Hood’s El Greco countenance grew less gloomy. “Not hurt by daily use—eh?” He doffed his hat and took leave of the ladies. Before riding off, however, he turned to look at Buck, who stood somewhat aloof. He bent down and whispered something to John Darby.
“What was that he said to you?” Buck asked Darby after Hood had gone. “About me?”
“Only a horse compliment,” Darby replied. “He is a Kentuckian, you know. He says, ‘You stand on your feet like a thoroughbred.
Buck had a knack, Mary Chesnut said, of “being fallen in love with at sight and of never being fallen out of love with.” Sam Hood rapidly succumbed to her charms. When he returned from the war in autumn of 1863, he was a greater hero than ever. At Chickamauga, where Confederate troops under Braxton Bragg routed a Union force led by William S. Rosecrans and prepared the way for the siege of Chattanooga, he led the decisive charge. But his state was in other ways as sere as the season. His body was smashed. At Gettysburg shrapnel from an artillery shell (it exploded as he led the doomed assault on Little Round Top) deprived him of the use of one of his arms. At Chickamauga he lost one of his legs. There would be no more dancing for Sam Hood.
Mary Chesnut was in her dining room giving orders to Laurence, her husband’s manservant, when Mary Preston called out to her. “Come here, Mrs. C. They are lifting Hood out of his carriage, here, at your door.” The maimed man was borne into the drawing room and laid upon a sofa. There was a flush of fever in his face. “This is the first house I have had myself dragged to,” Hood said. Luncheon was brought to him, as well as oranges. “How kind people are. Not once since I was wounded have I ever been left without fruit, hard as it is to get now.” Mary Chesnut saw that he looked wistfully towards the door of the apartment. She surmised the reason for his glances; but Buck Preston did not appear.
Sam Hood was determined, he said, “to be as happy as a fool, well, as a one-legged man, can be.” He found his principal happiness in the company of Buck, and he was soon driving out with her nearly every day. One day they went to the Richmond fairgrounds. Mary Chesnut was with them, and so was Henry Percy Brewster, a lawyer who had served as Secretary of War in Texas during the interval when the state had been an independent republic. Brewster was now on Hood’s staff. The day was cold, and they were swathed in rugs and furs. Buck was regal and remote in black velvet.
Hood asked Brewster to enumerate the symptoms of a man’s being in love. He was, he said, ignorant of the characteristics of that particular malady. He admitted that he had once, at the age of seventeen, fancied himself in love. But that was a “long time ago.”
Brewster described the condition of a lover in the first uneasiness of desire. When the swain beheld the object of his passion, his breath was apt to come short. “If it amounts to mild strangulation, you have got it bad. You are stupidly jealous, glowering with jealousy, and [have] a gloomy, fixed conviction that she likes every fool you meet better than she does you, especially people that she has a thorough contempt for. . . .”
“Well,” Hood said, drawing a breath of relief. “I have felt none of these things so far, and yet they say I am engaged to four young ladies— liberal allowance, you will admit, for a man who cannot walk without help.”
“To whom do they say you are engaged?” Buck asked. Her eyes were fixed on the bobbing heads of the horses.
“Miss Wigfall is one.”
“Who else?”
“Miss Sally Preston”—that is, Buck herself.
Mary Chesnut watched Buck’s reaction. The girl was as icy as ever. She did not move an eyelid. “Are you not annoyed at such a preposterous report?”
“No,” Hood replied.
“God help us,” Brewster said under his breath to Mary Chesnut. “He is going to say everything right out here before our faces.”
Buck, however, wanted no proposals. She spoke with great coolness. “Richmond people are liberal, as you say. I never heed their reports. They say I am engaged to [Charles] Shirley Carter and to Phil Robb.”
Hood looked at Buck. “I think,” he said, “I will set a mantrap near your door and break some of those young fellows’ legs too.” He dismissed her other suitors as “light-winged birds.”
Buck Preston and Sam Hood made a striking couple. Each was an embodiment of the Southern ideal—an incarnation of the spirit of the Confederacy. But after Gettysburg the Confederacy wore a ghoulish aspect. Their pas de deux was in danger of becoming a danse macabre.
Washington, July-September 1863
IN THE DAYS after Gettysburg, the question gnawed.
Why had Bobby Lee escaped?
“Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand,” Lincoln said, “and they would not close it.”
The President wrote in anger to General Meade. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would . . . have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”
He did not send the letter. Meade, he saw, had done his best. But he continued to lament the narrowness of his generals’ vision. A succession of commanders—McClellan, Burnside, Hooker—regarded the capture of Richmond as the key to the war. Meade and his staff seemed to share this view. Lincoln thought differently. “To avoid misunderstanding,” he wrote in September 1863, “let me say that to attempt to fight the enemy slowly back into his intrenchments at Richmond, and there to capture him, is an idea I have been trying to repudiate for quite a year.” “Lee’s army, and not Richmond,” he said, was the “objective point.”
Yet the problem, he knew, was not a purely military one. War is not only a contest of opposing armies: it is also a conflict of rival wills. In 1863, Lincoln had not only to instruct his commanders in the precepts of strategy, he had, too, to stimulate the North’s will to fight. Enthusiasm for the war had fallen off sharply, and it had been necessary to resort to conscription. But the Enrollment Act of 1863 brought difficulties of its own. There were disturbances in a number of Northern counties, and riots in New York City claimed more than a hundred lives.
The President’s task was to raise the nation’s morale at a time when his own was suffering. The slaughterhouse atmosphere had begun to tell. The President looked like an old man, and had bloody dreams. Frustrated though he was by the course of events, there was no one to whom he could unburden himself. Mary Lincoln inhabited a world of her own. She had made her life into a mausoleum for her dead son Willie, and like Tsar Alexander’s Mary, she spent many hours attempting to communicate with the departed. In July she was thrown from a carriage, and was never afterwards quite right in the head. Lincoln’s relations with his oldest boy, Robert, were strained. He had given Bob the “best of educations,” and had provided him with a better start in life than he himself had known; but the two were not close. With ungenerous disdain Lincoln “guessed Bob would not do better than he had.” He cherished his youngest son, Tad; the boy frequently slept in his father’s bed. But the President had not enough time for the child, who was curiously stunted; at the age of nine he could neither dress himself nor read a book.
Lincoln was a lonely man in the White House; but his solitude cannot by itself explain his darkening mood in 1863. He was, after all, used to being alone. He had gone so far as to elaborate a pet theory to explain the qualities that separated him from the lesser lights that surrounded him. His mother, he surmised, was the natural child of a high-souled Virginia planter, and from this source came his uncommon powers of mind and tenacity of purpose. “God bless my mother,” he once said, “all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” That Lincoln should have attributed his genius to the very patrician culture he set himself, in his public career, to destroy, might seem odd; but he was a creature of paradox.
Power, however, was relentlessly exposing his paradoxes. The tension between the democratic vindicator of equality and the g
reat-souled man born to “ride in triumph through Persepolis” had once existed only in the shadows of his imagination. The necessities of his revolution now made the contradiction nakedly visible; they forced Lincoln to play the part that had long beguiled him, that of the romantic strongman, the scion of eagles—a type that at once fascinated and repelled him.
The President’s detractors were quick to seize on the discrepancy between his professed principles and his actual deeds. His solicitude for the rights of slaves was, they said, a pretense, and they pointed to his ambiguous statements about blacks, who he once said could never live with whites “on terms of social and political equality.” As late as August 1862, Lincoln spoke of the need for blacks to go away—to leave the United States and form colonies elsewhere. He invoked the equality of opportunity that lay at the heart of the American idea; yet he supported protective tariffs and other giveaways to well-connected businessmen. To overcome, in the South, the last resistance to prohibitory tariffs was, the President’s opponents said, the real object of his revolution. And now men were dying, by tens of thousands, for his bloody ambition.
The accusations were painful to Lincoln in part because there was an element of truth in them. He was an ambitious politician; and like all ambitious politicians, he had at times to trim his sails to the prevailing wind, though to do so were to deviate from the course of absolute right. Yet the charges were not the whole truth, and Lincoln exerted himself to set the record straight. He consented to the enlistment of blacks in the army, and by this act invested precious political capital in the cause of black equality. He defended his “strong measures” in the field of civil liberties as essential to the safety of the state, and argued that their emergency character was too patently transitory to form the foundation of a permanent despotism. America would no more come to rely on such measures in time of peace, he said, than a man would “contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life.”
The President had considerable success, in the North, in overcoming opposition to his leadership, and in convincing his fellow citizens that he was not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His letter defending his “strong measures” was issued as a pamphlet; more than half a million copies were printed. Overcoming an earlier ambivalence, he pressed for black citizenship in those portions of the South occupied by Union armies. Writing to political ally Michael Hahn to congratulate him on having fixed his “name in history as the first-free-state Governor of Louisiana,” Lincoln asked “whether some of the colored people may not be let in” and enrolled in the state’s reconstructed franchise, “as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”
Yet a wartime leader who can do no more than refute his critics is bound to fail. He must energize his supporters. In 1863, Lincoln was still struggling to find the moral clue, a means of mobilizing the spirit of those who remained faithful to his revolution.
His efforts in this direction met with a degree of success, but something was missing. In July he described the principle for which Americans in the North were contending, the spirit of 1776. “How long ago is it?” he asked in a speech at the White House,
—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.”
Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, said that in Lincoln’s imagination the Union rose “to the sublimity of religious mysticism.” But the President had yet to find a way to convey the impassioned quality of this inner vision to his people.
Chapter 18
FIGHTERS FOR THE FUTURE
Munich, August 1863-October 1864
DINING IN STATE in the Nymphenburg Palace near Munich, Crown Prince Ludwig, the eighteen-year-old heir to the throne of Bavaria, was dreamy and remote. Ignoring both his mother, Queen Mary, and the dignitaries beside whom he was seated, he rapidly drained his champagne glass. The footman who carried the bottle did not, however, refill the Prince’s glass. Annoyed, Ludwig held his glass over his shoulder. The footman looked in perplexity to the Queen, and only at her direction was the Prince’s glass replenished.
Taciturn and gloomy in the company of state dignitaries, Ludwig in his solitary reveries burned with obscure enthusiasms. Later the nature of these yearnings would become clearer to him, but at eighteen he felt only bafflement and frustration, and a desire, vague yet intense, for some momentous form of greatness. At Hohenschwangau in the Bavarian Alps, where he passed much of his boyhood, Ludwig had evolved into a parody of German romanticism. The castle itself, which his father, King Maximilian II, had built on the ruins of an older edifice, might have been the Alpine retreat of Byron’s Manfred. Here, in the shadow of lofty pinnacles and castellated towers, Ludwig developed that taste for Schwärmerei (romantic rapture) which was to have such fatal consequences in his life. The Prince’s eyes were sensitive to light, and as a boy he had liked nothing better than to hide himself in the dark recesses of the castle, where he could more easily elaborate his visions. One day his tutor, the learned von Döllinger, found him nearly lost to sight in the depths of an enormous sofa.
“Your Highness should have something read to you,” the tutor ventured to suggest, “that would serve to pass the tedious hours.”
“Oh, they are not tedious to me,” little Ludwig replied. “I think of lots of things, and I am quite happy.”
The boy’s love of swans and beautiful knights might not by itself have been unhealthy; but there were other signs that the mind and imagination of Ludwig were not happily constituted. He could not bear the sight of common humanity. He would turn his face to the wall rather than look at an ungainly footman. He felt for members of the lower and middling orders an aversion which he had not always the good sense to conceal. Yet his nature was not essentially frigid. His eye and mouth were those of a lover and a voluptuary. He longed for intimacy with a few chosen spirits. But here there was an obstacle. He was morbidly sensitive of his own dignity, and he could not forgive, even in a favorite, a breach of the rigid etiquette that hedged his person. The pride of the House of Wittelsbach, so evident in the way he threw back his head and thrust out his chin when he walked, made him imperious, and this superbity of manner thwarted his desires for stimulating relations with artistic persons.
A little experience of the world, if it could not have altered the nature of Ludwig, might have softened his youthful egotism and hauteur. But such an education in reality was denied him when, in March 1864, his father, the King, died in the royal residence in Munich. Ludwig passed, in an instant, from the nursery to the throne. The young man who had needed his mother’s consent to drink a glass of champagne was now the ruler of nearly five million people.
Ludwig ascended the throne determined to foster an artistic revolution. He aspired to be such a promoter of art and encourager of genius as his hero, Louis XIV of France, had been. Ludwig carried the emulation far. He posed for a painter in a costume and posture that recalled one of the portraits of the Grand Louis by Hyacinthe Rigaud, and he constructed, at Herrenchiemsee, a palace modeled on Versailles. Yet self-absorbed though he was, Ludwig had sense enough to perceive that the Sun King’s style, however entrancing it might have been, was remote from the spirit of his own age. Only a new and powerful art, he believed, could effect the spiritual regeneration of his people. He cast his eyes far and wide, but he saw only one man who, by virtue of his peculiar genius, could be of use to him.
“Find Richard Wagner for me!” the King is said to have exclaimed in the earliest days of his reign.
Wagner had for some time fascinated Ludwig. A performance of Tannhäuser sent him into convulsions of ecstasy. Wagner’s essay, The Work of Art in the Future, made no less deep an impression. He longed to hear the composer’s revolutionary but as yet unperformed music-drama, Tristan und
Isolde. Here, Ludwig believed, was an artist who might redeem Germany by purging the land of the “soulless utilitarianism” which disfigured it. Art could transform the “utilitarian man” of the present into a spiritual being, the “artistic man” of the future. “It was this one word ‘Future,’” the historian Leopold von Ranke said, “which gained Ludwig for Wagner’s music.”
The man on whom the King’s hopes for the future hung was, at this time, a fugitive, flying from creditors and bailiffs. Wagner had left Biebrich and gone to Vienna. He had fled Vienna and gone to Mariafeld. Ludwig dispatched his secretary, Franz von Pfistermeister, to find him. The emissary found Wagner in Stuttgart. He left his card, but the composer, who suspected the ruse of a disgruntled lender, hesitated to see him. When, at last, the interview took place, Pfistermeister told him that his royal master admired him deeply and desired him to repair at once to Munich. The composer shed tears. It was the sign he had long awaited.
Early in May the two men met. They were both deeply moved. Wagner, bending low over the royal hand, was entranced by the beauty of Ludwig. “Alas,” the composer wrote, “he is so handsome and intelligent, so splendid, and so full of soul, that I tremble lest his life should dissolve like a fleeting dream of the Gods in this vulgar world.” Ludwig, for his part, promised to free Wagner from the constraints that had for so long hampered his art. “Rest assured,” the King said, “that I will do everything in my power to make up for what you have suffered in the past. The mean cares of everyday life I will banish from you for ever; I will procure for you the peace you have longed for in order that you may be free to spread the mighty wings of your genius in the pure aether of rapturous art.”
The King paid Wagner’s debts and established him in a villa near the royal residence of Berg. Every day the royal carriage was sent to the Villa Pellet to fetch the composer. The King loved him, Wagner said, “with infatuation.” He flattered himself that he figured, in Ludwig’s imagination, as an incarnation of the “first beloved,” that “ultimate object of desire” which, according to Plato, is “the source and origin of all friendship between human beings.” Yet on his own side Wagner was not less enamored. He flew to the King “as to a mistress.” Were Ludwig to die, he would die “the moment after.” Under the inspiration of the King he might even liberate himself from the bondage of feminine beauty. “Shall I be able to renounce women completely?” he asked. “With a deep sigh I confess I could almost wish it! One look at his dear picture helps me again! Oh, the lovely youth! Now he is everything to me, world, wife and child.”
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