Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  In 1888, Wilhelm I, the aged Kaiser, died. He was succeeded by Crown Prince Friedrich, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria. The new Emperor was in the grip of cancer, and he died just three months after ascending the throne. His son, Willie, became Kaiser Wilhelm II. The young ruler was impatient of restraint, and he forced Bismarck to retire. The ex-Chancellor passed his last years as a country squire, railing against the stupidity of the Reich’s leadership, and against those dangerous policies which were the fruit of his own craft and subtlety; for his Empire never did escape the crookedness and violence in which it was begot. The old man’s principal consolation lay, not in the memory of his statesmanship, but in the devotion of his family. His marriage continued to be a happy one, and he remained close to his three children. At the same time he cherished the memory of Kathi Orlov, who had died young, in 1875. Bismarck himself died in 1898 at his estate at Friedrichsruh. He was eighty-three.

  Field Marshal von Moltke died in Berlin, in his apartment in the headquarters of the General Staff, in April 1891, full of years and honor. He left no children; but his nephew and namesake, the younger Helmuth von Moltke, carried on the family’s military tradition, and in 1905 he succeeded Schlieffen as Chief of the General Staff. Moltke the Younger modified the mobilization orders for war with France that he inherited from Schlieffen. “It must come to a fight,” Schlieffen is said to have exclaimed on his deathbed. “Only make the right wing strong.” But the younger Moltke weakened the right wing; and it was his revised war plan that Germany followed into battle in the summer of 1914.

  During the battle of the Marne in September 1914, when the German advance was halted twenty miles from Paris, the soft, nervous nephew collapsed. The genius of General Joseph Galliéni, the Military Governor of Paris, and the gallantry of Tsar Nicholas II saved France. Galliéni attacked the exposed flank of General von Kluck’s army, as it marched within sight of the Eiffel Tower; the Tsar threw his armies at the Germans, and forced them to transfer two army corps and a division of cavalry from the Western to the Eastern theater. Thirty-two German troop trains raced eastward to meet the fortitude of Russia. It was the last great liberal act of the Tsarist régime, one in which Nicholas showed himself not unworthy of the memory of his grandfather Alexander. “Majesty,” Moltke the Younger is said to have informed the Kaiser after the Marne, “we have lost the war.” Relieved by the Kaiser of his command, the nephew died in June 1916, while the battle raged at Verdun. Two years later the military power of Germany was broken, and in September 1918 the last offensive of General Ludendorff, who was by then virtually the military dictator of Germany, failed. A desperate Kaiser proclaimed Germany a free state on the English model, with ministerial responsibility. But the concession came too late, and the Kaiser fled to Holland.

  The dynasty of the Hohenzollerns was at an end, but the General Staff, though restricted in its operations by the Treaty of Versailles, continued not merely to function but to dominate. The ascetic ideal of discipline and obedience which the elder Moltke had inculcated in the Staff ensured that its traditions would survive the wreck of the Reich. Behind “the veneer of republican governments and democratic institutions, imposed by the victors and tainted with defeat,” Winston Churchill wrote, “the real political power in Germany and the enduring structure of the nation” lay with the officers of the General Staff. Under General Hans von Seeckt, the brethren of the Staff secretly planned the revival of the army, and they ensured that the precious institutional knowledge of their order did not perish with themselves.

  AS FOR RICHARD WAGNER, he at last succeeded in erecting his temple of art. The first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876; the Kaiser himself was present, as were many notables of the Empire. Through the munificence of his patron, Ludwig of Bavaria, the composer was enabled to build, at Bayreuth, a splendid villa for himself; he called it Wahnfried, or Peace from Illusion. Wagner died of a heart attack at Venice, in the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi on the Grand Canal, in February 1883. He was sixty-nine.

  Ludwig survived his friend; he died in mysterious circumstances in June 1886, at the age of forty. Wagner’s widow, Cosima, lived to a great age. She was still residing at Wahnfried when, in 1923, her son Siegfried Wagner welcomed to his father’s house a young agitator who, in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, was rising into prominence. The guest’s name was Adolf Hitler. The Nazi leader stood silently before Wagner’s grave. Winifred Wagner, whom Siegfried married to beard his homosexuality, became a close friend of Hitler; she and her children were among the very few who were permitted to call the Fuehrer by his nickname, “Wolf.” “Frau Wagner—and that is her historic service—linked Bayreuth to National Socialism,” Hitler said. Wagner’s temple of art became the Fuehrer’s court theater; it was at Bayreuth, Hitler said, that “the Master . . . forged the spiritual sword with which we fight today.” Hitler delighted in the atmosphere of Wahnfried, which he said “radiates life,” and in the company of the Wagners. “I love these people and Wahnfried,” he once exclaimed.

  Nietzsche broke with Wagner a decade before Hitler was born. The estrangement deepened when the philosopher saw the Christian motifs in the composer’s late work, Parsifal. “Incredible!” Nietzsche exclaimed after he received the text from Wagner. His friend had “turned pious.” Nietzsche might have forgiven Wagner Parsifal—he dissolved in tears when he first listened to the prelude—but he could not forgive him for having become reichsdeutsch, a chauvinist of the Empire. Bayreuth, in Nietzsche’s opinion, was but a prop of the Reich. After his breakdown in Turin, in January 1889, the philosopher was taken to the clinic at Basel; he insisted on calling the attendant charged with restraining him “Bismarck.” He died insane at Weimar in August 1900, at the age of fifty-five.

  IN MAY 1873, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase was laid in his grave. Six months later his daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, saw her husband’s business fail. William Sprague lapsed into an inebriated stupor. Kate turned for companionship to Roscoe Conkling, the handsome New York politician. Henry Adams thought Conkling the preening epitome of senatorial pompousness, with an egotism so mannered “it became Shakespearian and bouffe.” There were rumors of a love affair, and in the summer of 1879 the newspapers reported that Sprague threatened Conkling with a rifle. Kate sued for divorce, and the marriage was dissolved. In 1890 her son, Willie, having failed at various jobs, went west looking for work. He committed suicide at Seattle. Kate lost her beauty as well as her wealth; her hair turned gray, and her face grew puffy. She died in Washington in July 1899. She was fifty-eight. William Sprague died fifteen years later in Paris.

  Henry Adams relinquished his Harvard professorship and became a writer, composing works of history and fiction. His wife, Marian “Clover” Hooper, committed suicide in December 1885. In 1904 Adams privately printed his paean to the Middle Ages, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres; three years later he brought out a private edition of his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, which traced his growing disenchantment with American democracy. He suffered a stroke in 1912, and six years later, in March 1918, he died in Washington. In 1919 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Education of Henry Adams.

  In spite of the doubts he expressed in Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman insisted that the American free state was the world’s last, best hope. He entertained various, somewhat obscure ideas about how the latent poetry of the country could be brought out; he imagined that a race of “orbic bards” would emerge and restore the country’s democratic faith. After suffering a stroke in January 1873, he moved to Camden, New Jersey. In his final years he was a celebrity, “the good gray poet.” His lectures on Lincoln widened his fame; Oscar Wilde made a pilgrimage to his house; Thomas Eakins painted his picture. Walt Whitman died in March 1892, at the age of seventy-two.

  James and Mary Chesnut moved into a new house in Camden, South Carolina, in 1873. Money was scarce, and the couple were obliged to sell their Gilbert Stuart portrait of President Washington. James Chesnut continued his political labors, w
ithout much success, and Mary Chesnut continued her literary work, with about the same result. She never published the diary into which she formed the journals she kept during the war, and during her lifetime her literary talents were unrecognized. Early in 1885, James Chesnut suffered a seizure and died. Mary Chesnut died the following year, in November 1886. She was sixty-three. Two decades after her death, a portion of her work was published under the title A Diary from Dixie. Subsequent editions appeared in 1949 and 1981. In his book Patriotic Gore (1962), Edmund Wilson paid tribute to the “brilliant journal of Mary Chesnut, so much more imaginative and revealing than most of the fiction inspired by the war.” He called her diary “an extraordinary document—in its informal department, a masterpiece . . . a work of art.”

  Sam Hood’s insurance business failed in 1879. He died that summer in a yellow-fever epidemic in New Orleans. His former fiancée, Buck Preston Rawlins, died the following year, at the age of thirty-eight. She was buried in Magnolia Cemetery at Charleston.

  LINCOLN’S REMAINS LIE in the vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. Mary Todd Lincoln never recovered from the shock of his death. She died in Springfield in July 1882, at the age of sixty-three. Only one of her four children survived her. The Lincolns’ youngest boy, Tad, died six years after his father, in July 1871. Their oldest child, Robert Todd Lincoln, married Mary Eunice Harlan, the daughter of Senator James Harlan of Iowa, the man H. L. Mencken called the “damndest ass” in America for his dismissal of Walt Whitman from a clerkship in the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Indian Affairs). Robert Todd Lincoln prospered as a railroad executive. He became Secretary of War under President Garfield and Minister to England under President Harrison. He died in Vermont in July 1926.

  After the passing of Lincoln, America confronted new problems. The North was beset by commercial oligopoly; in the South the system of segregation known as Jim Crow flourished. The former Confederacy was as little redeemed as the land of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk—or was rather redeemed in a way Lincoln could scarcely have approved.

  And yet. America did not become a slave empire. Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, slavery, in some perhaps modified form, under some perhaps prettier name, might have survived into the twentieth century. The institution would have derived fresh strength from the novel weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingo imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism. The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of Caribbean empire; Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Strengthened by a policy of militant nationalism, the coercive party might, in the twentieth century, have worked to prevent the United States from playing a part in the struggle against such coercive régimes as the Kaiser’s Second Reich and Hitler’s Third one.

  The historical probabilities would have been no less grim had Lincoln, after initiating his revolution, failed to preserve the United States as a unitary free state. The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with régimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy. The successors of Jefferson Davis would not improbably have linked arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck. Young German officers, in the tradition of Heros von Borcke, would have traveled to the Military Institute at Staunton to instruct cadets in the latest refinements of military art; and young Southern patricians would have crossed the ocean to complete their educations in the schools at Berlin.

  None of this came to pass. The virtue of Lincoln preserved the liberties of America. In the decades that followed, the nation he saved played a part in vindicating the freedom of peoples around the world.

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

  But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

  —Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

  Abbreviations in Notes and Sources

  AA Archives de l’Armée française, Château de Vincennes

  AAAPSS Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

  ALH John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. New York: Century, 1890

  AMH American Historical Review

  B C. Grant Robertson, Bismarck. New York: Howard Fertig, 1969

  BE The Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, 12 vols. London: Peter Davies, 1927

  BGE Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964

  BMS A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. New York: Vintage, 1967

  C Walt Whitman, The Correspondence 1842-1867, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961

  CP Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Random House, 1956

  CSP Canadian Slavonic Papers

  CW The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55

  D Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

  DGW Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911

  DST Sophia Tolstoy, The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, ed. O. A. Golinenko, S. A. Rozanova, B. M. Shumova, I. A. Pokrovskaya, and N. I. Azarova, trans. Cathy Porter. New York: Random House, 1985

  DTW Sofya Tolstoy, The Diary of Tolstoy’s Wife, trans. Alexander Werth. London: Victor Gollancz, 1928

  EHA Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels. New York: Library of America, 1983

  FA Foreign Affairs

  FP Foreign Policy Gedanken Otto Fürst von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, 2 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1898 Gesammelten Werke Bismarck: Die gesammelten Werke. Berlin: Otto Stollberg, et al., 15 vols., 1925-33

  GR Georgia Review

  HLL William H. Herndon, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln. New York: Da Capo, 1983

  IO International Organization

  JAH Journal of American History

  JHI Journal of the History of Ideas

  JMH Journal of Modern History

  JPE Journal of Political Economy

  JSH Journal of Southern History

  L Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee. New York: Touchstone, 1997

  LBD W. F. Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 6 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1910-20

  LDD Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865, ed. Earl Schenk Miers, 3 vols. Washington, DC: Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960

  LG Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. New York: Vintage and Library of America, 1992

  LGT Edvard Radzinsky Alexander II: The Last Great Tar, trans. Antonina Bouis. New York: Fr
ee Press, 2005

  LHJTVP Evelyn Ashley, The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley 1876

  LLJR Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1889

  LO Noah Brooks, Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, ed. Michael Burlingame. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

  LRW Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976

  LSWPF Francis Fessenden, Life and Services of William Pitt Fessenden, 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907

  LWEG John Morley The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols. London: 1903

  MCCW Mary Boykin Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1994

  MHM Maryland Historical Magazine

  MOS George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story: The War for the Union: The Soldiers Who Fought It: The Civilians Who Directed It: And His Relations to It and to Them. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887; Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning, 1998

  MR Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: Dover, 1971

  NC The New Criterion

  NCMH The New Cambridge Modern History, ed. J. P. T. Bury, 14 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960

  NYPL New York Public Library Origines Diplomatiques Les Origines Diplomatiques de la Guerre de 1870-1871, Recueil de Documents Publié, ed. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, 29 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1910-32

  ORTW On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, ed. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler. Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2002

  PMUSG Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U S. Grant, ed. E. B. Long. New York: Da Capo, 2001

  RAL John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life, 2 vols. New York: Baker & Taylor, 1909