Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  A friend of Julius Caesar remarked, “For all his genius, Caesar could not see a way out.” Caesar aimed to dismantle a republic, Lincoln to transform one; but both men were equally revolutionaries; and they both found themselves, once the initial revolutionary thrust was made, unsure of what to do next. In the spring of 1861 Lincoln was no more able to “see a way out” than Caesar had been.

  The Secretary of State did not fail to detect the President’s tremulous uncertainty. In spite of the mortification it gave Seward to serve with his enemy, Salmon P. Chase, the imperious New Yorker had agreed to sit in Lincoln’s Cabinet. The State Department was too valuable a prize to sacrifice to the gratification of a personal enmity. Scarcely had he taken his seat when his sharp and jealous eye perceived an opportunity of arrogating a greater share of power to himself. Seward’s judgment was, by this time, debilitated by ambition as by a form of palsy. In the spring of 1861, the Secretary of State was furtively carrying on a negotiation with the South, one which he deliberately concealed from the President. To protect his policy of conciliation, he urged Lincoln to embrace a policy of militant nationalism. By provoking a war with a European power, Seward argued, the President could distract Americans from the difficulties of their domestic politics.

  Shortly before Fort Sumter fell, Seward made a play for power. In an effort to save his program of accommodation with the South, he told Lincoln that the administration was “without a policy, either foreign or domestic.” If, he said, the President was unable to “pursue and direct” a coherent line of policy, he must devolve the task “on some member of his Cabinet.” “It is not in my especial Province,” Seward modestly added. “But I seek neither to evade nor assume responsibility.”

  The Secretary of State was the first man of power in the President’s party to challenge his competence directly; but Lincoln knew that his own ascendancy was formal and precarious. If he did not act, other mutinies would follow.

  To save his revolution, he must fight.

  Berlin and Saint Petersburg, June-July 1861

  IN JUNE 1861 the Prussian general, Albrecht von Roon, wrote a letter to his old friend Otto von Bismarck in Saint Petersburg. Events at Berlin, Roon informed Bismarck, had gotten out of hand; things were “ripe for a blow-up.”

  The letter revived Bismarck’s drooping spirits. His vigorous qualities were going dormant. Unable to lay his hands on authority, he had tried to amuse himself with social life. His standard, however, was high; he once claimed that, outside the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris, polite society no longer existed in the world. In this respect the Russian capital fell short of his ideal. Bismarck conceded that there were still to be found, in Saint Petersburg, men of the old school, men who had been alive in the sunset of the eighteenth century, and whose conversation preserved the light and splendor of a vanished age. Such men had come of age during the reign of the first Tsar Alexander; they had received a classical education; they spoke fluently not only French but also German. Bismarck classed them with the “cream of European civilization.” But they were a dying breed, and the men of the next generation failed to come up to the lofty standard of the Alexandrine period. It was true, Bismarck said, that old Prince Orlov was remarkable both in character and courtesy. Peter Shuvalov had perhaps the “best brain” in the imperial government. But their minds were limited, their conversation confined to the commonplaces of “the court, the theater, and the army.”

  Yet Saint Petersburg had its consolations. Chief among them were the pleasures of the imperial court. In his various diplomatic wanderings Bismarck never encountered anything that approached the wealth and luxury of the Romanovs. Upon his arrival at one of the Tsar’s palaces— if only for a meeting with Prince Gorchakov, the Foreign Minister—Bismarck would as a matter of course be assigned, for his personal use, a suite of opulent rooms. Here there was no end of delightful surprises. Lavish lunches and dinners of several courses, accompanied by “three or four superb wines,” were punctually brought in—even on those occasions when he was to dine elsewhere in the palace. The food was “absolutely faultless.” The wine was memorable. Cupboards in the wall were found, on inspection, to be stocked with “wines of high quality and other needful goods.” The vintages were exquisite, “nothing but the very best.”10 The cost of the bottles, he said, “must have been terribly high.” But only an absurd Stoic would deny himself a glass of Latour or Lafitte while he dressed for dinner. When Bismarck traveled with the Tsar on the imperial train, the same standard of luxury prevailed. He would be shown to a comfortable seat in one of the blue saloon cars blazoned with the double-headed eagles of the dynasty. A tray of tea and coffee would at once be brought to him, together with biscuits, meat, cigars, and an excellent bottle of Bordeaux.

  There were other compensations. Bismarck rented a house on the English Quay, with a fine view of the Neva and the Nicholas Bridge. In contrast to his previous diplomatic post, in Frankfurt, he was able to spend a considerable amount of time with his three children, Mary Elizabeth Johanna, twelve years old at the beginning of 1861, Nicholas Ferdinand Herbert (Herbert), eleven, and William Otto Albert (Bill), eight. Every Saturday the children would come before their father with their exercise books to give him an account of their studies. Bismarck found time, too, to learn the Russian language, which he studied, mastered, and cherished. For exercise, there was the chase. On hunting expeditions with the great nobles, he would don a Russian hunting coat and follow the elk, the wolf, and the bear to his heart’s content. His reputation as a crack shot won him the admiration of the aristocracy, and Bismarck was amused to discover that the aura of a sportsman was not useless to the success of a diplomat.

  Yet he seldom appeared in society. Bismarck did not like to stay up late, and during the high season in Saint Petersburg the soirées which formed the heart of the city’s social existence did not begin until eleven o’clock or midnight. In the middle of a freezing winter night, men and women of fashion, who had earlier in the evening been to the theater or the ballet, or to a ball which had grown dull, climbed into their sleighs and were driven, through snowy streets, to one or another of the city’s illuminated palaces to drink champagne. Under baroque ceilings, fashionable ladies gossiped, and men of pleasure pursued pretty ballerinas. A second round of soirées, at which supper was served, began at two in the morning and did not break up until four or five. Bismarck found this social regimen injurious to heath and not necessary to diplomacy. He refused numerous invitations, though he made an exception for those of Grand Duchess Hélène, whom he pretended to like.

  He derived a much greater pleasure from the society of the Empress-Dowager Alexandra, the mother of Tsar Alexander. A curious intimacy grew up between the ancient widow, dressed always in black, and the middle-aged ambassador. Bismarck came to regard her as a foster mother. She was, by birth, a princess of the blood royal of Prussia: she was the sister of King Wilhelm. She doted on Bismarck. On his visits he would dine with her at her bedside, where she took most of her meals, or he would sit beside her on one of the terraces. The aged Empress would lie on a chaise-longue, knitting and playfully scolding her protégé. Alexandra, Bismarck said, was “goodness itself to me.” Her “charming naturalness has really something maternal in it, and I can confide in her as if I had known her from a child.” The Romanovs were fond of Bismarck; Alexander went so far as to offer him a place in the Russian diplomatic service.

  But neither the kindness nor the cellars of the imperial family could altogether assuage his bitter apprehension that history was passing him by. “Three years ago,” he wrote to his sister, “I should have made a useful Minister; but now the very thought nauseates me.” He had lost the season for action. Perhaps it was for the best; all that remained for him was to retire to some picturesque but insignificant diplomatic post. He rather fancied Switzerland. “Dull places with handsome surroundings,” he said, “are perfect for old people.”

  Then Roon’s letter arrived. Switzerland was forgotten. Bismarck repli
ed immediately in a letter which was at once an analysis of the political situation in Berlin and a bid for power. He had, he told Roon, a plan to overcome the opposition of the free-state liberals—a plan to make a “break with the Chamber.”

  Chapter 6

  VIOLENCE

  Virginia, July 1861

  THE SUN ROSE as the main body of the Union Army marched out of the camp at Arlington. Thirty thousand soldiers moved in four columns along the Virginia roads. At their head was Irvin McDowell. He was forty-two years old, a brigadier general, a graduate of West Point; he had devoted his life to the army. Yet he had not, as he rode out of camp, the look of a conquering hero.

  He had been given the order to march by Lincoln, who was ready at last to draw blood. The President ordered a strike. General McDowell, however, felt no elation as he went down to battle. Three weeks before, at a council of war convened by the President, he had presented his plan to strike the Confederate Army near Manassas Junction, twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. The target was of strategic importance: at Manassas Junction two railway lines converged, the Manassas Gap, which connected eastern Virginia to the west, and the Orange and Alexandria, which linked southwestern Virginia to the Potomac. A victory at Manassas would not only sever the rail lines that connected the tidewater counties to the interior, it would also open the door to Richmond, which had superseded Montgomery as the capital of the Southern Republic.

  Lincoln approved the plan; but McDowell’s heart was not in his work. His army was by no means ready to fight. Most of the men who comprised it had, a few weeks before, been busy at the plough, in the shop, behind a desk. They did not march like soldiers. They did not act like soldiers. They left their columns at will to fill their canteens, or to pick the blackberries that grew in profusion along the Virginia roads. On the march to Manassas offenses of a more serious nature occurred. Some women were roughly handled by the troops, and several houses were plundered.

  Before McDowell set out with this raw untrained soldiery, Lincoln had attempted to reassure him. “You are green, it is true,” he said, “but they are green, also; you are all green alike.” The President’s words, however, did nothing to assuage the commander’s nervous misgivings. The Southerners might be green; but they were fighting on their own ground, and they were led by men who esteemed themselves Cavaliers—country gentlemen accustomed to ride and shoot, to threaten and command.

  If McDowell doubted the ability of his troops, he did not wholly trust the fidelity of his officers. Many of them, he knew, resented his promotion to command. He owed his appointment, they said, to his social connections in Ohio and New York. McDowell was descended, through his mother, from the Starlings, one of the founding families of Columbus, and he had married the daughter of Henry Burden, the master of the gigantic ironworks at Troy, New York. His fellow Ohioan, Salmon P. Chase, had vigorously advocated his elevation. McDowell knew that his officers questioned his capacity. But could he blame them? He seemed, at times, to question it himself.

  On July 18, the Union Army entered the valley where Manassas Junction lay. The troops, covered with the grime and sweat of the march, pitched their tents near the little town of Centreville. McDowell dismounted and proceeded to survey the terrain. Before him lay a shallow river called Bull’s Run. On the opposite bank, on a steep and rocky bluff, the Confederate battalions were arrayed in force. A bridge, known to the farmers and planters of the place as the Stone Bridge, crossed the river, and beyond it, at the edge of a sloping field, stood a farmhouse, the home of an aged widow, Mrs. Henry. In the distance McDowell could make out the faint outlines of a manor house. It was the field headquarters of his adversary, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the Louisiana Creole who commanded the Southern army at Manassas.

  On the twentieth, a light drizzling rain fell. The air was heavy and uncomfortable. General McDowell decided against giving battle; but he ordered that an attack be made early on the following morning. Towards nightfall the sky cleared. The air, it was observed, was cooler and more delicate than it had been for many days. Taps sounded; but although many in the camp were weary, few found the oblivion of sleep. Twenty-five miles away, in Washington, President Lincoln was also restless. He woke, in the White House, from a strange dream. He dreamt, he said, of a ship—a ship sailing over unknown waters to a dark shore. The significance of the vision puzzled him.

  At two o’clock in the morning drums sounded in the Union camp. The moon was full. General McDowell was himself far from well; but he gave no thought to postponing the meeting of the armies. The whole of his force was soon in motion. From the first, however, there were difficulties. Few of the men had any experience of night marches. Their efforts to muster in the moonlight were unskillful. General Tyler was slow to move his troops along the Warrenton Pike; it was half past six before he ordered his artillery to open fire on Confederate positions near the Stone Bridge. McDowell had intended the cannonade to coincide with the approach of Colonel Hunter’s and Colonel Heintzelman’s columns from the north, where they were to cross the river at Sudley Ford; but in the dawn light those commanders were nowhere to be seen.

  The sun was high when McDowell, his patience wearing thin, mounted a horse and rode up to Sudley Ford to find out what had become of his right wing. He crossed Bull Run and soon found the dilatory columns. The march to Sudley Ford, he learned, had been far from easy; the terrain was rougher than anticipated, and much time had been lost in negotiating the obscure and treacherous ground. McDowell took personal charge of the columns.

  It was now past ten o’clock. The advantage of darkness and surprise was lost. The sun was hot. The men dripped with perspiration. A cannon-ball struck a soldier dead. The other soldiers marched on, trampling the corpse in the dust. Ambrose Burnside’s Rhode Island Brigade was the first to form and fire. A short time later William Tecumseh Sherman waded across the river with the 3rd Brigade and formed on Burnside’s left.

  A fierce fight commenced. The Union men, raw though most of them were, fought like veteran troopers. The Confederate forces fell back in a flash of musket fire. Even so stalwart a Southern warrior as General Barnard Bee was in despair. “They are beating us back!” he exclaimed to his brother officer, Thomas Jonathan Jackson of Virginia. “Well, sir,” Jackson replied, “we will give them the bayonet.” Bee could not restrain his admiration for the tenacity of a natural soldier. “There stands Jackson,” he said, “like a stone wall.” A short time later Bee was dead.

  The roar of the battle could by this time be heard in Washington, where, at eleven o’clock, President and Mrs. Lincoln went to church. Little Tad Lincoln listened to the guns. He turned to Miss Taft. “Pa says there’s a battle in Virginia,” he said, and “that’s big cannons going off like slamming doors.”

  While the President worshipped, the forces under his command advanced. They stormed the Henry house. In the intense fire that ensued, trees were shorn of their branches. The Henry house itself was rapidly reduced to a ruin. Mrs. Henry did not survive its destruction. General Beauregard’s horse was hit by a shell; the head of the animal came clean off the body. Dead men lay everywhere, their faces grown black as charcoal in the sunshine.

  McDowell, scenting victory, readied his troops for a last push. He ordered Captain Ricketts, the commander of Battery I, 1st U.S. Artillery, to take his guns to the high ground just above the ruins of the Henry house.

  Potsdam, Magdeburg, and Berlin, January-July 1861

  THE GARRISON CHURCH at Potsdam was, until it was wrecked in the last days of the Second World War, one of the holiest places in the topography of Prussian chivalry. To the crypt of the church had been brought, in August 1786, the corpse of Frederick the Great, laid out in the uniform of the 1st Battalion of Guards. In 1861 preparations were under way for another solemn ceremony in the church, the consecration, before the tomb of Frederick, of the battle-standards of new regiments of the line.

  But there was a difficulty. The free-state men in the Prussian Chamber o
f Deputies objected to the formation of the new regiments. The regiments were intended to replace existing militia (Landwehr) units, and the Chamber had not consented to this change in the organization of the army. A minister with liberal sympathies, Rudolf von Auerswald, went to see the Chief of the King’s Military Cabinet, General Oscar von Manteuffel, to beg him to cancel the ceremony.

  The civilian was coldly received by the soldier. “I do not understand what your Excellency desires,” Manteuffel told Auerswald. “His Majesty has ordered me to arrange a military ceremony. Am I to renounce this because there are a number of people sitting in a house in the Dönhoffplatz, who call themselves a Landtag [Parliament] and who may be displeased with this ceremony? I fail to see how these people concern me. As a general, I have never yet been ordered to take my instructions from these people.”