The position in which Lincoln found himself was one of extraordinary danger. England was on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy. The American Consul at Liverpool warned Lincoln that, if his armies were not soon victorious in battle, Lord Palmerston’s government would be forced to recognize the South or else be driven from power. France would instantly follow England in embracing the Confederacy. The two powers would together impose armed mediation on the American belligerents. English warships would appear at the mouth of the Mississippi. The pan-talons rouges of the French would wade ashore at New Orleans. The combined might of the two empires would pierce the North’s blockade, and cotton would again reach Liverpool and Le Havre. The Southern Republic would survive, and Lincoln’s revolution would end in failure.
But the President was not yet finished.
He held what he called a “last card.” “I will play it,” he said, “and may win the trick.”
Berlin, September 1862
WHILE LINCOLN DESCENDED into the hottest places in the revolutionary furnace, Bismarck for the first time felt the heat. Even before he went down to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies to confront his adversaries on the Budget Committee, the new Minister-President was apprehensive. Bismarck was never at ease as a public speaker. “You like speaking,” he once said to a lawmaker. “For you speaking is a profession, for me it is a torment.” Bismarck was a big man; but his voice was high and shrill, and although in an intimate setting it could be caressing, its timbre failed him in larger assemblies.
Yet if he was nervous, the new Minister-President was also resolute. He had his plan.
He had, the week before, taken possession of the chancellery and the Foreign Ministry, Numbers 74 and 76 in the Wilhelmstrasse, and he was burning with the desire to assert himself in affairs of state. The history of his country in the last century was, he believed, one long neglected opportunity. As a result, Prussia, with its industrious population, its ancient military traditions, its fierce and warlike officer corps, could claim the title of great power only “cum grano salis” (with a grain of salt). But his countrymen, Bismarck believed, were ready to correct the mistakes which had in the past hindered the progress of Prussian greatness.
His face still sunburnt from travel, he informed the Budget Committee that the Crown had withdrawn, for the moment, the obnoxious army bill. He then attempted to reach an understanding with his adversaries. Prussia, he said, must take the lead in making Germany a nation. He explained how unhelpful it was for his countrymen to squabble with one another while Germany itself remained disunited. “It is not to Prussia’s liberalism that Germany looks,” he declared, “but to its power. ... It is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by Eisen und Blut [iron and blood].”
The most famous words Bismarck would ever utter came close to ending his ministerial career before it began. The liberal lawmakers were hostile. Did the new Minister-President really expect them to surrender their principles and prostrate themselves before his authority simply because he talked of uniting Germany? It was to no avail that Bismarck assured them that “the Government was actuated by a spirit of peace and conciliation.” His theatrical tricks—as a gesture of amity he took from his pocketbook the spray of olive Kathi Orlov had given him at Avignon—fell flat. Much of Berlin was soon jeering at the new Minister-President. The foreign press was hostile. The Times accused Bismarck of using “words of a very ominous description” and deplored his “well-known absolutist tendencies.”
More troubling to the new Minister-President, the ineptitude of his performance raised questions about his competence among those who gave their adhesion to the party of coercion. Even the loyal Roon doubted the wisdom of his friend’s “witty ruminations.” It was rumored that King Wilhelm himself, who had gone to Baden to celebrate Queen Augusta’s birthday, had begun to waver in his confidence. In his attempt to seduce the liberals from their liberalism with the bait of German nationalism, Bismarck had betrayed something worse than misjudgment—he had betrayed naïveté.
His plan to solve the constitutional problem appeared to have failed; and he had now to fight for his political life.
Washington, July-September 1862
LINCOLN’S CARD was one before which even Lord Palmerston might blanch. Emancipation. The freeing of the Confederate slaves. The end of the planters’ system of coercion. “I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy,” Lincoln said, “if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.”
Such was the card. But could he play it in the face of the hand McClellan held? The commander of the Army of the Potomac had warned the President that his men would not tolerate a war against slavery. It was not a threat Lincoln could ignore. Whatever might have been McClellan’s personal intention, his officers breathed hostility to the government. His senior commanders were ready “to march upon the capital and disperse Congress as Cromwell did the Long Parliament.” So Congressman George Julian asserted. Julian was a radical and perhaps exaggerated; but McClellan himself spoke of “taking my rather large military family to Washn. to seek an explanation. . . . I fancy that under such circumstances I should be treated with rather more politeness than I have been of late.”
In July, when McClellan was still on the Peninsula smarting from the blows of Lee, Lincoln first raised with his advisers the possibility of emancipating the Confederate slaves. His Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, had lost an infant child; the heart of the warlord was melted, and in his summer residence he lay insensible with grief. Lincoln drove to the funeral. With him, in the presidential carriage, were Secretary of State Seward and his daughter-in-law, as well as Gideon Welles, “Old Neptune,” the Secretary of the Navy. The President startled his companions by raising a subject about which he had never before spoken. Ought he now to free the slaves in those lands in rebellion against the United States? He had reached the conclusion, he said, that such an act was both a “military necessity” and “absolutely essential for the salvation of the nation.” A short time later, at a meeting of the Cabinet, Lincoln read out a draft of an emancipation order.
Lincoln had so far refused to characterize his revolution as a crusade to destroy slavery. He had come to power promising to overthrow the Silver Age policy of compromise where slavery in the territories was concerned; but he had always stopped short of making any attempt to extend his revolution to those states where slavery had long been lawful. It is true that, as President, he had tried, without success, to persuade the slave states of the border—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—to end slavery of their own volition, in exchange for Federal compensation. But he had done nothing more. Under the Constitution, he said, he could do nothing more. The outbreak of civil war changed the constitutional equation. In time of war the President possesses, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, an extraordinary military authority. What these war powers are has never been ascertained with precision; but in a pinch they might enable the President to emancipate slaves under color of military necessity.
He had not yet been willing to do so. The policy of liberating blacks would, he knew, kindle the wrath of the slave states of the border; and the slave states of the border, with their rich stores of cattle and corn, were a valuable prize. Emancipation, too, would infuriate important constituencies in the North, and Lincoln had his eye on the midterm elections. The Butternut populations of the Ohio Valley, with a “corn-hog-whiskey” culture similar to that of the Upper South, were as a rule hostile to blacks. Many workers in the Northern cities were as antipathetic. On a hot day in Brooklyn four hundred Irish immigrants, armed with brickbats and stones, surrounded a tobacco factory where twenty blacks were employed. “Kill the damn naygurs,” they cried. “Burn the naygurs.” A black worker was dragged from the factory, and the mob descended upon him with fury. The unfortunate man would have b
een beaten to death had the police not saved him. Would an emancipation edict lead to more violence? Lincoln listened, in the White House, to prophecies that differed scarcely at all from those which Tsar Alexander heard in the Winter Palace. Not Emelian Pugachev and Stenka Razin, but Nat Turner and Santo Domingo were the names on the lips of American opponents of freedom.
Such were the risks; but Lincoln nevertheless resolved to play his trump. “I felt,” he said, “that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game.” Seward, however, urged him to proceed cautiously. The Secretary of State, studying the diplomatic dispatches, worried that the proclamation would be viewed by the European powers “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help.” He advised the President not to promulgate the decree until he could give it to the country “supported by military success.”
Lincoln was impressed by the wisdom of the advice. Were emancipation perceived to be the desperate act of a crumbling régime, Palmerston and Napoleon III could easily make out a stronger case for intervention—and move to partition the United States on the humanitarian plea of averting a race war. Lincoln accepted Seward’s counsel. Emancipation, he said, should not “be considered our last shriek, on the retreat,” a measure as useless as “the Pope’s bull against the comet.” It must be backed by power and will. He would wait for victory.
But victory eluded him.
The disaster of the Peninsula was swiftly followed by the disaster of Second Manassas. Lee was victorious in Virginia, McClellan was insubordinate at Washington. The President groped his way in an atmosphere thick with intrigue and menace. “Things,” he said, went “from bad to worse.” In private conversation he alluded darkly to the weakness of his position. McClellan was stronger with the Army of the Potomac than he was; the civil magistrates had ceased to be masters of the situation. Across the ocean, General Manteuffel stood ready to march on Berlin, should Bismarck’s revolutionary policy fail. Why should not General McClellan march on Washington, to prevent Lincoln from implementing his? The President was sufficiently acquainted with both history and human nature to know that few things are more dangerous to constitutional government than an army which despises, but no longer fears, its civilian masters. Yet he was equally aware that the authority of his own administration was doubtful, and that continual reverses in the field had undermined its early popularity. As he pondered the transgressions of McClellan, Lincoln was by no means certain that the tottering edifice of his own power could withstand a renegade general’s blows.
The draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was relegated to one of the pigeonholes of the President’s desk, and Lincoln turned somberly to the disorders of the army and the government. General Pope had, he knew, forfeited the confidence of the soldiers on the plains of Manassas, while General McClellan, however despicable his character might be, retained the devotion of the troops. Early in September, Lincoln invested him with authority to superintend the defense of Washington. At the same time he entrusted him with command of the broken remnant of Pope’s army. It was, Lincoln said, the “greatest trial and most painful duty” he had encountered in public life.
A short time later the Cabinet assembled in the White House. Secretary Stanton came into the room ahead of the President and announced, in a wavering voice that did not conceal his dismay, the restitution of McClellan. A ripple of consternation went round the board. The murmurs of astonishment were not yet subsided when Lincoln himself entered the chamber. Was it true, his counselors asked, that McClellan had been restored to high command? The President replied that it was. A heated discussion followed. Sharp words were uttered, though Lincoln himself preserved that mildness of temper which characterized him even when most provoked. Stanton said that no order respecting the status of the General had been issued by the War Department. “No, Mr. Secretary,” Lincoln said, “the order was mine, and I will be responsible for it to the country.”
But the President’s troubles did not end with the restitution of General McClellan. Before the week was out he learned that General Lee, at the head of 60,000 men, had crossed the Potomac and invaded Maryland. Lincoln, who in his youth had been a freethinker, raised his eyes to the heavens. “I made a solemn vow before God,” he said, “that if General Lee was driven back ... I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.”
Berlin, September-October 1862
WITH POWER SLIPPING from his grasp, Bismarck determined to meet the King before he returned from Baden and succumbed to the poisonous atmosphere of Berlin. The Minister-President went to Jüterbogk, thirty miles south of the capital, and waited for the King’s train in the unfinished railway station. The train arrived; Bismarck made his way through the cars. He found Wilhelm sitting in an ordinary first-class carriage. The King was in a somber mood; and when, as the train got underway, Bismarck dissembled his fears and attempted to vindicate his program, Wilhelm cut him short with an allusion to the fate of Charles I of England and his Minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. “I see where this will end,” the King said. “In the Opernplatz, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and a little later mine.”
The sun sank; the light grew dim. Bismarck summoned his histrionic powers: of all his performances, this might be the most important. In the darkened railway compartment he said, “Et après, Sire?”
“Après, yes, then we’ll be dead,” Wilhelm replied.
“Yes,” Bismarck continued, “then we’ll be dead. Yet we must all die sooner or later, and how can we die better? I, fighting for the right of my King, and Your Majesty sealing with your blood your rights as King by the grace of God.”
Iago had not a keener insight into the springs of his master’s nature. Bismarck pleaded with his sovereign to dwell, not on the sorriest, but rather on the most glorious of royal liquidations. “Your Majesty,” he said, “must not think of Louis XVI. He lived and died in a state of mental feebleness, and does not make an impressive figure in history. Charles I, on the contrary, will always appear a distinguished character.”
The King’s honor was touched; he grew more animated; he began to see himself in the rôle Bismarck assigned him, that of an officer fighting for Prussia, under orders to hold a position to the death.
As the train sped towards Berlin, Bismarck could not resist mining so rich a vein of Hohenzollern conceit. He said nothing of his now discredited plan, which the King had never really understood; instead he urged Wilhelm to be a soldier. “Your Majesty is obligated to fight,” Bismarck said, “you cannot capitulate.” The words had the desired effect. The King cherished a romantic veneration for the “ideal type of Prussian officer” who goes forth to meet inevitable death with the words, “At your command.” In standing by Bismarck, he was doing his simple duty as a soldier.
The train arrived in Berlin; a knot of ministers and plumed equerries stood on the platform to receive the sovereign. Wilhelm, whom Bismarck had found at Jüterbogk weary and dejected, was cheerful, even “merry” as he stepped from the carriage. The conversation in the train was the real end of liberalism in Prussia: afterwards the dialogue between the Crown and the Parliament was broken off. Bismarck had attempted to persuade the free-state men to embrace his plan; the attempt had failed. He had now to find another means of emancipating the King from the restraints of the constitution.
The new Minister-President carried the army budget in the upper house of Parliament. When a majority of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, refused to give its assent to the bill, Bismarck persuaded the King to dismiss the recalcitrant lawmakers. Wilhelm would send them home. Bismarck then announced that, since the lower house had declined to pass a budget, the government would simply carry on without one. The Crown would continue, not only to collect taxes under existing revenue laws, but also to spend money until the matter was resolved. It was the end of constitutional government in Prussia; the pri
nciples of a free state are lost when the executive usurps the legislature’s dominion over the purse. Nevertheless Bismarck affected solicitude for the constitution his policy destroyed; he pretended to believe that Prussia’s laws did not contemplate a budgetary impasse, and that as a result he was not violating the spirit of the Prussian charter, but rather filling a “gap” in the legal architecture of the state.
This artifice did not for a moment deceive Prussia’s free-state men. It was, for them, a terrible moment. They could either acquiesce in Bismarck’s decision to consign them to irrelevance or, like the Long Parliament in England two centuries before, resort to violence, take to the streets, draw up the barricades. Bismarck was heard, during the tense autumn days, to mutter about the virtues of dying on the scaffold. There were worse modes of extinction than the ax. But this was bravado; he knew that the Prussian Crown had at its disposal an instrument no Stuart king had possessed—a standing army. The King of Prussia could dispatch, in an instant, tens of thousands of disciplined and obedient troops to the heart of his capital.
The humiliation of the legislature was accomplished without bloodshed. When, on October 13, the King dismissed Parliament, the lawmakers acted as Bismarck had prophesied: they acquiesced. Indeed there were cheers, in the Chamber of Deputies, for the King—as well as for a constitution that had practically ceased to exist.
Chapter 12
“GOD HAS DECIDED THE QUESTION”
Biebrich-on-the-Rhine, July-November 1862
THE REVOLUTION IN Germany which Bismarck initiated when he broke the Parliament in Berlin was accompanied by another, less visible, but scarcely less momentous alteration in the ideals and manners of the German people. The change could be detected in the music of Wagner, who had by this time recovered from the failure of Tannhäuser in Paris and was ready again to soar towards the heights. The composer had taken refuge on German soil, in Biebrich, a town on the Rhine not far from Wiesbaden. He took the lease of an apartment of three rooms overlooking the river, had his furniture brought from Paris, and meditated a production of Tristan und Isolde, his masterpiece of the previous decade, a work which had never yet been performed in an opera house.
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