Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  “Why, Mr. Lincoln,” Hatch replied, “this is the Army of the Potomac.”

  “No, Hatch, no,” Lincoln said. “This is General McClellan’s bodyguard.”

  The President returned to Washington satisfied that the army, though it might be indolent, was sufficiently submissive to his authority. The revolution had entered a new phase, and Lincoln, in spite of disappointments, displayed a new mastery of men and events. He saw, more clearly than ever, the global character of the struggle in which he was engaged, and using his gift of expression he tried to make his countrymen understand the historical significance of the revolution they were making. Lord Palmerston, Earl Russell, and Mr. Gladstone sought through their foreign policy to defend England’s interests in the world; but their conception of those interests was, Lincoln believed, too narrow. The decisive question of the decade, the President said, was whether free constitutions could survive and prosper in the world, or whether they possessed an “inherent, and fatal weakness” that doomed them to a premature degeneration. It was a question in which England had as deep an interest as America. In his annual message to Congress Lincoln alluded to the world crisis:

  We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.

  If freedom failed in America, where else was it likely to prosper? True, it might still flourish in England; but even in England it would be vulnerable should the island Kingdom find itself alone in a world of aggressive despotisms, armed with all the new powers of steam and coal and steel.

  Lincoln read the newspapers. In the autumn of 1862 the fate of liberty hung in the balance in three great nations. It hung in the balance in Russia, where an absolute ruler sought to promote liberal reform but was unable to overcome the inertia of despotism. It hung in the balance in Germany, where a minister of the Prussian Crown applied his dark genius to the destruction of the last feeble props of the Rechtsstaat (a state under the rule of law). And it hung in the balance in America, where Lincoln himself struggled to preserve the free institutions of his country from the evils of domestic rebellion and the machinations of Old World powers, as well as from the temptation to meet these difficulties in a manner fatal to the very conception of liberty he sought to vindicate.

  Lincoln, Bismarck, and Alexander each grasped the significance of the moment. Bismarck, the scion of knights, sought to prevent the progress of liberty by breaking the Prussian Parliament. So little did one know of the world, the new Minister-President wrote to his wife, that one was forever “going out into the dark like a child.” Not even Bismarck, however, could foresee the extent of the darkness into which his country was eventually to be plunged by the decisions he made in the autumn of 1862. Alexander, the descendant of kings, sensed that freedom is the only sure foundation of greatness; but he found the principle easier to acknowledge than to implement, and he had no notion of how to communicate the insight to his subjects. Alone of the three statesmen, Lincoln, the child of common people, perceived the promise of the free state, and embodied the perception in his statecraft. But the cost of his revolution was fearful.

  There was, however, one bright moment as the leaves fell from the trees that autumn. Lincoln concluded that he was finally strong enough to dispense with the services of General McClellan. A sealed envelope was brought by special train to the General’s headquarters. McClellan opened the envelope and found an order relieving him of command and directing him to return to his house in Trenton, New Jersey.

  Part Two

  THE REVOLUTIONS AT THEIR HEIGHT

  Chapter 15

  “WHOEVER HAS THE POWER”

  Berlin, Gastein, and Baden, December 1862-November 1863

  A PLAN LIKE BISMARCK’S, with inspirations so primitive—blood and iron and the divine right of kings—ought on every conventional estimate to have failed outright, and perished a mere archaism in an age of progress, science, and democracy. But in contrast to an older type of reactionary, in contrast to Manteuffel and Metternich, Bismarck was prepared to defend his philosophy with the most up-to-date methods. Romantic nationalism, manhood suffrage, jingo journalism—all that progress, science, and democracy could supply—he stood ready to place in the service of his revolution.

  His plan was still, he believed, a perfectly good one. Only there was no use, he now saw, in talking about it; he must act. In December 1862, two months after assuming office, he summoned the Austrian Ambassador, Count Károlyi, to the Wilhelmstrasse. Bismarck was blunt. He told Károlyi that Austria must relinquish her claims to primacy in Germany or face war. The Habsburgs must shift their center of gravity eastward, to Hungary. If they failed to do this there would be a catastrophe.

  Unfortunately for Bismarck, the chosen scapegoat was not at all co-operative. For all their ineptitude, the Habsburgs could be cunning when they felt themselves threatened. Vienna replied to Bismarck’s ultimatum not by preparing for war, but by proposing to convene, at Frankfurt, a Congress of Princes to explore changes to the Bundestag, the assembly of the German Confederation (Prince Metternich’s Bund).

  It was a clever bluff. Bismarck did not doubt that the changes Austria sought in the Bundestag would be disadvantageous to Prussia, yet he saw at once that, by styling the affair a Congress of Princes, Vienna had fingered his own weak spot. His royal master, King Wilhelm, was a profound legitimist; the old King was bound by intimate ties to each of the princely houses of Germany, and he felt the deepest reverence for the traditions and prerogatives, for the very pedigrees and quarterings, of the venerable dynasties. The Congress of Princes would appeal to all his notions of “princely solidarity.”

  Wilhelm was at Gastein, in the Austrian Alps, when he learned of the Austrian proposals. Bismarck, who was with him, was wrought to a pitch of nervous apprehension over the trick the Viennese had played him. “I should like to have nothing to do,” he wrote to his wife, “other than to walk on the heights, and to recline on the sunny banks, to smoke and see the snow-peaks.” But such an idyll was out of the question. Flags were put out; Franz Josef, the Austrian Kaiser, was coming to make his case in person.

  For once, Bismarck’s jealous vigilance failed. He was bird-watching when the decisive interview took place. Franz Josef won the King over. Wilhelm wanted to go to Frankfurt. He hoped, he told Bismarck, “to turn the antagonism of Austria and Prussia into a mutual struggle against the Revolution and constitutionalism.”

  Bismarck at once set about trying to change the King’s mind. Wilhelm, he said, must at all costs be kept “out of Frankfurt.” He followed his royal master from Gastein to Wildbad, and from Wildbad to Baden. “As a result of the Frankfurt foolishness,” he told his wife, “I cannot leave the King.” Together the two men rode through the Black Forest in an open carriage. They avoided the German language, speaking in French so as not to be understood by the coachmen on the box. By the time they reached Baden, Bismarck believed that he had prevailed. But he found, upon arriving at the ducal palace, a new danger. Lurking in the galleries was the King of Saxony, who carried with him a message from the princes gathered at Frankfurt. They implored their brother Wilhelm to join them.

  In an instant all the work of the carriage ride was undone. “Thirty reigning princes and a King as a courier!” Wilhelm exclaimed. How could he refuse such an invitation?

  The two men argued until midnight when the King, “worn out,” Bismarck said, “by the nervous tension of the situation,” gave way. The old soldier, tears streaming down his face, agreed to be guided by his Minister’s advice. Bismarck, as full of emotion, retired to his room, and smashed a vase.

  In the absence of the King of Prussia, the Congress of Princes came to nothing. Yet Bismarck was far from satisfied. The free-state men continued to oppose his rule, and the weakness of his grasp on power embittered even the beauty of Baden. “I went for a walk, at midnight, in the moonlight,” he wrote to his wife, “but could not get business out of my head.” He returned to Berlin, where the constitutional crisis was discussed in two separate Cabinet meetings
on the same day. “I had no heart” for it, he said; for he had no solution to the puzzle.

  What was he to do? The free-state men were every day becoming more impatient with his rule. He imposed a censorship on the press; but this, he knew, was a shopworn tactic, and only strengthened the opposition. He must try something else. He had been intrigued by the way in which Europe’s craftiest politicians used (or proposed to use) the power of the lower orders against the liberal middle—against the bourgeois and professional classes. In France, Napoleon III organized mass plebiscites to ratify his power. In England, Benjamin Disraeli envisioned a union between the common people and the aristocracy, an alliance which Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was later to christen “Tory Democracy.” Others called it “neofeudal paternalism” or “English Tory Socialism.”

  It was an ingenious strategy. Use democratic paternalism to subvert the institutions of freedom. Today, when democracy and liberty are practically synonymous, such a policy seems paradoxical. But it did not seem so in the nineteenth century. In England and the United States, the rule of law, bills of rights, independent judiciaries, and legislative control of the purse and the army developed before the advent of universal suffrage. When, during the nineteenth century, democracy grew up in England and America, the institutions of the free state were relatively stable; the broader franchise did not destroy free constitutions, it made them stronger. But in countries without such stable constitutions, unscrupulous leaders used democratic instruments—plebiscites and manhood suffrage—to subvert the fledgling institutions of freedom.

  Bismarck followed this lead. He employed a brutal rhetoric in the hope of winning over ordinary Germans. The “untern Klassen” (lower orders) were, he believed, attracted to strength; they cared little for the constitutional niceties which appealed to the educated classes. A free constitution was an idea “the practical benefits of which,” Bismarck said, were “but little understood by the masses.” “In the moment of decision,” he believed, “the masses will stand by the monarchy,” however despotic the monarch himself might be. With great psychological acuteness, Bismarck perceived how slender is the grip of free institutions on most people’s minds. Across the ocean, Lincoln reached a similar conclusion; but he put the insight to a different use.

  “If a compromise cannot be arrived at and a conflict arises,” Bismarck said of the constitutional crisis in Prussia, “then the conflict becomes a question of power. Whoever has the power, then acts according to his opinion.” Might makes right. Iron, not law, is the ultimate motive force.

  Yet words, however potent, are not enough. The man of iron must act. Should he follow the example of Napoleon III and use manhood suffrage to break the free-state opposition? Bismarck discussed the possibility with Ferdinand Lasalle, who in the spring of 1863 founded the General Union of German Workers. Lasalle, the son of a silk merchant in Breslau, was a singular character, a labor leader who was at ease in the beau monde, a socialist orator who made love to aristocratic women, a charlatan whose egotism, inflamed by syphilis, bore at times a faint resemblance to genius. Not yet forty, with aquiline features and a fine high brow, Lasalle regarded himself as a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. In a nervous falsetto he unburdened himself of a load of manic cleverness.

  Puffing on an expensive cigar, Lasalle explained his terms to Bismarck. “Give me universal suffrage,” he told the Minister-President, “and I will give you a million votes.”

  Bismarck was intrigued. He had no sympathy for Lasalle’s socialism, which he regarded as a delusion; but he saw in the labor leader’s ideas about enfranchising the masses and regulating their lives on the paternal principle a way to squeeze the liberal middle—as well as to render the coercive authority of his government more secure.

  There was, however, a problem. He knew King Wilhelm would never consent to so daring a means of outflanking the free-state men. Paternalism must wait. Yet by what other method could he maintain his grip on power? Such was Bismarck’s quandary when, in November 1863, the fates came to his aid. In that month, in the castle at Glüksburg in Schleswig-Holstein, the old King of Denmark, Frederick VII, died. A new King, Christian IX, was proclaimed, and Germany prepared for war.

  Virginia and Pennsylvania, April-June 1863

  ROBERT E. LEE, asleep in his field headquarters, was awakened by the sound of gunfire. He did not, however, get up to investigate. He needed rest; he had only recently recovered from a severe throat infection. But on this night rest eluded him. A short time later he was again roused. Someone was calling his name. He opened his eyes and saw the face of Captain James Smith, a young officer on Stonewall Jackson’s staff.

  “Well,” Lee said, “I thought I heard firing and was beginning to think it was time some of you young fellows were coming to tell me what it was all about.”

  Federal troops, Smith informed Lee, were crossing the Rappahannock in force. It appeared that the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, intended to make good the boast he had uttered on taking up his command. It was not, Hooker said, a question of whether he would take Richmond, but when.17

  Lee rose from his bed, and prepared to meet an army that was in all likelihood twice the size of his own. Two days later, as the sun sank behind the Blue Ridge, he was still pondering the problem. In a bivouac in a pinewoods south of Chancellorsville, he and Stonewall Jackson sat together on a log. “How,” Lee asked, “can we get at these people?” Suddenly, out of the darkness, Jeb Stuart appeared. Hooker’s right flank, the cavalry master reported, was exposed—it was “in the air.”

  In a short time Lee had his plan. Once again he decided to divide his forces in the face of superior numbers. He ordered Jackson and his II Corps to surprise the Union right.

  Jackson rose and saluted. “My troops,” he said, “will move at four o’clock.” As he said these words, he smiled.

  The men of II Corps executed Lee’s orders with their customary zeal and ability. They routed Hooker’s flank, and afterwards Jackson himself galloped forward into the darkness, determined to press his advantage. His pickets, however, mistook him for a Yankee horseman. Shots were fired, and three bullets shattered his left arm and hand. He was taken to a tent near Wilderness Tavern.

  When the smoke cleared, it was evident that the South had won a great victory at Chancellorsville. General Hooker, stunned by the suddenness of the enemy’s blows, fell into a bewildered stupor. Opportunities to take the offensive he failed to seize, and like a turtle retreating to its shell, he drew back. In the White House, Lincoln was appalled. Coming into the room with the telegram in his hand, the President was a “picture,” the journalist Noah Brooks said, “of despair.” His face was “ashen,” and his voice trembled with emotion. “My God! My God!” he said. “What will the country say?”

  Lee had triumphed; but in a glorious hour he was far from feeling elation. When he learned, from Captain R. E. Wilbourne, Jackson’s signal officer, of the misfortune which had befallen his lieutenant, his brow darkened.

  “Ah, Captain,” Lee said, “any victory is dearly bought which deprives us of the services of General Jackson, even for a short time!”

  Jackson was taken, by Lee’s order, to a cottage at Guiney Station, where he was less vulnerable to the sallies of the enemy’s cavalry. His shattered arm was amputated, and hopes were at first entertained for a recovery. But Jackson’s condition deteriorated, and he soon became delirious. “Let us pass over the river,” he said, “and rest under the shade of the trees.” A short time later he was dead. He was thirty-nine years old.

  “Such an executive officer,” Lee said, “the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done, it will be done. No need for me to send or watch him. Straight as the needle to the pole he advanced to the execution of my purpose.” Other commanders might possess Jackson’s constancy and diligence, but they lacked the enterprising spirit which attempts more than it can do, and aspire
s to do more than it can attempt. None of Lee’s remaining corps commanders possessed the warlike genius of Jackson. Ambrose Powell Hill wanted experience. James “Pete” Longstreet wanted confidence in Lee’s judgment. Robert Stoddert Ewell wanted confidence in himself.

  The Army of Northern Virginia “would be invincible if it could be properly organized and officered,” Lee told John Bell Hood, the young officer who had led the assault of the 4th Texas at Gaines’s Mill. “There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led. But there is the difficulty—proper commanders—where can they be obtained?” Time and circumstance prevented the recruitment of a new officer corps. With each passing day the North, with its immense population and enormous industrial capacity, grew stronger. With each day the South, with its rudimentary manufactures and blockaded harbors, grew weaker. Lee must work with such materials as were to hand, and he must work fast.

  At the end of June he marched north towards Pennsylvania in the hope of retrieving, through an act of desperate gallantry, the fortunes of the South. By taking the war to the North, Lee hoped to break the Union’s will to fight. Not less important, he wanted to feed his hungry soldiers, who were growing gaunt in war-ravaged Virginia. After they crossed the border, Confederate troops seized hogs and horses, cattle and clothes. As well as shoes. General James Johnson Pettigrew’s brigade set out in search of a rich supply of footgear which, it was rumored, could be found in a quiet crossroads town not far from the Mason-Dixon line. The name of the town was Gettysburg.