Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  Many of those who beheld the plumes of smoke rising from Apraxin Dvor wondered what cataclysm they foretold. But Prince Kropotkin did not wonder. He knew what they foretold. The end of liberalism in Russia.

  Washington, February 1862

  “PA DON’T HAVE TIME to play with us now,” Willie Lincoln lamented. He was a quiet and intelligent child; Julia Taft thought him “the most lovable boy” she ever knew. Willie’s younger brother, Tad, was a duller and more amusing boy. One day, while playing with a new ball in the White House, Tad shattered a mirror.

  “Well, it’s broken,” Tad said. The instinct of a boy at such a moment will be to dread his father’s wrath; but Tad quickly brightened. “I don’t b’lieve Pa’ll care,” he predicted, though as a precautionary measure he threw a pinch of salt over his shoulder and attempted to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

  “It’s not Pa’s looking glass,” Willie said gravely. “It belongs to the United States Government.”

  A broken mirror could add little to the troubles of a man who had on his hands a shattered country. Lincoln had by this time learned just how little real authority his office as chief executive of the United States Government conferred upon him. Leaders of free states have, notoriously, a greater difficulty in mobilizing their countries to meet an emergency than do heads of régimes despotically organized. The leader of a free state cannot simply order, or even artfully manipulate, he must persuade. His very generals feel themselves competent to criticize him. The republics of antiquity solved the problem through the institution of temporary dictatorship; but the founders of the American Republic, wary of Caesarism, did not revive it. Under the Constitution, the American President who confronts a crisis must fashion his own expedients. Every great presidency is an original invention.

  But the clue eluded Lincoln. He had not yet mastered the revolutionary art. The gigantic military machine he had assembled had ground to a halt. Lincoln had entrusted to General McClellan the command of the greatest army ever deployed on the North American continent; but six months had passed, and in McClellan’s hands the army remained, the President said, a “stationary engine.”

  In his anxiety, Lincoln pressed McClellan to attack the Confederate forces in their entrenchments southwest of Manassas. McClellan, however, refused, and when confronted with Lincoln’s order calling for a general advance in the last week of February, he composed a long letter citing the insuperable obstacles to such a campaign. The Southern army encamped on the Manassas plain was not a third of the size of McClellan’s army, but McClellan insisted that it was even larger than the Union force. He proposed an alternative. He wanted, he said, to bring his army by sea to one of the forks of land formed by the three great rivers—the James, the York, and the Rappahannock—that emptied into Chesapeake Bay south of the Potomac. From there the Army of the Potomac would proceed rapidly over land to Richmond, and sack the city.

  While the President pondered his choices, Mrs. Lincoln threw herself into preparations for a party. Maillard’s would prepare the dinner; wine and champagne would come from the Lincolns’ wine merchants in New York. Five hundred invitations were sent out. In the midst of these exertions, Willie Lincoln came down with a chill. A fever, possibly typhoid, took hold of the boy. (The water used in the White House was drawn from the Potomac, which at that time served Washington as both a fountain and a drain.) The day of the party found Willie in the grip of a virulent intestinal malady. It was too late to cancel the fête; the Lincolns must go through with it. The President donned a black swallowtail coat. Mrs. Lincoln emerged from her dressing room in a gown of white silk, set off with a long train and a quantity of flounces.

  Husband and wife descended the staircase to receive their guests. The affair was a splendid one, and amid the general gaiety the absence of a knot of sour-faced Republican radicals went almost unnoticed. “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war?” “Bluff Ben” Wade of Ohio wrote on the invitation he returned to the White House. “If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.” The President’s revolution was Puritan in inspiration if not in form; Wade, a stepchild of New England, warned the President to take care how he danced.

  Official Washington was surprised by the sureness of the hostess’s taste. But Mrs. Lincoln could not enjoy her triumph. For her as well as for her husband, the party was a hideous ordeal. Whenever they could, they left their guests to go to the sickbed. In the weeks that followed, Lincoln spent many nights with the boy; but Willie grew weaker and weaker. On the morning of the twentieth he appeared to be somewhat better, and hopes were entertained for a recovery. But the revival proved fleeting. The end came, and the forms of Victorian grief were decently observed: the open casket; the sprig of laurel, placed, on the child’s lifeless breast, by his weeping mother; the reading, in the howling wind of a winter storm, of the service for the Burial of the Dead.

  Mrs. Lincoln went to pieces after Willie’s death, but the President had the duties of his office to perform. Should he authorize General McClellan to proceed with his expedition to the lower reaches of the Chesapeake? He was inclined to be skeptical of a plan which bore too visibly the marks of its maker, a heavy freight of timidity and conceit. He doubted the wisdom of a strategy which, though prodigal of time and money, was unlikely to sever a single vital thread in the enemy’s web of communications. In a letter to McClellan, Lincoln observed that capture of Richmond by itself would not break the rail line that connected northern Virginia with Lynchburg and the southwest, while a march on the enemy’s entrenchments southwest of Manassas (his own preferred plan) might. McClellan replied that the entrenchments near Manassas were too formidable to be overcome, a contention that did not redound to his credit when, a short time later, the Confederates retired voluntarily from those trenches, and their overpowering arsenal was discovered to contain a number of “Quaker guns”—logs painted black.

  Yet Lincoln did not lose faith in McClellan. He would, he said, “hold General McClellan’s stirrup for him if he will only win us victories.” But the painted logs detracted somewhat even from a child of destiny; and Lincoln deprived McClellan of his position as General-in-Chief of the armies. He did not, however, go so far as to remove him from command of the Army of the Potomac.

  Saint Petersburg, May-June 1862

  A SINGLE WORD was now on every tongue.

  The novelist Turgenev, who chanced to return to Saint Petersburg on the day of the fire in the Apraxin Dvor, was startled to discover that the word “nihilist” had been caught up by thousands of people. A short time before, the word had been virtually unknown; when Grand Duchess Hélène encountered it in Fathers and Children, she asked one of her protégés what it meant. Now the word was firmly ensconced in the city’s vernacular; and scarcely had Turgenev stepped into the Nevsky Prospekt when an acquaintance took him to task.

  “Look at what your nihilists are doing! They are setting Petersburg on fire!’”

  The cause of the fire in the Apraxin Dvor was never discovered. Some believed that agents provocateurs in the pay of the reactionaries set fire to the market in order to give their enemies a bad name; but the suspicions of most inclined towards the red brigades themselves.

  The Tsar responded with a heavy hand. He feared a revolution gone out of control, shops looted, women ravished, palaces reduced to rubble. Prince Dolgorukov, director of the Third Section, which controlled the secret police, submitted to his master a memorandum in which he urged that stern measures be taken against suspected subversives. Alexander read the report and wrote in the margin, “All this is entirely in accord with what I want.” Soldiers marched down the boulevards of the capital, and mounted Cossacks patrolled the side streets. The Tsar, in a critical hour, hearkened to the same counsels which, in Berlin, inspired the Prussian generals. Like General Manteuffel, he thought only of reinforcing the garrisons. In doing so, he repelled the very people whose goodwill he needed if his revol
ution “from above” were to succeed.

  Prince Kropotkin was one of these alienated souls. The Prince was not yet ready to join the red brigades, but he ceased to be a liberal. He had recently been named Sergeant of the Corps of Pages—an enviable appointment. The Sergeant not only occupied a privileged position in the Corps, he was also the page de chambre of the Tsar. To be “personally known to the Emperor was of course considered as a stepping-stone to further distinctions.” As the Tsar’s personal page, Kropotkin was in a position to observe Alexander closely in the spring of 1862.

  He at first looked upon the Tsar-Liberator as a hero. But by degrees Kropotkin’s opinion changed. The tall and dashing monarch was, he discovered, a tired man. He went through the glittering rooms of his palace with rapid strides, as though he were afraid of something. He lost his temper easily. Kropotkin sometimes found him staring vacantly into space with a worried, absent-minded gaze. His doubts multiplied. Alexander had turned away from the reforming liberals who had labored over the emancipation law; he was now constantly in the company of reactionary barons like Count Shuvalov. The Tsar, Kropotkin concluded, “retained too much of the despotic character of his father,” Nicholas I, and this “pierced now and then through his easily good-natured manners.” Alexander was not “a truly reliable man, either in his policies or in his personal sympathies.”

  In June, Kropotkin went with his fellow cadets to the annual commencement parade. The candidates were personally examined by the Tsar in the manage of their horses and the evolutions of their drill. Alexander then raised them to the dignity of officers. The young men dismounted; the Tsar himself remained on horseback. “The promoted officers to me!” he shouted. Kropotkin and his brother officers gathered round the sovereign. He spoke, at first, gently. “I congratulate you,” he said. “You are officers.” Then he became angry. “But if any one of you— which God preserve you from—should under any circumstances prove disloyal to the Tsar, the throne, and the fatherland, take heed of what I say,—he will be treated with all the se-veri-ty of the laws, without the slightest com-mi-se-ra-tion!” The Tsar’s voice failed, his face grew peevish, “full of that expression of blind rage,” Kropotkin said, “which I saw in my childhood on the faces of landlords when they threatened their serfs ‘to skin them under the rods.’” Alexander spurred his horse and rode off.

  “Reaction, full speed backwards,” Kropotkin said to himself as he came away from the parade. He saw Alexander once more before he left Saint Petersburg. The occasion was a reception in the Winter Palace for the newly commissioned officers. The Tsar found his old page de chambre in the press of uniforms. “So you go to Siberia?” he asked. “Did your father consent to it, after all?”

  Kropotkin replied that he was indeed going east.

  “Are you not afraid to go so far?” Alexander asked.

  “No,” Kroptkin replied, “I want to work. There must be so much to do in Siberia to apply the great reforms which are going to be made.”

  The Tsar looked straight into the Prince’s eyes. At last he said, “Well, go; one can be useful everywhere.” Alexander’s face, Kropotkin remembered, “took on such an expression of fatigue, such a character of complete surrender, that I thought at once, ‘He is a used-up man; he is going to give it all up.’”

  Chapter 9

  PREPARATIONS FOR THE DEATH STRUGGLE

  Paris, Fontainebleau, and London, May-July 1862

  SO ALLURING IS the sentimental image of a Paris spring, of chestnuts flowering in gardens of the Luxembourg, of acacias ripening in the Bois de Boulogne, that a spell of cold, damp, rainy weather is apt to be felt by the visitor almost as a personal affront. So at all events a thwarted revolutionist felt it as he climbed into a gilt carriage dispatched from the imperial mews.

  Bismarck felt “like a rat in a barn.”

  He had not been made a minister. King Wilhelm had emerged unscathed from the assassination attempt in the Lichtenthal Alley at Baden-Baden. Though the bullet shredded his collar and necktie, it did no more than graze the royal neck. Oscar Becker, the would-be assassin, told the police that he had fired the shot because Wilhelm “had not done enough towards the union of Germany.” Nationalism, it appeared, was too important a sentiment to be overlooked; but the King could not bring himself to embrace Bismarck’s plan to adopt a nationalist program in order to crush the liberals. Instead, he formally approved Manteuf-fel’s plan for a march on Berlin. As a consolation prize, he gave Bismarck the Paris Embassy.

  The new Ambassador to France was driven through rainy streets to the Tuileries, the ill-starred palace which, before the violent events in which the decade culminated, stood on the bank of the Seine between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde. There, in an elaborate ceremony, Bismarck presented his letters of credence to the French Emperor, Napoleon III. The new envoy professed to find such rituals boring, but he conceded that in this case the ordeal was lightened by the presence of Louis-Napoleon’s consort, the Empress Eugénie. The Spanish beauty was, he said, “one of the handsomest women I know,” and in the interval since he had last seen her she had “even grown more beautiful.”

  Bismarck was unhappy in Paris. Louis-Napoleon’s court failed to dazzle him, in spite of the beauty of the Empress; the Tuileries was inferior, in splendor and elegance, to the palaces of the Romanovs. Paris, moreover, was just then destitute of agreeable society, and Bismarck was obliged to take his dinners alone in a café. Nor were his accommodations adequate; the official residence of the Prussian Ambassador, on the Quai d’Orsay, was, he said, “dark, damp and cold,” and the rooms gave off an unpleasant odor, “musty and cloacic.”

  Such complaints imperfectly concealed the principal cause of his dissatisfaction, his incessant ambition of power. Bismarck’s desire for authority had grown more intense, if that were possible, and in Paris he feverishly refined his plan to smash the liberals. He still resented his recent treatment in Berlin, where the King had all but ignored him; but Bismarck was not one to indulge his temper at the expense of his interest, and in his letters to his friend Roon he was careful to make it clear that he remained an aspirant for the first place. “You do me an injustice if you think I am reluctant,” he wrote. “On the contrary, I have lively spells of the bold spirit of that animal which dances on the ice when it is happy.”

  The weeks that followed passed in a whirl of garden parties. Bismarck followed Louis-Napoleon’s court to Fontainebleau, the ancient château of the kings of France, where he took a long walk with the Emperor in the grounds. Louis-Napoleon, fifty-four years old in 1862, talked vaguely of the possibility of an alliance between France and Prussia. Bismarck was unimpressed. The Emperor, he said, was a sphinx without a riddle.

  In his boredom he went to England. In London the Industrial Exhibition was on, and the air was thick with intrigue. The French Foreign Minister, M. de Thouvenel, came up from Paris, ostensibly to award medals at the Exhibition. But the newspapers speculated that the real purpose of his visit was to discuss, with the English ministers, the possibility that their two countries might jointly intervene in the American Civil War and put an end to Lincoln’s statesmanship. Bismarck himself made the rounds, and went to see the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston. But he could play only a limited part in the diplomatic game; he was not a minister. He was, however, drawn into an interesting conversation with another man who craved, as he did, a ministerial portfolio, but who in the summer of 1862 was out of office. Benjamin Disraeli was, at this time, a leading member of the Tory opposition to Lord Palmerston’s government. At a dinner in the Russian Embassy, two consummate political actors took each other’s measure. On the surface the English politician, with his olive complexion and coal-black eyes, could scarcely have been more different from the massive blue-eyed Teuton; but there were curious similarities. Disraeli and Bismarck both harbored an immense ambition together with dreamy and romantic qualities; both were devoted, though in different ways, to the counter-revolution against liberalism. “Take care of that ma
n!” Disraeli afterwards said; “he means what he says.” Many years later, Bismarck returned the compliment when he said of Disraeli, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann” (The old Jew, that is the man).

  Bismarck returned to Paris in not “very good health” and still in suspense as to his political fate—circumstances, he said, that left his “nerves unsettled.” On July 25, he set off on “a long journey in the south of France.” He intended to abandon himself to the Midi; yet he was not quite so blasé a traveler as he pretended to be. He took care to furnish Roon with his itinerary, and he worked out with his friend the code names they would use should they need to communicate by telegraph.

  Virginia, April-May 1862

  AT THE BEGINNING of April, General McClellan, on board the Commodore, steamed towards the dock at Fortress Monroe. The fortress lay at the tip of the Peninsula, the southernmost fork of the Chesapeake, a narrow tract of land bounded, on the north, by the York River, and on the south by the James River. “Mac,” as he was called by his brother officers, had got his way; Lincoln had reluctantly approved his plan for a Peninsular campaign. The General came ashore at the head of the Army of the Potomac, and within days of his landing he had with him 100,000 men. When he addressed his soldiers, he told them that he had held them back thus far in order that they might now “give the death-blow to the rebellion that has distracted our once happy country.” He modeled his peroration on Napoleon’s Address to the Army of Italy.