A more searching criticism of Lincoln’s statesmanship was made by those who questioned the propriety, not of the act of liberation itself, but of the manner in which it was accomplished. The freedom of millions was obtained not through the ordinary processes of liberty, but by an executive decree scarcely less arbitrary than the instrument with which Tsar Alexander effected the liberation of the serfs. The Emancipation Proclamation was the work, not of a magistrate acting within the ordinary bounds of the Constitution, executing laws enacted by the legislature, but of a revolutionary war chief who acknowledged only the authority of military necessity. Not since Oliver Cromwell, it was said, had a man of English blood exercised such an unlimited power over his fellow men.
Lincoln’s detractors exaggerated the threat which his methods posed to American liberties. Free elections continued to be held in the North during his presidency, and an opposition press flourished. But the President’s critics saw more clearly than many of his defenders the paradox of his revolution. Liberty he brought, but at the tip of a sword. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, perhaps the most effective restraint ever devised to restrain tyranny, throughout the country. He disobeyed the order of a Federal court to bring a suspected rebel before a judge of the United States. He authorized the disbursement of government funds without sanction of Congress, which alone possesses the power to unloose the purse strings; and although the Constitution gives to the legislature the exclusive power to raise and support armies, he created new regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery on no authority other than his own prerogative, much as King Wilhelm was doing in Prussia. He then compelled Congress to act as a rubber stamp and ratify his extraconstitutional acts— a technique Bismarck would soon master in Germany.
With Lincoln’s approval, Secretary of State Seward organized a secret police, not unlike Tsar Alexander’s Third Section; the clandestine bureau oversaw the arrest of persons deemed obnoxious to the régime.16 “I can touch a bell on my right hand,” Seward told Lord Lyons, the British Minister at Washington, “and order the imprisonment of a citizen of Ohio; I can touch the bell again and order the imprisonment of a citizen of New York; and no power on earth, except that of the President, can release them. Can the Queen of England do so much?”
Seward, to do him justice, would have preferred to exercise a less execrable type of power; but his passions were versatile, his ambition was flexible, and he did not hesitate to take up a commission which Lincoln, though he condoned it, did not like to touch. One of the Secretary’s communications concerning a suspected enemy of the state shows that he had at last found his place in Lincoln’s revolution, in its sewers:
DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
WASHINGTON.
John A. Kennedy, Superintendent of
Police, New York:
Arrest Charles Kopperl, of Carroll County, Mississippi, now in your city, and send him to Fort Lafayette.
William H. Seward.
The jails were soon filled with those whom the rulers of the state, in their apprehension, had represented as dangerous to the government, and during the course of the war thousands of men and women were subjected to “extraordinary” or “discretionary” arrests. Some of those arrested were said to have given aid and comfort to the Confederacy; yet they were never brought before judges, nor were they permitted to confront their accusers in courts of law. Others among the detainees had done nothing more than criticize the government.
To Lord Robert Cecil, studying the Emancipation Proclamation in London, the lesson of Lincoln’s revolution was simple: “if you will have democracy, you must have something like Caesarism to control it.”
Chapter 13
THE SCENT OF FREEDOM
South Carolina, April 1862–January 1863
DICK WAS DIFFERENT after Lincoln proclaimed the freedom of the slaves.
“He is the first negro that I have felt a change in,” Mary Chesnut said. Dick was a proud man; he had been the butler in the house of Mary Chesnut’s father, the old Governor. His life was a long submission. “Yes, Marster . . .just as Marster pleases” were the words continually on his lips. Yet Dick had found dignity in his rôle, and he loved his black frock coat. When his wife, Hetty, said that he would look fine in the colorful liveries the footmen wore, Dick was scornful. “Nonsense, old woman,” he said, “a butler never demeans himself to wear livery. He is always in plain clothes.”
Mary Chesnut had known Dick since she was a child. She and her sisters used to be given tea by their nurses out of doors, on pine tables scrubbed white as milk.
“Do, Dick—come and wait on us,” they would say.
“No, little misses, I never wait on pine tables. Wait till you get big enough to put your legs under your pa’s mahogany.”
The young Mary Chesnut taught Dick to read as soon as she herself learned her letters. But the world had changed since the days when she perched on his carving board and initiated him in the mysteries of the alphabet. “He won’t even look at me now,” Mary Chesnut said, “he scents freedom in the air.”
Even before Lincoln proclaimed the freedom of her slaves, Mary Chesnut was apprehensive. She saw a new gleam in their eyes. Molly, her maid, was “full of airs.” This was a blow, for Molly was one of the “upper ten” of Mulberry, a slave-aristocrat with a greater investment in the coercive system than most. James Chesnut was stung by Molly’s defection. “Tell her to go to the devil,” he said, “she or anybody else on the plantation who is dissatisfied. Let them go. It is bother enough to feed and clothe them now.”
Molly’s impudence might give her away; but as a rule the slaves betrayed nothing. Experience had taught them to conceal their feelings. Mary Chesnut had lived among slaves her entire life, yet they were not less an enigma to her. “They go about in their black masks, not a ripple or an emotion showing. . . .”
What were they thinking? Would they rebel as Nat Turner had done? Would they kill her? Her cousin, Betsey Witherspoon, had been murdered the previous summer—killed “by her own people. Her negroes. . . . Horrible beyond words.” They crept into her room in the night and smothered her with the bedding. In the midst of the murder the old lady’s nightgown was soiled, and Rhody, her maid, unlocked the traveling trunk to find fresh nightclothes. Suddenly the old lady came to. She “begged them hard for life.” What had she done, she asked, that they should want to kill her? The maid stopped the old woman’s mouth with the blanket.
Before the murder, Mary Chesnut “never thought of being afraid of negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why should they want to hurt me?” But now she was afraid. “Why,” she wondered, should they “treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?”
Officially Mary Chesnut subscribed to the paternal theory of the Fire Eaters, who held the slaves to be overindulged children, “the idlest, laziest, fattest, most comfortably contented peasantry that ever cumbered the earth.” Privately she knew this to be cant. She was remote from the ugliest facts, the branding irons, the whippings, the bloodhounds, the mutilations. But she knew enough.
The ancient Spartans struck fear in the hearts of their helots with their dagger-bearing youths, the Krypteria; the Southern slaveholders had the Patrol. Mary Chesnut heard dark rumors, stories of mass lynchings in the western districts, where they were “hanging negroes . . . like birds in the trees” for an attempted insurrection. She saw, too, the advertisements in the newspapers; she knew that slave families were routinely ripped apart for the profit of the master class. NEGROES FOR SALE,” one such notice read. “A negro woman 24 years of age, and two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired.” What to her was more distressing, slave women were routinely forced by their masters to have sex with them. In one respect, Mary Chesnut believed, the great indictments of slavery—The Life of John Brown by James Redpath and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe—did not go far enough. A veil of Victorian prudery overhung the darkest sin. “You s
ee, Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.” “God forgive us,” Mary Chesnut wrote, “but ours is a monstrous system [of] wrong and iniquity . . . Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everbody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”
The Fire Eaters saw blacks as children; Mary Chesnut, by contrast, thought them infinitely mysterious. Hers was the racism, not of the Fire Eaters, but of the ancient Greeks, who regarded Africans as sorcerers and magicians. In her descriptions of slaves Mary Chesnut’s metaphors are feline, or Egyptian. The slaves are “noiseless as panthers.” Her husband’s Mammy is as quiet in her “ministrations as the white cat.” Old Dick is an “Egyptian Sphinx.” The spiritual power of the slaves was, she believed, uncanny. Sometimes she went to the black church at Mulberry. One of the slaves, Big Jim Nelson, led the prayer. He was, she said, a great handsome man, a “full-blooded African. . . . His forefathers must have been of royal blood over there.” Big Jim fell on his knees and shut his eyes. He “trembled and shook as one in a palsy.” His voice “rose to the pitch of a shrill shriek.” Still it “was strangely clear and musical, occasionally in a plaintive minor key that went to your heart. Sometimes it rung out like a trumpet.” The enthusiasm of the congregation rose with Big Jim’s ecstasy. “Yes, my God! Jesus!” voices shouted. “Aeih! Savior! Bless the lord. ...” She wanted to shout herself.
Mary Chesnut had, by this time, lost whatever sympathy she had once felt for the philosophy of the Fire Eaters. Slavery, she believed, was finished in the South. It “has to go of course.” She thought it odd that “there are people who still believe negroes to be property.” If anything could reconcile her to the South’s defeat, “it is Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves.” The plantation, she maintained, was “Hell,” a hell “where a big black devil dominates and a crowd of little black devils swarm around you” in the malarial heat. The white devil of the plantation she omitted to mention.
The coercive oligarchy was crumbling; but the planters would not admit it. Mary Chesnut’s husband would not admit it—publicly. In South Carolina the cotton barons preferred to blame their tribulations on the Governor. In the opinion of the tidewater magnates, Francis Wilkinson Pickens was a fool. In order to prevent him from doing harm, the legislature proclaimed a regency, invested with power to restrain the incompetent executive. James Chesnut was appointed to the Governor’s Council, as it was called, and Mary Chesnut followed him to Columbia, the capital of South Carolina.
She found the atmosphere of the town partly romantic, in the Southern roses-and-magnolia tradition, and partly opéra bouffe, in an equally venerable Southern style. She came to know one family well. She gasped; they were beautiful. Yet beauty was only the beginning of the Prestons’ charm. “As Swift defines aristocracy,” the Prestons had “the three essentials—brains, blood, wealth.” Colonel Preston was a “splendid specimen of humanity.” They called him “the Magnificent John.” It was a little too much, in Mary Chesnut’s opinion, “that so handsome a man—six feet four—should be clever and charming in like degree.” He had been educated at the University of Virginia and at Harvard, and he had later made a fortune in Louisiana sugar. Mary Chesnut thought him “so very agreeable, so kind, so sensible.” Yet in spite of these outward gifts John Preston was “a bitter, a disappointed man,” for he had failed to win high office. If he could not lead, he would not hunt. (The old Cavalier story.) He had taken his family to live abroad, and had only recently returned from a long residence in Paris.
Colonel Preston’s bitterness was the fruit of the accomplishment that had been the making of him—his marriage. Caroline Preston was by birth a Hampton, the daughter of old General Wade Hampton. The family was among the most formidable in South Carolina. But there was a difficulty. When they married, he was poor—the sugar empire came later—and she was rich; and in the South, at that time, rich girls did not marry poor boys. It was said that “Magnificent John” married Caroline Hampton for money, for position, for the mysterious glamour of her name; and that in exchange for these, he resigned his manhood into the hands of his new relations. “I have always treated him,” an uncharitable soul confided to Mary Chesnut, “as a poodle of the Hamptons—of the family. Whenever I saw him, he was walking on his hind legs for their amusement—or rolling off the rug to get out of the way of their feet.”
If John Preston’s pretensions to greatness were questioned in South Carolina, his wife’s were not. The grand manner Caroline Preston assumed easily and unselfconsciously, in keeping with her birth and traditions. Her beauty was undeniable. “She has a majestic figure,” Mary Chesnut said, “perfectly molded. And chiseled regularity of feature.” When she went to a ball, resplendent in diamonds, point lace, and velvet train, she might have vied in dignity with a reigning queen. She was, however, free from the more intimidating forms of condescension. She was “exceedingly quiet, retiring, and reserved. Indeed her gentleness almost amounts to timidity.”
Such grandeur of character might have been an impediment to friendship; but an intimacy soon developed between Caroline Preston and Mary Chesnut. They went out driving together every day in Mrs. Preston’s landau. Footmen, dressed in the livery of the Prestons, stood on the footboard as the carriage drove through the streets of Columbia. Mary Chesnut might have forsaken the philosophy of coercion, but she had not given up the aristocratic ideal. In the Prestons she found a fresh manifestation of all that she cherished in the seignorial manner. “I wonder if a handsomer group was ever collected in one room,” she exclaimed. “I have fallen in love with a whole family. No exception whatsoever.”
The Prestons had created a miniature world of rare splendor, one that in a dark hour renewed Mary Chesnut’s faith in the Southern noblesse; yet of all the enchanting objects in the household, one creature stood apart by reason of her peculiar loveliness. This was the Prestons’ daughter, Sally Buchanan Preston, who was called “Buck.” Buck Preston, twenty years old in 1862, was, in spite of her beauty, singularly good-natured, with an excellent disposition. She was, her Mammy said, “the sweetest, the best, the prettiest child.” She was highly accomplished, spoke excellent French, and sang beautifully; yet in spite of this she was simple and natural, without any affectation of superiority.
Mary Chesnut was from the first intrigued by the special impression of grace which the girl made upon her. “Buck,” she said, was “the very sweetest woman I ever knew.” Knowing, as she did, things which the cygnet could not even dimly perceive, she took it upon herself to act as her guide. For Buck was as yet unconscious of what a trial her progress towards womanhood was to be. Nor could Mary Chesnut assume, as she might have done if a duller nature were at stake, that Buck would be insulated by stupidity from the horror of the ordeal. Such was the girl’s sensitivity that she was bound to feel every jolt in the road.
At no time would Buck’s début have been easy, for society has always taken an unhealthy interest in the deflowering of virgin beauty. But the prurient curiosity is all the more intense when the plant happens to ripen in the last phases of an aristocracy’s decay, in the shadow of an oligarchy’s fallen marble. The rites then are downright barbaric; it is as though the waning hopes of the doomed order hinged entirely upon the sacrifice of the corn maiden.
Saint Petersburg and the Crimea, August 1862-November 1863
IN THE SUMMER GARDEN in Saint Petersburg, an Englishman was strolling with his lady. Coming towards them, on the path, was a Russian officer. The Russian was tall, and apparently accustomed to command; his expression, though not without gentleness, betrayed a certain heaviness and fatigue. A test of wills ensued. The Russian showed no disposition to make way for the Englishman. The Englishman was as unwilling to concede the path to the Russian. This bulldog determina
tion seemed, at first, to surprise his antagonist. But an indulgent smile soon lighted up the Russian’s face, and with a shrug of his shoulders he “deviated from his straight course, and ceded the centre of the path to the Englishman.”
When the Englishman and his wife finished their walk, they found a crowd gathered at the gate of the Summer Garden. Eager to discover what the fuss was about, the Englishman worked his way to the front of the throng, where he beheld a landau emblazoned with the double-headed eagles of the Romanovs. A ripple of excitement passed through the crowd as scarlet flunkies and police detectives cleared a path for the Emperor. Hats came off, bows and curtsies were made, and in a moment the astonished Englishman found himself face to face with the officer he had encountered in the garden path. Alexander flashed a pleasant smile of recognition before driving off.
The Tsar was not quite so “used up” as Prince Kropotkin believed him to be. Even as his minions were, with his approval, flinging suspected agitators into the Fortress of Peter and Paul, raiding the houses of liberal noblemen, and condemning writers and intellectuals to Siberian exile, a part of Alexander was still the sensitive Sasha, the boy with the mild, lamblike eyes. Nevertheless, the burdens of despotism had begun to tell. To his brother, Grand Duke Constantine, Alexander spoke of the nervous tremors that now afflicted him. “I am often seized,” he said, “by an internal trembling when particularly stirred by anything. But one must control oneself, and I find prayer the best means to this end.” The rumor went round that the Tsar had contracted tuberculosis. In fact he suffered from asthma, a condition that was exacerbated by his addiction to tobacco.
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