Such might have been the fate of the Bismarcks. Ferdinand, Otto’s father, was by all accounts a man without distinction of culture or activity of mind. No one would have supposed him capable of retrieving his family’s fallen fortunes. Yet retrieve them he did. Rebelling against the pride of caste, he married a daughter of the Menckens, a family which, though it was destitute of noble blood, had risen high in the service of the kings of Prussia. It was from his mother, Wilhelmine, that Bismarck inherited those vigorous qualities that enabled him to restore the honor of his scutcheons. He adored his father as the incarnation of the chivalric virtues of old Germany; but it was his middle-class mother who, having herself been educated by a scrupulous father, superintended his schooling. She enrolled little Otto in a good Berlin Gymnasium and laid the foundation for his subsequent intellectual development. He repaid her with enmity, and once professed “hatred” for her.
In 1861, this strange figure, a revolutionary statesman encased in the armor of a Teutonic knight, seemed to have reached the end of his road. He had made his name as a partisan of the party of coercion, a “Hotspur of reaction,” an upholder of the highest pretensions of the Prussian Crown in its struggles with the free-state liberals. But ever since the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, Prussia’s rulers had inclined to caution rather than boldness in the struggle against free-state principles. In the royal palace—the Stadtschloss—in Berlin the courtiers said that Bismarck “smelt of blood.” In 1848, when much of Europe rose up in revolt against the ancient dynasties, the young reactionary went about Potsdam and Berlin with four rounds of ammunition in his pocket and a multitude of plots swimming in his head. With an inflated sense of his own importance, he urged the army to put down the revolt with grapeshot. But the old King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, wanted no blood on his hands. He capitulated to the free-state men and granted them their dream of a written constitution and an elected legislature.
Not long after his antics in 1848, the “mad Junker,” as Bismarck was called, was sent to Frankfurt as Prussian delegate to the Bundestag, the assembly of the German Confederation (or Bund). The Bund was the handiwork of the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich; to it representatives of the various German states came together to endorse the policy of Austria’s ruling house, the Habsburgs, who by a long tradition were the foremost of the German dynasts. (The Austrian representative was ex officio President of the Bund, which met in the Austrian Legation in Frankfurt.) For the greater part of four centuries the Habsburgs had worn the imperial purple; as Holy Roman Emperors, elected by the suffrage of the German princes, they claimed to be the successors of Trajan and Augustus. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, but the Habsburgs continued to regard themselves as the pre-eminent dynasty in Europe, and they continued to look upon their Prussian cousins in the north as vastly inferior to themselves. The royal house of Prussia, the Hohenzollerns, had obtained the marquisate of Brandenburg only in the fifteenth century; and Brandenburg, with its sterile soil and dreary bogs, was an ambiguous prize—the “sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire.” Later the Electors of Brandenburg received the Duchy of Prussia from the King of Poland, but not until the eighteenth century did a Hohenzollern potentate dare to assume the title of King, and then only with the consent of the Kaiser in Vienna.
“I had been brought up,” Bismarck said, “to admire, I might almost say worship, Austrian policy,” but in Frankfurt he found himself repelled by the “crafty and perfidious” diplomacy of the Habsburgs. It was at this time, he said, that “I conceived the idea ... of withdrawing Germany from Austrian pressure.” He proceeded at once to dispute the preeminence of Austria. Bismarck was a great actor, as well as a close student of Shakespeare’s plays, and he loved to disconcert his adversaries by playing the buffoon. In the Bundestag he took out a cigar and asked the Austrian delegate for a match. No Prussian delegate had ever before done such a thing; by a long tradition only the Austrians smoked in the Bundestag. It was as if Bismarck had blown smoke in the Kaiser’s face.
“Germany is too small for both of us,” he said in 1856. The shadow on the wall, however, was visible to him alone. At Berlin he was still regarded as an erratic figure, unreliable, perhaps unstable, certainly
lacking in the self-restraint which a Prussian dignitary must possess. He was dispatched to Saint Petersburg, where, at the distance of a thousand miles, he was unable to influence the formulation of policy in the Wilhelmstrasse. He had, he said, been “put on ice.”
In this frigid exile his health suffered. The rigors of the climate wrought upon his nerves, which, for all the ferocity of his passions, were never strong. But even more his unused energies left him weak and dispirited. Nothing is so frustrating to power as the inability to make its force felt.
Chapter 4
TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO THE CAPTIVES
Washington, February 1861
WHILE BISMARCK, in Saint Petersburg, dreamt of power, Abraham Lincoln, at the other end of the Western world, left Springfield to take up its burdens. He arrived in Washington on February 23, about six o’clock in the morning. Only two men attended him on the train from Baltimore, Allan Pinkerton, the private detective, and Ward Hill Lamon, a lawyer from Danville, Illinois, of gigantic physical stature, who acted as the President-Elect’s bodyguard.
The station was all but deserted. A crowd of hackney coachmen, most of them black, stood near the entrance to the station, looking for fares. Elihu Washburne, the Illinois Congressman, was one of the few officials present to greet the incoming President. “Abe,” he called out after Lincoln stepped from the railway carriage, “you can’t play that on me.” It was an inglorious entrance, dictated by fear of assassination. A rumor had spread that Lincoln was to be set upon and murdered in Baltimore as he passed through that city. As a result of this intelligence the President-Elect had been advised to abandon his entourage and travel incognito to the capital.
His person and demeanor confirmed the least charitable apprehensions of those who awaited him in Washington. The capital had for weeks been giddy with stories of his boorish manners. Lincoln’s appearance excited, in the polished circles of the East, something of the same uneasy malevolence which greeted the savage Goth or the exotic Syrian, recently raised to empire and invested with the purple, when he showed himself to the proud and cultivated epicures of the Roman Senate. The face of the President-Elect was stamped with the bleakness of the prairie; Henry Adams thought it a “plain, ploughed face.” Yet it was not only Lincoln’s looks, but his manner, too, that revealed, to those accustomed to Eastern standards of refinement, a want of taste and breeding—a vulgarity “beyond credence,” one observer said, “a thing you must see before you can believe it.”
The President-Elect did not always remove his hat when politeness dictated that a man must, and when, on his way to Washington, he stopped in New York, he wore black kid gloves to the Opera, when all the fine gentlemen listening to Verdi that night wore white. The merchant patriciate of New York, with its faux English standards, gave no quarter; and although the New York ladies condescended to give a reception for Mrs. Lincoln, even this exercise in social charity was not quite free from malice, for Mrs. August Belmont, the grande doyenne of New York society, did not appear. When the newspapers erroneously reported that Mrs. August Belmont had been present at the levée, the “Queen of Fifth Avenue” promptly issued a denial, and so reiterated the snub. Her husband, the New York agent of the House of Rothschild, was a Douglas Democrat.
One man claimed to see beneath the appearance of insipidity which Lincoln presented to the world. Walt Whitman, a poet who had, the previous year, brought out a new edition of his poems, Leaves of Grass, caught a glimpse of Lincoln as he passed through New York. A long train of equipages made their way from the Thirtieth Street Station to the Astor House. A great multitude thronged the street. The poet watched as a tall figure stepped out of a barouche. The President-Elect “paus’d leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the granite walls and looming arch
itecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds.” Many “an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there,” Whitman said, “ready, soon as break and riot came.”
The poet exaggerated the hostility of the crowd; the newspapers told of a kinder reception. But whatever his deficiencies as a reporter, Whitman was a superior student of character. No less than “four sorts of genius, four mighty and primal hands,” he said, could have limned Lincoln truly; he named Plutarch, Aeschylus, Michelangelo, and Rabelais. Plutarch and Michelangelo one understands—Lincoln was a hero. Rabelais, too: such was the quality of his humor. But Aeschylus? Perhaps Whitman believed that only the artist who painted the doomed Cassandra could accurately depict the superstitious dread in the President-Elect’s mind. This burden of presentiment, which Lincoln was always to carry with him, was undoubtedly innate, but it had been signally confirmed by the circumstances of his boyhood. He had been born, in 1809, in Kentucky, and he had passed his early years, his law partner, William Herndon, said, among “illiterate and superstitious” people belonging “to that nomadic class still to be met with throughout the South, and known as ‘poor whites.’” The rapid growth of his intellectual powers never wholly drove out Lincoln’s conviction that he was privy to presages and signs that revealed the occult workings of destiny. Shortly after his election as President, he experienced a vision while reclining on a sofa in his house in Springfield. He “saw in a mirror on the wall a double reflection of his face, with one image paler than the other.” He blanched: surely the paleness of the second reflection bore witness to the near approach of death. At all events he acquiesced in his wife’s interpretation of the oracle, which Mrs. Lincoln said signified that her husband “would be elected to a second term but that he would not live to complete it.”
He might trifle with the arts of prophecy and divination; but on the whole Lincoln’s understanding was cool, lucid, and impatient of nonsense. In native power of mind he had, perhaps, few superiors. With little formal schooling he had made himself into a successful lawyer and politician, and the pattern of intellectual growth which early established itself continued to be the rule of his nature during his riper years. In every decade his mind underwent a revolution in ideas; but in no period were its workings more fierce than in the middle years of the 1850s, when he discovered his political raison d’être and revolutionary vocation. Herndon remembered how, before this revival, Lincoln would sometimes sit, in the dingy law office in Springfield, for hours at a time “staring vacantly at the windows.” His opposition to the policy of militant nationalism which inspired the Mexican War had, he believed, ruined his political hopes; and living constantly with the great unhewn stones of his ambition, he was often betrayed, in the early fifties, into a morose-ness or dejection of temper, for he saw no way either to rid himself of his ambitious desires or to put them to a constructive use.
Then, in 1853, Stephen A. Douglas brought a bill in Congress to organize the Nebraska Territory. In its final form the bill provided for the repeal of the portion of the Missouri Compromise legislation that prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30’. The bill became law, and it instantly aroused Lincoln’s wrath. Territory which had once been consecrated to freedom might now know the scourge of slavery. The more Lincoln thought about it, the more furious he became. “In the office discussions,” Herndon said, “he grew bolder in his utterances.” To compromise with the forces of coercion was to appease them—to palliate evil. “The day of compromise,” Lincoln insisted, “has passed.” The “two great ideas” of slavery and freedom, he contended,
have been kept apart only by the most artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart. Some day these deadly antagonists will one or the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled.
In October 1854, Senator Douglas returned to Illinois. The state fair was on; Springfield was crowded with visitors. Douglas undertook to defend his Kansas-Nebraska policy. Lincoln denounced it in what one newspaper called the “profoundest” speech he had yet given. He “quivered with emotion,” and when he finished his listeners erupted in huzzas, and women waved white handkerchiefs.
In 1858 he was nominated by the Republican Party as its candidate for the United States Senate seat which Douglas held. In accepting the nomination he consigned to the ash-heap of history not only the Kansas-Nebraska policy of Douglas but the entire framework of conciliation devised by the Silver Age senators:
We are now in the fifth year, since a policy was initiated [that of Senator Douglas], with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
The race was close: but in the end Lincoln lost. The defeat, however, was not complete, for the House Divided speech revealed its deliverer to be a new kind of American statesman, vigorous and uncompromising in his adherence to a revolutionary principle, yet tenacious of power and unwilling to let it slip from his grasp without a struggle.
The institutions of liberty were, Lincoln believed, in danger. A new philosophy of coercion was on the march. It was not improbable, he said, that as the new philosophy advanced, human bondage would become lawful in all the American “States, old as well as new—North as well as South.” If the authoritarian banners continued their progress, America would witness the “total overthrow” of free-state principles: it would become a country in which “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” At such a conjuncture, he would, he said, “prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
But it was not only in America that the institutions of the free state were threatened. The new philosophy of power was, Lincoln argued, making rapid strides in other parts of the globe. He repeatedly characterized the struggle between freedom and servitude as a world struggle. The outcome of the American contest between the two philosophies would, he predicted, have a great, possibly a decisive, impact on the world crisis. Were the American Republic to be broken on the anvil of slavery, men and women around the world would suffer. If, on the contrary, the United States was saved on principles of freedom, “millions of free happy people, the world over,” Lincoln said, would “rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
Scholars have criticized Lincoln for exaggerating the threat to liberty; but it is important to understand how formidable, in his day, the odds against the free state seemed. The new philosophy of coercion was dangerous precisely because it went to the heart of the free-state ideal. It attacked the principle that all men are created equal. The “definitions and axioms of free society” were, Lincoln said,
denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting of the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they wil
l subjugate us.
Had the “van-guard” of “returning despotism” prevailed in the United States, or had two hostile republics, one slave and one free, emerged on the North American continent, it is doubtful whether America would have been strong enough, and free enough, in the decades that followed to resist effectively the slave empires that emerged in Germany and Russia, and that in the twentieth century aspired to dominion of the planet.
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln said in Philadelphia as he made his way to Washington to be inaugurated as President. Yet this champion of liberty and self-government harbored within him another, secret self, a restless, darkly ambitious being, fascinated by human greatness, and passionately craving the splendor of a personal ascendancy. His ambition, Herndon said, was “a little engine that knew no rest.” Many years earlier Lincoln had spoken of those men who belong to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” It was the tribe to which he himself belonged. “Towering genius,” the young Lincoln said, “disdains a beaten path. ... It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”
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