Maria von Thadden sank; yet it seems that, before she died, she intimated her wish that Bismarck should unite himself with her friend, Fräulein Johanna von Puttkamer, a fellow Pietist. He sought the young lady’s hand, and she accepted him. The two were married in the summer of 1847. Bismarck afterwards wondered how a man who reflected on his own nature, yet knew nothing of God or family, could go on living. Life without God, without a wife, without children was, he said, a “schmutziges Hemde”—a dirty shirt—best cast away.
In the year of his marriage Bismarck was chosen—quite “by chance,” he later said—to represent the local squirearchy in the United Diet, an assembly which King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia had reluctantly summoned in order to finance the construction of railroads. Liberalism was in the air. Bismarck rose in the Diet and condemned the liberals’ favorite doctrines. With a malicious glee he played the part of the reactionary Junker. The result, he said, was “a storm.” So great was the consternation that he was forced to break off his oration. He calmly turned the pages of a newspaper while he waited for the fury to subside. He then finished his speech.
Fifteen summers later, Bismarck, floating off Biarritz in the waters of the Atlantic, was on the verge of realizing the dream of his early manhood. He was on the brink of playing a decisive part in the world crisis and leading a counter-revolution against the free state. Yet he seemed to draw back. His imagination was essentially dramatic, and before any assumption of revolutionary responsibility there must be an interlude of poetry, of pastoral or erotic truancy. In the first week of August 1862 there appeared, on the promenade at Biarritz, the Prince and Princess Orlov, She was blond, beautiful, and twenty-two; her husband was old and tired. Nicholas Orlov was the son of the Prince who had vainly opposed Tsar Alexander’s revolution; Bismarck had known him slightly in Saint Petersburg, but not, it seems, his pretty wife. The Orlovs were living now in Brussels, where the Prince served as the Tsar’s emissary to the King of the Belgians.
On August 9, Bismarck opened his first bottle of champagne since leaving Paris. He drank it with the Prince and Princess. “Ever since the Orlovs came,” Bismarck wrote to his sister, “I live with them as though we were alone in the place.” A daily regimen was soon established. The morning was given over to a brisk walk and a sea-bath. The hour of siesta followed; Bismarck would lie lazily on the sofa, reading and dreaming, or watching the sea drive foam against a distant lighthouse. In the afternoons, he and the Orlovs took long walks together. They wandered about the cliffs, and picnicked in little orchards overgrown with aloe and figs. After bathing again in the sea they would return to their rooms to dress. Dinner followed, by an open window that overhung the sea; while they dined, the sun sank in the Atlantic. Princess Ekaterina would go to the piano and play something from Beethoven, Chopin, or Mendelssohn. Afterwards they would walk out to the lighthouse, where they would sit above the crash of the surf and watch the moon rise over the Pyrenees. He took to calling her “ma chère niece” or “chère Kathi”; she called him “oncle.” “I find,” he wrote, that “I am falling a little in love with la gentille princesse.”
Virginia, June-August 1862
JOHN BELL HOOD once boasted that he could “double-quick the Fourth Texas to the gates of hell and never break the line.” Before him loomed the heights near Gaines’s Mill—hell on a hill. Seventeen Federal batteries guarded the plateau. Ninety-six big guns stood ready to pour forth a lethal fire.
“Steady, steady,” Hood urged as his men crawled up the hill.
The enemy’s first fire came. Soldiers fell, but the line did not break. “Forward! Forward!” Hood cried. “Charge right down on them. . . .” There was a strange shriek, a sound soon to be as celebrated as the alalagmos, the war cry of the Roman legions. It was the rebel yell; and under its weird inspiration the 4th Texas stormed the heights. The Union men, confounded by the appearance, on their ramparts, of warriors who seemed not to know fear, threw away their weapons. They ran for their lives or perished where they stood.
Hours later, in the stupor of despair, McClellan wrote to his superiors in Washington. “I have lost this battle,” he said, “because my force was too small.” The days that followed the taking of Gaines’s Mill were the unmaking of George McClellan. Other successes he might have, and other victories he might yet win, but nothing he did could efface the stain of the Peninsula, and everything he said served only to make it blacker. “I again repeat that I am not responsible for this,” he wired Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War. The distraught commander insinuated that he had been undone by treachery at the highest levels of the Republic. “If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”
This was always to be McClellan’s claim—that Lincoln and Stanton forced him to fight, during the Seven Days before Richmond, “a terrible fight against vastly superior numbers.” Yet by the lowest estimate McClellan had 91,000 effective troops on the eve of the first engagement. Lee had perhaps 85,000 men under arms at the same moment—a concentration of force that might never have come into being had McClellan conducted a swifter and more resolute campaign in the Peninsula. On the day the armies first clashed, each of the rival commanders believed himself to be outnumbered; but the belief that crippled McClellan raised Lee to lofty acts of military will.
“Mac” nevertheless clung obstinately to the illusion that he had been defeated, not by Lee, but by Lincoln. “If, at this instant,” he wrote after the sack of the Mill, “I could dispose of ten thousand (10,000) fresh men, I could gain the victory tomorrow. I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result.”
There were fearful clashes at Savage’s Station and Glendale, and a last, ghastly battle at Malvern’s Hill. When the fog lifted, the survivors found an appalling scene. Some of the corpses were “swollen to twice their original size.” A few had “actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases.” McClellan retired to Harrison’s Landing, where Federal gunboats in the river could protect him from the fierce sallies of Lee. He covered his retreat with petulant letters. Having lost all claim to strategic supremacy, he made his stand on moral authority. “I may be on the brink of eternity,” he informed the President, but he could not allow his views with respect to slavery and the Constitution to perish with himself, even if they did not “strictly relate to the situation of this army or strictly come within the scope of my official duties.”
McClellan warned Lincoln not to embrace the anti-slavery policies of his enemies, the radical Republicans; and in words that might bear an ominous construction, he suggested that the President could not survive without the support and confidence of his military commanders. “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery,” McClellan wrote, “will rapidly disintegrate our present armies. The policy of the government must be supported by concentrations of military power.”
Having failed to vindicate Lincoln’s revolution, McClellan threatened to turn against it.
The South of France, Berlin, and Babelsberg, August-September 1862
SHORTLY AFTER MCCLELLAN descended to the James, Bismarck prepared to go up into the mountains. By his own report, he was “ridiculously well.” He drank Madeira at breakfast, and champagne with the Orlovs. Over bottles of Möet, the conversation went on in German, Russian, and French. He wanted, he said, “only wings to fly.” It was, Kathi said, a time of “foolishness, gaiety, and poetry... so full of dreams.” The enchanted days stretched themselves into weeks; singing French chansonettes and snatches of Mendelssohn, the sightseers went up into the Pyrenees. They ascended the Col de Venasque, and at 7,000 feet beheld the narrow portal to Spain. To the right, Bismarck wrote, “rushed the waters of the Ebro, to the left those of the Garonne, and towards the horizon one snow cap after another looked us in the eye, far into Catalonia and Aragon.” They
dined on partridges, and spent the night in a hut, from which they emerged in the morning to watch the sun rise over the mountaintops.
How far did they go? Bismarck, for all the exaggeration of his rhetoric, was in many ways a prudent man. His love affair with “Catty, Katsch, mon admirable Kathi” had about it an artificial, almost a literary, quality; even his Bacchanalia was a masquerade. He carefully preserved, in his cigar case, the little presents Kathi made him, a yellow flower she plucked at Superbagnères, a sprig of olive from Avignon. He called them souvenirs of a “joyous time,” the “sole moment” when his spirit “was free” to take the direction which was natural to it—a Garden of Eden, a “paradise lost.”
If there was a strain of knight errantry in the affair, there was in it, too, an element of willful parody. To fall in love with a Russian princess was almost a necessary epoch in the life of a Continental diplomatist. Old Prince Metternich had also loved a Russian princess—Princess Lieven, whose husband, like Kathi’s, had represented a Russian tsar in the courts of Europe. It was only fitting that Bismarck, who had met Metternich in 1851 and made a careful study of his life, should follow his teacher in great things as well as small. The Austrian statesman was at once the inspiration of the younger man’s revolution, and the precedent he was determined to go beyond.
Bismarck had long been intrigued by the way the intellectual godfather of reaction resisted the intrusion of free-state principles into Central Europe. After the fall of the first Napoleonic Empire in 1815, Metternich led the counter-revolution against liberty. He was the prime mover in the promulgation of the Carlsbad Decrees, by which freedom of speech and of the press was abrogated in Germany. He was also the high priest of the “Holy Alliance,” the league which brought Austria, Russia, and Prussia together in an effort to arrest the progress of free-state principles in Europe.
Metternich and Bismarck had more in common than a contempt for the free state and a weakness for princesses from the East. Both were masters of language; the diplomatic dispatches they composed are models of their kind. Both were notable talkers, captivating, insinuating, in certain circumstances irresistible. Both possessed a strain of gallantry and were susceptible to the charms of women; but here their characters diverged. Metternich preferred witty and clever mistresses, women who, in the tradition of the Parisian salonnières, were devoted to politics and intrigue. Bismarck was drawn to a less assertive type of femininity; he dreaded, perhaps he feared, a virago. He once said that he had “a horror of feminine cleverness,” and he detested women who, like Queen Augusta and her daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Vicky, meddled in politics.12 Kathi Orlov appealed to him precisely because she was so obviously without intellectual intensity; hers was the simplicity, he said, of a Pomeranian girl, with just enough of the great world in her to keep her from being a bore. In the interval between the state dinner and the masked ball, Metternich carried on the most complicated diplomatic and amorous intrigues; reactionary though he was, he embraced the emancipated women and libertine culture of the beau monde. Bismarck, by contrast, conformed to the Victorian proprieties, and spurned the liaisons dangereuses of the old régime. His extramarital love affairs seem to have been Platonic; and although he once spoke of the “brutal sensuality” which “leads me so close to the greatest sins,” he placed what he called his faculty for “depraved fantasy” in the service not of love but of power.
There were other, more profound, differences. Metternich was a creature of the eighteenth century; Bismarck was a child of the romantic revival. Metternich was, by his own confession, “a man of prose and not of poetry.” He feared “disorganised excitement.” Men, he said, “must not dream of reformation while agitated by passion.” The fruit of his diplomacy, the Concert of Europe, was as nicely proportioned as a symphony of Haydn’s. The Concert was a diplomatic minuet, intended to preserve order and prevent revolution through the maintenance of a balance of power, a state of affairs in which no single nation possesses a decisive superiority of power.
Bismarck wanted to smash the Concert. He hated it, not because it thwarted the progress of liberty, but because it protected the declining power of Austria, and was an obstacle to the rise of Prussia. He was cut out for this work of destruction; his style was less mannered and more natural, in some ways more brutal than Metternich’s. Where the neoclassical Metternich had used the intellectual techniques of the eighteenth century to bring order to the European scene, Bismarck was to develop a new approach to power, rooted in the blood and passion of the romantic sensibility.
On September 16, Bernstorff, the Foreign Minister, telegraphed to him. “The King wants you to come here, and I advise you to come at once.” Bismarck, however, did not bother to reply. Two days later Roon sent him, in code, a more pointed telegram. “Periculum in mora. Dépêchezvous” (Danger in delay. Get going). To preserve secrecy, Roon signed the telegram “L’oncle de Maurice Henning.”
Bismarck hastened to Berlin, where he learned that Wilhelm’s ministers had implored the King to compromise with the free-state men. Wilhelm, however, was obstinate; he would not allow his army to rot, in Roon’s phrase, in the “cesspool of doctrinaire liberalism.” Yet in the fatal moment, he could not bring himself to order General Manteuffel to march on Berlin, close the Parliament, and shed his subjects’ blood. The King saw no course open to him other than abdication. He summoned his son, Crown Prince Friedrich, and spoke of relinquishing the scepter to him.
Bismarck’s hour had come. He had been playing a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in France; in Berlin he prepared to re-enact one of Shakespeare’s history plays. The day after his arrival, he went to Wilhelm’s summer palace at Babelsberg. The Gothic château stood in a quiet woods near Potsdam. The question Wilhelm confronted, Bismarck knew, lay at the heart of the meaning of the state. Did the King alone command the armed might of the nation? Or was the power of the army subject to constitutional oversight? It was the very question that had given birth to the modern free state. In England, two centuries before, a long and bloody struggle between Parliament and the Stuart kings ended with the establishment of a principle that will endure as long as freedom itself. The executive may possess the power of the sword, but ultimate control of the army rests with the legislature, which alone determines how the treasure of a nation shall be expended.
Bismarck deplored the English example. Without hesitation, he took his stand for the royal prerogative.
At Babelsberg, the King made him a little speech. “I will not reign if I cannot be true to God, my conscience, and my people,” Wilhelm declared. “Yet I cannot do that if I must submit to the will of the present majority in Parliament. ... I have therefore decided to lay down my crown.” Wilhelm pointed to a document, written in his own hand, that lay on his writing table, and he lamented his inability to find suitable ministers.
Bismarck said that he was himself ready to enter the ministry. The King asked him whether he was willing to stand up to parliamentary majorities. Bismarck nodded. “Then it is my duty,” Wilhelm said, “to continue the struggle with you. I shall not abdicate.” The two men went out into the park. “I would rather perish with the King,” Bismarck declared during the course of their walk, “than desert Your Majesty in the struggle with parliamentary power.” Wilhelm was moved by these professions of fidelity; and in a short time Bismarck’s appointment as both Minister-President (the principal officer of the Russian Crown) and Foreign Minister was confirmed.
Virginia, August-September 1862
THE MAN WHO SAVED Richmond from McClellan’s army was fifty-five years old in the summer of 1862. Robert Edward Lee bore one of the historic names of Virginia. His father, the daring and unfortunate “Light Horse Harry” Lee, possessed in full measure the extravagant genius characteristic of the family. A hero of the Revolution, a man whom Washington loved, Light Horse Harry was undone by speculation and died a ruined man. But Light Horse Harry’s fourth child, Robert Edward, was not only a Lee; he was also, through his mother, a Carte
r, and he inherited, in addition to the brilliant qualities of the Lees, the sober judgment and steady character that belonged to the maternal line. Where the Lees were hotheaded and unpredictable, the Carters were gracious, amiable, and sane. In Robert Edward the solid virtues of the Carters more than counterbalanced the erratic and mercurial qualities of the Lees.
Blood may not determine a man’s character or destiny, but family sometimes does. The stamp of the seventeenth-century Cavaliers—the English country gentlemen who stood for King Charles I in his contests with Parliament and the Puritans—was everywhere evident in the character of Lee. His manners were those of an earlier age. His courtesy was exquisite, though some observers noted a sort of diffidence or formality in his comportment to those whom he did not know well. The great ladies of Richmond, with whose families he was intimately familiar, thought his company delightful. When he encountered them while out riding, he would make a graceful bow. One summer’s day, while he rode beside the open carriage of a Richmond widow, Mrs. Stanard, that grande dame playfully accused him of being ambitious. Lee protested with a smile. He was not ambitious; he wanted only, he said, “a Virginia farm,— no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.” An English officer, Viscount Wolseley, spoke of the “sweetness of his smile and the impressive dignity of the old-fashioned style of his address.” His pleasures were simple and innocent, and in particular he liked to plant trees.
Lee was descended from the gentry of western England. In the 1650s his family had feuded with Oliver Cromwell’s partisans, and as a result Lee was born into the oldest quarrel in America, that between the Virginia Cavalier and the New England Puritan. He was alive to the primitive antagonisms; he thought the liberal professions of New England cant. “Is it not strange,” he wrote, “that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?” He was always to fear that the free-state rhetoric of New England was a mask for tyranny, a new form of Cromwellian dictatorship.
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