inflicted the lash, and the man who consented that the lash should be inflicted, were in his eyes equally bloody men. When, a few years before, a Southern Senator challenged him to a duel, Wade accepted the challenge and, as was his right under the Code Duello, named his weapons and conditions: “squirrel rifles at twenty paces,” with “a white paper the size of a dollar pinned over the heart of each combatant.” The Southern Senator retracted his demand for satisfaction.
The fifth Republican on the Crittenden Committee was a more complicated case. William H. Seward of New York was the most illustrious member of his party after Lincoln himself. His loss to Lincoln at the party’s nominating convention in Chicago in the spring of 1860 was mortifying to a man who believed his own claims to pre-eminence to be unrivalled. Seward continued, many months after the defeat, to be sullen. “Disappointment!” he told a disgruntled officeseeker. “You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer. You speak to me of disappointment!”
Would Seward agree to a compromise on the question of territorial slavery? He bore the reputation of an uncompromising man. He was in many ways the antithesis of a Silver Age statesman, and he had condemned Daniel Webster when that Senator lent the force of his oratory to Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850. But ten years in the Senate had softened Seward’s zeal. A small, sallow-faced man, the Senator from New York was quick, perceptive, and ambitious. His disordered clothes and slouching manners bespoke the provincial lawyer; but a careful observer might have discerned, in the pursed lips, the steady gaze, the aquiline nose, intimations of a strength that survives the wreck of youthful idealism.
Success came easily to Seward; perhaps too easily. At the age of thirty-seven he was Governor of New York. A decade later he was Senator. The achievement of so much splendor of fortune so early in life had its usual effect, and Seward, who began his career as an angry young man, was by degrees transformed into a cynical elder statesman. In his heart he was still a hater of slavery. In 1858 he declared the conflict between servitude and freedom to be an “irrepressible” one. But ambition is a plant that adapts itself to a variety of soils. After his bid to lead the Republican revolution failed, Seward cast about for other paths to glory. Little as he resembled the statesmen of the Silver Age school of Webster and Clay, he demonstrated, in the last weeks of 1860, a newfound admiration for their conciliatory policies. Whether from motives of patriotism or frustrated desire, he proclaimed the virtues of moderation and negotiation. Shortly after the election of Lincoln, there appeared, in the Albany Evening Journal, a paper known to enjoy the confidence of Seward, a proposal for reviving the old Missouri line of 36°30’—the principle of conciliation at the heart of Senator Crittenden’s plan. A short time later the newspaper reiterated the proposal, and in private conversation Seward promised to support a bargain arranged on this principle.
But there was a difficulty with Seward’s policy. Abraham Lincoln had not endorsed it. The President-Elect opposed any accommodation between the North and the South on the territorial question. Lincoln was the most uncompromising politician of the age where territorial slavery was concerned, and he had labored assiduously to prevent the emergence of a Free Soil movement based on any principle other than the absolute exclusion of slavery from the territories.
Such an obstacle might have deterred an ordinary politician. But Seward had a supreme faith in his powers. Lincoln, he reasoned, was new to the national stage. His experience was limited. At a time when Seward himself had been Governor of a large and populous state, Lincoln had been a lawyer struggling into practice on the Illinois frontier. Seward had spent the 1850s in the Senate. Lincoln had spent the same decade trying, without success, to gain admission to that body. Surely the novice would submit to the tuition of the master statesman. Seward, flicking away the ashes of his cigar, saw that he had lost the prize. He was not to be the President. But might he not save the country from the President?
Seward opened a negotiation with Lincoln, who had asked him to be his Secretary of State. In December 1860, the New Yorker dispatched an emissary to the President-Elect, who was then residing in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Seward chose for the mission his closest adviser, the political boss Thurlow Weed. Weed arrived in Springfield on December 20, the same day South Carolina seceded from the Union. Lincoln received him in his house on Eighth Street. The two men spoke for six hours. The President-Elect’s tone was cordial. He seemed genuinely to hope that Seward would accept the office of Secretary of State. But on one subject he was not to be moved.
He would not compromise on the question of slavery in the territories.
In order to remove any doubt as to his position, Lincoln gave Weed a paper to deliver to Seward, with instructions to govern the Senator’s conduct on Crittenden’s Committee of Thirteen.
Weed left Springfield and, meeting the Senator at Syracuse, delivered Lincoln’s ultimatum as the two men rode the train together to Albany. In an instant all the structures of power and predominance Seward had raised in his imagination came crashing down. The choice before him was clear. He must either stoop to do Lincoln’s bidding or surrender his ambition of swaying the destinies of a nation. The latter course was impossible; Seward could not bear the idea of being outside the golden circle of power. Laying aside his previous talk of compromise, he went to Senator Crittenden’s Committee and declined to support the proposal to revive the Missouri line.
On December 28, the same day Senator Crittenden’s Committee, having failed to reach an agreement to preserve the Union, adjourned in failure, Seward wrote to President-Elect Lincoln to accept the State Department.
Saint Petersburg, December 1857-March 1861
IN HIS BEDROOM-STUDY in the Winter Palace, Tsar Alexander rose at eight. Situated in the western wing of the palace, the room formed part of a suite of chambers that served as the Tsar’s private quarters. (The Tsaritsa’s apartments were adjacent to those of her husband, in the southwest corner of the building.) One reached the Tsar’s study through an anteroom, which, in turn, opened on a library; this last room housed Alexander’s collection of books, maps, and pornography.6
Visitors to the study were startled by a simplicity of décor which, amid the interminable splendors of a palace, was in some ways more ostentatious than luxury. The r
oom was, like many in the Winter Palace, adorned with marble columns, yet it was plainly furnished, in the Empire style. The architect Alexander Briullov, charged with repairing the room after a fire ravaged the palace in 1837, was faithful to the eighteenth-century inspirations of an earlier designer, Giacomo Quarenghi. There was a desk, which was covered with photographs of the Tsar’s family, and a circular table, piled high with state papers. Nearby was a leather easy chair. In the corner stood that fixture of Russian rooms, the glazed stove.
The Tsar affected the character of a simple soldier. He slept on a folding camp bed. Rising from it, he donned a cherry-colored robe, brought to him by his valet. Another servant brought him coffee. It was Alexander’s habit to go to the window as he drank it. Looking through the double-glass, he took in the Petersburg morning. Directly below him lay the parade ground, where soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment were preparing to change the guard. Beyond the parade ground lay the yellow-and-white Admiralty Building, the headquarters of the Russian navy. To the southwest lay Saint Isaac’s Cathedral; to the northwest flowed the Neva.
It was said of the tsars that what they dreamt of in the night they could carry out upon waking in the morning. The reality Alexander confronted when he woke in his bedroom-study was different. Autocracy does not eliminate opposition, it drives it underground, where, like other matter that has been forced into a subterranean channel, it assumes a molten form, and becomes explosive. In England, the rowdy grandees bayed for broken glass. In Russia, they bayed for the broken heads of their sovereigns. The Empire of the Tsars was a despotism tempered by assassination.
Alexander, plotting his revolution “from above,” anticipated the machinations of the opposition with a shrewdness of forecast that Lincoln and Bismarck—who were both to stumble in the early phases of their own revolutions—might well have envied. The Tsar knew that the fathers and grandfathers of the men who regulated his palace and drilled his regiments had not scrupled to plunge a dagger into the back of the autocrat who threatened their luxurious repose. Alexander’s great-grandmother, Catherine the Great, had obtained the crown by persuading the grandees to connive at the arrest and murder of her husband, Tsar Peter III, Alexander’s (putative) great-grandfather. (The integrity of the Romanov line was rendered doubtful by the infidelities of Catherine.) Alexander’s grandfather, Tsar Paul, fell a victim to another palace revolution. The unhappy child of Catherine, Paul was a man of morose temper and uncertain paternity, and he struck fear in the hearts of the potentates of the army and the court. While the courtiers sighed for the looser tyranny of the mother, their murmurs inflamed the dark and suspicious nature of the son. Paul’s capricious punishments exasperated the magnificoes of the capital, and on a winter night in 1801 a motley collection of generals and statesmen, heated with brandy, invaded the palace and burst into the imperial bedchamber. The seditious retainers discovered the Tsar cowering, in his nightclothes, behind a screen or drapery. It was subsequently related that Paul expired of an apoplectic seizure; but the only real question is whether he was strangled or bludgeoned to death.
Alexander’s father, Nicholas I, came close to sharing the fate of Peter III and Paul I. On the day Nicholas was proclaimed Tsar, rebellious troops marched into the center of Saint Petersburg. At their head was a body of disaffected officers, some of whom were intimates of the court, and stood close to the throne. Alexander, a boy of seven at the time, was too young to understand the events that shattered the tranquility of Saint Petersburg in December 1825. But he was old enough to feel their terror. Little “Sasha,” as he was called by his family, had been at his lessons in the Anichkov Palace. Attendants rushed into the schoolroom and hurried the child downstairs, where a carriage was in readiness. The Tsarevitch was taken to the Winter Palace, where his father was endeavoring to crush the revolt. When darkness fell, Nicholas ordered the artillery to be wheeled out. Flashing guns illuminated the night. Afterwards the Tsar commanded his son to be dressed in the miniature parade uniform of a Hussar of the Life Guards. In this costume the terrified child was taken out into the night. Alexander watched as his father went about in the light of enormous bonfires. Suddenly the Tsar took his son in his arms and raised him aloft. “Here, boys,” Nicholas cried. “This is my heir, serve him faithfully!” A cheer went up, and the soldiers came to kiss the cheek of the trembling Tsarevitch. Little Alexander burst into tears—and learned a lesson in autocracy. He never afterwards forgot how much falseness could lie concealed in the rancid soul of a courtier.
Four decades after the revolt, Alexander found himself as little able as any other tsar to trust in the fidelity of his retainers. The courtier whose disaffection he had most to dread was Prince Alexis Fyodorovich Orlov, the leader of the party of coercion in Russia. The Prince would sooner cut off his hand, he said, than submit to a revolutionary policy of emancipating serfs and giving them land. His words could not be dismissed lightly; the Prince was one of the most powerful figures in the Empire. His family had first obtained power in the days of Catherine the Great. Gregory Orlov, the Prince’s uncle, had been the lover of that ambitious Princess, and he had helped her to obtain the Crown through the deposition of her husband, the feeble Peter III. The versatile courtier had been amply rewarded both for his political and his personal services to the Empress. Honors and emoluments were showered upon Orlov and his connections; and the memory of the Tsaritsa’s illicit love invested his family with an aura of romance.
The high birth and large possessions of Prince Alexis Orlov were only the beginning of his authority. In his youth the Prince had been a splendid warrior, and his uniform sagged with the medals which his valor during the Napoleonic Wars had gained him. In the years since 1812 he had evolved into a resourceful courtier, a master of the arts of intrigue that had been brought to perfection on the banks of the Neva. Elegant, courteous, and unscrupulous, with a captivating manner that recalled his eighteenth-century ancestors, the Prince had been raised by Alexander’s father, Tsar Nicholas, to the highest civil honors. To his stewardship had been confided the Third Section of His Majesty’s Private Imperial Chancery, which housed the Tsarist secret police; and as a reward for his fidelity he had been made President of the Imperial Council of State.
Prince Orlov was prepared to humor the Tsar, and to promise him results; but in his heart he despised Alexander’s liberal impulses. To resist the revolutionary innovations was the beginning and the end of his policy; and he had reason to suppose that such resistance would not be in vain. Orlov had studied his master with care. The Tsar, he concluded, was a lazy man. He was also, he saw, a licentious one. The two qualities, artfully manipulated, might yet deliver Alexander into the hands of his courtier.
Prince Orlov knew that the domestic life of his master was troubled. Alexander had, before he ascended the throne, made a tour of Europe, and during a visit to Darmstadt, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, he had fallen in love with a German Princess, Maximiliana-Wilhelmina. The Princess was delicately beautiful, with a slim waist and golden hair. But a cloud hung over her birth. Her mother, it was said, had passionately loved some base fellow about the court of Darmstadt, and it was this man, not Grand Duke Louis, who had in fact sired the girl. None of this, however, made any difference to the infatuated Alexander. “She is the woman of my dreams,” he said. “I will never marry anyone but her.” Displaying an energy of will that contrasted strangely with his habitual indolence, he broke down his parents’ opposition to the marriage. The Princess was received into the Orthodox Church in December 1840; at her baptism she took the name Mary Alexandrovna. She and Alexander were married, in the spring of 1841, in the Winter Palace. They had at first been happy together. In 1842 Mary bore her husband the first of eight children. The girl, Alexandra, died at the age of six; her father preserved for the rest of his life her little blue dress. In 1843 a boy, Nicholas, was born; the child, delicate and intelligent, became the object of his parents’ fondest hopes. More children followed, but the romance of Alexander and Mary f
aded. The Tsar’s desire for fresher flesh grew more intense, and he was believed to have taken a mistress.
The violence of his desires did not yet carry Alexander to the extravagances which, at a later period, scandalized the capital; but his behavior may nevertheless have rendered him vulnerable to the stratagems of Prince Orlov and his party. If a story that went round the court can be credited, the reactionary courtiers imposed upon the Empress’s confessor to do their dirty work. The priest was compliant. He insinuated, to the Tsaritsa, the necessity of reclaiming the Tsar from the epicurism and lust in which his spirit was sunk, and under the pretense of care for Alexander’s soul he urged the Empress to take her husband to task for his infidelity. The result, it was said, was just what the courtiers hoped. The Tsar declined to sacrifice the concubine and instead shrank from the reproaches of the wife. Turning away from the domestic apartments of the palace, Alexander sought out the earliest companions of his pleasures. In the company of dissipated fops like the young Count Adler-berg, he forgot the cares of state and escaped the strictures of the Empress. The worthless favorites, in turn, preyed upon the sovereign and amused his looser hours. By pandering to Alexander’s vices, they hoped to distract him from the laborious business of reforming Russia.
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