Forge of Empires
Page 50
REL Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee, 4 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1935; Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, 2001
RGR Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994
Rheinpolitik Hermann Oncken, Die Rheinpolitik Kaiser Napoleons III von 1863 bis 1870,3 vols. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags, 1926
RP Review of Politics
RR Russian Review
SCHM South Carolina Historical Magazine
SDC Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995 SD NARA State Department Archives, National Archives and Records Administration
SR Slavic Review
SS Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in German History. Vol. I: The Prussian Tradition, 1740-1890, trans. Heinz Norden. Princeton Junction, NJ: Scholar’s Bookshelf, 1988
SSH Social Science History
SW, 1832-1858 Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, ed. D. E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America, 1989
SW, 1859-1865 Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865, ed. D. E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America, 1989
T Hernri Troyat, Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux. Garden City NY: Doubleday 1967
TE Maurice Paléologue, The Tragic Empress: A Record of Intimate Talks with the Empress Eugénie, 1901-1919, trans. Hamish Miles. New York: Harper & Bros., 1928
TL Tolstoy’s Letters 1828-1879, trans. R. F. Christian. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978
VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
WLM The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1879
WPQ Western Political Quarterly
WWHS The Works of William H. Seward, ed. George E. Baker, 5 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884
Notes and Sources
Note to the Reader
xiii “The impulse”: Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), xx-xxi.
xiv “penetrated the leaden”: John Petek, Archbishop Joseph Beran, ed. Michael Novak (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 8.
xiv “Symbol”: Ibid.
xiv “Dr. Beran”: Ibid., 12.
xiv persecuted: Albert Gaiter, The Red Book of the Persecuted Church (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1957), 343-93; “Freedom for a Fighter,” Time, October 11, 1963; Maria Teresa Carloni, Il Cardinale Scomodo: II Card. Giuseppe Beran, Arcivescovo de Praga (Urbanía: Bramante, 1972).
xiv 413 South Seventh: Floyd S. Barringer, Historic Homes of Springfield (Springfield, IL: Privately printed, 1966), 54-55.
Prologue: Three Deaths
1 fractured: “Our Great Loss-Assassination of President Lincoln,” The New-York Times, Monday, April 17, 1865, 1.
1 shortly after seven o’clock: “Our Great Loss-Death of President Lincoln,” The New-York Times, Sunday, April 16, 1865, 1.
1 his belly ripped: Bernard Pares, A History of Russia, 5th ed. New York: Vintage, 1965), 403.
1 died unloved: W. E. Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1970), 138, 141-42, 146.
1 amputate: “The Assassination of the Emperor of Russia,” The Times, Wednesday, March 16, 1881, 10.
1 The German Crown Prince: “Russia,” The Times, Friday, March 25, 1881, 5.
1 shortly after the death: Elizabeth Narishkin-Kurkakin, Under Three Tsars, ed. René Fölöp Miller, trans. Julia E. Loesser (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1931), 66.
2 “a heartless law”: Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, Once a Grand Duke (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp.-Farrar & Rinehart, 1932), 44.
2 undemonstrative Russians: “Russia,” The Times, Tuesday, March 22, 1881, 5.
2 the dungeon: H. Sutherland Edwards, The Russians at Home and Abroad: Sketches, Unpolitical and Political, of Russian Life Under Alexander II, 2 vols. (London: W. M. H. Allen, 1879), i, 5.
2 golden dome: Maurice Paléologue, The Tragic Romance of Alexander II of Russia, trans. Arthur Chambers (London: Hutchinson, 1927), 24-25.
2 Katya, heavily veiled: A. A. Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, ed. A. A. Pilenco, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Methuen, 1996), 71-72.
2 rather handsome: Frederic Hamilton, The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1934), 116.
2 “very tall”: Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Library of America, 1984), 311.
2 lifted her veils: Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, 71-72.
3 Alexander had insisted: Alexander, Once a Grand Duke, 48, 50.
3 embraced Katya: Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, 71-72.
3 A heavy snow: “The Funeral of the Late Emperor of Russia,” The Times, Monday, March 28, 1881, 6.
3 chanting passages of Scripture: “Russia,” The Times, Tuesday, March 22, 1881, 5.
3 to bend over the corpse: “The Funeral of the Late Emperor of Russia,” The Times, Monday, March 28, 1881, 6.
3 threw sand and leaves: Ibid.
3 potent form of publicity: David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Vintage, 1961), 4-5.
3 attempted to touch: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Tuesday, April 25, 1865, 1.
4 turned black: Ibid.; “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Wednesday, April 26, 1865, 1.
4 An embalmer: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Tuesday, April 25, 1865, 1.
4 pressed handkerchiefs: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Saturday, April 22, 1865, 1.
4 “HONOR TO WHOM”: Ibid.
4 “THE ILLUSTRIOUS MARTYR”: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Sunday, April 23, 1865, 1.
4 “WASHINGTON”: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Tuesday, April 25, 1865, 1.
4 “THOUGH DEAD”: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Tuesday, May 2, 1865, 1.
4 The railroad car: “The Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Saturday, April 22, 1865, 1.
4 robed in black: Ibid.
4 Memphis … Rochester: “The Funeral Cortege,” The New-York Times, Friday, April 28, 1865, 8.
4 “COME HOME” … “GO TO THY REST”: “The President’s Obsequies,” The New-York Times, Thursday, May 4, 1865, 1.
4 “Children of the Heavenly King”: “The Burial,” The New-York Times, Friday, May 5, 1865, 1.
5 a limestone sepulcher: Ibid.
5 “sufferer from hysteria”: Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, 202.
5 “He’s raving mad!”: Ibid., 203.
5 “It was all”: B, 473.
6 He hurled: BMS, 241
6 snatched the paper: The Kaiser vs. Bismarck: Suppressed Letters, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Harper, 1921), 100-201. John. C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888-1900, trans. Sheila de Bellaigue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 297.
6 in so many words: Alexander said, “C’est un garçon mal élevé et de maivaise foi” BMS, 247. The Tsar also called the Kaiser a “rascally young fop” and a “pipsqueak”—Röhl, Wilhelm II, 37; George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 398.
6 “A state funeral”: BMS, 253.
6 “That”: BMS, 265 (emphasis added).
7 twenty-two million serfs: Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vii, 3. Also affected by emancipation, though far less dramatically, were twenty-five million Crown peasants-ibid., 3. The state peasants had been given title to their land and certain other freedoms during the reign of Nicholas I, and from that time “were, for all purposes, freemen”—Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), 146.
7 four million men, women: According to the Census of 1860, there were 3,954,000 slaves in the United States,
but this was almost certainly an undercount.
7 free states: Rather than democratic ones; for although the freest state will always be in some degree democratic, a democratic state may not be free. France, in 1861, was in some respects more democratic than England at that time; its suffrage was broader. Yet it was less free. Democracy is only one element in the mixture which secures freedom. Compare F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 20, 103-17.
7 “from above”: Larissa Zakharova, “Autocracy and the Reforms of 1861-1871 in Russia: Choosing Paths of Development,” trans. Daniel Field, RGR, 20; Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1969), ii, 883.
7 deplored the English theory: Bismarck “has always hated the English,” Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone in 1870—Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of Granville George Leveson Gower, Second Earl Granville, K. G., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), ii, 67.
7 liberty of trade: Bismarck’s revolutionary path was blazed by those who made the Zollverein, the customs union which eliminated numerous restraints on trade in Germany. The Zollverein, Friedrich List said, did away with more barriers to trade and national unity “than had been swept away by the political whirlwinds of the American and French Revolutions”—Edward Earl Meade, “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Meade Earle (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 141; Handels-Vertrag zwischen dem Zollverein und Großbritannien, SD NARA M44/ROLL 13.
7 a Free Trader: Otto Pflanze, “Bismarck’s ‘Realpolitik,’” RP, vol. 20, no. 4 (October 1958), 498-99; James Wycliffe Headlam, Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 421-22.
7 Under his government: Henry W. Littlefield, History of Europe Since 1815 (New York: Harper … Row, 1963), 96-97; Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Vintage, 1979), 93.
7 “applicable to all men”: Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, et al., April 6, 1859, SW, 1859-1865, 19.
7 “lost the future”: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in English Literature: The Victorian Period, ed. George Morey Miller (New York: Scribner’s, 1930, 1933), 439. Compare F. A. Hayek on the receding of the liberal tide in The Constitution of Liberty, 202. In this book I use the terms “liberal” and “free state” interchangeably, and have generally preferred the latter to the former. I have done so in order to avoid the ambiguities inherent in the terms “liberal” and “liberalism.” In the nineteenth century, and in Europe to this day, “liberalism” refers to the principles of liberty ascendant in England after the Revolution of 1688—constitutional government, the rule of law, and the liberty of the individual in political, spiritual, and economic matters. In the United States, “liberalism” acquired, during the course of the twentieth century, a somewhat different meaning.
7 “germ”: Lincoln, “Address to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois,” February 22, 1842, SW, 1832-1858, 89.
7 “the wolf’s dictionary”: Lincoln, “Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland,” April 18, 1864, SW, 1859-1865, 590.
Part One: Into the Pit
1. Three Peoples on the Precipice
11 Saint Petersburg, January 1861: This section heading and those that follow are intended to give the reader a rough idea of the time and place with which each segment of the narrative is concerned. Not every incident or quotation in a particular section falls within the temporal and geographic limits set forth in the heading.
11 the Winter Palace: Geraldine Norman, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 67-71.
11 their wands: A. A. Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, ed. A. A. Pilenco, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Methuen, 1996), 198.
11 catch the eye: MR, 143.
11 silk stockings: Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, 194-196.
11 Diamonds and sapphires: E. A. Brayley Hodgetts, The Court of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1908), ii, 70.
11 good looks: That student of beauty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, remarked, “The Chevalier Garde and Garde à; Cheval recruits were a nice-looking lot, though the fact that hardly any of them had any hips made their white capes look as though they had been poured over their slim bodies”—Wilhelm II, My Early Life (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 256.
12 polonaise: MR, 143; Mosolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, 198-99.
12 courtesy: Hodgetts, The Court of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, ii, 70.
12 “democratic air”: Bayard Taylor to James T. Fields, January 24, 1863, in Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, ed. Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), i, 407.
12 His manner was amiable: E. M. Almedingen, The Emperor Alexander II: A Study (London: Bodley Head, 1962), 204.
12 “the Great Mogul”: Frederic Hamilton, The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1934), 116.
12 Vasily Zhukovsky: Irina M. Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976).
12 “beautiful poem”: Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia’s Drift to Revolution 1825-1917 (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 155.
12 “are times”: W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (New York: anchor, 1981), 431.
12 “He does not give”: John Van der Kiste, The Romanovs 1818-1959 (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 31.
13 authoritarian government: Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), 24, 73.
13 Russia never knew: “The locus of original political authority,” Richard Pipes writes, “was the private domain of the prince or tsar, his oikos or dvor. Within this domain the prince reigned absolute, exercising authority in the double capacity as sovereign and proprietor. Here he was in full command, a counterpart of the Greek despotes, the Roman dominus, and the Russian gosudar’, that is lord, master, outright owner of all men and things”—Ibid., 21-23, 48-51, 65-73.
13 mixed constitutions: Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England, WLM, i, 22, 119.
13 “kholops”: Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 85.
13 exchanged one form: Macaulay, History of England, WLM, i, 22, 34.
13 Catherine the Great: During Catherine’s reign, the highest servants of the Crown (dvoriane) obtained title to their estates, and a tradition of private property grew up. Numerous restrictions on trade were abolished, among them most of the imperial monopolies-See Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 69, 113-14, 131-33, 211.
13 forestall the catastrophe: Valerie Bunce, “Domestic Reform and International Change: The Gorbachev Reforms in Historical Perspective,” IO, vol. 47, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 119; Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), xiii. For a different perspective, see Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
13 rapidly outstripping: See Elie Halévy, The Liberal Awakening 1815-1830, 2d ed. (London: Ernest Benn, 1949), vii; A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), xxx; Henry W. Littlefield, History of Europe Since 1815 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1-12; and James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9-21.
14 paternalism: Shearer Davis Bowman, “Antebellum Planters and Vormarz Junkers in Comparative Perspective,” AMH, vol. 85, no. 4 (October 1980), 779-808; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 4-7, 317. Compare Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in
America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 146-48, 178-83; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 312.
14 Landowners in Russia: MCCW, 245; Peter Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude: American Proslavery and Russian Proserfdom Arguments, 1760-1860,” AHR, vol. 85, no. 4 (October 1980), 811-17. For a different perspective, see Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861, 22.
14 “regulate the school”: Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Gladstone on Church and State,” WLM, vi, 332-33.
14 what in Germany: See below, chapter fifteen and the epilogue.
14 racial chauvinism: The doctrines of racial chauvinism were propounded by such thinkers as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Joseph von Goerres in Germany; Edmund Ruffin and James Henry Hammond in the United States; and Nicholas Danilevsky in Russia. The romantic school of racism drew inspiration, too, from the philosophy of racial aristocracy propounded by the Comte de Gobineau, whose Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines appeared in the 1850s. Romantic nationalism “would open die door to [modern] racism”—Alan Davies, “Racism and German Protestant Theology: A Prelude to the Holocaust,” AAAPSS, vol. 450 (July 1980), 20; see also George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 77. Bismarck had a curious racial theory of his own. The Germans, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the English, the Hungarians, and the Turks were, he said, “masculine” races; the Slavs and the Celts were “feminine”; the French and the Italians were hermaphroditic—Hamilton, The Vanished Pomps of yesterday, 28.
14 all men are not created equal: The philosophical premises of the romantic philosophy of coercion which challenged the philosophy of the free state are analyzed by Harry V. Jaffa in A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), esp. 94-96, 100-02, 329-30. See also Shearer Davis Bowman, “Antebellum Planters and Vormarz Junkers in Comparative Perspective,” AMH, vol. 85, no. 4 (October 1980), 800-01; Peter Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude: American Proslavery and Russian Proserfdom Arguments, 1760-1860,” AHR, vol. 85, no. 4 (October 1980), 811, 817; and Hans L. Trefousse, “Unionism and Abolition: Political Mobilization in the North,” in 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), 101-02.