Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  This confidence was not misplaced. As the high command sped towards the front, the intricate processes of mobilization unfolded with an efficiency and precision that bore all the marks of Moltke’s tenacious organizational abilities. The sixty glittering officers who served on the General Staff had matters well in hand; and so sanguine was their Chief that, after the mobilization order was given, he was said to have passed the time reading French novels. Observers were astonished as regiment after regiment went forward in perfect order, in accordance with their timetables. There “was neither confusion nor hurry nor haste.” Nor were the Prussians and their confederated brethren the only Germans to mobilize; Bavarians, Badeners, and Württembergers also heeded Bismarck’s trumpet.

  By the beginning of August, more than a million Germans were under arms.

  Saint Petersburg, June 1870-May 1874

  IF BISMARCK’S REVOLUTION appeared destined to succeed, the Tsar’s was ending in fatigue, and in horror. Disraeli saw Alexander after his vitality was spent. “His mien and manners are gracious and graceful,” the English statesman said, “but the expression of his countenance, which I now could very closely examine, is sad. Whether it is satiety, or the loneliness of despotism, or the fear of violent death, I know not, but it was a visage of, I should think, habitual mournfulness.” There are some natures, Disraeli observed, which experience power as the most exalted of sacraments, “an inward and spiritual grace.” But the mystic pleasures of authority were unknown to Alexander; it was not for him the exquisite narcotic that Bismarck (and Disraeli himself) found it to be.

  Once, he had inclined to leniency. When an informer reported “an insolent expression used at the Saint Petersburg Chess Club when someone’s king was in jeopardy,” Alexander threw the report in the wastepaper basket, summoned the spy, gave him twenty-five rubles, and dismissed him from the service. But power and fear were ruining the Tsar. His hatred now encompassed those who expressed even a mild opposition to his régime. The formerly magnanimous man began cruelly to mistreat the most modest of his adversaries. A young man was arrested for possessing a copy of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” A teenaged girl was sentenced to nine years’ hard labor in Siberia for putting a socialist pamphlet into the hands of a worker. A teenaged boy was hanged for posting a revolutionary proclamation in a railway station. If the Tsar forbore to execute the darkest of the terrorist princes who had been caught up in his nets, Sergei Nechaev, it was perhaps because he could not decide whether it would be more agreeable to kill him outright or bury him alive in a ravelin of the Fortress of Peter and Paul.33

  There were moments when Alexander saw all too clearly what he had become; he would break down in tears; he would reproach himself for his acts. More often he turned away from that which he found painful. Courtiers were forbidden to mention subjects which were distressing to the Tsar. He did not like to be reminded that his wife, the Empress Mary, was still living; he had wronged her, and she now led an existence almost entirely separate from his own. “Don’t speak to me of the Empress,” the Tsar said, “it makes me suffer too much.” The name of Katya could only be whispered in the palace; but gossip, like politics, may be carried on by indirection. Was it true, the fashionable personages who haunted the court asked one another, that Count Tolstoy was at work on a new novel, the subject of which was the bad end to which adulterers came?

  Alexander had in the past been a light drinker, but he now drank to excess, or so it was said. And whenever he could, he disappeared into the parallel world he had constructed for himself and Katya. The bond between the lovers was strengthened when Katya gave birth, in the study of Nicholas I, to a son, whom the parents named George. Alexander installed mother and child in a suite of rooms in the Winter Palace just above his own; an elevator made for ease of communication between the two apartments. The Tsar was fond of his natural child, who seemed to absorb him more than his legitimate offspring did. “Gogo,” as the boy was called, was, Alexander said, “a true Russian,” something which could not be said of the other Romanovs, with their mostly German blood. In 1868 the first of a new generation of legitimate Romanovs was born. Grand Duchess Mary, the former Dagmar of Denmark, presented her husband, Tsarevitch Alexander, with a baby boy. They named the child Nicholas, after his great-grandfather and his uncle, the dead Tsarevitch. But the boy who was destined be the last of the tsars saw little of his grandfather Alexander, and experienced nothing of his personal influence.

  Count Shuvalov disapproved of his master’s relations with Katya; she was, he believed, a tool of the Pan-Slavs. (Reactionary though he was, the cosmopolitan Shuvalov had no patience for utopian visions of Russia’s romantic nationalists.) A vizier is always jealous of the harem, and the Count sensed in the concubine a threat to his own pre-eminence. He continued to carry himself with the voluptuous arrogance of an aristocrat who adores every type of pleasure and scorns every form of sentimentality, but for a moment his cynicism failed, and forgetting to sneer, he became almost tender, and exhibited all the pathos of a jilted courtier. He remonstrated with the Tsar, and when he was in his cups he railed against Katya. Alexander, he said, was “completely dominated by her, unable any longer to see save through her eyes, and capable now of the worst follies to prove his love for her.”

  Shuvalov’s interference in the domestic affairs of the Romanovs was not wise. It irritated not only the Tsar, but other members of the imperial family as well. It seemed at times as though the Count cherished the hope that by aggravating the family’s troubles he would make the Romanovs more dependent on his counsels. But Alexander was not to be thus managed. His counter-intelligence services kept him apprised of Shuvalov’s activities, and he determined to strip him of his powers as director of the Third Section.

  “I congratulate you, Peter Andreivich,” the Tsar said to the courtier one morning when he came in to make his report.

  “May I ask, Sire, in what way I have deserved Your Majesty’s congratulations?”

  “I’ve just appointed you my Ambassador in London.”

  The fall of Shuvalov did not, however, result in a return to the earlier policies of the reign. The old energy and the old idealism were gone; and the initiative, in Russia, passed into other hands.

  London and Paris, July 1870

  SOME STATESMEN EXCEL in the art of leveling, of knocking things down. Others expend their energy in repairing what is broken, and in making the shattered vessel whole. Mr. Gladstone, however, possessed a twin vocation: he aspired to be both a breaker and a restorer. In the earliest phases of his career he dreamed of reconstructing Holy England; in his mature statesmanship he was iconoclastic, and sought to shatter the idols of conventional England. Mr. Gladstone’s very hobbies reflected the duality of his nature. He chopped down trees at Howarden Castle; and pursuing streetwalkers in London, he attempted to restore them to virtue.

  In the summer of 1870, Mr. Gladstone was in a destructive frenzy, and like an Oxford-educated dervish he whirled about, a fantastic vision of motive power, working feverishly to break down the shibboleths of the civil service, the army, the schools, Ireland. Bismarck, always vigilant, watched the maniac carefully; here was a force which, should it ever comprehend the meaning of his own revolutionary purposes, might utterly disconcert them. Ridiculing him as a “big Utopian Babbler,” he took to calling Mr. Gladstone “Gloucester,” after the prince in Shakespeare’s Richard III. “England, beware of Gloucester,” Bismarck was fond of saying.

  Plainly, Mr. Gladstone did not understand the significance of Bismarck’s statesmanship. His powers of foresight were as defective in 1870 as they had been eight years before, when, in the heat of Lincoln’s revolution, he declared that Jefferson Davis had made a nation. On the eve of Bismarck’s triumph, Mr. Gladstone failed to comprehend how much England must lose were France to fall, and were a German Reich to be constituted under Prussia.

  The data on which he might have founded a more accurate judgment of men and events were there. France was, in the 186
0s, a power in decline. Gone were the days when she had offered the world a path to modernity. The neo-Roman forms of her government, the massive monuments of power raised up by her statesmen and extolled by her intellectuals, the immense regulatory structures reared by the diligent mandarins who labored in her bureaucracies—these had once inspired the world with envious awe. Here, surely, was the formula of national greatness. But the centralizing ideal of the French state—an ideal which the disciples of the French Republic cherished scarcely less than the partisans of the Bourbons and the Bonapartes—had been gradually eclipsed, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the English approach to political and economic order. England’s freedoms, her laws, the reach of her commerce, the extent of her capital—her gold standard and naval supremacy—had given the world a new model to emulate, and afforded it a new formula of power.

  Now Germany was rising, and preparing to counter the English revolution with one of its own. China and India, Greece and Rome, France and England—the German philosophers demonstrated that each of these nations had, for a time, offered the world a vision of its destiny, a distinctive conception of human possibility: each had been a “World-Historical people,” an incarnation of the advancing “World-Spirit.” But history had passed these nations by; and Professor Hegel conclusively proved that the “German Spirit” was now destined to fill the earth.

  The speculations of the German philosophers heralded the appearance of a power that would, within the lifetime of Mr. Gladstone’s own grandchildren, pose the gravest threat to English liberties since the Spanish Armada. But Mr. Gladstone did not see it. Bismarck, eager to stave off English interference in his projects, was determined that he should not see it. He told Lord Loftus, Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin, “that if Germany should be victorious . . . the balance of power in Europe would be preserved; but if France should unfortunately obtain the upper hand, she would be mistress of Europe and would impose her law on other States.” This was precisely the opposite of the truth; but Mr. Gladstone, who believed that Germany, under Prussia, would establish a mild and liberal form of government, found the prediction persuasive.

  He stipulated only that the belligerent powers respect the integrity of Belgium. The point was a sensitive one in England, where the Belgian fortresses had long been regarded as “the outworks of London.” Three decades before, in 1839, Lord Palmerston put the plains of Flanders and Brabant out of reach of an aspiring Continental power: he secured an international treaty guaranteeing the inviolability of Belgium. Ever since then the principle that Belgium was an untouchable breakwater had been a cardinal article of English policy.

  Bismarck was quick to assure Mr. Gladstone that Prussia had no intention of violating the Treaty of 1839. He then slyly released to the world photographic copies of the draft treaty which Count Benedetti had given him four years before in the aftermath of Sadowa. The document boldly flouted the Treaty of 1839 and lay bare France’s designs on the territory of the Belgians. Bismarck summoned the diplomatic corps to the Wilhelmstrasse and showed the envoys the autograph manuscript in the poor Count’s hand. Those in England who distrusted. Louis-Napoleon had for some time attributed to him an appetite for the precious bulwark, but there had never been any proof of his intentions. With the release of Benedetti’s draft, however, France’s desire to strip England of her prophylactic barrier was nakedly exposed; and any reservations the English might have harbored concerning Prussian aggression were swept away in a rising tide of indignation at the perfidy of the French.

  In the Quai d’Orsay, the Duc de Gramont could only shake his head. Bismarck, the most warlike statesman on the Continent, had succeeded in painting France as the sole aggressor in the crisis. Gramont, who had once aspired to be the “French Bismarck,”34 saw all his work undone by the fraud, the violence, and the genius of the object of his pathetic emulation. He looked on in horror as his country went to war without an ally or even a friend. The Austrians and the Italians, on whom Gramont had counted for support, declared that they would await the outcome of the first battles before deciding whether to join the fight; the Russians appeared to have entered into some mysterious understanding with Bismarck; and the English were in an uproar over Belgium. Gramont bravely, though not very convincingly, issued a communiqué in which he stated that “France seeks no alliance, but prefers single-handed conflict.”

  South Carolina, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Washington, January 1867–July 1877

  THE MARRIAGE OF Buck Preston and Rawlins Lowndes, which took place in the Prestons’ house in Columbia, was an unsatisfactory dénouement. After the ceremony, the newlyweds withdrew to Oaklands, the Lowndes plantation on the Combahee River. Buck bore her husband three children, and went into a steep decline.

  A month after the wedding, Sam Hood married a young lady in New Orleans, where he had gone into business. “Poor wounded hero and patriot,” Mary Chesnut said. Buck ought to have married him; he was the “only true man” she ever saw in her protégée’s train.

  Mary Chesnut herself was now very poor, living between regret and fear. All that remained of her brilliant personality she invested in the journals she had kept during the war. If she could only save something out of time, that undammable river. It was a labor of tears.

  She did not regret the passing of slavery; but she continued to cherish the aristocratic ideal. Together with Dixie School writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Mary Johnston (Joe Johnston’s niece), she helped create a romance of the Old South. “Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees one,” she wrote, quoting Lord Byron. “I have never met a man who could describe one.” Yet she made the attempt. Though she criticized the coercive system of the antebellum “Chivalry,” Mary Chesnut was as enamored as ever of the planters’ vision of nobility.

  She and the other Dixie School writers endowed planter paternalism with a retrospective appeal it could never have possessed in the heyday of Cavalier prosperity. At the height of their power, the great landowners of the South had inspired resentment in poorer whites whose democratic impulses they had stifled. But the planters had fallen, and white Southerners of all conditions could now dwell with nostalgic satisfaction on a class that had ceased to threaten and command. At the same time, many Southerners—and not a few Northerners—found in the planters’ philosophy a justification, not indeed for slavery, but for a new caste system, one in which every (white) man was an aristocrat, separated from the untouchable class by the mystic virtues of skin color.

  Lincoln had defeated the Southern partisans of coercion, but he had not changed their hearts. Radical Republicans like “Bluff Ben” Wade, viewing with dismay the servile “Black Codes” which Southern whites imposed on former slaves after the war, tried to force the South to embrace equality Early in 1867, legislation dividing the former Confederate states into military districts under the jurisdiction of the United States Army passed both houses of Congress.35 President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, vetoed the legislation; the intent of the bills, he said, was “to protect niggers.” Congress overrode the vetoes, and the House of Representatives impeached the President.36 Under the Reconstruction Acts, the South was governed by the sword, and blacks were given the vote.

  Radical Reconstruction did not last. In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took office as President after a disputed election. A “let alone” policy towards the South prevailed. The last Federal troops were withdrawn from the statehouses in Louisiana and South Carolina, and Southern “Redeemers” proceeded to erect a new fabric of white supremacy.

  Not all the gains of Lincoln’s revolution were erased. Blacks moved about the reconstructed South with a degree of freedom unknown under slavery. Some enrolled in schools, others went into business. The freshly ratified Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—which holds that no state may deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law—provided hope for the future. But the reconstructed South fell short—far short—of the vision of a “new birth of freedom
” which Lincoln, in his prophetic fury, had foreseen. For a “brief moment,” the Harvard-trained black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, the former slave stood “in the sun.” But he soon “moved back again toward slavery.” Like the liberated serfs of Russia, the former slaves in the South found themselves, two decades after they received their freedom, in a condition not much better than servitude. “They have taken the bridle out of our mouths,” one freedman said, “but the halter is round our necks still.”

  The myths of paternalism prevailed. In his book In Ole Virginia (1887), Thomas Nelson Page invoked a sentimental version of the planters’ system in order to justify the new régime of Jim Crow, which like the old régime treated blacks as childlike creatures incapable of freedom. “Dem wuz good ole times, marster,” Page makes a former slave say of the old plantation days, “de bes Sam ever see! Dey wuz in fac’! Niggers didn’ hed nothin’ ’tall to do.”

  In the North, too, Lincoln’s revolution was in danger of betrayal. The new money power appeared to many to be as great a threat to liberty as the old slave power had once been. The United States had, at that time, no law capable of addressing the problem of economic monopoly. In the aftermath of the Civil War, a small number of industrialists and financiers acquired the lion’s share of critical markets. By the end of the century J. P. Morgan’s firm alone held directorships in corporations with an aggregate capitalization exceeding twenty-two billion dollars. The plutocrats intimidated competitors, overcharged consumers, exploited employees, bought and sold senators. In the summer of 1877 workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad struck; their pay had been cut for the second time in less than a year. The strike spread. Chicago and Saint Louis came to a standstill. In Philadelphia militiamen opened fire on protestors. Twenty people were killed. Enraged workers torched the railroad yards; a hundred locomotives and two thousand cars were consumed. In the spring of 1886 a bomb was thrown during a labor rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago. One policeman died on the spot; seven others were mortally wounded. The police opened fire; eleven people fell dead.37 Four years later, in 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act became law; but not until the twentieth century was an effective antitrust régime established in the United States.