As he pondered history and watched his family grow, Tolstoy was seized by an idea. The belief that the world was shaped by the acts of revolutionary statesmen was a gross error. Almost as though he were trying to justify the choices he had made, he argued passionately that families did more to shape history than political and military leaders. In 1812, Napoleon the Great invaded Russia, entered Moscow, and was compelled to make his disastrous retreat. Historians told the story as though the leaders of the age—Napoleon himself and his marshals, Tsar Alexander I and his generals—shaped its historic contours. Tolstoy maintained that this conception of historical causation was flawed. He was determined to tell the story of those years in a different way. He would show how insignificant and blind were the great figures of the epoch. He would reveal the true character of the age in stories the historians overlooked. Napoleon and Alexander would figure in the work he projected; but they would not be its heroes.
By the fall of 1863 Tolstoy was hard at work. “I’ve never felt my intellectual powers, and even all my moral powers,” he wrote in October, “so free and so capable of work. And I have work to do. This work is a novel of the 1810s and 1820s, which has been occupying me fully since the autumn.” He soon ceased to call the book a novel. It “is not a novel and is not a story,” he insisted. But neither was it a history. He was, he believed, working out a new kind of art, one that combined elements of history and fiction, but was free from the vices of these genres. “There are marvelous people in it,” he said. “I love them very much.” He thought of calling the book All’s Well That Ends Well. He held out no great hopes for its reception. “Probably,” he said, “it will pass unnoticed.”
One day he went out riding and fell from his horse. When he came to, a thought flashed in his mind. “I said to myself, ‘I’m a writer.’” He kept repeating aloud, “I am being reborn.” (“What does he mean?” Sofya Andreyevna wondered.) In the mornings, after taking coffee with his family, he would retire to his study with a quantity of tea. When the writing went well he would come away from his desk in a state of exultation, saying that he had left “a bit of his life” in the inkstand.
Art and family, which he now took to be his portions in life, were higher callings than politics; and he took another step away from the Tsar’s liberal revolution. Although Tolstoy did not hesitate, in his work-in-progress, to obtrude numerous asides about politics and history, he insisted that the “aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social problems.” He wanted to write, not a solution to social and political controversies, but a book “to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.” Questions about the reform of Russia were trivial. All “these problems splash about in a little puddle of dirty water which only seems like an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle.” It was “a matter of complete indifference” to him “who suppresses the Poles, or captures Schleswig-Holstein. . . . Butchers kill the oxen we eat, but I’m not obliged to accuse them or sympathize with them.”
Sofya Andreyevna was at first skeptical of her husband’s literary passion. She raised her eyebrows as he slipped away with his pitcher of tea to work “on The History of 1812.” “He is writing about Countess So-and-So, who has been talking to Princess Whosit. Insignificant.” She was relieved, however, “that his mental state has improved, for I was afraid.”
As War and Peace began to take form, she changed her mind about its value. It was “so clever.” She saw to it that her husband was not disturbed when he was working. She relieved him of the task of looking after the estate, and while he was writing, she went round Yasnaya Polyana herself, an assortment of barn-door keys hanging at her waist. She cared for little Sergei and the other children who came, Tatyana in 1864 and Ilya in 1866, and devoted many hours to the nursery. She took her husband’s rough drafts and, using a magnifying glass to decipher his scarcely legible revisions, wrote out the fair copy.
“As I copy I experience a whole new world of emotions, thoughts, impressions,” Sofya Andreyevna said. “Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius.” Her husband was now writing furiously; he was “irritable and excited,” and tears often stood in his eyes. “All the parts he has read to me,” she said, “have moved me almost to tears too; whether this is because, as his wife, I feel so much for him, or because it really is very good I cannot say for certain—although I rather think the second.”
Chapter 19
THAT A NATION MIGHT LIVE
Pennsylvania, November 1863
Four score and seven years ago . . .
The truth enshrined in the Declaration of Independence was in danger. History, the President told the citizens gathered on the battlefield, was testing it. At home, a great civil war threatened to destroy the nation conceived in liberty. Abroad, the world crisis was working against the faith of the Declaration, the belief that all men are created equal. Freedom was losing the future to new forms of coercion.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln attempted to get the future back.
Every revolution mortifies the flesh. The successful ones exalt the spirit. On the battlefield that saved his revolution, Lincoln raised up his altars. He had found his clue. In his address he allied America’s free institutions to what he found to be still living in the country’s original spiritual inspirations.
He had not searched his Bible in vain. The men who gave “the last full measure of devotion” at Gettysburg had, he said, “consecrated,” not only the soil of the battlefield, but also the truths of the Republic. They had washed the principles of the Declaration of Independence in their blood. In doing so they had “hallowed” those principles—purified them, after the fashion of Hebrews 9:22.20
The implication was strange, yet obvious. The Republic was twice-born. It would have a second birth—what Lincoln called a “new birth”— of freedom.
Lincoln at Gettysburg identified the “new birth of freedom” which his revolution made possible with the multiple-birth theory of John 3:3 (“except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God”). The improbable conceit ought to have failed, perished a mere piece of rhetorical sentimentality. But it worked. Amid the pressures of the world crisis, the child of the romantic revival used an older poetry—a drop of honey—to consolidate his revolution and fortify the free state.
After the President spoke a dirge was sung, and a short time later he boarded a train and returned to Washington. He was by this time sick with a fever, and upon returning to the White House he went to bed.
Denmark, Berlin, and Biarritz, June 1864-October 1864
IN THE DEAD of a June night the Prussian transports slipped quietly from their moorings. Under cover of darkness they made their way to Alsen Island, the last of the enemy’s strongholds in southern Denmark. At dawn on the twenty-sixth, the transports debouched their loads. Prussian troops fell upon the unsuspecting Danes in their batteries and redoubts. The Prussians were in a short time masters of the island.
The war in Denmark had reached its crisis. The Germans moved with lightning speed. A new spirit of method and celerity characterized their operations. The old commander in the field, Field Marshal Wrangel, was withdrawn. He was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, and with a misplaced confidence in his abilities he dispensed with the advice of the General Staff. Helmuth von Moltke’s war plans he contemptuously flung aside. So ponderous were the tactics of the old Field Marshal that the Danes were able to retire behind their fortifications without serious loss. Many in Germany became indignant, one diplomat observed, when it appeared that the Prussians were “not crushing [Denmark] fast enough.” Wrangel was recalled to Berlin, and Moltke became the principal director of the war; he was made Chief of Staff to the new commander in the field, King Wilhelm’s nephew, Friedrich Karl, the “Red Prince,” so called because he was partial to the scarlet coat of the Ziethen Hussars.
The distress of the Danes was by this time great. Their capital was menaced. Their military power was broken. T
heir fortifications, some of which, like Dannewerke, had stood for centuries, had been leveled to the ground by the Prussian field guns. The Prussian infantry corps, with their breech-loading needle guns, poured a lethal fire on the remaining Danish positions.21 The whizzing bullets made a pinging sound which, during a hot engagement, sounded like a swarm of insects. Many bullets found their mark, and the black coffins of the Danes piled up.
King Christian was in a short time forced to sue for peace. The Dannebrogwould fly over Schleswig and Holstein no more. The duchies were extorted from the Danes as a condition of peace, giving the Germans a prize of immense strategic value. The duchies touched two seas—the Baltic and the North—and might, in the hands of a large and populous nation, form the base of a formidable naval force. The harbor of Kiel alone, Lord Robert Cecil wrote, was a “splendid prize for which the mightiest nations would be glad to compete.”
In Prussia, the architects of the victory over Denmark were liberally rewarded. Moltke was showered with medals and honors. As he made his way from the seat of battle, he was chagrined to discover that he had become famous. Wherever he went he was pointed out and saluted with cheers. The Danish war was, he believed, the crowning glory of his career, and he went at once to King Wilhelm to broach the subject of his retirement from the army. But the old King was not about to part with so valuable a lieutenant; Moltke was informed that his services were too important to be relinquished.
Bismarck, too, tasted the fruits of victory. The Exalted Order of the Black Eagle was now his. He found a more substantial benefit in the new stability of his power. He was, one contemporary said, “completely master of the situation in Prussia.” Europe marveled at the way in which Fortune, that fickle strumpet, had smiled upon his audacity. In October 1864 he felt himself entitled to a vacation, his first since becoming premier. For a fortnight he sauntered about Biarritz. He saw Kathi Orlov, swam in the ocean, toured the Basque villages. During his sojourn he had a dream. He was climbing a mountain. The defile grew steeper. He found himself confronted by a mass of rock, and a profound abyss. He hesitated, and wondered whether he ought not to turn back. But he resolved to press on, and taking up his stick, he struck the rock. The rock vanished; and Bismarck resumed his ascent.
The obstacles to his revolution were falling fast. The plight of the Prussian liberals was by this time scarcely less acute than that of the Danes. The free-state men in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies were inundated with letters from across Germany beseeching them to support Bismarck. “We know,” one of these correspondents wrote, “that you have important domestic dissensions, a great home question to settle, but we wonder at your regarding it otherwise than as dust in the balance compared to the immeasurably greater interests at stake in the duchies.” The liberal deputies found themselves in an unfortunate position. If they stood firmly on their constitutional principles, they confessed themselves traitors to the German nation. If they urged the Crown to proceed vigorously in the matter of the duchies, they could not consistently refuse it supplies for the army They chose a middle course. They continued to withhold monies from the Crown. The budget which Bismarck submitted they again refused. A request for an emergency supply of twelve million thaler was rejected. Permission to raise a loan was denied. Yet on the whole the opposition of the free-state men to Bismarck’s régime was less fierce than it had been. The lawmakers sympathized with the Minister-President’s efforts to liberate their brethren in the duchies, and they allowed themselves to believe that his policy would in time strengthen the cause of the free state. War, they reasoned, was productive of civil turmoil, and might “bring a relief from some of the dynastic influences that press down the liberal element” in Germany.
The Concert of Europe, another obstacle to the rising power of Bismarck, proved to be as unavailing as the Danish arms. The European powers, in declining to enforce the Treaty of 1852, were careless of the principle of collective security. Bismarck, it is true, pretended that there was no violation of the Treaty, and that Prussia had acted in accordance with its provisions. His sophistry could persuade only those who desired to be deceived. Certainly Denmark, too, had breached the Treaty: she had, in contravention of the document’s terms, imposed a constitution that bound Schleswig more closely to Copenhagen. But the breach by the Danes of their obligations did not justify the Prussians in forsaking theirs. It took no great sagacity, one diplomat observed, to see that “under her zeal for the enforcement of treaties” Prussia concealed a multitude of “ambitious projects.” Those with eyes to see knew that “territorial aggrandizement” was “among the dreams of Herr von Bismarck.”
England, too, proved to be a less formidable stumbling block to Prussian ambition than Bismarck could reasonably have expected. For three hundred years England had been the umpire of the balance of power in Europe, and had opposed the emergence, on the Continent, of a military power capable of threatening her own liberties. Even now England aspired to the role of arbiter. “A great many paper missiles,” Lord Robert Cecil wrote in the Quarterly Review, “were projected from the Foreign Office.” Bismarck ignored them.
The result, for the English, was humiliation. “The friendship of England,” one diplomat observed, “has been the bane of Denmark.” English diplomacy “is a jest and causes sneers throughout all Europe.” The cartoonists of the Continent depicted John Bull in a variety of humiliating postures, and German writers sneered at decadent Carthage, sunk in “cowardice and sensuality.” The pledges and the threats of Her Majesty’s Government, Lord Robert Cecil wrote, were equally ineffectual, and the Danes in consequence of their reliance on England’s good faith suffered one “of the most wanton and unblushing spoliations which history records.” Bismarck drew his own conclusions. “I wasted several years of my life,” he said, “by the supposition that England was a great nation.”
One by one the lights went out, and step by step Bismarck’s revolution proceeded. He had opposed power to domestic law, and he had survived. He had opposed power to international law, and he had triumphed. The first victories of the new régime marked the re-emergence of a wildness in the diplomatic atmosphere of Europe. Though as a rule Bismarck devoted more time to revising his lies than publishing his truths, he was candid about the moral character of the revolution he had initiated. A French diplomat who came to the Wilhelmstrasse struggled to express his disapproval of the Minister-President’s conduct towards Denmark without, however, transgressing the bounds of conventional politeness. Bismarck cut him short. “Don’t put yourself out,” he said, “nobody but my King thinks that I acted honorably.”
Yet he was pleased with himself. The German foray into Jutland had reawakened his royal master’s “taste for conquest.” Like an animal who, after a long interval of domestication, sinks its teeth into a carcass, the old King had regained a lust for blood. Bismarck, too, possessed such a sanguinary instinct. “When I have an enemy in my power,” he said, “I must destroy him.” “I am going my own way; whoever goes with me is my friend, who goes against me is my enemy—to the point of annihilation.”
Virginia and Alabama, June-May 1864
“GOD HELP MY COUNTRY,” Mary Chesnut exclaimed.
In the elegiac phase of the Confederacy, gloom hung “like a pall everywhere.” Frank Hampton was dead. His heroic end—he fell at the Battle of Brandy Station—eclipsed his ridiculous self-conceit. Mary Chesnut followed the bier to the Capitol in Richmond. Inside Mr. Jefferson’s neo-classical temple, she and her friend, Mrs. John Coles Singleton, opened the coffin.
“How I wish I had not looked! I remember him so well in all the pride of his magnificent manhood. He died of a saber cut across the face and head and was utterly disfigured.” Mrs. Singleton broke down at the sight. “We sat for a long time on the front steps of the State House. Everybody had gone. We were utterly alone.” They remembered the happy week they had all passed together at Mrs. Singleton’s house. A beaming Frank Hampton had brought his bride. “And now . . . only a few years . . . nearly
all that pleasant company are dead—and our world, the only world we cared for, literally kicked to pieces.”
The great personages of the South, Mary Chesnut found, were all more or less dejected. Mrs. Jefferson Davis could give her no ground for optimism. She was “utterly depressed.” The two ladies went for drives together around Richmond with the Davis children. Mary Chesnut was struck by their “unbroken wills.” The exception was five-year-old Joseph Evans, who was called Joe. He was the “good child” of the family.
President Davis was as gloomy as his wife. As a political mechanism the Republic over which he presided did not work. The purest oligarchies have typically been characterized by a jealousy of executive power. In ancient Sparta, where a warrior caste lived parasitically on the labor of enslaved helots, the Heraclid kings were practically impotent. In the Venetian Republic, the Doge was at times little more than a shadow. At Richmond, President Davis contended with a legislature dominated by proud and luxurious planters who were unwilling to shoulder the burdens of war. When, in 1862, the Confederate Congress raised the upper age limit of the draft to forty-five, it provided that “one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves” should be exempted from conscription. As a result, many fine gentlemen stayed home.
Yet even if a greater spirit of sacrifice had prevailed among the planters, Davis would still have found it difficult to vindicate the South’s independence. There was not enough money. As in Tsar Alexander’s Russia, liquid assets were scarce in the Confederacy; the greatest part of the planters’ wealth was invested in land and slaves. Capital and credit mechanisms were primitive. To meet his obligations, Davis turned to the printing presses. The Confederacy’s paper money, however, commanded little confidence, and prices soared.
Nor could Davis reasonably expect to alleviate his domestic troubles through a coup de main in foreign affairs. In the fall of 1863 Lincoln’s ally, Tsar Alexander, sent his fleets to the coastal waters of the United States. The Russian navy anchored, during the winter, in American harbors— the Atlantic fleet at New York, the Pacific fleet in San Francisco Bay. The flagship Alexander Nevsky called at Alexandria on the Potomac. Davis knew that Russia’s demonstration of support for Lincoln’s revolution all but ended his hope that England and France would intervene in the American conflict.
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