Like Bismarck, Wagner was a married man who in the summer of 1862 found himself falling in love with another man’s wife. Unlike Bismarck, however, Wagner was ready to go whole-hog. Cosima von Bülow was the wife of his most faithful disciple, the musician Hans von Bülow. She was the natural daughter of his closest friend, the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Cosima’s mother, the Countess d’Agoult, had been one of the great beauties of her day; she had fallen madly in love with Liszt, and there had been a violent love affair. Cosima, the fruit of this illicit passion, was not unworthy of her romantic inheritance. She was, her mother said, “a girl of genius, very like her father. . . . She feels the démon intérieur, and will always resolutely sacrifice to it everything it may demand of her.”
Cosima von Bülow was twenty-four when she and her husband visited Wagner at Biebrich. In the evenings the composer would take out the score of Tristan und Isolde; Hans would go to the piano. The work was a monument to love. Wagner had composed much of it under the inspiration of an earlier lover, Mathilde Wesendonk, the wife of one of his patrons, the Zurich merchant Otto Wesendonk. Yet Tristan und Isolde was also a drama of disillusion, the work of an artist who claimed to have sounded the lowest depths of despair. Cosima perceived the composer’s sadness, and one day, overcome, as Wagner said, with “passionate tenderness for me,” she fell at his feet, and covered his hands with tears and kisses.
Tears, rather more than kisses, were the stuff of Tristan und Isolde; its music was pregnant with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who in the pages of The World as Will and Idea had inculcated the necessity of overcoming the “will to live.” The romantic idea had taken possession of Wagner, and in Tristan und Isolde he had attempted to give it musical form. “The last song of the ‘world’ has died on my ear,” he told Liszt. The world was “bad, bad, bad to the core: only the heart of a friend, the tears of a woman, can redeem it for us from its curse.” He longed to shuffle off this mortal coil and embrace, like the Buddha, oblivion, Nirvana, the land of “Being-no-more.” His profoundest desire, he said, was to die, to know, at last, “complete unconciousness, total nihility, a final end to dreaming, the last and only salvation.”
Wagner had given life, in Tristan und Isolde, to a perennial element in the German character, the morbid idealism which found abundant expression in the old Teutonic myths and romances, but which had been obscured by the decorous, neo-classical culture of the eighteenth century. The timing of the composer’s revival of the Teutonic ideal of mortal devotion was propitious. “We may go even further,” one of the greatest of the Wagnerian scholars later declared, “and say that Tristan itself was something inherent in the German soul of that epoch that had to find expression some time or other, somehow or other, needing for its final perfect realisation only the coincidence of the right artist and the right moment. . . .”
By such means was hell uncorked. The infinities of human longing, which are brought to life in that music as in no other, corresponded to the mood which made the German revolution. The composer had resurrected the primitive Teutonic dance with death, and under its romantic inspiration he had created a music-drama in which death figured, not merely as a solution to the problems of life, but also as the ultimate expression of love.14 A revival dangerous indeed, for as the poet Heinrich Heine foresaw, the excesses of German romanticism, if they led anywhere, were likely to lead to barbarism and cruelty.
London, Gotha, and Broadlands, September 1862
IN THE MIDDLE of September word reached England of Lee’s victory over Pope and his march into Maryland. Every day London expected to hear that the generalissimo of the South had erected his standard on the ruins of the Capitol. On September 13, The Times reported that Washington was in a perilous state, and “that within a very few hours, the good easy President may be seized, and led captive to Richmond with Mr. Seward and Mr. Stanton to bear him company.”
The day after this report appeared in The Times, Lord Palmerston wrote to Earl Russell from Cambridge House. The Federals, the Prime Minister said, had “got a very complete smashing; and it seems not altogether unlikely that still greater disasters await them.” If, Palmerston wrote, Baltimore or Washington should fall, “would it not be time for us to consider whether in such a state of things England and France might not address the contending parties and recommend an arrangement on the basis of separation [of the North and the South]?”
Lord Russell was at this time attending Queen Victoria on a sentimental journey to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in central Germany, the homeland of Her Majesty’s recently deceased consort, Prince Albert. In his reply to Palmerston, Russell did not merely endorse the Prime Minister’s proposal to intervene in America, he took a more aggressive line than his chief. The question of intervention, he said, should not be made contingent on the fall of Washington or Baltimore. It was “clear,” Russell wrote, that the Federal army “has made no progress in subduing the insurgent States.” He argued that, whatever might be the outcome of Lee’s invasion of Maryland, England and France should offer mediation “to the United States Government with a view to the recognition of the independence of the Confederates.” Should the North refuse mediation, England should instantly recognize the South. At all events, he said, the Cabinet should meet as soon as practicable to decide the question.
That Johnny Russell, the “incarnate creation,” Disraeli said, of “High Whiggism,” should now try to put a stop to Lincoln’s revolution bore witness to an astonishing change in the climate of opinion. But the tide of freedom was going out, and in the changed atmosphere even free-state men like Russell lost sight of their principles. Liberalism, the poet Matthew Arnold said, was fast descending from a power of the first to a power of the second rank.
Writing on September 23 from Broadlands, his Palladian mansion on the banks of the Test, Palmerston enthusiastically embraced Russell’s suggestion that England intervene whether or not Washington fell to Lee. “My dear Russell,” the Prime Minister wrote, “your plan of proceedings about mediation between the Federals and Confederates seems to be excellent.” Thus encouraged by his chief, Russell set about preparing a memorandum for the Cabinet laying out the arguments for intervention.
Frederick, Sharpsburg, and Washington, September-October 1862
ON A SEPTEMBER MORNING not long after Lee invaded Maryland, a regiment of Union infantry, the 27th Indiana, marched north towards the town of Frederick. The day was warm. The regiment halted. Some of the soldiers lay down in the grass to rest. One of them saw an envelope lying nearby. The package was taken up; some cigars fell out, together with two pieces of paper—wrapping, evidently, for the cigars.
The cigar wrapper made history.
The papers in which the cigars were wrapped were found, when examined, to be covered with writing. Bearing the legend “Special Orders, No. 191,” they had been issued by General Lee three days before. The papers disclosed the operations of Lee’s army in the west of Maryland, and they revealed that the Southern commander had once again made a daring decision to divide his forces.
In a short time the papers were in the hands of General McClellan. Someone in the rival army had been careless, and as a result of this negligence the Union commander was privy to his adversary’s plan of invasion. Before the discovery of Special Orders, No. 191, McClellan had pursued Lee with his customary caution and despair. The rebel army, he informed Washington, amounted to “not less than 120,000 men”—double its actual size—and was “numerically superior to ours by at least 25 per cent.” But once reconnaissances confirmed the genuineness of Special Orders, No. 191, McClellan marched with uncharacteristic boldness on the Southern lines. Within hours of discovery of the papers, Confederate troops defending the passes of South Mountain in the west of Maryland beheld a sea of Union blue.
Lee, mystified by the unwonted resolution of his rival, ordered his men to fall back, in the night, to Sharpsburg, a village which lay between two rivers, the Potomac, to the west, and a lesser stream, Antietam Creek
, which pursued its meandering course a mile or so to the east. The Federal army swiftly invested the place, and at dawn on September 17 a great battle commenced.
It would be the single bloodiest day in American history.
“Every body tears cartridges, loads, passes guns, or shoots,” Major Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote. “Men are falling in their places or running back into the corn.” A kind of madness gripped them. “The men are loading and firing with demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically.” “The mental strain was so great,” another Union soldier said, “that I saw . . . the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”
McClellan’s massive columns seemed to foretell the doom of the Southern army and perhaps the extinction of its Cause; but just as Lee’s exhausted men seemed ready to give way, four brigades, the banners of Virginia and the Confederacy waving aloft, appeared on the horizon. The arrival, in the nick of time, of General Ambrose Powell Hill’s men from Harpers Ferry prevented the annihilation of the Confederate Army at Sharpsburg.
The next day the sun rose over a field strewed with corpses. Dead men lay everywhere, their bellies swelling in the sunlight. The remnant of the Southern army stood ready to fight, should battle be offered; but the spell which Special Orders, No. 191, cast over the mind of McClellan had been broken. The spasm of virtue passed, and the commander, reverting to his accustomed state of pusillanimity, did not stir. Late in the day Lee ordered his army to retire to the other side of the Potomac. “Please do not let him get off without being hurt,” Lincoln wired McClellan when he learned of Lee’s retreat from Antietam. The President’s order, however, was disregarded. McClellan declined to pursue the flying enemy.
His indolence contrasted markedly with the vigor and ability of Lee, whose conduct as his army retired across the Potomac prevented a defeat from becoming a rout. Many years later white-haired veterans who in their prime had worn the gray could recall their commander’s singular calmness during those dark hours. In the crisis of fortune, pressed by a force much greater than his own, Lee never lost his presence of mind, and only once lost his temper. During the heat of the battle, he encountered a Confederate straggler; the unhappy man was carrying away a dead pig. Lee, incensed at this dereliction of duty at a time when straggling was ruining his army, ordered the soldier to be shot. The order, however, was not carried out, and Lee recovered his equanimity.
The victory of the Union Army at Antietam was less decisive than Lincoln could have wished. It was nevertheless a victory—an almost miraculous one. But for the cigar wrapper, Lee would likely have reached the Susquehanna, destroyed the bridge that connected the Eastern seaboard to the West, and found himself in a position to threaten Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Washington as he saw fit. Instead, the bloodbath of Antietam enabled Lincoln to fulfill the vow he had made when Lee first crossed the Potomac.
Five days after the battle, the President convened a meeting of his Cabinet and initiated a new phase in a revolution which, a fortnight before, had seemed destined for failure. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal about the relation of this war to slavery; and you all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an order I had prepared on this subject.” All along, he said, he thought the time for acting on that order “might very probably come.” “I think the time has come now. I wish it were a better time. I wish we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have liked best. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion.”
The President disclaimed a revolutionary purpose. He was, he said, but “an instrument in God’s hands.” He told the Cabinet how, when Lee crossed the Potomac, he had vowed that, as soon as the Confederate Army should be driven out of Maryland, he would issue “a Proclamation as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself and”—here he hesitated—“to my Maker.”
Lee was driven back; the will of the Deity was manifest. “God,” the President said, “had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”
“I know very well,” he continued, “that many others might, in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew any Constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield to him. But though I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.”
Lincoln then read his ordinance. In it he proclaimed that on January 1, 1863, all persons held as slaves in any place where the people were then in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free. . . .” Two minor changes were made at the suggestion of Seward, and the document, known as the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (it would not take effect if the insurgents returned to their allegiance within a hundred days), was issued that afternoon.
In scope and power, the act rivaled the enactments of the greatest lawgivers. But the character of its revolutionary author puzzled those who knew him best. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner for many years, concluded that the architect of the Emancipation Proclamation was, not merely a private, but a cold man, a man capable of touching, to the depths of their beings, strangers whom he did not know, but one who was separated from those most intimately associated with him by an impenetrable barrier. Lincoln “never poured out his soul to any mortal creature at any time,” Herndon said. “He was the most secretive—reticent—shut-mouthed man that ever existed.”
Certainly the mastermind of one of history’s most liberating revolutions was an odd man. “Mr. Lincoln,” one of his closest friends, Joshua F. Speed, said, “was so unlike all the men I had ever known before or seen or known since that there is no one to whom I can compare him. In all his habits of eating, sleeping, reading, conversation, and study he was, if I may so express it, regularly irregular.” Lincoln stood, like Bismarck, well over six feet, yet he ate surprisingly little, and weighed only about one hundred and eighty pounds. Unlike Bismarck, for whom the pleasures of the table were an essential part of life, Lincoln was indifferent to food; he frequently dined on nothing more than crackers and cheese and a glass of milk. During the war, his appetite failed almost entirely. “Well, I cannot take my vittles regular,” he said. “I kind o’ just browse round.” Nor was he fond of wine. Liquor left him, he said, feeling “flabby and undone,” and in maturity he never touched it.
Nature meant as little to him as haute cuisine. “I never cared for flowers,” he once confessed. In Springfield he had tried, for a time, to cultivate some rose bushes; but he soon neglected them. Money bored him: he lacked what Herndon called “money sense” and had no “avarice of the get.” He had been, in Illinois, a leader of the bar; but his practice was not a labor of love. He could work himself up into an enthusiasm over particular cases, but the law itself, considered either as a practical pursuit or as an object of scholarly study, interested him scarcely at all. Neither was he a great reader. He delighted (as Bismarck did also) in Shakespeare and the Bible; but his contemplation was more than his reading. No man in America, Herndon said, read less and thought more.
Lincoln possessed, his law partner believed, “a strong latent capacity to love”; but he had for a long time directed his passions almost exclusively towards high and public objects. When perplexed by a problem he seemed oblivious of his surroundings. He would move about, one witness said, in a “vague, abstracted way,” as though “unconscious of his own or anyone else’s existence.”15 The continual application of prodigious mental
power to the public questions of the day, if it marked Lincoln out of the ordinary run of men, enabled him, too, to rise to the statesmanship of the Emancipation Proclamation, an act in which he consummated the more noble of the two ambitions which he had sketched in his youth. The genius who aspires to make a revolution, he said a quarter of a century before, “thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”
Distinction he now had. There was no mock modesty. “I know very well,” he said, “that the name which is connected with this act will never be forgotten.”
Yet those who saw only his exterior qualities for a long time found it difficult to credit Lincoln’s revolutionary genius. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a captain of infantry who had just been shot through the neck at Antietam, said that “few men in baggy pants and bad hats are recognized as great by those who see them.” The proportions of genius are more accurately measured in the perspective of time and history than from the vantage of proximity, and even as Lincoln put his name to the Emancipation Proclamation, many of those who labored beside him regarded him as deficient in the attributes of leadership.
Why, they asked, did the President strike against the philosophy of coercion only in territory controlled by the Confederacy? Why did he not unbind the chains in areas actually controlled by the Union? The Emancipation Proclamation, Secretary of State Seward said, “emancipated slaves where it could not reach them, and left them in bondage where it could have set them free.” But military necessity, Lincoln believed, could only be made to cover so many constitutional sins; and he was unwilling to give further offense either to the spirit of the national charter or to the sensibilities of the border states. Nor did he need to do so: slavery, he was convinced, had “been cracked.”
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