Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  The loss was regrettable; but what was the disappearance of a house to the glory of the Russian spring? The season had always an enchantment for Tolstoy. “It’s spring!” he would shout when the snows melted and the first blossoms appeared. “It is so good to be alive on this earth, for all good people and even for such as I.” Where his grandfather’s mansion once stood larch saplings now grew, along with the weeds. Tolstoy rode over the countryside, swam in the Voronka, heard the music of the nightingales, and at night gazed up at the immensity of the Russian sky. In the spring, he said, “nature, the air, everything is drenched in hope, future, a wonderful future.”

  Tolstoy returned to Russia filled with the spirit of reform. He wanted to contribute to the Tsar’s revolution. He had agreed to serve as a local Justice of the Peace (or “Peace Mediator”), an office created to implement the Tsar’s new emancipation law; and he wanted to build up the school he had started for serf children. Everyone, he said, “feels the need for action.”

  Every day the muzhiks—the peasants—came to Tolstoy with another impossible demand. “Well, lads, what do you want?” Tolstoy would ask them. After hearing them out, he would shake his head. “I am very sorry I can’t do what you wish. Were I to do so I should cause your landlord a great loss.”

  “But you’ll manage it for us some how, batushka [little father],” the peasants would say.

  “No, I can’t do anything of the kind,” Tolstoy would reply.

  “But somehow, batushka. . . . If only you want to, batushka, you’ll know to find a way to do it.”

  Tolstoy would then make the sign of the Cross. “As God is holy,” he would say, “I swear that I can be of no use at all to you.”

  “You’ll take pity on us, and do it somehow, batushka!”

  The landlords, with their own unreasonable demands, could not be disposed of quite so easily as the muzhiks. Tolstoy was soon quarrelling, he said, with “all the landowners.” He received letters filled with threats. In the streets of Tula, the provincial capital, he was not safe, and a petition for his removal was laid before the responsible Minister in Saint Petersburg. Nevertheless, Tolstoy remained in office.

  Like others charged with implementing the emancipation law, he soon discovered that, whatever decision he made, he must cause someone pain. The serfs had worked the land for generations. They had, they believed, paid for each field, each furrow, many times over with their sweat and blood. Anything less than an outright gift of the soil on which their families had toiled for decades was to them an injustice. “Our life belongs to you,” the serfs told the landowners, “you can take it. But you have no right to move us from the land which belongs to us.” Yet under the emancipation law the serfs were to receive only a portion of the land to which they believed themselves entitled. Their landlords, far from being made to feel the consequences of their greed and their brutality, were to be compensated for the loss of their property by the government. The government, in turn, looked to the peasants to be made whole. Under the emancipation legislation, liberated serfs were required to reimburse the imperial treasury, over a period of years, for the land they acquired.

  The landowners, naturally enough, saw the matter in a different light. In an instant they were to be deprived, for inadequate compensation, of as much as a third of their real property. Their serfs were to be taken from them for no compensation at all. Even before the enactment of the emancipation law, a large number of noble families struggled under a heavy burden of debt. Many landowners had not yet recovered from the destruction caused by Napoleon’s invasion half a century before. Other nobles, if they had been spared the desolation of war, found it difficult to afford the luxuries of peace—clothing from Paris, rest cures at Baden, winters in Nice, gaming at Monte Carlo. Many patrician families would now be ruined; most would lose much of their old dignity and influence.

  Tolstoy labored at his task, he said, “in the coolest and most conscientious manner.” But the endless disputes wore down his spirit. It was, he believed, life-sapping work; and he resented every type of activity that took him away from the mysterious essence of life. To gallop over the countryside on a fast horse, to plough a field of maize with his muzhiks, to commune with nature, to make love to a pretty peasant girl—what was politics to that? This distrust of the state was not unique to Tolstoy. A century earlier the class to which he belonged had been released, by Catherine the Great, from its obligation to serve the imperial government. After the abolition of compulsory service the nobles gained title to their lands; these they were permitted to keep regardless of whether they labored for the Tsar. The landowners cherished their freedom. Wary of being lured back into a life of official servitude, they looked with suspicion on the most innocent forms of civic responsibility. This apolitical mentality, so different from the ideal of noblesse oblige (nobility obligates) that inspired the aristocrats of Western Europe to toil in the public service, would have important consequences for Alexander’s program of reform.

  Tolstoy questioned the value of his political work; but his descents into the sweaty depths of life were as unsatisfying. At times the ache of the flesh was overwhelming. “I absolutely must have a woman,” he would write. He would throw himself upon some village girl. He would go off to the Gypsies. He would debauch himself in a tavern on the outskirts of Tula or Moscow. “Girls, silly music,” he wrote after one of these episodes, “girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls!”

  But the Bacchanalia brought him no nearer a solution to the problem of life. His excursions into ecstasy were followed by flaccid intervals of remorse and despair. He would castigate himself for “living like a beast.” His “awful lust,” he said, amounted “to physical illness.” It was “disgusting.” He yearned “for something higher, something perfect.” There were moments when, looking up at the heavens, he found that “everything fainted away and became transformed into joy and love.” “What is it I so ardently desire?” he asked as he gazed at the stars. “I do not know.” “It is dark,” he wrote, “holes in the sky, light. I could die! My God! My God! What am I? Where am I going? Where am I?”

  The spring at Yasnaya Polyana brought the promise of new life, a fresh start; but it yielded no answer, and over the beauty of nature there brooded the spectre of death. “Again the same question: why? I am no longer very far myself from the crossing-over. Over where? Nowhere. . . .” “What’s the point of everything, when tomorrow the torments of death will begin, with all the abomination of meanness, lies, and self-deceit, and end in nothingness, the annihilation of the self? An amusing trick!”

  A man in such a frame of mind might possibly withdraw to a monastery. Could he be relied upon to implement an emancipation law? Tolstoy’s turn towards mysticism was characteristically Russian; but from the point of view of the Tsar, such spiritual drifting was disconcerting. If his revolution were to succeed, he must find a way to mobilize the faith of men like Tolstoy.

  Washington, April-May 1861

  THE CAPITAL, at least, was safe.

  It had, for a time, seemed not unlikely that Lincoln’s revolution would end before it began. It had seemed not improbable that Washington would fall, and that the new administration would collapse, before a sufficiently strong defensive force could be transported from the North to protect the Federal city. Across the Potomac, a hostile army was being raised. A new power had come into being in the South. The Confederate States of America, once the dream of a small knot of romantics, had become a reality. Fort Sumter had fallen to the new Republic. Virginia had joined it in spirit, and would in a short time unite herself to it in fact. The government at Washington had little with which to oppose it.

  There was a sigh of relief when, in response to Lincoln’s call for troops, the Massachusetts 6th Regiment of Volunteers arrived after fighting its way through Baltimore. But for some time no more soldiers came. The President looked into the abyss every revolutionary leader sooner or
later confronts. It is one thing to cross the Rubicon. It is another thing to know what to do when one reaches the other side.

  Lincoln understood the moral necessity of a revolutionary policy; but in contrast to Tsar Alexander, he had given little thought to its practical consequences. Where, he asked, was the Massachusetts 7th Regiment? “I don’t believe there is any North,” he remarked in frustration. “The 7th Regiment is a myth.” Lincoln was not easily frightened, but those close to him perceived, in his dark and lowering looks, an uncharacteristic agitation. He paced the floor of his office. “Why don’t they come!” he was heard to say as he gazed out the window of the White House. “Why don’t they come!”

  The crisis passed, and Washington was soon swarming with soldiers. The Massachusetts 7th Regiment arrived. Troops from Ohio and Vermont, Maine and Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan poured in. Colonel Cameron’s Scotch Regiment—the 79th New York—marched up Pennsylvania Avenue in tartan and plaid. Colonel Corcoran’s Irish Regiment—the 69th New York—followed. By the beginning of the summer more than 30,000 soldiers were encamped in or around the Roman temples of the capital—the germ of the Army of the Potomac. The city resembled a vast bivouac. Franklin Square was covered with barracks. The East Room of the White House was converted into a guardroom. Two Rhode Island regiments were quartered in the Patent Office. Across the river, at Arlington, more troops were encamped, and a vast array of tents and standards stretched from Alexandria to Georgetown, protected by an intricate system of forts and redoubts.

  With the influx of men and arms the tone of the city changed. The rudiments of a wartime society emerged. Before the outbreak of the war, Washington had been, in its social complexion, a Southern city, with French overtones. At Washington, as at Charleston, cultivated men and women piqued themselves on their intimate knowledge of the culture of France. They alluded to the novels of Balzac and Mlle Scudéry. President Buchanan conversed in French with strollers on the lawn of the White House. But the leisured, Francophile culture of old Washington was swept away in the revolution; in the spring of ’61 the life of the city was regulated by the bugle, the fife, and the drum. The routines of the army formed the pattern of social existence. The city’s matrons woke to reveille; their daughters made elaborate toilettes in anticipation of officers’ call and dress parade; the men of the city, drowsing, after supper, over their newspapers and cigars, heard the bugle notes of tattoo (“tapto,” the call to quarters), and made their way to bed to the music of taps. Sometimes, in the night, the ominous “long roll” sounded—a long, low, monotonous drumming, the signal that something was amiss.

  By common consent the darling of the new society at Washington was Miss Kate Chase, the daughter of the new Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. She was a young lady of twenty, and she quickly replaced Miss Lane as the reigning belle. Her face was handsome, spoiled only, in the opinion of some, by a retroussé nose; her figure was “exceedingly well formed.” She was always beautifully dressed, with the haughty carriage of an empress; yet with all her grandeur, Miss Chase contrived to produce an effect of simplicity, as befitted the daughter of a man who drew his inspiration from the Puritans, and who like them had emerged from the pew to grapple with the ungodly. Flowers supplied, in Miss Chase’s wardrobe, the place of jewels; and she rarely went forth, from her house at the corner of Sixth and E Streets, without a rich and fragrant blossom in her hair.

  Washington, anxious to escape the tension of revolution, was soon absorbed in the melodrama of Miss Chase’s coming out. She was used to getting what she wanted; and what Kate Chase wanted most was not long a secret in the capital. William Sprague rode into Washington that spring on a white horse to take command of the 1st Rhode Island; and Miss Chase’s destiny was sealed. How could she resist? Few gifts of nature or fortune, it seemed, had been denied this young man. Sprague was handsome, he was rich, he was powerful. He was the Governor of Rhode Island. He was thirty years old—a man of apparent splendor, and possibly of inward danger. In his dark gray eyes Miss Chase beheld the revelation of her future.

  With her brusque, almost military manners, Miss Chase shone brilliantly in the firmament of wartime Washington; but the life of the city nevertheless revolved around the President. Lincoln was less awkward, in his social character, than many had expected him to be. Judge Horatio N. Taft of the Patent Office was inclined to be critical in matters of etiquette. But he never saw Lincoln embarrassed. “The President seems to be anxious,” he said, “to make everyone comfortable and at their ease.” This was “the essence of good breeding.” When the diplomatic corps came to dine in state at the White House, the President surprised many by acquitting himself well, though his son Thomas (“Tad”) observed that beside the beribboned diplomats and braided attachés, “Pa looked pretty plain with his black suit.” Mrs. Lincoln was another matter: “Ma was dressed up,” Tad said, “you bet.” In her desire to outshine the Miss Chases of the world, Mary Todd Lincoln made, in May, an expedition to the shops of Philadelphia and New York; the result was grim.

  In contrast to the egotism and display of Mrs. Lincoln, the President preserved a decent simplicity of demeanor. Judge Taft’s daughter, Julia, saw him often in 1861. Miss Taft’s brothers, Bud and Holly, were the playmates of Lincoln’s two youngest boys, Tad, eight years old, and William Wallace (“Willie”), ten. (Lincoln’s oldest son, Robert Todd, was an undergraduate at Harvard; his second son, Edward Baker, lay buried in an Illinois graveyard.) Miss Taft was a pretty, well-bred young lady of sixteen; to her fell the lot of chaperone. She often found the President, when business was not pressing, in the family’s oval sitting room on the second floor of the mansion, in the big chair by the window. He usually had a book in his lap—a “big, worn, leather-covered book.” It was his Bible; and when not in use, it “stood on a small table ready to his hand.” After lunch he would sit beside the window reading, “sometimes in his stocking feet,” Miss Taft remembered, “with one leg crossed over the other, the unshod foot slowly waving back and forth, as if in time to some inaudible music.”

  Miss Taft was at first a little afraid of the President. But she soon discovered him to be good-humored and easy of approach. He called her “flibbertigibbet.” When, in the sitting room one day, Miss Taft, in a white frock with a blue sash, professed ignorance of the term, the President looked at her in mock astonishment.

  “You don’t know what a flibbertigibbet is?” Lincoln asked.

  Miss Taft did not.

  “Well, I am surprised, child; I thought everybody knew what a flibbertigibbet was.”

  “Well I don’t,” Miss Taft replied. “Is it a French word?” (Miss Taft took pride in her excellent French.)

  “No, Julie,” the President said, “it’s not a French word. It’s a good American word and I’m surprised you don’t know what it means.”

  “I don’t think you do either,” she told the President.

  “Don’t know what flibbertigibbet means? Of course I know what it means and I’ll tell you. It’s a small, slim thing with curls and a white dress and a blue sash who flies instead of walking.”

  Yet suddenly the merry joking would cease; the laughter would stop; and though no sharp words escaped him, the President would sit “sad and silent under the strain.” Miss Taft would find him “sprawled out in that big chair in the sitting room” with the book in his hands. It was Lincoln’s habit to search the book for clues. The free state, he knew, had been forged in the heat of the English Bible; it was practically Protestant. No modern reformer, whatever might be his personal theology, could afford to overlook the reform spirit which produced the Reformation. The imagination of the American people had, moreover, been touched by the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical revival that began in the late eighteenth century. The poetry of King James’s Authorized Version of the Bible lingered in the nation’s consciousness.

  “My friend has said to me that I am a poor hand to quote Scripture,” Lincoln once remarked. Yet he had turned to the Bible i
n 1858 when, as Republican candidate for the Senate in Illinois, he sought what he called “some universally known figure” that would “strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times.” He found what he was looking for in Mark 3:25: “And a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” Would the book yield another such clue?

  One morning Miss Taft found the President sitting in his chair looking out the window. The Bible lay in his lap. “He spoke to me in an absent-minded way and, clasping my hand, rested it on his knee, as I stood by him. He seemed to see something interesting out the window. I stood there for what seemed to me a long time, with my hand clasped in his. I followed his gaze out of the window but could see nothing but the tops of some trees. I thought it wouldn’t be polite for me to pull my hand out of his grasp, even if I could, so I stood there until my arm fairly ached.” Why, she later wondered, did she not ask the President what he saw out the window? “I think,” she said, “he would have told me.”

  At last the President turned to her. With a startled look Lincoln said, “Why, Julie, have I been holding you here all this time?”

  Nothing in his life had prepared him for the violent turn events had taken. He had hoped to accomplish his revolution pacifically, and he had not permitted himself to imagine what would happen should his people throw open the gates of war. He was not a practiced man of action. He had not, like Tsar Alexander, been bred to power. He was not, like Bismarck, versed in matters of state. He had never before exercised executive authority. It is unlikely that he knew, in the spring of 1861, how to frame a military order. The highest office he had held, before his elevation to the presidency, was that of Congressman; more than a decade before he had served a single term in the House of Representatives. Still less was he a soldier. His experience of combat was, he said, limited to a struggle with the mosquitoes during the Black Hawk War. His party had, in the recent election, deployed paramilitary units like the Wide Awakes to influence the result at the polls; these companies, with their torchlight parades and “monster meetings,” had been organized, Henry Adams said, “in a form military in all things except weapons.” But it is one thing to connive at the acts of street thugs in an election canvass, quite another to form armies and lead a nation in an atmosphere more or less revolutionary.