Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  Wagner found it always easier to talk of renunciation than actually to renounce, and when Ludwig went off to take the waters of Kissingen in the company of other royalties, the composer in his loneliness ceased to proclaim the virtues of a chaste aloofness from women. “My solitude,” he said, “is terrible.” Fortunately Cosima von Bülow arrived in Bavaria at the end of June. Wagner had not seen her since the day, six months before, when with tears and sobs they had made to each other a mutual confession of love, or what Cosima styled “death-in-love.” Cosima’s husband, the faithful Hans, did not accompany his wife on her journey to Bavaria; he was in Berlin suffering another nervous breakdown, and would not be able to travel for a week. The interval seemed to the lovers of the Villa Pellet a happy eternity. “I have been here three days,” Cosima wrote to a friend from the villa, “and it seems as though it were already a century. . . .” When poor Hans finally arrived from Berlin, he discovered that his wife belonged to his friend. Tristan now monopolized the cave of Isolde’s love.

  In the meantime Wagner’s power in Bavaria grew and grew. The soft mind of the King was unequal to the arts of so accomplished a seducer, and Wagner’s ascendancy over Ludwig became, for a time, almost complete. The composer had been brought, by suffering and study, to renounce the world, but neither adversity nor philosophy had purified his mind of its innate love of power. Wagner soon ceased to be a protégé of the King of Bavaria. The King of Bavaria appeared rather as a proselyte of Wagner. The visions of the composer became the policy of the state. The treasure of the Kingdom was diverted to the purposes of music and art. Preparations were made, not only for a production of Tristan und Isolde, but for the establishment of a new school of music and a new festival theater in Munich.

  Wagner himself, forsaking the isolation of the Villa Pellet, came to Munich, where he was enabled, by the King’s munificence, to make an appearance not unworthy of his exalted status. He took a house on Briennerstrasse. A handsome income was settled upon him, and he furnished his rooms in rich velvets, silks, and satins. After many struggles, the prophet of the German revolution had found a home.

  Washington and Pennsylvania, November 1863

  AT HALF PAST EIGHT on a November night, in her father’s house on the corner of Sixth and E Streets, Kate Chase married William Sprague. Rhode Island’s “Boy Governor” had been chosen to represent Rhode Island in the United States Senate, and not long after he took his seat the couple became engaged. The match was steeped in the spirit of the revolution in which the two were caught up: the daughter of Puritan idealism was to be joined in flesh to the son of Puritan industry.

  In the parlor of the Chase house, the great figures of Washington assembled. Some anxiety was manifested on account of the President. At twenty-five after eight, Lincoln had not yet appeared. The diplomats and statesmen gathered in the parlor knew that the President’s relations with Kate’s father, Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, were far from good. So cunningly have desire and jealousy been woven into our nature that even the purest spirits can surmount them only with difficulty; and the spirit of Salmon P. Chase was not pure.

  He was tortured by the desire for power. He felt for those who possessed a greater share of it than he feelings not far removed from hatred. He reviewed, in an agony of envy and rapacity, the disappointments of his life. He had, when Abraham Lincoln was still an obscure lawyer in Illinois, been elected Senator from Ohio. Later he had governed the state. He had done as much as any man to transform the anti-slavery movement in the North from a quixotic moral crusade into a revolutionary force in national politics. These early successes, he believed, marked him out as a man of destiny, the anointed figure who would lead the Republicans to victory and greatness. But in 1860 the obscure lawyer from Illinois had wrested from him the mantle of glory. Three years after the Republican Convention in Chicago, Chase continued to be unreconciled to the pre-eminence of Lincoln. Even now, as he waited for the President to cross his threshold, he was preparing to challenge him for the party’s nomination in 1864.

  The sound of cheering in the street heralded the near approach of the President. A crowd of gawkers watched as the presidential carriage drove up to Chase’s door. The President came alone. Mrs. Lincoln, who still grieved for Willie and nursed an antipathy towards the bride, pleaded a cold. As the President ascended the steps, he was met by his Treasury Secretary. The two potentates greeted each other cordially, but between them there was no bond of trust or friendship. The previous autumn, Chase had, in an attempt to cultivate those senators who might in the future prove useful to his ambitious designs, poured into the ear of William Pitt Fessenden of Maine a stream of malignant gossip concerning the administration. The aspirations of a lifetime were mingled in his poisonous talk. Chase told Fessenden that Secretary of State Seward had obtained an evil ascendancy over the mind of the President, and that his “back-stairs influence” effectively controlled the executive. The rumor of Seward’s power was the signal for a revolt on Capitol Hill. Radical Republicans like “Bluff Ben” Wade had long distrusted the Secretary of State as an enemy to their cause. They clamored for the dismissal, from the President’s councils, of the Judas of the revolution. A delegation of Republican senators went to the White House and remonstrated with Lincoln. The war, they told him, “was left in the hands of men who had no sympathy with it or the cause,” and they urged him to make such changes in the Cabinet as would give “unity and vigor” to the government.

  Lincoln met the challenge to his leadership with energy, and with cunning. He brought the senators face to face with the Cabinet for what he called a “free and friendly conversation.” In fact, he set a trap. Lincoln asked each Cabinet member (other than Seward, who was not present) to state before the senators whether there had been any want of unity in the Cabinet. Chase saw at once that he was in an untenable position. He must either defy President Lincoln to his face or disavow his words to Senator Fessenden. In vain did he attempt to extricate himself from the consequences of his tale-bearing. He said that “he should not have come here had he known he was to be arraigned by a committee of the Senate.” But he knew that he had been outwitted, and he at last conceded that “there had been no want of unity in the Cabinet.”

  A year after the revolt was quelled, Lincoln watched Chase give his daughter away in marriage. The costume the bride had chosen for the occasion was simplicity itself. The dress, of white velvet, was from a good Paris maker; it was the last word in fashion, yet it was plain and unadorned. Washington was of two minds concerning her character. Some pronounced her an amiable woman, “modest and retiring in her manners.” Others thought her grasping and aspiring. Certainly she was adept in the arts of social flattery. Her conversation, which was singularly winning, was the net with which she snared the unwary—and even the wary. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, succumbed to her charms. Lord Lyons, the British envoy in Washington, fell in love with her. Before her marriage she was often seen riding with James A. Garfield of Ohio.

  Those who held Kate Chase to be a young woman without shame or scruple fully believed her capable of contracting a mercenary alliance with the Spragues in order to improve her father’s political chances. The mill which William Sprague’s forebears had established on the Pocasset River had grown into an industrial empire. Each week the Sprague looms wove and printed immense quantities of cotton and calico. The family commanded an array of houses, yachts, racehorses, and banks. The government of Rhode Island itself might almost be considered a domestic possession. Kate Chase was already the leading political hostess in the capital. The Sprague fortune would allow her to do things on a scale which Washington, with its tradition of republican simplicity, had not yet seen. She would be, in America, all that a Duchess of Devonshire or a Duchess of Bedford was in England. No, she would be more. She would make her father President, and reign triumphantly over the White House.

  In the Chases’ parlor the Bishop of Rhode Is
land read the marriage office. The dignitaries watched as Sprague slipped the ring onto Kate’s finger. He was a small man, slight of build. Some thought him handsome, but his eyes gave his face a drooping aspect. It was the outward sign of a life that was less golden than it seemed. His father had been murdered when Sprague was little more than a boy. At fifteen he had been taken from school and set to learn the cotton and calico trade. His education had been sacrificed to the exigencies of business, and he possessed, one observer thought, only a “limited mental capacity.” Yet he had sense enough to be conscious of his deficiencies, and in the Senate he rarely opened his mouth. His heart, moreover, was better than could be reasonably expected in one who had from infancy been brought up in the knowledge that a great fortune was one day to be his. In one of his letters he expressed the hope that his and Kate’s love for one another would make good the losses each had suffered. “I have not had a father’s care for twenty years,” Sprague wrote, and “Katie has missed a mother.” (Kate was five years old when her mother died.) As a pledge of his devotion, Sprague vowed, three weeks before the wedding, to give up smoking and drinking. Tobacco, he said, led to “brandies and whiskies.” Brandy and whiskey led to “dyspepsia and an unhappy life.” He was sorry for his dark carouses, but he warned his fiancée that he would “be very cross for a few days” after forswearing his habitual stimulants.

  The marriage rite was followed by champagne and dancing, and afterwards Senator and Mrs. Sprague retired to their nuptial bed. President Lincoln, in the meantime, returned through the dark streets of the capital to the White House. In a week’s time he was to speak at Gettysburg, where a national cemetery was to be dedicated on the battlefield. He had received the invitation only the week before; in preparing his remarks he would not have the luxury of time. The President intended to use the opportunity the ceremony afforded to say something about why his revolution to save and transform the United States was worth making, in spite of the cost in blood.

  It was a subject close to his heart. The fragility of his country’s liberties had long been a source of concern to Lincoln. Twenty-five years before, in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, he had argued that, although America had nothing to fear from a foreign foe, her institutions might nevertheless perish from the indifference or apathy of her citizens, should they cease to find in those institutions anything to inspire fidelity or attachment. The possibility that “the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated” from the Republic was, the young Lincoln said, real. Across the ocean, in Germany, Bismarck said that the Prussians, forced to choose between the institutions of freedom and those of despotism, would stand by the despot. Lincoln, in America, wondered whether his countrymen might not permit their free constitution to degenerate into a form of despotism. To “fortify” the country against this civic dissipation, he proposed the development of public myths and rituals, a “political religion of the nation. . . .”

  This was a romantic solution. It was not enough to appeal to people’s minds. One must touch their hearts. So romantic statesmen such as Giuseppe Mazzini (during his Young Italy phase) and Benjamin Disraeli (during his Young England period) contended. So Abraham Lincoln, in his youthful romantic phase, believed. Though one’s “cause be naked truth itself,” he declared in one of his early essays, one could never persuade others with reason alone. One must employ the “drop of honey which catches the heart.”

  A quarter of a century later, the nightmare Lincoln had envisioned in his youth had come to pass. Americans were alienated from their government. In the South, the Fire Eaters had walked away from it. In the North, the peace-at-any-price men, or Copperheads, did not want to fight for it. Lincoln had, by this time, outgrown the cruder romantic impulses of his youth, when, like Bismarck, he read Byron and suffered from “hypochondriasm,” a form of ostentatious melancholy. As a mature statesman, Lincoln did not seek a “political religion of the nation”; that strain of romanticism led inexorably to coercion, a cult of the state. He could never believe, as Disraeli did, that the “divine right of government” was “the keystone of human progress.” But he believed as firmly as ever that free states, if they were to survive, must have a higher inspiration, a poetry that fortifies.

  Romanticism supplied the revolutionary statesmen of the nineteenth century with a new set of tools, implements with which they might mold opinion in an age of telegraphs and daily newspapers. In the period 1861-1871, men who had in their youth had been influenced by the romantic school attained power and influence in the world. Disraeli (born 1804) and Marx (born 1818), Bismarck (born 1815) and Lincoln (born 1809)—they had all been inspired, in their different ways, by the romantic revolution, which was, when they were young men, just beginning to reach a wide audience. They were all touched by the romantic enthusiasm for lofty, high-souled ideals; they all felt that reverence for the past, for the “mystic chords of memory,” which Burke and Coleridge, Fichte and Father Jahn, had inculcated in their disciples. (Marx, the least sentimental man in the romantic school, venerated ancient Greece.) They all felt the truth of what the English priest John Henry Newman said when he spoke of the need for something “deeper and more attractive” than the “dry and superficial philosophy” of the eighteenth century. But where Bismarck and Marx placed their romantic myths in the service of coercion, Lincoln placed his in the service of freedom. The genie unleashed by the romantic conjurors, which had promised to destroy the free state, might yet be made to work its salvation.

  At noon on November 18 the President boarded a special train bound for Gettysburg. He arrived at nightfall. The next morning, after breakfast, he retired to his room to work on the address which he had begun to compose in Washington. At ten o’clock he emerged with the manuscript in his hand. Surrounded by an eager crowd, he mounted the horse he would ride to the cemetery. After various delays, the procession went forward, led by a squadron of cavalry, a regiment of infantry, and two batteries of artillery—the funeral escort accorded the bier of the highest ranking officer in the service.

  The cemetery, when he saw it, was unfinished. Graves had still to be dug, and the skeletons of Confederate soldiers lay unburied in Devil’s Den. He was greeted by a military salute, and as he ascended the platform, all the men present uncovered. A heavy fog obscured the field, yet some men told how, during the prayer offered by the Reverend Mr. Stockton, the sun broke through the mists. The scholar-statesman Edward Everett delivered the principal oration of the day, and afterwards a hymn was sung. Lincoln then rose to make what were styled, in the ceremony’s program, “dedicatory remarks.”

  Yasnaya Polyana, June 1863-January 1867

  DARLING,” Tolstoy urged his wife, “try to wait until midnight.”

  Sofya Andreyevna was in labor. In a few hours it would be the twenty-eighth, and Tolstoy had a superstitious regard for the number signified by this date. It happened as he wished, and early the next morning the baby, a boy, was born. The child came into the world on the same leather sofa on which Tolstoy himself had been born, thirty-five years before. The proud father wanted to name his son Nicholas, after his own father and his older brother. But Sofya Andreyevna objected that the name was unlucky; both men had died young. They named the baby Sergei instead. Tolstoy was no longer, he said, a “free man.” He was instead “lucky enough to be fettered by chains of rich liquid green-and-yellow children’s s**t.” But happy families are not all alike: some of them harbor, beneath a placid surface, depths of discontent. Sofya Andreyevna was downcast. Her husband, she said, “constantly frustrates my spontaneous outbursts of love.” She accused his coldness and neglect: now that his passion had spent its novel force, he thought her not much better than his borzois, Lubka and Krylat, a little dearer than Mashka, his English thoroughbred. “I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child,” she said. “I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman.”

  When his wife threw a tantrum, “everything collapses,” Tolstoy said, and “I stand there
as though I had been scalded. I am afraid of everything and I see that there can be no happiness or poetry for me except when I am alone.” The problem, he concluded, lay, not in Sofya Andreyevna, but in himself. “I am happy with her,” he said, “but I am dreadfully unhappy with myself.” “Where is it—my old self, the self I loved and knew, who still springs to the surface sometimes and pleases and frightens me? I have become petty and insignificant.”

  He needed to do something. But what? He spoke of going off to the army to serve “the fatherland,” a ridiculous enthusiasm, his wife thought, “in a man of thirty-five.” The fit of romantic nationalism passed, but Tolstoy was no happier. He could not go on running the estate. “I’m not cut out for it.” He once thought his vocation lay in teaching. But the “teacher that used to be in me,” he said, was “there no longer.” Teaching was too arduous a calling, involving as it did a constant struggle to conceal the fact that he did not know what to teach. Still less did he envision himself as a reformer, an actor, however minor, in Tsar Alexander’s liberal revolution.