At six in the morning on March 7, an urgent dispatch for Metternich arrived from the Austrian Consulate in Genoa, Italy, with news that Napoleon had slipped out of his island prison at Elba. “Bony’s conduct is very extraordinary,” Wellington, who had just taken Castlereagh’s place as England’s representative at the congress, wrote on hearing of the escape, adding that he found Napoleon’s actions worthy of “one fit for Bedlam.”47 Napoleon, who had with him about a thousand men, declared on landing at the southern coast of France: “The Congress is dissolved.”48 Wellington left immediately to take command of British forces stationed in Belgium. Six days later, the congress declared Bonaparte an outlaw, having “placed himself beyond the protection of the law and rendered himself subject to public vengeance.”49 Napoleon returned triumphantly to Paris, where he reclaimed his throne and defied the rest of Europe for one last time, and on March 25, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to provide one hundred fifty thousand men each to defeat him. Before long a million men were on the march. Napoleon’s return changed surprisingly little at Vienna. With the most challenging questions already settled, the negotiations continued uninterrupted during the fighting, and the representatives of the great powers worked to finalize the details of a comprehensive agreement.
The final acts of the Congress of Vienna were signed on June 9, 1815, nine days before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The agreement restructured the borders of Europe and established a framework that provided a durable peace in Europe. By driving a wedge between the victorious great powers and exploiting their differences, Talleyrand was able to gain a seat at the table and to ensure that despite France’s military defeat, its interests were protected as Europe’s borders were redrawn. Austria emerged almost twice its previous size, adding Dalmatia on the Adriatic and control of much of northern Italy, including Parma, Modena, and Tuscany. Prussia, though disappointed, emerged as the dominant power in Northern Europe, while France surrendered its conquests and returned to its “ancient frontiers” before the rise of Napoleon.
The Congress of Vienna consolidated over three hundred pre-Napoleonic German kingdoms and principalities into thirty states joined in a loose German confederation that covered most of present-day Central Europe and extended from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The congress established Switzerland as a neutral, independent state, re-created a nominal Kingdom of Poland and made it subject to Russia (which soon absorbed it entirely), gave Norway to Sweden, and abolished the international slave trade. Saxony remained independent and kept three-fifths of its territory and two-thirds of its population. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, which Great Britain sought to strengthen and enlarge as a buffer on the coast, received Belgium, Luxembourg, and adjacent territory. The balance of power largely held, and Europe would not see a major, continent-wide conflict until World War I, nearly a hundred years later.
Chapter 4
The Portsmouth Treaty
1905
With the balance of power holding Russian ambitions in check in Europe in the late nineteenth century, Russia turned its attention eastward. The lack of effective central governments in China, Korea, and Manchuria created a vacuum that enabled Russia to extend its influence deep into the Far East, carving out exclusive trading zones and occupying a large swath of northern China and Manchuria. Japan, an emerging industrial power recently awoken from two hundred years of feudal isolation, had its own designs on the region and its raw materials, and saw Russian expansion as an intrusion into its sphere of influence and a strategic threat.
In February 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack against Russian forces in Manchuria and inflicted humiliating losses on the larger but poorly led Russian army. Russian troops dug in, reinforced by fresh soldiers brought over the Trans-Siberian Railway, and by early 1905, the war had cost more than one hundred fifty thousand lives, with no end in sight. Russia and Japan both rejected mediation efforts, each believing that continued fighting would work in its favor. The Japanese public, intoxicated by victories, demanded more, while Tsar Nicholas II placed his confidence in Russia’s bottomless reserve of men and material. Nevertheless, American President Theodore Roosevelt saw an opportunity.
The United States, an ascendant power, also lay at a turning point. With the Civil War behind it and the taming of the West complete, the United States consolidated its position as a continent-wide power. Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, America’s population doubled, and by 1900 the United States was producing a third of the world’s cotton, corn, and oil, and half of its manufactured goods. U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 broadened American horizons, and the American public became interested in the United States playing a more assertive role on the world stage. While President Roosevelt’s experience in international diplomacy was limited, his irrepressible confidence and sharp political instincts led him to believe he could bring Russia and Japan together and secure peace. At stake lay the future of the Far East, and Roosevelt worried that if war continued, Japan’s and Russia’s ties with other European powers would draw them in and ignite a global conflict.
Roosevelt suspected both parties were in worse shape than they admitted. Russia had suffered savage losses, and the Japanese, despite their unbroken string of victories, felt the strain of fighting an enemy three times their size. Worldwide public opinion, appalled by the scale of bloodshed, had turned against the war, and this had begun to affect the belligerents’ ability to raise money for supplies and ammunition.
President Roosevelt faced two serious obstacles. First, he believed correctly that the Russian secret service had broken the American diplomatic code, compromising his overseas communications. Second, John Hay, his secretary of state who in his younger days had been President Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary, was incapacitated by an illness that would soon take his life. As Hay put it: “There is nothing the matter with me except for old age, the Senate, and two or three mortal maladies.”1 Roosevelt would be on his own.
Russia and Japan at first were cold to the president’s advances. Secretary Hay complained in his diary that the Russian ambassador in Washington “throws a pink fit”2 reference to peace. The Japanese, although polite, were no less adamant. Roosevelt nevertheless believed continuing the war was folly. He felt that protracted fighting “would be a very bad thing for Japan, and an even worse thing for Russia.”3 He wrote that Japan had “nothing further to gain from continuation of the struggle; its continuance meant to her more loss than gain even if she were victorious,”4 while Russia, “in spite of her gigantic strength was . . . apt to lose even more than she had already lost.”5
After a year of fighting, the break Roosevelt hoped for came on May 27, 1905, when the Russian fleet met the Japanese navy in the Strait of Tsushima. With a torrent of two thousand shells a minute, the Japanese annihilated the Russian fleet, sending twenty-two Russian ships to the bottom of the Sea of Japan, and with them the tsar’s hopes for a quick victory. Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, remarked, “Neither Trafalgar nor the defeat of the Spanish Armada was as complete.”6 He told the Japanese now was the time for them “to build a bridge of gold for the beaten enemy,”7 and sent a telegram to both parties stating that “The President feels that the time has come when in the interest of all mankind he must endeavor to see if it is not possible to bring to an end the terrible and lamentable conflict now being waged.”8 He asked them “not only for their own sakes but in the interest of the whole civilized world to open direct negotiations for peace,”9 offered his good offices to help.
Tentative indications of interest from the Japanese led Roosevelt to cut short a five-week bear hunt in Colorado to return to Washington in pursuit of bigger game. With the Japanese in play, Roosevelt concentrated on finding a way to bring the Russians to the table. He considered his approach carefully. His concerns about the Russian ambassador in Washington, Count Arturo Cassini, whose unreliability in passing on messages to his governm
ent and tendency to “lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying”10 led Roosevelt to shift his focus to St. Petersburg and to direct George von Lengerke Meyer, his trusted ambassador there, to approach the tsar directly.
Meyer, an old friend of Roosevelt’s who had been in the class ahead of him at Harvard University, had previously been the U.S. ambassador in Italy. Meyer had been in St. Petersburg only seven weeks when Roosevelt asked him to set up a meeting with the tsar. “The trouble with our Ambassadors in stations of real importance,” Roosevelt wrote in his instructions, “is that they seem to think that the life of an Ambassador is a kind of glorified pink tea party. Now, at St. Petersburg I want some work done, and you are the man to do it.”11 In an audience at the Imperial Summer Palace, Meyer read the tsar a brutally frank letter from Roosevelt: “It is the judgment of all outsiders, including all of Russia’s most ardent friends, that the present war is absolutely hopeless and that to continue it will only result in the loss of all of Russian territory in Asia. To avert trouble, and, as he fears, what is otherwise inevitable disaster, the President most earnestly advises that an effort be made by . . . representatives of the two powers in order to terminate the present hostilities and prevent the grand-scale calamity which the President greatly fears.”12 Roosevelt concluded: “The President seriously wishes to receive his early approval for this proposition in order to avoid further bloodshed and catastrophe.”13 Meyer told the tsar that if he agreed it would save “possibly hundreds of thousands of lives”14 and win the respect of the world. As the audience drew to a close, the Tsar agreed to send a Russian delegation.
Russia and Japan each had a great deal to gain from a negotiation and a great deal to lose. Japan’s victories had thrown the Russians on the defensive, but its military pace was unsustainable. A diplomatic solution could secure the gains already won and bring further concessions as the price of peace, but if the Japanese negotiators overplayed their hand and the negotiation failed, Japan risked famine and economic collapse. Russia was in the embarrassing position of being larger, stronger, and richer, but with an unbroken record of defeats. Although it was able to threaten a prolonged war, that might only deepen its losses. The negotiation table was the best chance to achieve what the Russian army had failed: to stop the Japanese advance and regain lost territory. There was little room for error. Russia faced domestic pressures and simmering unrest that foretold revolution, and the Russian state was unlikely to survive either a humiliating peace or an open-ended string of costly defeats.
In a sign of difficulties to come, it took over two months for Russia and Japan to agree on a location. Angling for a home-field advantage, Russia preferred Paris, the capital of its closest ally, while Japan for similar reasons favored Chefoo in China. Roosevelt proposed The Hague in the Netherlands, which both promptly rejected, as Europe’s history of opportunistic meddling in the Far East raised legitimate doubts about its disinterestedness. The only actor both sides felt they could trust was the United States, so Washington, D.C. emerged as the obvious choice. Roosevelt, though, had misgivings about holding the talks in Washington. A British cabinet report called it “probably the most difficult theatre in the world for carrying on delicate negotiations.”15 Washington’s sweltering climate and intrusive, gossipy culture were invitations to trouble, so Roosevelt began looking for an appropriate place nearby where cooler heads could prevail without distraction. He was hoping for “some cool, comfortable and retired space, with as much freedom from interruption as possible.”16
He found it in the small coastal town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Located on the Maine-New Hampshire border a little more than fifty miles north of Boston, it offered a quiet spot secluded from outside pressures, while the large Navy base just across the Piscataqua River provided a secure location for the representatives to meet and a full complement of modern communications facilities. The people of Portsmouth were delighted, and extensive preparations were made. Western Union laid extra telegraph lines to connect the hotel and Navy Yard with the transatlantic trunk cable in nearby Rye Beach. Washington sent a twelve-man Secret Service contingent to provide security, and ten French waiters arrived from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to attend to the Russian delegation in case its members had difficulty ordering in English. A simple, two-story brick naval stores warehouse on the Navy base was chosen to house the talks, and two hundred men worked around the clock to prepare the building. Within two weeks they constructed a large central conference meeting room, a three-room suite on either side for each delegation, a dining room for lunch between meetings, and a reception room for visiting American dignitaries.
Russia and Japan had difficulty finding representatives, because insiders on both sides considered it a political suicide mission. After his top three choices declined, the tsar with great reluctance turned to Sergei Witte. When his name had been raised earlier as a potential envoy, the tsar replied firmly, “Anyone but Witte.”17 A former finance minister, Witte had served for many years under the tsar’s father, but had clashed with Nicholas II, whom he described as, “A well-intentioned child, whose actions were entirely dependent upon the character of his counselors, most of whom were bad.”18 Witte had long opposed the war, but he saw appointment as chief delegate to the peace conference as a political death sentence. After his appointment on July 13, he told a close friend:
Now this is what I think: I have been chosen not so much to render a service to my country as—figuratively speaking—to stumble and break my neck. They really want to go on with the war. It is calculated that the chances of my striking up a peace on really acceptable conditions are superlatively slight, and that in all probability, therefore, I shall fail. Then I shall be dead and buried. But my “well-wishers” go farther and argue that if I should succeed in ending the war on the terms that unfortunately are congruous with the military situation, my name will become odious to every self-respecting Russian.19
Sergei Iulievich Witte was born in 1849 to minor nobility of Dutch descent in the town of Tbilisi in southern Russia, now the capital of the Republic of Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus Mountains along the Turkish border. His family was moderately well-to-do, his father having begun as a storekeeper and built a successful enough banking business to serve as an adviser to the regional viceroy. Witte’s first job was as a porter and ticket clerk for the Odessa railway. He rose quickly as his superiors recognized his native intelligence and aptitude for logistics. The Russo-Turkish war of 1877 allowed him to prove himself under the needs and disciplines of war, and he so outshone his corrupt and incompetent colleagues that he was swiftly promoted to division superintendent, and then in 1889 to minister of railways.
Witte’s facility with organization, his despotic energy and his obsession with efficiency brought such order to the railroad tariffs that he was elevated to minister of ways and communications, and then, after only a year, to minister of finance. His rapid rise to the inner sanctum of the Russian elite brought him the mistrust of the upper nobility, and his ordering an investigation of Rasputin earned him the lasting hatred of the tsarina. Witte’s industriousness, however, made him indispensable, and with a mad enthusiasm he threw himself into the role of finance minister. He monopolized the government manufacture and distribution of vodka, rebuilt the industrial base, doubled the national revenue, established the gold standard, and amassed such quantities of gold in the Imperial Treasury that he was able to make the currency redeemable at par. His crowning achievement was the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which he organized and directed almost single-handedly. Still, for all Witte’s accomplishments, his domineering intensity and contemptuous treatment of the aristocracy returned to haunt him. Because of his resistance to the war, after eleven years as finance minister, having established himself as the most powerful man in Russia next to the Emperor, he was promoted upstairs into obscurity as president of the Council of Ministers. It was from this political exile that he was recalled to lead the Russian delegation.<
br />
Six-and-a-half-feet tall, Witte was a commanding figure. His long, taciturn face partly covered by a mustache and graying beard conveyed a gruff, electric intensity. There was a hypnotic quality about him, and one journalist wrote how “his great, earnest, eloquent eyes held you.”20 Witte’s character was complex. Respected for his honesty and ability, qualities in short supply in Russia at the time, he was moody and could be haughty and abrasive. The English ambassador in St. Petersburg was struck by his “rough manners, brusque speech and overpowering presence.”21 Witte was not easily impressed with anyone besides himself, and as is often the case with sensitive egos, he was unforgiving of the faults of others.
Witte’s deputy in the negotiation, Baron Roman Romanovich von Rosen, had recently replaced Count Cassini as the Russian ambassador in Washington. A genteel man, and a talented musician, he spoke several languages fluently, including Japanese. He had been the Russian ambassador to Japan and was highly regarded by the Japanese, and it was hoped that his engaging personality and urbane manners would prove a useful contrast to Witte’s blunt style. Sharply dressed, with warm but weathered features, Baron Rosen was the picture of diplomatic propriety. His skill lay in his methodical reliability, and an observer wrote, “He is incapable of a brilliant diplomatic stroke, but on the other hand he is incapable of making a grave diplomatic blunder.”22
Great Negotiations Page 7
