Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  But Prince Orlov had a plan to forestall the liberal revolution. If he could not resist emancipation itself, he hoped to prevent the peasants from acquiring land at the same time they obtained liberty. Without land, the peasant might be nominally free; but he would in fact be dependent on his old master. With pretended goodwill and secret malice the Prince set about raising innumerable procedural questions concerning the proposed legislation. He hoped, through this strategy of passive resistance, to break down the spirit of his adversaries. He would try their tempers. The Tsar’s younger brother, the volatile Grand Duke Constantine, the most energetic of the reformers, was an especially tempting target. The reactionaries despised him. They also thought he might crack; Constantine’s mind, Prince Menshikov said, had been “unhinged by masturbation.” If he could be broken . . .

  It happened largely as Prince Orlov foresaw. The question of emancipation became enmeshed in a tangle of committees. Behind the stucco façades of Saint Petersburg tempers rose, and nerves rubbed raw by the tiresome work of drafting complicated documents gave way. The Tsar became impatient. When Prince Orlov reminded his sovereign that the questions in dispute were difficult and complex, Alexander replied, “I am more than ever convinced how difficult and complex this question is, but all the same I desire and demand that your committee produce a general conclusion as to how it is to be undertaken, instead of burying it in the files under various pretexts.”

  At last the hatreds could no longer be suppressed. The party of force charged the reformers with being “reds.” The reformers accused the reactionaries of duplicity. An explosion was inevitable.

  At length it came. Grand Duke Constantine accosted Prince Orlov. Imperial functionaries looked on in astonishment as the Tsar’s younger brother told the Prince that he “greatly doubted” the sincerity of men who “instead of removing difficulties, did all they could to increase them.” It was the moment Prince Orlov had patiently awaited. He played his part to the hilt. With a show of outraged gallantry he resorted to the language of the Code Duello. He told the Grand Duke that his words were an insult to the honor of the Russian nobility. The Grand Duke was not one to bear such a reproach tamely. Whether he went so far as to tell Prince Orlov that the nobility of Russia was not worthy to be spit upon, or whether he contented himself with the observation that true nobility did not exist in Russia, is a matter of dispute; but it was shortly afterwards arranged by the Tsar that the Grand Duke should undertake an extended naval cruise in the Mediterranean.

  The difficulties in which the reformers found themselves did not end with the abrupt departure of Grand Duke Constantine for the fleet. General Rostovtsev began to despair of carrying out the work with which the Tsar had entrusted him. He fell sick with exhaustion. Alexander became alarmed. He did what he could to raise the old man’s spirits. “Do not lose heart,” he told Rostovtsev, “just as I do not despond, although I, too, have much grief to bear. Let us pray God together that He may give us strength. I embrace you with all my heart.” But the Tsar’s encouragement was in vain; the old soldier sank rapidly. Soon he was confined to his bed. Alexander gave orders that the sick man was on no account to be disturbed; but Rostovtsev continued to labor over his papers. With the little strength that remained to him he prepared a memorandum in which he set forth all that remained to be done. He intended his testament, as the document became known, for the Tsar’s use after his death, which he foresaw must follow all too soon.

  The Tsar visited the dying man in his house. Rostovtsev looked into his sovereign’s eyes. “Sire,” he said, “do not fear them.”

  While Alexander knelt in prayer at the bedside in February 1860, Rostovtsev died. The weeping monarch helped to carry the coffin. Yet no sooner had he laid his faithful servant in the grave than he determined to put in his place Count Panin, a courtier who opposed reform. The Tsar, it seemed, did fear them.

  “Things assumed a very gloomy aspect,” one observer wrote. “The question whether the liberation would take place at all was now asked.” “The liberation will be postponed,” it was said. The Tsar and his ministers “fear a revolution.”

  Washington, January-February 1861

  IN AGREEING TO be Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward appeared to abandon his pursuit of a conciliatory policy towards the South. But the love of supremacy is not easily surrendered, and Seward’s aspiring nature soon found a new channel in which to work. On January 12, 1861, fifteen days after he had gone to Senator Crittenden’s Committee and voted down the proposal to revive the Missouri line, Seward rose in the Senate. He spoke with an air of sadness. His tone was soft. Gone was the fervor with which he had, a decade before, denounced the peacemaking efforts of Daniel Webster. Forgotten, for the moment, was the belief he had expressed two years earlier, his conviction that the conflict between slavery and freedom was irrepressible. The question before the nation was, Seward confessed, perplexing. He himself opposed any extension of slavery into the territories; but he knew that many of his fellow citizens felt differently. He feared that these disagreements would lead to a civil war, which must in the end be fatal to the nation. He said that he did not know what the Union would be worth if it were preserved by the sword—and he opened the door to compromise on the territorial question in order to forestall what he called a “disastrous revolution.”

  Seward professed, in his Senate oration, to be in difficulties and doubts. But his conscience or vanity had already decided the question by which he pretended to be perplexed. He knew that if his policy of compromise were to bear fruit, he must conceal it, or show it, at most, in half-lights. He could not risk a breach with Lincoln; but in a private setting he threw away the mask. To Baron de Stoeckle, Tsar Alexander’s envoy at Washington, Seward declared that, in spite of the vote he cast in Senator Crittenden’s Committee, he remained sympathetic to a revival of the Missouri line, the idea which lay at the heart of Crittenden’s proposed compromise. “It seems to me,” Seward said, “that if I am absent only three days, this Administration, the Congress, and the District, would fall into consternation and despair. I am the only hopeful, calm, conciliatory person here.” At a dinner party given by Stephen A. Douglas, Seward proposed a significant toast. “Away,” he declared, “with all parties, all platforms, all previous committals, and whatever else will stand in the way of restoration of the American Union!” The assembled party drank off the bumper; and so forcefully did old Senator Crittenden afterwards set down his glass that it shattered on the table.

  The French Minister at Washington thought Seward’s pronouncements clouded with ambiguity; but Frances Seward had a surer perception of her husband’s object. She shuddered to think that he was following in the steps of the man whose apostasy he had once condemned. Her husband, she saw, was taking the path “that led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave.” One of Seward’s colleagues in the Senate agreed. “God damn you, Seward,” the Senator said, “you’ve betrayed your principles and your party; we’ve followed your lead long enough.” But Seward’s pride rose high; all that was weakest, and all that was strongest, in him urged him forward, and determined him to be the preserver of the Republic in its last extremity.

  Seward’s transactions in January and February 1861 are obscured by sophistry and dissimulation, the usual devices with which a politician seeks to conceal his most daring maneuvers. The intrigue was a deep one; we will never know all the winks and nods. But it is certain that Lincoln himself was alarmed. The President-Elect had repeatedly disavowed any intention of compromise on the question of slavery in the territories; yet troubling rumors reached him, in Springfield, of a secret challenge to his authority. So concerned was he by the enemy within that on February 1 he wrote a letter to Seward. The letter was, in several respects, extraordinary. Lincoln reiterated his instructions to his future Secretary of State, even though those instructions had all along been perfectly clear. He did not raise the question of infidelity directly, but it is evident that he scented betrayal. He was, he said
, “baffled” by the confusion which had arisen concerning what he called the “vexed question” of slavery in the territories. The President-Elect described how William Kellogg, an Illinois Congressman, had recently come to see him in Springfield. Kellogg was, Lincoln wrote, “in a good deal of anxiety, seeking to ascertain to what extent I would be consenting for our friends to go in the way of compromise” on the territorial question.

  “I say now, however, as I have all the while said,” the President-Elect told Seward, “that on the territorial question—that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices,—I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation. And any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire, is the object of all these proposed compromises. I am against it.”

  Lincoln had reason to be alarmed. No one did faster, darker political work than the New Yorker. Seward was a master of the political trap, and although the President-Elect had so far eluded him, he knew that he might yet find himself caught up in his old adversary’s nets. “Serpentine Seward,” they called him. “The majority of those around me,” Seward said, “are determined to pull the house down.” But “I am determined not to let them.”

  Berlin and Saint Petersburg, February-March 1861

  AT THE HEART of the German revolution lay the army.

  In the middle of the seventeenth century, when princes across Europe were breaking down the limited monarchies of the Middle Ages in order to replace them with new régimes organized on principles of absolutism, those who succeeded owed their success to large bodies of professional troops. Friedrich Wilhelm, the “Great Elector” of Prussia, took note; he gathered together a few thousand men and formed them into a standing army. It was the nucleus of what would become, in time, one of the mightiest war machines the world has ever seen. In Prussia, liberty was at the mercy of those who wielded the sword.

  The free-state liberals in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Kingdom’s Parliament, were determined to change this. They wanted to convert the Great Elector’s “soldier state”—his military régime—into a Rechtsstaat, a state grounded in the rule of law. To this end they sought control over the army the Great Elector had created. In 1861, they saw their chance. The Prussian arms were not quite what they had been. Albrecht von Roon, a Pomeranian nobleman and Prussian officer, drew up a plan to revive the military grandeur of the Kingdom. He proposed to enlarge the regular (or line) army—the school of Prussian valor—at the expense of the territorial militia (or Landwehr), which he regarded as an unreliable “citizen army” enfeebled by a middle-class officer corps.

  The free-state men balked at the proposed reforms. Roon’s reformation, they said, would militarize the nation. Prussia would be covered with barracks. The country would be in the grip of a military caste—the monocled, beplumed, sword-bearing Junkers. The renovated war machine would be staffed with precisely those “men known to oppose the liberal spirit of the time and resolved upon fighting that spirit with every possible means, including nationwide military indoctrination.” In contrast to the French nobles, who two centuries before had been seduced by Louis XIV into a luxurious slavery, and whose remaining power had been broken by the French Revolution, the Junkers were, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a potent force in the state. Unlike the aristocrats of England, the Junkers had not been shorn of their claws by a strong and self-confident commons, a middle class jealous of its liberties. Nor had they, like the Russian nobles, been stripped of their pride by despots like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

  It was precisely because the Prussian warrior class retained its fighting spirit that the Kingdom’s free-state men were determined to prevent Roon’s reformation of the army. They insisted that King Wilhelm did not have the power to effect a military reorganization of the state. Under the Prussian constitution, they argued, the sovereign could reorganize the army only with the consent of the legislature, which in theory controlled the purse strings of the Kingdom.

  This was too much for Wilhelm, the old soldier who, in 1861, acceded to the throne following the death of his brother, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In Prussia the King was by a long tradition the Supreme Warlord; it was only from courtesy that Wilhelm laid before the legislators his plans to remodel the army. The King flew into a rage. The reformation of the army was a cause dear to his heart; it lay close to the meaning of his life. But the liberals refused to back down. It was a question of power. A crisis loomed.

  While Berlin was agitated by these events, Otto von Bismarck, forty-five years old at the beginning of 1861, was far away in Saint Petersburg, where he served as Prussian Ambassador to the court of the Tsar. The character of the envoy was not simple: Bismarck was a sphinx with too many riddles. “Faust complains of having two souls in his breast,” he said. “I have a whole squabbling crowd. It goes on as in a republic.” Yet the squabbling was not in vain, for it resulted in a pronounced originality of thought and utterance. Bismarck was a man who carried his own Walpurgisnacht7 around with him. He once fantasized that he was a bomb, and he confessed himself capable of lying awake through a whole night “hating.” Undoubtedly, his dreams were violent, his imagination washed in the darker oils; at the heart of Bismarckian self-culture was the question, “What have you really hated till now?”

  Hatred, whatever else it may be, is a powerful mental stimulus. Bismarck had, with all his angry passions, a highly developed interior life, and a rich imagination. He was a voluptuary of power, alive to those great, sometimes wicked energies that move nations and shape the course of history. His realism was subsequently to become notorious; but what is sometimes called realism is often a cleverly disguised capacity for fantasy, the instinct of a powerful imagination to overlay the objects with which it deals with a film of fancy. Bismarck said that his imaginative faculties were the most notable element of his character; his nature, he maintained, was essentially dreamy. The great leader, like the great artist, is the most inspired fantasist: he sees the object not only as it is, but as it can be, and persuades others to submit to his hallucination.

  This element of romance in Bismarck’s realism gave him the keenest insight into the mysterious fatality of events; he once said that a statesman “cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.” The man who claimed to hear the historic footfall of the Deity possessed an iron will and an inordinate love of power, yet he was also nervous and oddly tender. A revolution, he knew, is the offspring of poetry and hatred; yet many years after an inspired loathing enabled him to achieve his revolutionary ends, Bismarck dismissed all the fame and authority he had acquired as insignificant compared to his greatest blessing. He was grateful, he said, that “God did not take any of my children from me.”

  The discrepancies of soul which, in a short time, would enable Bismarck to undertake a revolution as momentous as Lincoln’s and Alexander’s flowed from the deeper contradictions of his blood. Bismarck was a Junker. (The term derives from the Middle High German word for “young nobleman.”) He prided himself on his descent from a race of German knights. The Junkers were, of all the hereditary aristocracies of Europe, one of the poorest. With the possible exception of the Castilians, they were the most haughty. The Junkers had not the large incomes, the splendid country seats, the palatial town houses which the greatest peers of England and France possessed. In many cases the Junker’s manor was little more than a farmhouse, adorned, if it were adorned at all, with a rusting cannon or two. (The Junker’s notions, even in matters of art, were all military.) The lord of the manor, as often as not, bridled his own mount, and his lady milked her own cows. Lacking the exterior attributes of an aristocratic class, the Jun
kers insisted all the more vehemently on the distinction of blood. Their order took on the qualities of a caste; and in Prussia the line that demarcated the patrician from the plebeian was sharper than in England or even in Russia. If the English nobility was the most democratic of the European aristocracies, the Prussian was the most peremptory and exclusive.

  A Junker was thought to degrade himself if he espoused the daughter of a middle-class burgher. Although his peasants were no longer his vassals—serfdom had been abolished in Prussia in 1807—the Junker nevertheless exercised over his tenants a paternal supervision, and extracted from them many proofs of obsequious submission. A Junker might, in conversing with a man of inferior condition, employ the familiar form of the personal pronoun, du (thou); but his interloctutor had always to respond with the deferential Sie (you). To engage in trade or finance was, for a Junker, tantamount to disgrace; if he desired occupation or needed income, the Junker entered the service of the King. Commissions in the line army went, with rare exceptions, to Junkers; and in the recruitment of its officer corps Prussia continued to be guided by the maxim laid down, in the eighteenth century, by Frederick the Great, who said that the “promotion of a burgher to the status of an army officer is the first step in the decline of a state.”

  Bismarck sprang from the primitive nobility of Germany, but his house had fallen on hard times and could lay claim only to a slender fortune. The family estate at Schönhausen stood in a park of limes sixty miles west of Berlin. Its formal gardens had been laid out in the French style; as a boy Bismarck liked to take potshots at a moss-covered statue of Hercules which stood in one of the groves. But the parterres were overgrown with weeds, and the faded manor house, with the coat-of-arms carved into the gray stone over the door, bore witness to the degeneration of a line. The young Bismarck grew up surrounded by presentiments of decay—a familiar formula for revolutionary statesmanship, which often thrives in the soil of decadent gentility. The life of the North German gentry was a perpetual struggle to make the land pay, but the result was rarely adequate to the maintenance of seigneurial self-respect, and in their contests with a dry and sandy soil many old families sunk by degrees into debt, lost their estates, and fell into obscurity.