Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  But the Tsar was not to be thus easily diverted. He did not, indeed, break openly with his adversaries. That was the mistake his grandfather, Tsar Paul, had made. Alexander reasoned instead that success lay in the appearance of vacillation. The course he chose ran contrary to all the manuals of leadership, which extol boldness and evident decision; but in the circumstances in which he found himself, the inheritor of a throne that depended for its strength on the goodwill of a powerful oligarchy, the strategy he embraced was an intelligent one. By adopting what appeared to be an equivocal and vacillating course, he could hope to conceal his true designs, while he might at the same time lull his opponents into complacency. Such a course, prompted, perhaps, less by conscious deliberation than by an instinct of survival, enabled Alexander to disguise the strength of his reforming aspirations with shows of voluptuous idleness. Not for nothing was he compared to a chameleon, constantly changing his colors in order to elude his barons, the natural predators of insufficiently wary autocrats.

  Nor did the cause of reform suffer during these intervals of imperial lethargy, for the Tsar was assisted, in his labors, by a party of reformers whose energy in some measure made up for his laxity, and whose brains and ingenuity counterbalanced the vigor and obstinacy of Prince Orlov and the counter-revolutionary faction. The Tsar leaned particularly hard on Adjutant General Jacob Rostovtsev, whom he placed in the chair of the Editorial Commission, the body charged with laying the foundation of emancipation. Rostovtsev had secured the goodwill of the Romanovs when, in 1825, he informed Tsar Nicholas of the plot against him. A plain, blunt man who inclined to corpulence, Rostovtsev was not as subtle or adroit a maneuverer as Prince Orlov. But the simple soldier possessed qualities of resolution and practical sagacity that enabled him to joust confidently with the refined and devious courtier. These qualities had enabled Rostovtsev to rise, from obscure beginnings, to great office. He had no deep knowledge of the emancipation controversy; the question of whether a policy of freedom or a policy of coercion was most likely to exalt the greatness of Russia interested him hardly at all. But that which he lacked in speculative intelligence was supplied by his lieutenant, Nicholas Milyutin, an economist who had risen to be Acting Deputy Minister in the Ministry of the Interior. As a boy, Milyutin had been passionately interested in Russian history; later, after an interval of romantic distress and obsession with French theater, he had entered the civil service and become a zealous reformer. His genius and industry soon discovered themselves, and he was generally acknowledged to possess one of the finest minds in the Empire.

  The relations between Rostovtsev and Milyutin were, at first, far from easy. The younger man, high-minded and idealistic, had nothing but contempt for his superior, whom he regarded as an informer and tool of the party of coercion. He doubted whether the old General, fat, merry, perpetually cracking ribald jokes, was equal to the task of liberating the serfs. That this “thickheaded scoundrel,” this “shady political cardsharp,” should now lead the party of reform seemed “the most howling absurdity.” But no sooner had Rostovtsev taken up the business of emancipation than his character seemed to undergo a change. The magnitude of his assignment made a deep impression on him, and the old soldier, with his wisecracks and sarcastic asides, threw himself into the work of reform with a ferocity that startled those who knew him. “I thought about history,” Rostovtsev said, “and dreamed of an honorable page in its scrolls.” He became a dedicated emancipator. A man like Milyutin, with his intellectual airs and earnest attachment to the cause of freedom, might once have moved the mirth of the old General; but not now. Rostovtsev was carried away by the young bureaucrat’s boldness of thought and perception. He nicknamed Milyutin “Egeria,” the nymph-goddess who, it was believed by the ancient Romans, had loved King Numa, and inspired his wise regulations.

  Could Egeria overcome the resistance of Prince Orlov? Perhaps— but only if assistance were forthcoming from powerful personages at the court. The advocates of emancipation discovered that they had a powerful ally in the person of the Empress. Mary’s life had for some time ceased to be a happy one. Her sudden removal, at the age of seventeen, from an obscure German principality to the court of the Romanovs had been almost too much for her. After the first glow of marriage faded, she wilted. Turning away from scenes of luxury and display, “Masha,” as her husband called her, withdrew into an elegant but impenetrable reserve. Foreign visitors thought her charming; but Petersburg society was unimpressed. The Empress’s French was poor, a disadvantage in a court where all the notables prided themselves on their proficiency in that tongue, and her old-fashioned formality rendered her unpopular with the men and women of fashion who haunted the galleries of the Winter Palace. They called her “la petite bourgeoise Allemande,” and they laughed at her deteriorating beauty. By nature tall and lean, the Tsaritsa became excessively gaunt. The climate of the capital was unfavorable to her constitution, and her cadaverous cheeks seemed to presage the ravages of consumption. What was more, her skin became inflamed with a hideous rash, which she imperfectly concealed with makeup.

  In her aloofness and yearning for spiritual solace, Mary resembled the last Tsaritsa, Alexandra, who would one day wed her grandson, Nicholas, the last of the tsars. Both empresses preferred the boudoir to the salon. Alexandra’s boudoir was mauve; Mary’s was red. A rich brocatelle covered the walls of her retreat in the Winter Palace; the furnishings came from Cartier in Paris. In one respect, however, Mary was less fortunate than Alexandra. Her husband ceased to care for her. She passed her days in study and prayer; she mastered the classic literature of Russia; she devoted many hours to trying to raise the spirits of the dead. Yet she found herself, at night, constantly in tears. At the beginning of 1861 her hopes were concentrated not on this life but the next. Abandoned to the cold emptiness of a palace, she turned, for consolation, to the spiritual warmth of the Orthodox Church. In the elaborations of its liturgy and the fragrancy of its ritual she found an imperfect substitute for all that she had been denied by a wandering husband. She was a genuinely kind woman, and with a charity not, perhaps, unmixed with the desire to be revenged upon her enemies, she devoted herself to the destruction of serfdom.

  The Empress was not the only figure at court to declare against the party of coercion. Her pious designs were embraced by Alexander’s aunt, the Grand Duchess Hélène Pavolvna. Hélène was the widow of Nicholas I’s younger brother, Grand Duke Michael. Like the Empress, she had begun life as a German Princess, but she was a more worldly figure than her niece. She had been educated in Paris, where she had acquired a taste for literature and liberal politics. Her opposition to serfdom was ethical rather than religious. Yet though she took her stand against the party of coercion, she remained a princess in the grand style, and she reveled in the intrigue of Saint Petersburg. She was at home, in the Michael Palace, on Thursday evenings, and her soirées were among the most splendid in the capital, for she was an astute collector of personalities. Her galleries resounded with the music of her protégé, Anton Rubinstein, who was soon to found the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Statesmen mingled with artists and intellectuals in her salon; the Tsar himself liked to be present. Petersburg society was the stuff of her existence; but Hélène possessed convictions that rose above fashion. She devoted herself body and soul to the cause of freeing up Russia’s obstructed potential. In her drawing room the disheartened reformer, bruised in the latest sally against the opponents of emancipation, was certain to find succor and a sympathetic ear—and perhaps something more. According to the rumor that went round Saint Petersburg, Hélène had taken the brilliant Milyutin for a lover.

  Such were the men and women who sought to make a revolution.

  Charleston, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama, January-April 1861

  NO MAN DRIVES another man with a whip without exposing his soul to moral whiplash. Mary Chesnut knew it. She had been born to high place in the oligarchy of the South, and delighted in that brilliant world; yet she was to becom
e, in time, a penetrating critic of the coercive psychology of her class. When, on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s revolution, she came up to Charleston, she found the metropolis of the Fire Eaters giddy in the anticipation of secession. She was inclined to cheer, and also to shudder.

  While Prince Orlov, in Saint Petersburg, was busy obstructing Tsar Alexander’s revolution, the Fire Eaters in the American South were readying themselves to resist Lincoln’s. In her Charleston hotel, Mary Chesnut listened to their patriotic orations. She thought them exceedingly pungent, in the “hot, fervid, after-supper Southern style.” Her own feelings, however, were more complicated. She was, she said, a “rebel born.” She had early imbibed the skeptical attitude towards the Federal government characteristic of the states’ rights school of Thomas Jefferson. Her father, who had been Governor of South Carolina, had lived and died a states’ rights man. Among her friends were states’ rights men like Laurence Keitt, the bullyboy who helped Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner to a pulp on the floor of the Senate. South Carolina, she said, “had been so rampant for years.” The state “was the torment of herself and everybody else.” No one, she said, could live in the “state unless he were a fire-eater.” She herself lived in the state. That made her a Fire Eater, too. At least in part.

  The Fire Eater was a creature of fantasy, or so Mary Chesnut believed. He regarded slavery, not merely as an instrument of economy, but as a foundation of culture. He believed that the compulsory labor of blacks would free whites to realize the highest forms of liberty and virtue. On the mud-sill of slavery the South would erect a new Sparta, a second Athens. This desire to re-create, in an age of crinolines and gaslight, the slave republics of antiquity was a variant of the romantic yearning for an ideal existence. One of the principal begettors of modern romanticism had himself blessed the project. “Can liberty be maintained only on the basis of slavery?” the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked. “Perhaps. The two extremes meet.”

  At the beginning of 1861, a part of Mary Chesnut sympathized with the aspirations of the Fire Eaters. She wanted them to get on with it. “Come what would, I wanted them to fight and stop talking.” But her sympathy was mingled with skepticism. Her sensitivity to the element of romantic delusion in the Fire Eaters’ mentality was heightened by the traditions of her husband’s family. The Chesnuts were as fervent in their attachment to the United States as her father had been in professing the states’ rights creed of President Jefferson. The Union was, for the Chesnuts, a family affair, almost a domestic concern. A portrait of General Washington by Gilbert Stuart hung in the hall of Mulberry, the Chesnut plantation near Camden, South Carolina. A Chesnut had served under Washington in the days when Washington bore a commission in the British service. Another Chesnut had feasted President Washington during his tour of the Southern states. Mary Chesnut’s father-in-law, Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., remained true to his hereditary traditions. He was a staunch Union man without, however, being a staunch free-state man. The old Colonel was one of the most opulent gentlemen in South Carolina. He owned more than five hundred slaves, and his house at Mulberry concentrated, within its walls, the accumulated charms of a hundred years of aristocratic taste and extravagance.

  Colonel Chesnut’s son, Mary’s Chesnut’s husband, was cast in a different mold. Unlike the imperious Colonel, James Chesnut, Jr., was of a reserved and sober nature, a “modest gentleman of decent parts.” He was a graduate of Princeton, a lawyer, a man at home in a library. He gave an impression of aloofness; and whether from pride or shyness or an admixture of the two he withdrew into his privacies to a degree unusual in a public man. He was a man of much coolness and moderation; but the times were not propitious to such qualities, and he was drawn by degrees into a boldness unsuited to his nature. He succumbed to the vision of the Fire Eaters. On learning of Lincoln’s election, he resigned his seat in the United States Senate in order to join the resistance to the new régime. “No hope now,” Mary Chesnut wrote. Her husband “was in bitter earnest.” He “burned the ships behind him.”

  Mary Chesnut was thirty-seven years old on the eve of Lincoln’s revolution. Her life had not been free from grief; and although she was now in middle age she was childless. Sadness is intelligent. In the first months of 1861, she believed that the South was at once making a nation and digging a pit. Devoted as she was to South Carolina, she feared the future, and she admitted to “a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as the U.S.A.”

  As the crisis mounted, Mary Chesnut traveled with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama, the temporary capital of the new secessionist Republic of the South. There she encountered Varina Davis, the wife of the President of the Southern Republic, Jefferson Davis, who had taken office determined, he said, to save his people from Lincoln’s revolution. The seaboard planters turned up their noses at Mrs. Davis; in their eyes the Mississippi lady was a vulgar “Western belle,” bred up among six-shooters and Bowie knives in the less aristocratic world beyond the tidewater. Mary Chesnut, however, found Varina Davis’s luncheons good and her gossip delicious. The two women were soon on terms of perfect unreserve. Mary Chesnut was intrigued by Mrs. Davis’s intimate and probing talk; like many respectable ladies in that age, she delighted in the hushed conversations in the parlor that stripped away the velvet and muslin and laid bare the fallen flesh of her acquaintances.

  But not even the most agreeably sordid revelations could dispel Mary Chesnut’s unease. Tiring of tarnished petticoats, she opened her history books to study the roots of the world crisis in which she found herself caught up. She read the Earl of Clarendon’s account of the English civil war, in which the historian painted the men of the seventeenth century, the Puritans and Cavaliers who fought to decide whether England was to be a free state or a servile state. As she turned the pages she began to despair. Men of the toughness and sinew of Clarendon’s Englishmen were, she knew, to be found in the South. But were they valued? Were they entrusted with authority? Only by choosing “the born leaders of men,” Mary Chesnut believed, could the South hope to prevail. Yet everywhere, she said, “political intrigue is as rife as in Washington.” The endless jobbery too often resulted in the promotion of mediocrity. “One of the first things which depressed me,” she wrote, “was the kind of men put in office at the crisis, invariably some sleeping deadhead long forgotten or passed over. Young and active spirits ignored, places for worn-out politicians seemed the rule—when our only hope is to use all the talents God has given us. This thing continues. In every state, as each election comes on, they resolutely put aside everything but the inefficient.”

  In her despair Mary Chesnut prayed that “a Caesar or a Napoleon may be sent to us.” This was another romantic dream of the age; Americans were scarcely less susceptible to its appeal than Germans and Russians. A great-souled man would master the revolution and lead his people to victory. But at other times Mary Chesnut allowed herself to hope that the revolution could be averted. She seized on the report of a former Treasury official who, having resigned his post to return to the South, described the optimistic mood of the politicians in Washington. “There was to be peace,” he declared.

  A part of Mary Chesnut hoped that he was right.

  Chapter 3

  THRUST AND COUNTER-THRUST

  Saint Petersburg, January 1858-March 1861

  THE MAN WHO IS WARM, a Russian has said, cannot understand the man who is cold. Russians are familiar with the cold. The cradle of Russia lies in the northern forest zone, a land of short, bright summers and long, snow-saturated winters. Moscow, though it is situated on roughly the same latitude as Edinburgh, possesses a far crueler climate. Unprotected by the currents of the Gulf Stream, Russia feels the wrath of the arctic winter.

  Over the centuries Russians have relied on three salves to protect them from the rigors of their climate. Fire, religion, and strong drink are the Russian’s remedies against the cold. In his log izba the Russian peasant had his stove corner and, diagonally across from
it, his icon corner—his “red” or “beautiful” corner. The icon warmed the peasant’s soul. The stove warmed his body. When fire and mysticism failed to dispel the evil spirits of the winter, the Russian turned to another stimulant. According to legend, Prince Vladimir of Kiev embraced Christianity rather than Islam because “Russians are merrier drinking—without it, they cannot live.” Originally a beer- and mead-loving people, the Russians eventually learnt the art of distilling grain. Vodka became the foremost national drink. To enjoy its full soul and body-warming effect, the Russian drank it on an empty stomach. At zakouska (hors d’oeuvres) he ate his cheese or caviar only after he drained his glass of vodka.

  The longer the winter, the shorter the growing season. The question of emancipating Russia’s peasants was bound up with the difficulties of farming in a cold climate. The country’s agricultural yields were among the lowest in Europe. The Prussian agricultural expert August Haxthausen, after making a study of the subject in the 1840s, concluded that without serf labor estate farming in northern Russia would cease to be an even marginally profitable enterprise. Already the great majority of those who drove serfs were impoverished squires, unable to maintain their genteel status. Many even of the more prosperous nobles, with a hundred or more male serfs at their command, would be ruined if deprived of the unremunerated labor of the peasants.

  As for the peasants themselves, they would suffer no less than their masters in the aftermath of emancipation—or so Prince Orlov and the opponents of liberation argued. Liberty, the partisans of force contended, was but another name for anarchy. The muzhiks, emancipated from the paternal care of their masters, would wreak havoc on the countryside. The landowners, burdened by debt and despair, would be powerless to restrain them.