Grant understood the importance of two other qualities which under Moltke were to become articles of faith in the Prussian high command. The first was speed. Grant did not, like McClellan, spend months laboring over the war machine. He used it. Within six weeks of assuming command of the armies, he went down to battle. On May 4, he led 116,000 Union soldiers across the Rapidan towards the Army of Northern Virginia, which under the command of Robert E. Lee continued to hold the line of the Rapidan and the Rappahannock.
Grant’s second article of faith was co-operation. The Army of the Potomac did not take the offensive alone: it marched as part of a concerted attack on the vitals of the South. On May 5, General Sherman, for whom Grant felt an affection and respect akin to that which Lee had conceived for Stonewall Jackson, rode out of Chattanooga in the direction of Atlanta. Simultaneously, General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James embarked on steamers at Fort Monroe and proceeded up the James River towards Petersburg and Richmond; and General Franz Sigel went forth to seize cattle and corn in the Shenandoah Valley. This movement “all along the line” opened the series of campaigns known as Operation Crusher. Lincoln, who had for some time pressed for concerted action, helped in an unobtrusive way to shape Grant’s strategy. “Those not skinning,” he said, “can hold a leg.”
The sun was bright as the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan. Battle-stained standards fluttered in the breeze. General Grant, who had taken a degree of care in his dress not usual to him, wore a sword and a sash as he rode his bay horse, Cincinnati, to Germanna Ford. Upon his hands were a pair of yellow thread-gloves, a gift, it was thought, from Mrs. Grant. Having crossed the river, Grant and his troops entered the desolate country known as the Wilderness. The region, with its tangled underbrush, was in many places almost impenetrable, and the few roads which cut through it were far from good. Union skirmishers soon encountered the enemy.
Lee’s army could muster only between 60,000 and 80,000 men in the spring of 1864, but although they were outnumbered, the Southern soldiers retained an ardent spirit, and they were intimately familiar with the terrain on which they fought. Jeb Stuart rode out with his cavalry, followed by Lee himself and A. P. Hill at the head of III Corps. The hostile armies were in a short time hotly engaged. The struggle on both sides was obstinate and bloody. The Confederate line buckled, and seemed ready to break, but was saved by the onset of darkness. The next day the Union ranks twice began to give way, but afterwards recovered. Bursting shells ignited the thickets, and the odor of charred flesh hung in the air.
While the battle raged, Grant chain-smoked cigars. He had never witnessed more desperate fighting. Yet he retained his mental poise. Other Union commanders emerged from their first encounter with Lee stunned and dazed, and never afterwards regained their composure. If Grant felt a similar distress, he did not show it. Others, he observed, clothed Lee “with almost superhuman abilities.” But he himself had served with the great commander in the Mexican War. “I had known him personally,” he said, “and knew that he was mortal.”
In refusing to acquiesce in the mystique of Lee, Grant acquired in the eyes of his men an aura of his own. The Army of the Potomac had been ready, one soldier said, “for an explosion at the first mistake Grant made.” But the animosity towards the new commander passed away, and Grant soon had the eastern army as firmly in hand as ever he had that of the west. Men noticed the look in his face. It was the look of a man who had “determined to butt his head through a brick wall and was about to do it.” He has “the grit of a bull-dog,” Lincoln said. “Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in, and nothing can shake him off.”
Neither side gained a clear victory in the Wilderness, and the spring passed in a succession of battles as Grant marched south towards the James. Lee’s forces reached Spotsylvania Court House first and had the advantage. Repeated Union assaults failed to dislodge the enemy. So great was the rate of mortality in one place, where the trench turned sharply, that it lives in history as the Bloody Angle. The fighting was savage. Muskets crossed, and skulls were crushed with the club ends.
The thread-gloves with which Grant opened the campaign had by this time disappeared. They were never afterwards seen. In a dispatch to Washington he announced his “purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” The war of attrition had begun.
The cost was enormous; but the balance turned. The initiative passed, in Virginia, from one side to the other, for although Lee’s lines held, the situation of his army became every day more desperate. Union cavalry under the command of Philip Sheridan rode towards Richmond and severed the lines of supply which enabled the Confederate Army to live. Jeb Stuart sallied forth gallantly to engage Sheridan’s cavalry. But at Old Yellow Tavern he received a mortal wound. Heros von Borcke was with him when he died. “My dear Von,” Stuart said, “I am sinking fast, but before I die I want you to know that I never loved a man as much as yourself. I pray your life may be long and happy; look after my family when I’m gone, and be the same friend to my wife and children that you’ve been to me.”
“We must,” Lee said, “destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River. If he gets there it will be a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” What might have been Lee’s greatest opportunity to break the Union forces came at the beginning of June. As the Army of the Potomac advanced on Cold Harbor, eight miles from Richmond, Lee saw a chance to catch the Federals on the march. He ordered an attack. Mary Chesnut’s friend Laurence Keitt was in the vanguard: he led the 20th South Carolina to the fight. He was instantly cut down. The regiment broke, and the whole Confederate line fell back, retiring behind their works. A series of costly assaults ordered by Grant failed to pierce them. Lee’s own losses were comparatively light, but the moment of opportunity had passed. He had failed to break the Army of the Potomac, and he now saw no way to do so.
By the middle of June, Grant’s army was south of the James.
Berlin and Washington, September 1864
ACROSS THE OCEAN, Bismarck watched the progress of Lincoln’s statesmanship with dismay. He detested the American President; his personal sympathies lay wholly with the aristocratic landowners of the South. Yet he made no effort to hinder the President’s revolution as it unfolded. He steadily rejected proposals for European intervention in the Civil War—not from love of Lincoln, but from a desire to undermine an enemy closer to home, Louis-Napoleon of France, whose Mexican Empire could not long survive the victory of the United States.
Bismarck lives in history as a practitioner of Realpolitik; but the hatred of the free state which drove his statesmanship had its origin, not in what he called the “clockwork” side of his nature—the cunning realism that enabled him to baffle all the diplomatic chess players of the age—but in a less accessible part of his mind that was curiously tender and poetical. He spoke once of being touched with the melancholy of one who, on an autumn morning, beholds the sere foliage and feels within himself immortal longings—a yearning for forests and oceans, for sunsets and the music of Beethoven. His statesmanship, for all its fierce realism, was elegiac. He was alive to the fragility of the civilization into which he had been born, and he saw how easily its treasures, wrought of intricacy of soul and a nobly erotic instinct for good form, might be swept away in the deluge, that flood of disintegrating vulgarity which Lincoln seemed to him to embody. “If there is to be a revolution,” Bismarck said, “we would rather make it than suffer it.”
But could he act purposefully in history to save the things he loved? In his private speculations Bismarck doubted man’s ability to unlock the secrets of providence and master events:
It was borne in upon me that God had denied man the possibility of knowledge, that it was presumption to claim to know the will and the plans of the Lord of the World, that man must wait in humility to see how his Creator will dispose of him at his death, and that we on earth have no other means of knowing God’s will than through conscience, which has given us a feele
r with which to find our way through the darkness of the world.
“As God will,” he concluded. He however distinguished sharply between the destinies open to a man in his private condition and those which beckoned when he assumed a public character. The moral limits which applied in public life were, Bismarck believed, less narrow than those which governed the private realm: they permitted a wider scope for intelligent action. Providence, too, wore such a Janus-face. The private man must feel his “way through the darkness of the world” with no other guide than conscience; but the public man could avail himself of the special providence which discloses itself to gifted leaders. The statesman might not be able to steal a look at “God’s cards,” Bismarck said, but he could “see where the Lord wishes to go” and “stumble after Him.”
Four thousand miles away, Lincoln, in Washington, was as conscious of the mysteries of time and history. He, too, had meditated on the divinity that shapes man’s ends:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
Lincoln said that “probably it is to be my lot to go on in a twilight, feeling and reasoning my way through life, as questioning, doubting Thomas did.” He and Bismarck held similar ideas of providence: both viewed the mysteries of time and destiny through the dark glass of old-fashioned Protestantism. But where the German kept his theology to himself, the American began to work his into his public utterances. God’s will might be inscrutable; but Lincoln nevertheless began to speak, with cautious optimism, of a providential design in which man’s better impulses would prevail. “God disposes,” he said in 1864. But looking over the past three years, Americans could, he believed, fathom something of His purposes, and could therefore “feel more hopeful and confident for the future.”
Events seemed, for a time, to justify the President’s optimism. At home, General Grant, though he had not succeeded in outmaneuvering Lee, was wearing him down. Abroad, Europeans in ever greater numbers viewed the contest in America (so Minister Adams in London reported) as “plain between vested rights and popular liberty.” Lincoln was pleased, too, that Russia seemed to be moving towards freedom. Bayard Taylor, the chargé in the American Legation in Saint Petersburg, had returned to the United States and given a lecture on Russia. Lincoln attended the lecture in person and afterwards wrote to Taylor. “I think a good lecture or two on ‘Serfs, Serfdom, and Emancipation in Russia’ would be both interesting and valuable,” the President said. “Could not you get up such a thing?”
But much remained doubtful. The coming elections filled Lincoln with foreboding. Not since 1832, when Andrew Jackson was re-elected, had an American President been granted a second term of office. In June 1864 delegates to the Republican22 Convention at Baltimore nominated Lincoln for President. But his difficulties were not ended with his victory over those in his party who, like Salmon P. Chase, questioned his leadership. His popularity in the North as a whole was uncertain. Grant’s campaign, though it promised eventually to be successful, was costly; more than 60,000 Union soldiers had fallen dead or wounded since the opening of the Army of the Potomac’s campaign of 1864. Many in the North yearned for a settlement that would restore peace at once, even if the terms of the armistice stipulated the maintenance of slavery in the South. Lincoln, however, rejected this moral equivalent of a separate peace—such a truce would force him to repudiate the Emancipation Proclamation and return to bondage blacks who had fought bravely for the faith that all men are created equal. “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing,” the President said.
Yet he knew that his opposition to slavery was likely to prove costly in the canvass. The Copperheads stigmatized the Emancipation Proclamation as the Miscegenation Proclamation. In the summer of 1864 these peace-at-any-price men appeared to be winning the war of public opinion. George McClellan, the most prominent Democrat in the nation, seemed poised to ride a wave of Copperhead sentiment into the White House. It “seems exceedingly probable,” Lincoln wrote in August, “that this Administration will not be re-elected.” Unless “some great change takes place,” he would, he said, be “badly beaten” by McClellan in the autumn.
Berlin, Paris, and Nice, April 1865
THE IMPERIAL TRAIN sped across the frontier of Russia at an unprecedented speed, hurtling the Tsar towards France. Alexander’s son, Tsarevitch Nicholas, lay languishing in a villa on the Riviera. The spinal malady from which he suffered had worsened. The health of members of the imperial family was a closely guarded secret in Russia; but word spread that Niks was gravely ill.
Alexander went first to Berlin, where his uncle, King Wilhelm, embraced him. He went next to Paris, where the eastern railway joined the line which led to Lyons and the south. Napoleon III was waiting on the platform. As the Tsar emerged from the railway carriage the rivalry of empires was, for a moment, forgotten. A newspaper correspondent who glimpsed Alexander’s face thought that it betrayed a profound depression. Louis-Napoleon stepped forward and, with the peculiar grace which not even his detractors denied him, offered his sympathy to the Tsar. After exchanging a few words of courtesy with his host, Alexander went back into the railway carriage.
His paternal intuition ought to have told him long before that his oldest son was ill. Niks had grown frightfully thin. Ordinary tasks were painful to him. Once, during a foxhunt at Peterhof, he grimaced in pain after leaping into the saddle. When Alexander asked him what was wrong, Niks was too proud to reply. He put spurs to his horse and rode on. Later, when Alexander saw the emaciated youth dragging himself about the palace, he chided him for walking like an old man. A future Tsar must carry himself like a soldier.
Alexander’s conscience must now have smote him. The behavior he had attributed to his son’s effeminacy was in reality the result of illness, possibly tuberculosis of the spine. Caused by the same bacterium that causes pulmonary tuberculosis, Pott’s disease attacks the vertebrae and slowly destroys them.
The imperial train pulled into the old station at Nice, and the Tsar went at once to his son’s bedside. Niks, it is said, was able to recognize his father; but Alexander could not mistake the gravity of his son’s condition. The Tsarevitch was dying.
Chapter 21
POWER AND ENCHANTMENT
Richmond and South Carolina, May-August 1864
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT the windows of President Davis’s house were open, and the curtains blew wildly. Little Joe Davis, the “good child,” had fallen from a railing. Mary Chesnut, hearing the news, went at once to the mansion. She found the boy white and beautiful in death. Mrs. Davis did not appear; but Mary Chesnut, seated in the drawing room, heard the heavy footfall of the President. In the room above Jefferson Davis paced and repaced the floor.
The death was ruled an accident, but it dripped doom. The bloody child, spattered on the pavement, seemed to Mary Chesnut an evil omen. She left Richmond shortly after the boy’s funeral and readied herself to witness the annihilation of her class. Her husband had a short time before been made a brigadier general, and he had been ordered to return to South Carolina. The train took her as far as Kingsville, where she sought accommodation in a dingy hotel.
“No room,” she was informed by the hôtelier at the desk. “Who are you?”
Mary Chesnut gave her name.
“Try something else,” the woman said as she ey
ed the traveler’s torn dress and dusty petticoat. “Mrs. Chesnut don’t travel round by herself, no servants, no nothing.” When, at last, Mary Chesnut convinced the clerk of her identity, she professed astonishment. “The Lord sakes alive,” she exclaimed, “and to think you are her. Now I see—dear! dear me! Heaven sakes, woman, but you are broke!”
At last she reached Mulberry. She found the place greatly changed. Old Mrs. Chesnut, her mother-in-law, was dead. Her father-in-law, the aged Colonel, was left alone in the darkness. Mary Chesnut felt pity for the parent she had long regarded as a tyrant. When his wife was living he used each morning to don a dressing gown and go to her room, where he brushed his hair before her mirror. He continued to go to her room in the mornings now that she was in her grave. One morning Mary Chesnut saw him there. He was kneeling beside the empty bed, sobbing bitterly.
Mary Chesnut fled to Columbia. She found the town wild with excitement. General Sherman was marching on Atlanta at the head of 100,000 men. The innards of the Southern Republic would soon be within his grasp. Columbia itself was not safe. In the Prestons’ house Mary Chesnut came upon Buck. The girl was now Sam Hood’s fiancée. She stood at the head of the stairs in a flowing dressing gown. Her blue eyes, wide open, shone black with excitement.
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