When no child was forthcoming, the empress herself arranged for Catherine to take her first lover, Serge Saltykov. A son, Grand Duke Paul, was born. Catherine was not beautiful, but she was handsome, small and curvaceous, with bright blue eyes and thick auburn hair. She went on to take other lovers, though she only had a dozen in her entire lifetime—almost seventy years—which hardly justifies her reputation as a nymphomaniac. She was never promiscuous, more a serial dater. She enjoyed sex but was more of a romantic who longed to settle with one man.
Amid the vicious rivalries at the Russian court during the Seven Years’ War, Catherine’s intrigues almost destroyed her. But she used her cunning and charm to survive, shrewdly taking Grigory Orlov, a popular Guards officer, as her lover. When Elizaveta died and her husband succeeded to the throne, Peter III took only six months to alienate everyone. On June 28, 1762, dressed in male uniform, Catherine seized power. By the rules of the day, Peter had to be murdered to protect her dubious claim to the throne; the Orlovs strangled him—and she knew she would forever bear the blame.
Once in power, however, she ruled cautiously and sensibly. She set about expanding Russia south toward the Black Sea, seizing territory from the Ottoman Turks. She called a legislative commission to study the abolition of serfdom and the making of proper laws. She corresponded with the philosophes, including Voltaire, who hailed her as the Great. The huge peasant revolt of Pugachev and the realities of aristocratic rule meant that many of these ambitions ended in disappointment, but her rule was decent, sensible and orderly—she worked hard to make Russian law and society more merciful and humane.
When her long relationship with Orlov broke down, Catherine found the love of her life, who was also to be her partner in power. Prince Potemkin was a dashing one-eyed cavalry general who was as politically brilliant as she was; but where he was wild and imaginative, she was sensible and diligent. The combination worked. Their fiery sexual affair started in late 1773, recorded in the most outrageous and romantic letters ever written by a monarch. They probably married, secretly, but when their affair ended, Potemkin became her co-ruler and best friend. Together they fought the Turks, annexed the Crimea, built cities, outwitted the English, constructed a Black Sea fleet, bought art collections. Following Potemkin’s advice, Catherine found love with a series of ever-younger favorites, whom she enjoyed teaching about the classics, but who played no political role. These young men usually humiliated the old empress by running off with a girl their own age, leaving Potemkin to comfort her. When he died in 1791, the aging Catherine was heartbroken and allowed a talentless young lover, Platon Zubov, to replace him, leading to political mistakes, including the annexation of Poland and a bungled Swedish alliance.
Catherine’s achievements—political, military and artistic—were colossal nevertheless. Her reign was a golden age, her vision of Russia essentially a liberal one, and her character exuded invincibility. Catherine the Great remains not only the paragon of Russian rulers, but history’s most accomplished female potentate.
POTEMKIN
1739–91
An inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, bravery and timidity, ambition and insouciance.
Louis Philippe, comte de Segur
Grigory Potemkin was born of poor gentry near Smolensk in 1739, but he grew up to be so beautiful and intelligent that he was compared to Alcibiades. He was a scholar who, fascinated by religion, craved the priesthood, but instead he joined the Guards and helped bring Catherine to power. He fell in love with her but was ten years her junior, and she was still with her permanent lover, Orlov. She knew that Potemkin was so dominating, demanding, passionate and gifted that he would be a difficult partner. But when Catherine faced a political crisis in 1773, they embarked on a wildly sexual romance. Potemkin was much too energetic and talented to be a kept man. Instead, Catherine promoted him to the rank of prince, and he became her partner in power. As their passion, but not their friendship, dwindled they each took other lovers.
Like Catherine, Potemkin prided himself on decency, tolerance and humanity. As co-tsar and viceroy of the south, he annexed the Crimea in 1783 (becoming Prince of Taurida), founded the naval base of Sebastapol and created the Russian Black Sea fleet. He also founded a series of cities, from Kherson to Odessa, then led Russian forces in the war against the Turks, in which he stormed Ismail, and conquered the southern Ukraine and Black Sea coast. But during his later years he became increasingly powerful, extravagant and bizarre.
“The most extraordinary man I ever met,” wrote the Prince de Ligne, “constantly reclining yet never sleeping, trembling for others, brave for himself, bored in the midst of pleasure, unhappy for being too lucky, a profound philosopher, able minister, sublime politician or like a ten-year-old child, embracing the feet of the Virgin, or the alabaster neck of his mistress. What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and more genius.” This one-eyed giant enchanted and scandalized Europe like a sultan in The Arabian Nights, even seducing one princess by serving plates of diamonds instead of pudding. Pushkin hailed the “glory of his name,” while Stalin reflected: “What was Catherine the Great’s achievement? To appoint talented men like Potemkin to rule Russia.”
Potemkin died in 1791 on an open Bessarabian steppe, weeping over Catherine’s letters. When she heard the news she collapsed: “There’ll never be another Potemkin.” Theirs was one of the great love stories of history, in a league with that of Napoleon and Josephine or Antony and Cleopatra, but more romantic and much more successful than either of those.
WASHINGTON
1732–1799
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves … The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.
George Washington, in his general orders to the Continental Army (July 2, 1776)
George Washington, the first president of the United States and commander of the American army in the War of Independence against Britain, remains the paragon of the decent, honest—and hugely gifted—leader. Covered in glory, blessed with all the talents, equipped for the highest office and command, he was a gentleman who combined virtue and modesty with ambition to serve. Legend has it that he turned down a crown, though in fact there was no scepter to offer. He set the standards of probity and honesty for every president who followed him.
Born in Virginia in 1732 to a family of landowners who had emigrated from northern England in 1657, Washington started in public service as a brash young lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia. In May 1754 he commanded a small force in—and perhaps initiated—the opening engagement of the French and Indian War (at the Battle of Jumonville Glen), which would eventually become the worldwide Anglo-French conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. A few days later he built Fort Necessity on the Ohio River, though when it was besieged by a larger French force, he was eventually forced to capitulate—the only surrender of his career. The next year he again fought the French, under British general Edward Braddock.
His natural talents, military and administrative, earned his promotion to colonel and commander-in-chief of the Virginian troops in 1755, at only age twenty-three, and in 1758 he served under General John Forbes in the successful campaign to capture the French Fort Duquesne. Afterward, Washington returned to his Mount Vernon estate, married a wealthy widow, Martha Curtis, and entered politics. In June 1774 he led the Virginia legislature’s call for a continental congress to coordinate opposition to unpopular British colonial policies. In June 1775, after fighting had broken out, Congress unanimously elected him commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.
During the War of Independence, Washington managed to train the American army and to hold together all the different personalities and the differing characters of the states that made up the alliance, even in the face of defeat and adversity. Having forced the British to evacuate Boston in 1776, after a year-long siege, he committed mistakes
in his defense of New York, losing the Battle of Long Island (the largest battle of the war) to General Howe and retreating, short of men and supplies, into Pennsylvania. Late in the year, however, he crossed back into New Jersey and took the British by surprise, defeating them at Trenton and Princeton.
But in 1777 his forces were defeated at the Brandywine in September and at Germantown in October, and Howe occupied Philadelphia. Washington led his army to Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where the weakened forces encamped through the winter of 1777–8, perhaps the lowest ebb of the revolutionary cause. It was Washington’s personality above all that held together his broken army during that long winter. He used his almost dictatorial wartime powers with caution, tempered with bold action and skilled improvisation, common sense and respect for civil power. Aided by French entry into the war, in 1781 Washington commanded the superb Yorktown campaign against the British commander Cornwallis, whose army was besieged in the Virginia town which, after much bombardment, surrendered on October 19, 1781. This was to be the final major battle of the war.
After his victories, Washington retired to Mount Vernon. In 1787 he attended the Philadelphia Convention that discussed the creation of a new American government. Washington was elected president of the convention but refrained from joining the debate. The office of president of the United States was created to head the new government, and in 1788 Washington was elected to the post, winning re-election in 1792. As president, he attempted to maintain neutrality between the pro-French faction led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and the pro-British faction of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, but he generally favored the latter, angering those who supported the French revolutionary cause and wanted another war with Britain. When Washington’s second term ended, he refused to stand for a third, setting a precedent that held for 140 years before being enshrined in law by the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951.
His calm, dignified leadership was followed by a civilized return to private life at Mount Vernon, where this democratic hero of talent and decency, the founder of a future superpower, died of a throat infection in 1799.
JEFFERSON
1743–1826
I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
J.F. Kennedy, welcoming forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962
Thomas Jefferson was a radical polymath who put into words the principles of the American Revolution and then put those words into practice as a statesman. Private, intense and simultaneously possessed of matchless generosity of spirit, grace and sensitivity, Jefferson was a man almost without compare who advanced the cause of liberty across the world.
Jefferson’s intellect was second to none. The son of a wealthy Virginian planter, he could, at college and while studying law, as a close friend recalled, “tear himself away from his dearest friends, to fly to his studies.” Gracious and charming in manner, he nonetheless had an intense dislike of oral debate and rarely spoke in public. But the intricate brilliance of the young politician was quickly noted in Virginia’s colonial legislature.
Jefferson’s power was in his pen. It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. As a delegate at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Jefferson became the chief author of the document repudiating British sovereignty. In his exposition he championed universal liberty and equality. It was the first charter of civil rights, the founding document of freedom. The stamp of Jefferson’s peerless mind, his determination to secure liberty and his immense generosity toward his fellow men are apparent in the declaration’s every word.
Elected to the new Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson was determined to translate his ideals into practice in Virginia’s new constitution. He secured the abolition of primogeniture and entail. He tried in vain to introduce a scheme of universal education but later succeeded in founding the University of Virginia, which he considered among his greatest achievements. A deist himself, Jefferson pushed through a statute for religious freedom that established the complete separation of church and state, a division that lies at the very core of American democracy.
Jefferson’s passionate belief in freedom at times made his liberalism somewhat anarchic. “Was ever such a prize won with so little blood?” he asked during the early years of the French Revolution. He earned a reputation as a demagogic radical, but as the third president of the United States from 1801 Jefferson showed restraint and sensitivity in preventing the ideological schism that threatened to fracture the infant nation. He was an extraordinarily intense man, but was almost incapable of animosity. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he declared at his inauguration.
The Republican Jefferson believed government’s paramount duty was to protect the individual’s right to “life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He deplored the Federalists’ readiness to curtail civil rights in the supposed interests of the nation. But he concealed his extraordinary passions. His even-tempered approach quelled fears. Americans embraced republican principles, realizing that Jefferson’s protection of liberty would protect them too.
In one of the first acts of his presidency in 1801, Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the pirate state of Tripoli the extortionate tribute it demanded in return for safe passage of American ships on the high seas. In so doing, he sent America for the first time into combat against an Islamic power in the Middle East.
Nominally vassals of the Ottoman empire, but in reality independent states run by corsair dynasties, the regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were known, along with the sultanate of Morocco, as the Barbary States. Unashamedly piratical, they existed very profitably on the revenue garnered from slave trading, looting, tribute and ransom.
The ships of the newly independent United States, now lacking British naval protection, were prime targets. Only substantial tributes could secure them some relief. By 1801 America was paying out 20 percent of her annual federal revenue to the pirate states. When Jefferson assumed the presidency, he was determined to prove that war was preferable to tribute and ransom.
The Karamanli dynasty of Tripoli ruled what is now Libya. Pasha Yusuf Karamanli defied American power: “I do not fear war, it is my trade.” Prospects initially looked bleak. In October 1803 the USS Philadelphia was shipwrecked and its crew taken captive by Tripoli. Infiltrating Tripoli harbor in February 1804, a daring young officer named Stephen Decatur set fire to the Philadelphia and thwarted the corsairs’ hopes of turning the pride of the US fleet into a pirate ship. But his attempts to blow up Tripoli’s fleet backfired, killing eleven US servicemen.
The erstwhile US consul to Tunis, William Eaton, managed almost single-handedly to reverse the fortunes of war. A maverick, educated at the elite Dartmouth College, fluent in Greek and Latin, a veteran of the Indian wars who could throw a knife with deadly precision from eighty feet, Eaton fulminated at the prospect of “bartering our national glory for the forbearance of a Barbary pirate.” He proposed conquering Tunis with a force of 1000 marines. Then he suggested ways of enforcing regime change in Libya. The US secretary of state rejected both proposals.
Eaton acted unilaterally instead. He recruited a Karamanli prince, Hamet, in Egypt, and with nine marines and a mercenary force of 400 he led his motley troop of Arabs and Christians on a 500-mile desert march to launch a surprise attack on Tripoli’s second-largest city, Derna (modern Darnah). In the fierce pitched battle that ensued, Eaton and Hamet emerged triumphant. But Eaton’s plans to make good his coup and march on Tripoli were thwarted. The pasha hastily offered the USA a treaty, which US naval officials immediately negotiated. Hamet was sent back to Egypt. Deeply disappointed, Eaton returned to America—a renegade hero whose role in American history has never been fully acknowledged.
Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States. This bold move, seizin
g on Napoleon’s unexpected offer to sell French territory, was a decision taken (as Jefferson freely admitted) without constitutional authority. It was an act that secured America’s stability and created what Jefferson called an “empire for liberty.” It also earned him a landslide election to a second term as president.
The man who declared that “all men are created equal” has been censured for his racial attitudes. Jefferson was a staunch opponent of slavery, yet he owned large numbers of slaves on his Virginian plantation. His only book, Notes on Virginia, revealed in its discussion of slavery a deep opposition to racial mixing and at times a surprising degree of racism.
Jefferson recognized his fundamental hypocrisy, based on an irreconcilable opposition between justice and self-preservation. “We have the wolf by the ears,” he remarked of slavery to a friend, “and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” Jefferson was no less anxious to shield his private life from posterity than from his contemporaries, but what we know of it shows the confusion of his attitudes. It has only recently been revealed that while ambassador to France (1785–9) Jefferson began a long relationship with his slave Sally Hemings (who was the half-sister of his beloved deceased wife Martha).
Jefferson’s energy and creativity were phenomenal. He knew French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon. At seventy-one he read Plato in the original (he thought it overrated). He collated Native American dialects. He was a keen archaeologist who pioneered new methods of excavation on the Indian burial mounds on his estate, and an oenophile who promoted the establishment of American vineyards. He smuggled back plants and seeds from his travels to enrich his new country. He invented a swivel chair and an early form of automatic door. He was a magnificent architect: his own constructions—the University of Virginia and his Virginian estate of Monticello—are now World Heritage Sites. His library, which he left to the American nation, became the Library of Congress.
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