Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  The internal antagonism between the liberal figure, content with the life and culture of the free state, and the romantic figure, yearning for something more, will always be a puzzling one. Probably the works of the romantic artists of America in that period best illuminate the desires and dissatisfactions of such a soul. Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emerson’s Representative Men may reveal more about the President-Elect’s motives than all the newspapers of the age. Yet it is certain that the contradictions which festered in Lincoln’s soul would enable him, in time, to unlock the secret of the revolution he made.

  Saint Petersburg, February-March 1861

  AS LINCOLN WAS making his way to Washington to implement his revolution, Tsar Alexander, in Saint Petersburg, initiated a new phase in his. Prince Peter Kropotkin witnessed the dramatic events. It was a Sunday morning, the last Sunday of the Carnival that preceded Lent, and the Prince lay lounging in his bed in the Corps of Pages, the seminary of the Russian officer corps. In a short time, however, he must rise and dress, for on Sundays he was required to attend the changing of the guard at the Riding School.

  Saint Petersburg, at that time, was transfixed by a single question. In between the quadrilles of the Bal blanc (the White Ball) and the waltzes of the Bal rosé (the Pink Ball), at intimate little supper parties given by the aristocracy, in the gaslit restaurants of the capital, lurid in gilt and velvet, the talk everywhere was of emancipation. Prince Kropotkin took it all in, for he was a young man, not yet twenty, with a gift of observation. As a witness to history, he was well placed; the Prince had entrée to all the fashionable personages of the capital, even to the Tsar himself, whose page de chambre he was soon to become.

  Yet for all his intimacy with Saint Petersburg, Prince Kropotkin was not a native of the capital. He was a scion of the old boyar nobility of Moscow, descended from one of those princely houses that had for generations lived in proud isolation in the Old Equerries Quarter of the city, in the shadow of the Kremlin. This remnant of the ancient aristocracy of Russia, jealous of its heritage, had for many years stood aloof, unsympathetic to the changes the country had undergone since the seventeenth century. Some of the old families were rich; Prince Kropotkin’s father possessed twelve hundred men-serfs. But the hereditary wealth of the primitive nobility of Russia concealed the extent of its relative decline, for many of the old families had been surpassed, in the race for honors and places, by a new class of men, the quick, vigorous souls who had risen to power in the bureaus of Peter the Great. In Saint Petersburg, the city of Peter, Prince Kropotkin was a figure almost provincial in his naïveté, the relic of an archaic race. He was an appealing young man; George Bernard Shaw, who knew him at a later period, thought him “amiable to the point of saintliness.” Yet in Kropotkin’s high-minded purity there was something unsettling—a suggestion of that lofty pride which would, in time, lead him to turn against the Tsar’s revolution, and to offer to it a resistance more hurtful to Russia than all the clever stratagems of Prince Orlov and his party.

  Kropotkin was still lounging in his bed when his servant, Ivanov, brought in the tea tray.

  “Prince, freedom!” the servant exclaimed.

  “Did you see it yourself?” Kropotkin asked.

  “Yes. People stand around; one reads, the others listen. It is freedom.”

  The Tsar’s diversionary tactics—the dispatching of Grand Duke Constantine to the Mediterranean, the installation of Count Panin in General Rostovtsev’s place—had served their purpose. Alexander was ready now to act, but the deed itself he masked in another layer of secrecy. The signing of the emancipation manifesto took place two weeks before it was made public. The Tsar, after praying in his chapel and breakfasting with his family, retired to his study. With him were Grand Duke Constan-tine, who had returned from the Mediterranean, Tsarevitch Nicholas, and a few other trusted souls. Prince Orlov was not among those who witnessed the revolutionary act. He had fallen sick, and no other figure had emerged capable of contesting the Tsar’s will.

  Constantine looked on as his brother took up the manifesto. The Tsar’s hands trembled as he touched it. He read it aloud. Afterwards he made the sign of the Cross. He signed the paper, and his brother sprinkled sand on the ink. The first phase of his revolution was complete. The fetters that bound more than twenty million human beings were no more.

  The Tsar, however, did not, just then, announce the revolution he had initiated. Lent was approaching, and he withheld the manifesto lest the fury of the Carnival—the interval of excess that preceded the Lenten fast—furnish a pretext for violence. Behind this caution was the revolutionary statesman’s apprehension that he will lose control of his revolution. Memories of the peasant revolts inspired by Stenka Razin and Emelian Pugachev lingered in the imagination of Russia. By waiting until Lent to announce the emancipation, Alexander hoped that his subjects would receive the news of his revolution in a sober and contrite frame of mind.

  Two Sundays after the manifesto was signed, copies were distributed throughout the Empire, together with the text of the law itself, the Statute on the Peasants. Russians gathered in little groups to study the Tsar’s message. It was by no means easy to decipher, for it had been composed, by the prelate Philaret, the Metropolitan of Moscow, in the archaic style of the Church, with many phrases drawn from the old Slavonic. “Make the sign of the Cross, thou Russian people,” the manifesto began. This was the first, but not the last, error Alexander would make in his effort to remodel the state. How could he expect his people to embrace a revolution he was unable to explain to them?

  While his subjects struggled to make sense of the manifesto, the Tsar went as usual to the Riding School to preside at the changing of the guard. Passing under the double-headed eagles emblazoned on the gate of his palace, he drove into Palace Square. Bells pealed, and the Tsar-Liberator was hailed by an immense throng. Some cheered. Others wept. Still others, conscious of the miraculous promise of the moment, exchanged the traditional Easter greeting, though it was the beginning of Lent.

  “Christ is risen!”

  “In truth He is risen!”

  After the ceremony at the Riding School, Alexander remained on horseback. “The officers to me,” he called out in a loud voice. The Tsar proceeded to justify his act to his horse guards. Prince Kropotkin overheard parts of the Tsar’s address: “The officers . . . the representatives of the nobility in the army... an end has been put to centuries of injustice ... I expect sacrifices from the nobility. . . the loyal nobility will gather round the throne.”

  More eloquent, to Kropotkin, was the modest exultation of a simple peasant. Seeing a fine gentleman after Mass that morning, the peasant greeted him with mirth in his eyes. “Well, sir?” the peasant said, “now— all gone?”

  The task of remaking Russia had begun.

  Berlin, May 1861–January 1862

  IN A BRICK BUILDING on the Bendlerstrasse, a somber, neat-looking man pored over his maps. He wore the uniform of a Prussian general; but the man’s delicate features, and in particular his eyes, strikingly blue, suggested nothing of the latent savagery of the warrior. At once gentle and a trifle sad, the eyes might have been those of a Lutheran pastor, or perhaps of a retiring scholar, a Privatgelehrter, in a quiet market town. In the spring of 1861 few even well-informed students of power were aware of the existence either of the man or the institution he directed; but he rather relished than resented this obscurity. Helmuth von Moltke, on the eve of his sixty-second birthday, had for four years been the Chief of the Prussian General Staff, and the code of this interesting body required the complete subordination of ego and ambition to the needs of the army and the state.

  Germany was, at this time, teeming with would-be revolutionaries; but none was more daring or original than the self-effacing man in the Bendlerstrasse. If Wagner supplied the music of the German revolution, Moltke supplied its machinery. The forms of power he organized would reshape his age; and the shadow of his military cloak would extend far into the twentieth
century. He commanded the shock troops that would soon shake the world.

  In his room in the Bendlerstrasse, Moltke gloomily studied his maps. Everywhere he looked, he saw danger. Prussia was surrounded by great powers. To the west lay France, whose ruler, Napoleon III, was the nephew of the man who half a century before overran Germany and rode in triumph through Berlin. To the south was Austria, the prima donna of the German states, determined to keep the aspirant power, Prussia, in its place. To the east was the Russian colossus, while to the north lay the sea, dominated by the naval power of England. Moltke went over the possibilities. What if the Romance peoples in the west— the French, the Spanish, the Italians—formed a coalition with the Slavs in the east with the object of crushing the German center?8 What if Napoleon III, lusting, as his uncle had lusted, for power and possessions, made war on Prussia in order to gain territories on the Rhine?

  This perpetual imagination of disaster was morose; but it was the business of an officer of the Prussian General Staff to be morose. The work of a Staff officer consisted in nervously pondering the future and drawing up plans to meet every conceivable military contingency. War games were the Staff officer’s life. An utterly normal personality was unlikely to flourish in such an occupation; an element of neurotic morbidity was almost a prerequisite for success on the Prussian General Staff. This qualification Moltke possessed. Like the illustrious Staff officers of the past, like Scharnhorst and Clausewitz, he was touched by melancholy. The Empress Eugénie, the consort of Napoleon III, saw him once in Paris; she thought him oddly quiet, and wondered whether he were not wrung by a “continuous inner tension.”

  It was an indication of the genius of the Prussian army that it could make use of such a man. The prevailing idea of the Prussian officer— stolid and unimaginative, with an air of military stiffness—was true enough. But there was also, in the Prussian service, room for men of a humanistic cast of mind—men like Moltke, who at the time he became Chief of the General Staff had never commanded a regiment. The warriors, or “Plumes,” led the troops, while the worriers, or “Scribes,” directed the operations of the Staff. The contributions of both kinds of men, the flamboyant athletes in the field and the monocled chess players in the war room, would soon make Prussia’s the most lethal military machine on the planet.

  In contrast to the field commanders, with their colorful personalities, the officers of the General Staff were advisers and strategists, technical experts who were content to remain in the shadows. “My life is an existence that leaves no traces,” Carl von Clausewitz, the most penetrating intellect to serve on the General Staff, once said. Clausewitz did not venture to publish, in his lifetime, On War, the work in which he distilled his knowledge of military art; the book appeared only after his death. On War is rooted in a romantic vision of the prostration of the individual before the majesty of the state. The state, according to Clausewitz, embodies the soul of the people; true freedom lies, not in the pursuit of individual happiness, but in the effort “to put king and country above all else”; war is the great creative activity of patriotism.

  Moltke carried the tradition of Clausewitz into a new age. He sprang, like much of the Prussian officer corps, from the nobility of northern Germany, and he early embraced the austere creed of devotion and obedience by which his ancestors had lived. Unlike most of his brother officers, however, Moltke was intellectually curious and aware of a larger world beyond the Baltic. He owed his brains, not to his father, a Prussian officer and unsuccessful gentleman-farmer, but to his mother. Moltke’s mother, like Bismarck’s, had grown up in a city; she came from Lübeck, and she had absorbed something of its Hanseatic culture. Moltke himself possessed literary and artistic propensities; he seems to have aspired, in his youth, to be a universal man on the Renaissance model. His love of art and music did not, however, deter him from becoming a soldier. After an unhappy interval in the Danish service, he took up a commission in the Prussian army in 1821; to supplement his income, he published a prose romance and several historical sketches, and he embarked on a German translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Later Moltke traveled to Constantinople, where he became military adviser to the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmoud II; he there undertook a survey of the Ottoman domains as far east as the Euphrates, and penetrated regions into which no European had strayed, he said, since Xenophon. He loved the southern sun and the choice air of the Mediterranean, and he was never happier than when studying the antiquities of Provence or Rome. The “gray fogs, dripping gutters, and long evenings” of the Berlin winter depressed him.

  Moltke’s ambition, upon becoming, in 1857, Chief of the General Staff, was to adapt Prussian strategy to the technological revolutions of the age. He was convinced that in the next war railroads and telegraph lines would be more important than conventional fortifications. “Build no more fortresses,” he said; “build railways.” He published, in 1843, an essay on railway strategy, and one of his goals, upon becoming Chief of the General Staff, was to supplement traditional military exercises with railway transport drills. The first such drills took place in 1862.

  Yet the principal contribution of Moltke was not technical. It was spiritual. His delicate pallor seemed to betoken an inner purity, a quiet grandeur of soul. Under his direction the General Staff developed an intensity of purpose reminiscent of a monastic brotherhood. Its theology of violence would, in time, infect the entire army. War is, with slavery, the ultimate form of coercion, the art by which one man forces another man to submit to his will. At the same time, war is the most complete expression of the romantic desire to turn away from life; the warrior does not merely reject the flesh, he destroys it. Not for nothing did the Prussian army, with its Death’s-Heads and Black Eagles, exalt the totems of death; the true Prussian warrior longed to seal his faith in a sacrament of blood. Moltke, in forging a new order of Teutonic Knights, refined this spirit of fanaticism, and bred a race of men whose souls seemed molded of the same iron as their crosses.9

  Washington, February-March 1861

  LINCOLN’S FIRST OBJECT, on reaching the capital, was to suppress counter-revolutionary heresy. Governor Seward must be put in his place. Gently, if possible, firmly if necessary.

  Seward was mortified. Not only was his advice rejected, but the hand of his enemy was strengthened. Lincoln asked Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Chase was a child of the Puritans; he opposed concessions to the party of coercion and thought the politics of compromise profane. It was more than Seward could bear. He went to Lincoln and told him that he must choose. His sense both of the public interest and what was more particularly due to himself compelled him, he said, to insist on the exclusion of Chase as the condition of his own service in the Cabinet.

  The President-Elect was unmoved by this appeal. Seward determined to force the issue. Two days before the inauguration, he wrote to Lincoln. “Circumstances which have occurred since I expressed to you in December last my willingness to accept the office of Secretary of State,” he said, “seem to me to render it my duty to ask leave to withdraw that consent.”

  Lincoln saw at once the danger Seward’s withdrawal posed. The expression of what amounted to a lack of confidence in his revolutionary policy, coming from one so highly placed in his own party, could only weaken his position and injure his chances as he entered into power. Yet what could he do? He could not afford to lose Seward. Neither could he afford to yield to him.

  The course he chose revealed the extent of his shrewdness. He pretended that, in the perplexed hours that preceded the inauguration, he had not received Seward’s letter. “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” Lincoln told his private secretary, John Nicolay, as he put the letter away. Seward anxiously waited for a reply from the President-Elect; but for two days no reply came.

  On the eve of the transfer of power the rumble of artillery caissons was heard in the streets of Washington. Muffled batteries made their way to Twelfth Street and to Capitol Hill it
self. Winfield Scott, the ranking general of the army, was taking no chances.

  March 4 dawned bright. President Buchanan, too weak, the British envoy Lord Lyons observed, to wring his own hands, drove to Willard’s Hotel early in the afternoon. There President-Elect Lincoln joined him in the barouche. The two presidents were driven up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, accompanied by mounted marshals adorned with blue scarves and white rosettes. Sharpshooters in green coats stood on the rooftops, and squadrons of cavalry patrolled the streets. A sullen crowd watched the presidential carriage pass. “There goes that Illinois ape, the cursed Abolitionist,” a Washington lady said as the procession went by. “But he will never come back alive.”

  At half past one, Lincoln descended from the carriage and mounted the steps of the Capitol.

  Chapter 5

  MOBILIZATION

  Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, April-May 1861

  A YOUNG MAN, not tall, but powerfully built and muscular, sat in the train as it crossed the Russian frontier. He wore a beard, partly, perhaps, to cover up a face he thought unattractive; but undoubtedly the most remarkable aspect of his appearance was his gaze, gray-eyed and intense. “Frontier,” the young man wrote in his journal as the train sped across the snowbound countryside. “Health good. Am happy.” After a long tour of Europe, Count Leo Nicholaievich Tolstoy, thirty-two years old in the spring of 1861, had come home.

  Early in May he reached Yasnaya Polyana, his hereditary estate south of Moscow. He followed the cart-road through fields of maize, drove past the village and the onion-domed church, and went down a narrow avenue of birches and limes. At last the whitewashed pavilion itself was before him, with its neo-classical façade—his home, or rather all that remained of it. Gone was the colonnaded mansion that had once stood on the property, the house to which his maternal grandfather, Prince Nicholas Sergeyevich Volkonsky, had retired, many years before, after long and faithful service in the court of Catherine the Great. That eighteenth-century gentleman, with his powdered wig and passion for order and activity, had determined to live aloof from the world, in the seclusion of his porticos. It was in old Prince Volkonsky’s house that Tolstoy himself had been born, in 1828; but he sold the house in 1854 to pay gambling debts he contracted while serving as an officer during the Crimean War. His boyhood home was dismantled and carried off.