Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  It was obvious to most observers that if the campaign were to be successful, McClellan must rapidly traverse the land that lay between his army and Richmond, for each moment of delay wasted his own advantages, while it multiplied the defensive resources of his adversary. But the commander of the Army of the Potomac determined to proceed cautiously. McClellan found the enemy “altogether stronger” than expected. Days were consumed in the siege of a garrison at Yorktown, and in the elaboration of an intricate system of siege etiquette. “Yesterday made Fitz Porter ‘Director of the Siege,’” McClellan wrote to his wife, “a novel title, but made necessary by the circumstances of the case. I give all my orders relating to the siege through him, making him at the same time commandant of the siege operations and a chief of staff for that portion of the work.”

  The Confederate Army had, indeed, only 11,000 men in the vicinity of Yorktown when McClellan arrived on the Peninsula, while he himself had almost ten times that number under arms; but he was haunted by the idea of Confederate strength. “I am probably weaker than they are now,” he reported gloomily, “or soon will be.” The situation “grows worse the more you look at it.” On the whole, he thought it best to proceed slowly. On the whole, it would not do “to hurry it.”

  After he had been before the ramparts of Yorktown for nearly a month, McClellan began to feel better about the campaign. He was always happiest contriving solutions to complicated problems of engineering. “I am getting on splendidly with my ‘slow preparations,’” he reported. Visitors, he said, were impressed by the “gigantic” system of earthworks he had constructed at Yorktown. “Would be glad to have the 30-pounder Parrotts in the works around Washington,” he wired Lincoln as he brought his masterwork to perfection. “Am very short of that excellent gun.” Yet while McClellan labored over the placement of each mortar, each howitzer, each Parrott gun at Yorktown, the real object of his campaign, the fortifications of Richmond, were being daily strengthened through the skill and diligence of Robert E. Lee.

  Lincoln was disturbed by the lassitude of his commander. “Your call for Parrott guns from Washington alarms me,” the President wrote to McClellan, “chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?” No, McClellan replied, nothing could at present be done. The roads were “horrid,” his maps were “perfectly unreliable,” and the enemy was “collecting troops from all quarters, especially well-disciplined troops from the South.” He would be fortunate, he said, if he could simply maintain his position. “I shall run the risk,” he wrote, “of at least holding them in check here. . . . My entire force is undoubtedly inferior to that of the rebels, who will fight well.”

  Eventually, the Confederate Army relinquished its line at Yorktown, and McClellan advanced slowly up the Peninsula. From the first, however, the atmosphere of the place, soft, sinking, deceptive, seemed to unnerve the young General. The land appeared solid enough, but it was not; the ground was swampy, crisscrossed by sluggish rivers that flooded suddenly and without warning. The fetid air was not conducive to health. And there was the rain. Always the rain. The country was “covered with water,” McClellan said, and everyone was “knee-deep in mud.” He pressed on, with mounting unease, into the damp wilderness. He disliked the corps commanders Lincoln had imposed upon him and was soon barely on speaking terms with them. He retreated often to the privacy of his tent, which was after all “quite comfortable.” The tent possessed its own stove, as well as a “splendid two-legged washstand” and a “floor of pine boughs—a carpet of boughs, I suppose I ought to say. ... So you see I am living quite en prince.” In this sanctuary McClellan could write his long, chatty letters and talk things over with his friend Fitz-John Porter, a handsome officer who had been a year ahead of him at West Point, and who was the only one among his senior commanders whom he met on a footing of easy familiarity.

  Still the rain continued to fall. “I rather like to hear it patter on the tent,” McClellan wrote. But in time the drizzling weather came to seem ominous. “It is certain,” he wrote to his wife, “that there has not been for years and years such a season; it does not come by chance.” “Another wet, horrid day! . . . Still raining hard and dismally.”

  In this enervating mud-world, melting and unreal, McClellan’s martial spirit once again sank. “If I am not reinforced,” he wrote, “it is probable that I will be obliged to fight nearly double my numbers, strongly intrenched.” He blamed his enemies in the capital for the lackluster progress of his campaign. It was their malice and perfidy, not his own want of vigor and resolution, that clouded his prospects of success. Washington, he said, was filled with “traitors” who were “willing to sacrifice the country and its army for personal spite and personal aims.” Those treacherous “hounds” were determined to ruin him. Judas, he said, was an angel compared to Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Sinister forces were everywhere at work. Why was General McDowell’s corps suffered to remain in the vicinity of Washington? It was “the most infamous thing that history has recorded.” “The fate of a nation depends upon me,” McClellan said, and yet “I have not one single friend at the seat of Government.”

  It is true that McClellan had enemies in Washington. “Bluff Ben” Wade of Ohio despised him and did what he could to undermine him. But McClellan possessed all that he needed to overcome the opposition of Wade. He commanded a vast army, and he retained the confidence of Lincoln. A victory in the field would quickly silence the radicals. Lincoln urged his commander to fight, but McClellan continued to insist that he was short of men. The President was puzzled, and not a little hurt. “Your dispatches complaining that you are not properly sustained,” Lincoln wrote, “while they do not offend me, do pain me very much.” He would not, however, jeopardize the safety of the capital by shifting the whole of McDowell’s corps to the Peninsula. “Do you really think,” he asked, “I should permit the line from Richmond, via Manassas Junction, to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops? This is a question which the country will not allow me to evade.” Lincoln nevertheless agreed to send McClellan a part of McDowell’s corps—some 11,000 additional men under the command of General W. B. Franklin. He concluded his letter by reminding McClellan of the painted logs at Manassas. “The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.” It was, the President said, “indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. ... I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.”

  On the twentieth, the advance party of the Army of the Potomac crossed the Chickahominy River near New Bridge, and McClellan’s vanguard approached to within a few miles of Richmond. The closer he drew to the Confederate capital the more agitated he became; the city loomed before him, and in his imagination it acquired a hideous strength. His personal radiance had by this time faded; he looked, one observer said, “prematurely old,” and he appeared to be on the verge of nervous collapse. “They are concentrating everything for the last death-struggle,” he exclaimed. “My government, alas! is not giving me any aid.” He felt sick—indeed, he soon was sick. It was, he said, his “old Mexican enemy,” dysentery. By the twenty-ninth he was somewhat better, but the long, scarcely coherent letters he wrote to Washington suggest that he did not altogether recover his mental balance. The “intentions of the enemy are still doubtful. . . . Unless he has some deep-laid scheme that I do not fathom, he is giving up great advantages. . . .”

  Yasnaya Polyana, July 1862

  THAT SUMMER, Tolstoy felt the wrath of the Tsar.

  The Tsar’s henchmen, under orders to contain the revolutionary passions which had ignited the Apraxin Dvor, were arresting reformers. In the poisonous atmosphere a wretch called Shipov, a police
informer, came forward and accused Tolstoy of being a red. The school at Yasnaya Polyana was, he asserted, a front for revolutionary activity; and concealed behind secret doors in the manor house lay a printing press and stacks of revolutionary manifestos. Prince Dolgorukov, the director of the Third Section, authorized a raid.

  Tolstoy was traveling when, on a July night, three troikas drove up the alley to his house. Gendarmes in sky-blue uniforms were soon swarming over the property. Yasnaya Polyana was in the grip of the Third Section. The shadowy institution was, at this time, the most powerful in Russia. Its activities were shrouded by an impenetrable veil. Its director was a man far more dreaded in the Empire than the Tsar himself. The windows of its headquarters in Saint Petersburg were covered with iron bars, and in the dead of night carriages with drawn blinds drove mysteriously through its gates.

  Yet for all the Man-in-the-Iron-Mask variety of legends to which it gave rise, the Third Section was a rational, and even a philosophical, institution. It was the child of Alexander’s father, Nicholas, and it embodied that Tsar’s cunning, cruel, and perceptive theory of despotism. When Count Benckendorff, the first director of the Third Section, asked Nicholas to clarify his responsibilities, the Tsar handed him a white handkerchief. “Here are your orders,” Nicholas said. “Take this, and wipe away the tears of my people.” The objects of the Third Section were to keep under surveillance any person who displayed unusual energy of mind, and to discover those secret or potential treacheries which, if unchecked, might in time become a danger to the régime. The ultimate purpose of the organization was to break, through intimidation or violence, the spirit of any man who might possibly become a danger to the state. To accomplish these ends, the Third Section employed an army of agents provocateurs. The disguised policemen did more than watch and inform; they worked subtly and ingeniously to draw forth, from the careless victim, a treacherous breath. They spread their nets, not only in Russia, but throughout Europe, in the effort to ensnare their unsuspecting prey; and however far from his homeland the Russian might fly, he could never be certain that he had escaped the hand of the despot.

  In addition to secret agents, the Third Section employed a bureau of clerks who patiently scrutinized essays, novels, poems, even paintings, in the effort to uncover the latent seeds of disaffection. These critics in the pay of the government were especially attentive to thinkers and artists who displayed “audacity” in their work. Those who displayed too much audacity risked administrative arrest, torture, mock execution, consignment to an insane asylum, or deportation to Siberia, all without being brought before a regular court of law.

  Under the eye of Colonel Durnovo, a functionary of the Third Section, the gendarmes searched Yasnaya Polyana thoroughly. Floorboards were pried apart, the pond was dredged, rooms were ransacked. Tolstoy’s sister, Countess Mary, cowered in fear as policemen read aloud from her brother’s diaries and letters. For two days it went on. The gendarmes handled the books in the library, examined the bed linen, peered behind the toilet, and cracked coarse jokes.

  When Tolstoy learned of the raid, he was furious. His property had been invaded. The “slovenly Colonel” from the gendarmerie “read all my letters and diaries.” “I feel malice and disgust,” he said, “almost hatred, for that dear government which searches my house for lithographic and typographical machines. . . .” “We can’t live like this. . . . Damocles’ sword of tyranny, violence and injustice is always hanging over everyone.” If he did not obtain reparation for his injuries, he would sell his estates and leave Russia; he would not remain in a country where the spirit of Ivan the Terrible still prevailed, a country “where it’s impossible to know a minute in advance that they won’t chain you up or flog you together with your sister and your wife and your mother. . . .”

  “There are loaded pistols in my room,” Tolstoy told his great-aunt. “I am waiting until the matter is decided one way or another.” In the last week of August, he wrote a letter to the Tsar and went off to Moscow in a huff. Alexander had just come down for the army maneuvers in Khodynka Meadow. Tolstoy went to the Peter Palace, where the Tsar was staying, determined to lodge his complaint in person.

  Near Richmond, Virginia, May-June 1862

  AT THE END of May, the attack General McClellan had long feared took place. Confederate forces launched an offensive against his positions on the Chickahominy River near Fair Oaks, five miles east of Richmond.

  The Confederate assault was bloody, but it failed to break the Union lines.

  President Davis rode out from Richmond to watch the progress of the battle. Night came over the field, and Davis fell in with General Robert E. Lee, who had been similarly restless in the capital. In the darkness and confusion the two men encountered litter bearers carrying the broken body of the field commander, Joe Johnston. Johnston was conscious indeed, but gravely wounded. Davis and Lee turned their horses and went back to Richmond. As they rode through the night towards the lights of the city, Davis made one of the most momentous decisions of the war. He ordered Lee to take up the fallen Johnston’s command.

  Lee began at once to make his preparations. In three weeks he judged his defensive works sufficiently strong to permit an offensive. On June 26, he sent his men into battle. The Seven Days before Richmond began.

  The Southern troops fought bravely, but in assault after bloody assault they were driven back by the tremendous firepower of the Union Army. Lee concluded that if he were to rout the Federals, he must first dislodge them from the commanding position they occupied near Gaines’s Mill, a steep acclivity, bristling with guns—a place calculated to inspire dread in the hearts of attacking infantrymen. The cream of the Southern army was sent forward, but to no avail. J. R. Anderson made three charges; and three times he fell back. W. D. Pender went off, and was similarly repulsed. Maxcy Gregg succeeded, indeed, in crossing Boatswain’s Swamp, the dismal bog that lay before the Union stronghold, but he soon found himself pinned down by a heavy fire.

  Lee mounted his horse and went off in search of John Bell Hood, the commander of the 4th Texas Infantry, a regiment which, on this day, was fighting as part of the Texas Brigade. Hood saluted his chief, and Lee explained his objective. “This must be done,” Lee told him. “Can you break this line?”

  “I will try,” Hood replied.

  Chapter 10

  “PERICULUM IN MORA”

  Bordeaux and Biarritz, July-August 1862

  MAKING HIS WAY south from Bordeaux, Bismarck went at the vintage. “I drank Lafitte, Mouton, Pichon, Laroze, Latour, Margaux, St. Julien, Branne, Armeillac, and the other wines.” The vineyards were hot, “but with good wine in the body this is not at all bothersome.” He had not seen the German newspapers in days, nor, he said, did he miss them. At the end of July he reached Biarritz. He took rooms in the Hôtel de l’Europe, in the Place de la Mairie, and went out daily to bathe in the Bay of Biscay.

  Biarritz in the 1860s was a playground of Eros, consecrated to the vitality of that nineteenth-century Venus, the Empress Eugénie, whose favorite watering hole it was. The disparity between the purity of the Empress’s religion and the eroticism of her person only heightened her appeal. Eugénie was a chaste Catholic in the Mediterranean mold; the Pope had given her a Golden Rose, anointed with balsam by the papal hand, in recognition of her piety and virtue. Yet she remained the most sultry of saints, and her darkly Spanish sensuality fascinated a generation. Bismarck came alone to Eugénie’s resort; but he did not come, as some husbands did, to escape domestic tribulations. His marriage was happy. The man who stood on the threshold of power and opportunity rarely granted to statesmen wrote to his wife almost daily—sometimes twice daily—whenever he was away from her. He called her “My Dearest Heart,” “My Beloved Nan,” “Dearest only Beloved Juanita,” “Très Chère Jeanneten.” He was not, he assured her, “unthankful, either for God’s mercy, or for your love and truth. It is with us today as it was at the time of our wedding, and I have never thought that that was very long ago—fiv
e or six thousand happy days.”

  She had saved him, or so he always believed. When Johanna von Puttkamer first met Bismarck, two decades before, he had seemed destined for a life of failure, bitterness, and fruitless eccentricity. In his chosen career, the judicial department of the Prussian civil service, he had been unsuccessful. The tasks, he said, were “petty and boring.” The Prussian official was “like a member of an orchestra, but /want to play only the music which I myself like, or no music at all.” Bismarck resigned his position and went off to Pomerania to manage his family’s estates. Cows and husbandry, however, suited him no better than briefs and pleadings. He would mount his horse, Caleb, and ride off to engage in solitary reveries, passing “over many a mile, happy and sad, angry and calm, past moors and fields, past lakes and houses and people.”

  It was during this period of Pomeranian retirement that a change came over Bismarck. Like the young Lincoln, he had flirted with free-thinking; but as he rode about rural Pomerania he wondered whether he was not like the fool in the Psalms, who “hath said in his heart, there is no God.” He came to know a family called the von Thaddens, whose serenity piqued his interest. How was it that they were so contented, while he himself was so restless and dissatisfied? They adhered, he learned, to a form of evangelical Lutheranism known as Pietism. The character of young Maria von Thadden, so suggestive of peace and inner repose, held a special appeal for Bismarck. To her he opened his heart; and no sooner had he done so than he became aware of the unworthiness of his way of life. Wenching, drinking, dice—his existence was so much “champagne” fizzing to no purpose. He wanted a better, clearer wine. Maria rewarded Bismarck’s confidences by talking of the secret springs of her own spiritual existence. She however took sick, and Bismarck, setting aside his scruples about the efficacy of prayer and the existence of the Deity, cried out to God. The “first fervent prayer, without my ruminating on its reasonableness, tore itself from my heart.”