Forge of Empires
Page 31
Had Mary Chesnut heard the news? President Davis had relieved Joe Johnston of command of the army charged with saving the South from Sherman. In his place he had appointed Sam Hood. “I have prayed God,” Buck said, “as I never prayed him before.” The eyes of the world now rested upon her fiancé; and Buck Preston, the belle of the Confederacy, sank to her knees in prayer.
Washington, March 1865
AFTER THE PRESIDENT HAD, as was his custom, received the day’s petitioners in his office on the second floor of the mansion, he ordered the door to the chamber to be closed. Joshua F. Speed, the friend of his youth, was paying a visit to Washington, and Lincoln wanted to talk to him of private things. As the President beckoned Speed to a place by the fire, he saw that they were not alone. Two women, whose dress bespoke the humbleness of their station, had contrived to remain in the room after the dismissal of the other petitioners. Their presence seemed to provoke the President.
“Well, ladies, what can I do for you?” Lincoln asked.
The older of the two women begged the President to release her son from the prison in western Pennsylvania in which he had been confined for draft evasion. The younger woman begged him to release her husband from the same place.
“Where is your petition?” the President asked.
“Mr. Lincoln,” the old woman said, “I’ve got no petition; I went to a lawyer to get one drawn, and I had not the money to pay him and come here too; so I thought I would just come and ask you to let me have my boy.”
“And it’s your husband you want,” the President said to the young woman.
“Yes.”
Lincoln rang the bell and asked for a paper. In a moment Mr. Dana entered the room with the document. On it were set forth the names of men held by the Federal government for draft evasion in western Pennsylvania.
“Well,” the President said as he gazed out the window, “these poor fellows have, I think, suffered enough; they have been in prison fifteen months. I have been thinking so some time, and have so said to Stanton, and he always threatened to resign if they are released. But he has said so about other matters, and never did. So now, while I have the paper in my hand, I will turn out the whole flock.” He took up a pen. “Let the prisoners named in the within paper,” he wrote in his neat hand, “be discharged.” He signed the paper and turned to the two women. “Now ladies,” he said, “you can go. Your son, madam, and your husband, madam, is free.”
The young woman knelt to him.
“Get up,” Lincoln said as he raised her to her feet, “none of this.”
The old woman went to the President and, wiping the tears from her face, looked into Lincoln’s eyes. “Good-bye, Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “we will never meet again till we meet in Heaven.”
The President took the old woman’s hand. A change came over his face. “With all that I have to cross me here,” he said, “I am afraid I will never get there; but your wish that you will meet me there has fully paid for all I have done for you.”
After they left, the door to the chamber was again closed. Lincoln took off his boots and stretched his feet towards the fire. “That young woman,” he said to Speed, “is a counterfeit, but the old woman is a true mother.”
The end of the war was in sight. The noose was tightening around the neck of the South. Atlanta had fallen to General Sherman. General Grant was before Petersburg and Richmond. In Tennessee, Sam Hood and his army had been routed and crushed. Lincoln himself, in spite of his forebodings of defeat at the polls, had been re-elected to a second term. The sentiments of the peace-at-any-price men were less pervasive in the North than he had feared, and General McClellan, who was for a time the darling of the Copperheads, had received only 21 electoral votes. Lincoln himself had received 212. A free people had endorsed his revolution.
The President, in victory, was tired, and not entirely well. His feet and hands, he said, seemed always to be cold. A good night’s sleep, the usual remedy for life’s smaller shocks, did not allay the sensation of fatigue. Nothing, Lincoln said, seemed to touch the “tired spot.” To his friend he confessed his apprehensions. “Speed,” he said, “I am a little alarmed about myself; just feel my hand.”
Speed touched the President’s hand. It was cold.
On March 4, the day on which his first term of office was to expire, Lincoln went early to the Capitol. There had been a great storm in the night. The wind howled, and the rain beat down on the glass roof of the hall of the Capitol. The morning dawned dark, leaden, soaking. The streets were so many rivers of mud. The authorities feared mischief, and the President was accompanied, as he made his way to the Capitol, by a bodyguard of soldiers. He rode at a sharp trot. The lines cut deeper than ever into the brown face; but the old goodness, one observer thought, was still visible underneath the furrows.
Rain and fog obscured the recently finished dome that now dominated the approaches to Capitol Hill. Upon reaching the seat of the legislature, the President went to the Vice President’s room. There he sat for some time transacting business and affixing his name to freshly enacted laws. The Thirty-Eighth Congress was approaching its demise, and weary lawmakers, many of whom had labored through the night in the gaslit chambers, were preoccupied with negotiating provisions for the taxation of income and the supply of the gigantic army which in the last four years had been called into being.
The President did not fret over the address he was to deliver in the afternoon. He had composed it in the days preceding the inauguration, and he had it with him now, printed on a half-sheet of foolscap. The newspapermen had been informed that the oration would be brief. The address, the Associated Press reported, would in all likelihood not exceed a column in the newspapers.
In the chamber of the Senate, the great figures of Washington assembled. Diplomats, generals, and politicians presented their tickets and were admitted to the chamber. Ladies and newspapermen crowded the galleries. The heads of the executive departments came, led by the ranking member of the Cabinet, Secretary of State Seward. He was a man greatly changed from what he had been on the same day four years before. He was now submissive in all things to a President whom he recognized as his superior in political strength, and possibly in wisdom and judgment as well. Lincoln, Seward had for some time believed, was “the best of us.” The President’s re-election had placed him, he said, “beyond the pale of human envy.”
A hush came over the chamber as Lincoln’s new Vice President made his entrance. Andrew Johnson was a staunch Union man. He had served as military governor of Tennessee, and he was credited with exertions that had done much to keep alive, in that state, the cause of the United States. But those near to him were anxious for him on this day. They watched uneasily as he approached the rostrum, arm-in-arm with the outgoing Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. Johnson had earlier called for whiskey to soothe his nerves, and his friends wondered whether he had not consumed too much.
He now addressed the assembly. He was, he said, a man “from the ranks.” Yet he had come to occupy the second highest office in the land. He was a plebeian . . . and he thanked God for it. He then turned to Salmon P. Chase, whom Lincoln had recently raised to be Chief Justice of the United States. “And your exaltation and position,” he said, “depend on the people.” (In fact the Chief Justice, like all judges under Article III of the Constitution, held his office during good behavior.) Johnson next turned to the Cabinet. “And I will say to you, Mr. Secretary Seward, and to you, Mr. Secretary Stanton, and to you, Mr. Secretary—” Here he hesitated; in his befuddlement he could not remember the name of the Secretary of the Navy. He turned to someone sitting near him. “Who is the Secretary of the Navy?” he asked. “Mr. Welles,” he was told. “And to you, Mr. Secretary Welles, I would say, you all derive power from the people . . .”
“There is evidently something wrong,” Secretary Stanton whispered.
“Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” said Secretary Welles.
“The man is certainly deranged,”
said Attorney General Speed.
A ray of sunshine penetrated the chamber, and it was determined that the President should go out of doors to take his oath and kiss his Bible. (Had the bad weather continued, the inauguration of the President would have taken place in the Senate chamber.) Lincoln passed from shadow into light. “Don’t let Johnson speak outside,” he instructed the marshal of ceremonies, Ward Hill Lamon, the gigantic lawyer. A platform had been erected before the east front of the Capitol, and at the appearance of the President the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln delivered his address.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it— all sought to avert it. . . . Both sides deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. . . .
“Probably no other speech of a modern statesman,” Lord Charn-wood said of this address, “uses so unreservedly the language of intense religious feeling.” In language closer to that of John Winthrop and John Cotton than that of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Lincoln invoked the “living God” of the Bible.23 The history of the country was, he said, providential. It was a story of sin, suffering, and redemption. The sin (or offense) was slavery; the suffering (or woe) was the Civil War; the redemption (or grace) lay in the possibility of peace, and the binding up of wounds that would follow the revolution.
With malice towards none; with charity for all. . .
Lord Charnwood said that Lincoln’s oratory, which differed from that of most of the other great speakers in history, was “perhaps more like that of some of the great speeches in drama.” Such dramatic exertions take their toll, and when the inaugural fêtes were concluded, Lincoln collapsed in fatigue. He had uttered his tragic valediction; but the tragedy itself was not yet complete.
Saint Petersburg, June 1865-March 1866
THE WINTER WAS a memory in Saint Petersburg. The White Nights came. Dusk merged into dawn without an interval of blackness. The days were hot, and the canals emitted a foul odor, the Petersburg stench. In the taverns people sat at sticky tables drinking beer and vodka. Out of doors drunken men staggered in the sunshine. The music of street singers filled the air.
Oh, my handsome soldier
Don’t beat me for nothing
The newspapers reported an alarming increase in incidents of crime. Sleep was difficult in the White Nights; and much that in other seasons is buried in the oblivion of darkness was acted out in the light.
The frigate Alexander Nevsky, which had recently paid a call at Alexandria, Virginia, to demonstrate Russia’s support for Abraham Lincoln, steamed towards Kronstadt. The wind blew fiercely. The imperial standard flapped on the mizzenmast. Eighteen men-of-war were drawn up in line of battle to receive the flagship, and a hundred batteries thundered. The Tsar himself, who had come up in his yacht Strela, sailed out to the London Buoy to meet the ship. He went aboard, received the salutes of the officers and sailors, and proceeded to the principal cabin. From it came the sounds of plaintive chanting. The monks were there. They were praying for Niks, whose mortal remains, brought from Nice, lay on a catafalque. Father Pachcmi, a monk from the Saint Sergius Monastery of the Trinity, read the panichide for the repose of the Tsarevitch’s soul. While the Nevsky was towed into Merchants’ Harbor, the Tsar knelt before his son’s coffin.
Two days later the body was interred. The imperial family came to the capital early that morning from Tsarskoe Selo. The Tsar and the other pallbearers—the Crown Prince of Denmark, Prince Albert of Prussia, and the dead Tsarevitch’s brothers—went up to Merchants’ Harbor in the Alexandria to collect the corpse. (The Neva was too shallow for the draft of the Nevsky.) In a few hours they returned with the remains of Niks. The vessel docked at the English Quay. Bells tolled, and minute guns fired. The pallbearers carried the coffin to the street, where the funeral car waited. The horse of the Tsarevitch, in the velvet housing of the Ataman Cossack regiment, snorted and pawed. The cortège went forward to the strains of a dirge. The Ataman Cossacks, in uniforms of sapphire blue, carried the dead man’s flag and mace. The Tsar followed his son’s bier past dense crowds to the fortress. Nik’s coachman, his box draped in black velvet, drove the eight horses which pulled the car. (Tradition required that the man never drive again. In exchange for renouncing forever the exercise of his calling, he received a pension from the Romanovs.) At eight o’clock a funeral Mass was sung in the fortress. Two hours later the distraught Empress arrived. Supported by her husband, Mary came to weep and pray before the coffin of her son.
The death of the Tsarevitch plunged Russia into mourning. The peasantry was in those days still loyal to the dynasty. The workers were scarcely less devoted. “At that time,” one radical said, “it was dangerous to speak badly of the Tsar in the factories.” Students who went among the workers to distribute revolutionary literature were booed. “As a rule the worker does not love the students just because he looks upon them as enemies of the Tsar,” one observer said. “The Tsar is for him the personification of truth and justice.” When they learned that the Tsar’s eldest son was dead, ordinary Russians were sad.
Still the students came. Some were nihilists, others socialists. Most were intent on practicing on the workers a romantic version of noblesse oblige derived from the philosophy of Bakunin, Marx, and Eugène Sue, in which the love of power was disguised into a universal pity. One who went among the people had a wild look in his eyes. His face was pale and his hair hung down to his shoulders. Dmitri Karakozov came from the decaying gentry of Saratov, where his family, before emancipation, possessed some fifty peasants. He had been expelled from the university in Moscow, and had become a teacher in one of the free schools there. Karakozov possessed the inverted holiness often found in revolutionary circles. He was connected to a socialist cell called “Hell”; its dogmas were a garbled mixture of Saint Paul, Machiavelli, and Robespierre. The sect’s disciples repudiated the Tsar’s liberal revolution; Karakozov’s cousin, who held a high place in the priesthood of Hell, said that if the free-state men won, they would “invent some sort of constitution and push Russia into the Western way of life. This constitution will find support among the upper and middle classes, as it will guarantee individual liberty and give a stimulus to industry and business.”
The young revolutionists were always to blame what they called the “abnormality of the social organization” of Russia on the selfishness of the middle and upper classes. But those among them who talked to the people knew better. The peasants and workers, it transpired, had as little love for socialist altruism as the well-to-do. The toiling masses “gave unmistakable evidence of an acquisitive spirit of the worst bourgeois type combined with moral cynicism and politically reactionary attitudes.” If the revolutionists were to avert a liberal-bourgeois catastrophe and at the same time shatter the Tsarist régime, they could not rely on the goodwill of the people. They must instead be cruel. Only after the revolution, when “all men will become righteous in one instant,” could they afford to be kind.
Karakozov, haunted by the suspicion that he would die before he had accomplished a noble deed for the people, longed to contribute to the revolution. But what could he do? In his despair he contemplated suicide. He went so far as to acquire poison. The winter came, and he withdrew to the Saint Sergius Monastery of the Trinity. (Although he had converted to socialism, Karakozov had never freed himself from the grip of the older faith.) In March 1866 he arrived in Saint Petersburg.
He had, by this time, acquired a revolver.
Chapter 22
MUFFLED DRUMS
Richmond and Chesapeake Bay, April 1865
THE SUN SHONE as the President went up the James River towards Richmond. The capital of the Confederacy had fallen. Jefferson Davis had fled. In the global struggle for liberty, those who were fighting on the side of the President were on the verge of a great victory.
He came up from City Point, a bluff south of the fallen Capitol which overlooked the converging waters of the James and the Appomattox. There he had maintained, since March 24, a floating White House aboard the steamer River Queen. He had later transferred his headquarters to the Malvern. Its accommodations were less spacious than those of the River Queen; but though the quarters were cramped, the President declined Rear Admiral Porter’s offer of the principal cabin, and he contented himself with a smaller berth, just six feet in length. He pretended to find it comfortable; yet he admitted that “you can’t put a long blade into a small scabbard.”
The Malvern and its escorts steamed up the winding river past the seats of a fallen aristocracy. Death and decay mingled strangely with the life and hope of a spring morning. The flotilla paddled past Shirley, the stately seat of the Carters and the Hills; it was at Shirley that Anne Hill Carter had been born, the mother of Robert E. Lee. The boats passed Turkey Island, a plantation of the Randolphs, the family which had given America one of her greatest presidents, Thomas Jefferson, and one of her greatest jurists, John Marshall. The convoy steamed past Varina; here John Rolfe had cultivated tobacco, and here he had taken his bride, Pocahontas, after their marriage in 1614. It was Rolfe who described the fateful day, five years later, when a Dutch man-of-war appeared in the bay and “sold us twenty Negars”—the beginning of the story which Lincoln came to end.
At length the spires and chimneys of Richmond came into view. As the flotilla drew near to the city, the presidential party found débris blocking the channel. Live torpedoes bobbed amid the corpses of horses and the wreckage of boats. The President descended into the captain’s barge, and a detachment of Marines towed him towards the Southern capital. When the Marines could do no more, the sailors rowed Lincoln to the landing. The President stepped onto the dock and walked up the hill towards Mr. Jefferson’s statehouse. “I want to see the Capitol,” he said.