Auerswald went away. The battle-standards were unfurled.
Otto von Bismarck was not the only Prussian who in 1861 was meditating a plan to break the Parliament and remodel the state. General Manteuffel also contemplated a renovation. The old soldier was archaic even by the primeval standards of the Prussian officer corps; Bismarck thought him a “fantastic corporal.” Manteuffel was a martinet with a turn for fantasy. His feeling for the past was intense; like General Patton, he lived in a romance of dead commanders— Epaminondas, Hannibal, Wallenstein. His imagination was formed on seventeenth-century models; he found his political ideal in Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, the statesman who labored unsuccessfully to make Charles I absolute ruler of England. The question, Manteuffel told King Wilhelm, was whether he would allow “power to be wrested from his hands even before open battle had been joined.” He begged the King to remember that he still possessed “power and the army”; that he was Supreme Warlord; that he might easily make his authority in the Kingdom complete. He could abolish the constitution and afterwards rule by decree.
Manteuffel’s dreams were interrupted when, shortly after the dedication of the battle-standards in the Garrison Church, Karl Twesten, a Berlin magistrate, published a pamphlet in which he criticized the generals’ plans to remodel the army. Such a reorganization, Twesten said, would “produce an atmosphere of distrust and hostility between the military and civil society.” Manteuffel took personal offense, and challenged Twesten to a duel. He shot the magistrate in the arm. Prussian Junkers were accustomed to cudgel refractory burghers; but a duel violated army regulations. Manteuffel insisted on punishing himself. He retired to the detention fortress at Magdeburg, where he sat for some time in a posture of stoicism, in parodic emulation of Strafford in the Tower of London.
Manteuffel continued, in his cell at Magdeburg, to contrive plots and plans; he drew his inspiration from the methods which Caesar and Bonaparte had employed to subvert civil liberty. After his release, he drew up orders to strengthen the Berlin garrisons. He hoped to form the garrisons into a Praetorian Guard capable of overawing the opponents of royal and military authority in Berlin. A march on the capital was to follow—a “cleansing mud bath,” one of the generals called it. Thirty-four thousand men and a whiff of grapeshot. What would the free-state orators say to that?
Camden, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, May-July 1861
OF ALL THE FORMS of government, an oligarchy is the most easily roused to fight, and the most difficult to mobilize once roused. Try though she might, Mary Chesnut could not suppress the Cassandra in her. She knew too intimately the blood-pride of the Southern planter to be confident in the course he had chosen. The Cavalier was bred to arrogance by the plantation; he must have his way, or he would, like Achilles, retire to his tent to sulk.
Not only did the plantation breed a spirit of uncooperative independence in the planter, it also sapped his will. Mary Chesnut witnessed the processes of deterioration at Mulberry. The very luxuries of the place were deadly. Sixty persons were attached to the household service alone—butlers, footmen, housemaids, picturesque in white turbans and blue dresses. Hundreds more labored outside the big house, in the kitchen and the smokehouse, the dairy and the stables, the grist mill and the lumber mill, at the cotton gin or in the fields. The result of this superfluity of labor, Mary Chesnut said, was that there was nothing to do at Mulberry. One sank into apathy, fell into a moral coma.
Mulberry was morbid. It played tricks on the psyche. Old Colonel Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s father-in-law, was the master of the house and its 12,000 acres. He was genial, courtly, and as “absolute a tyrant as the Czar of Russia.” His “métier is to be an autocrat, the prince of slaveholders.” The wonder was that he “was not a greater tyrant.” In 1861, the old Colonel was ninety years old. He had been born a subject of George III, in the days when South Carolina was a colony of Great Britain. The patent of Mulberry bore a royal seal. During many decades of feudal preeminence his egotism had assumed a variety of curious forms. No lady of his family was permitted to appear before him in a red dress. Conversation at his table was strictly limited to a stream of banal pleasantries. His own opinions were never to be contradicted. He “roars and shouts,” his daughter-in-law said, “if a pebble of an obstacle is put in his way.” Yet he usually had his way. Mary Chesnut suspected that he had fathered children by one of his slaves. “Merciful God!” she said, “forgive me if I fail. Can I honor what is dishonorable? Rachel and her brood make this place a horrid nightmare to me.”
Her father-in-law was a tyrant out of Tacitus; her mother-in-law was sprung from the pages of Gothic romance. Mary Cox Chesnut had been a Philadelphia belle in the last years of the eighteenth century; she had known George Washington and had been often in Martha Washington’s drawing room. But during six decades on a cotton plantation her eccentricities had grown upon her. No less than four slaves were required to attend her each night. Two women slept in her bedroom. Two more slept in the next room, in the event the first two should need assistance. Before any garment was suffered to touch the old lady’s skin, it had first to be ironed; the mistress of Mulberry could not bear the touch of anything cold or clammy. Smoothing irons had always to be kept before the fire in her dressing room, and the flame was never permitted to go out while she was at Mulberry. Her nose was as morbidly sensitive as her skin. Candles were taken out of her rooms before they were snuffed. Lamps could be extinguished only out of doors. Violets were under no circumstances to be brought into the house, and only a certain breed of rose was tolerated.
The old lady’s tenderest sensitivity was reserved for her servants. She had been used to slaves from girlhood; her father had owned them in Quaker Philadelphia. But she had never accustomed herself to the scale of Southern bondage. She could not forget the stories she had been told, when little more than a girl, of the slave insurrection at Santo Domingo. Fearful lest the people who served her should one day turn upon her, she sought to purchase their goodwill with an exaggerated courtesy. She treated each of her slaves “as if they were a black Prince Albert or Queen Victoria,” and she bored her daughter-in-law by talking constantly, in a loud voice, of “the transcendent virtues of her colored household—in full hearing of the innumerable negro women who swarm over this house.” She spent hours “cutting out baby clothes for the negro babies,” and she was always ready with an ample wardrobe for the most recent arrival in the slave quarters. Only when she dined did the mask of benignity slip; she scented death in the pot. “I warn you,” she would say as the black footmen looked on. “Don’t touch that soup. It is bitter. There is something wrong about it.”
In the theory of the Fire Eaters the plantation was an oasis of culture. The labor of Africans was supposed to free the paternal class to perfect its soul. The reality, Mary Chesnut knew, was different. The plantation was stupid. The inmates of Mulberry, she said, “have grown accustomed to dullness. They were born and bred in it. They like it as well as anything else.” The bleating of the sheep, the dripping branches that hung low in the swamp water, the “weird sounds” of the whippoorwills on moonlit nights—they all contributed “to the general despairing effect.” A “dismal-swamp feeling hangs round us” here. She had a name for it: “Southern swamp depression.”
She felt relief when, at last, she fled to Richmond, to be nearer her husband, who was with Beauregard at Manassas. Amid the “stir and excitement of a live world” she was able to breathe. Her hotel, the Spotswood, was filled with Southern public men and their wives. It was a “miniature world,” with as much intrigue and drama—as many quarrels and love affairs—as a student of the human heart could wish for. For that is what Mary Chesnut was, an historian of the vagaries of human character, a delver into the secret depths of personality. Perhaps she was something more . . . Might she not be an artist? She decided to keep a journal. She intended her “notes,” as she called them, to be “memoirs of the times.” She seems to have hoped, when she began the journal,
that she might one day draw on it for material for a novel. Only in time would it become evident that the journal itself, revised and rewritten by the author in her old age, was the true masterpiece of Mary Chesnut’s life.
At Richmond she threw herself into the life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis’s court. But what she saw there was no more reassuring than the depressing visions of the plantation. The lords and ladies of the South carried the insolence of the big house into the forum and the senate. None would brook a superior, and few could tolerate an equal. Their meetings resembled Convocations of Nobility. One false word, and hands gripped pommels.
Mary Chesnut was instantly absorbed in the strife of antagonistic personality. There was pretty Louisa Bartow, so girlish, in her white muslin dresses, yet so cruel. Her wit was as sharp as any gentleman’s saber. Mrs. Bartow was, like Mary Chesnut herself, childless, an emptiness she made up by a passionate attachment to her husband, Francis Stebbins Bartow, a lawyer who had recently been commissioned a colonel in the 8th Georgia.
Mrs. Bartow thought her husband the very first man in the South; but it was a point Mrs. Joe Johnston could never concede. Her own husband was quite obviously the most splendid specimen of masculinity in the new Republic. Was he not the highest ranking officer in the United States Army to have gone over to the Confederacy?
“If my Joseph is defeated,” Lydia Johnston announced one day at tea, “I will die.”
“Lydia,” Mrs. Jefferson Davis said, “beware of ambition. By that sin fell the angels.” The Confederacy might be big enough to contain the pride of one of the two husbands; it could not encompass both. Varina Davis had no doubt which of the two ought to have the precedence at Richmond. The First Lady of the South went about the town in a landau drawn by spanking bays, and gave brilliant levées. Mary Chesnut, with her own sensitivities of pride and rank, complained that Mrs. Davis “was not civil enough” to her at tea and kept her “bandied about for a seat.”
One day, while she was sitting in Mrs. Davis’s drawing room, she was startled, on looking up, to see her husband. She had thought him still at Manassas. James Chesnut had come down in haste from Beauregard’s headquarters, and must go at once to see President Davis. When, at dusk, he emerged from the President’s room, he told his wife almost nothing of what had taken place within; but from the few words he let fall she guessed what happened. Joe Johnston had been ordered to move his army from Winchester to Manassas to reinforce Beauregard.
“I did not know there was such a ‘bitter cry’ left in me,” Mary Chesnut wrote after James Chesnut returned to Manassas. “But I wept my heart away today when my husband went off. Things do look so black.” Mrs. Davis came into her room to try to raise her spirits; she sat by the bed telling stories. But Mary Chesnut was convinced, from the First Lady’s preoccupied air, that something was wrong.
Chapter 7
A WHIFF OF POWDER
Bezdna, Russia, March-May 1861
IT IS SAID that certain followers of the Khlysty, the Russian cult of flagellants, believed that the path to paradise lies through the “sinful encounter.” The seeker of salvation was obliged to mortify, not only his flesh, but also his pride; for only by plumbing the depths of humiliation could he hope to experience forgiveness, redemption, and paradisiacal bliss. Men and women who followed the path of the Khlysty would gather together and “cast all their garments from them during their wild dance.” “I flagellate, flagellate, seeking Christ,” they would chant in rhythmic ecstasy. The abyss into which the dancers descended resembled a scene from Euripides. “Here and there, one of them is seized with convulsions and sinks to the ground senseless; the lights are extinguished, the women with unbound hair fall on the men and embrace and kiss them passionately. In ‘sinful encounter’ the people of God roll on the ground and copulate. . . .”
The most notorious exponent of the doctrines of the Khlysty was Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin, the spiritual adviser to whom Tsar Alexander’s grandson, Nicholas II, and his Empress, Alexandra, turned in the desperate effort to save their son from hemophilia. Rasputin was reproached by the Orthodox clergy for counseling penitent women to seek salvation through sinfulness and sensual self-abasement. He humiliated “the devil of pride” in the women who came to him by forcing them to undress in front of him, and by compelling them to stand or dance naked in his presence. An officer’s wife, who had called on Rasputin in the hope of preventing her husband’s transfer, claimed that the holy man “told me at once to take off my clothes. I complied with his wish, and went with him into an adjoining room. He hardly listened to my request; but kept on touching my face and breast and asking me to kiss him.” Rasputin contended that such lewdness led to grace; confronted by one of his detractors in the Orthodox priesthood, he replied, “Certainly, little father, our Saviour and the holy fathers have denounced sin, since it is a work of the Evil One. But how can you drive out evil, little father, except by sincere repentance? And how can you sincerely repent, if you have not sinned?”
The doctrines of the Khlysty, exaggerated perhaps by the prurience of the sect’s critics, were nevertheless true to the traditions of Holy Russia. At its core Holy Russia was apocalyptic and antinomian. Paradise beckons us, here and now; we have only to learn to heed its miraculous summons. Dostoevsky distilled the essence of the millennial idea in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. “Mama,” says a dying boy in the novel, “do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don’t want to realize it, and if we did care to realize it, paradise would be established in all the world tomorrow. . . . Why count the days, when one is enough for a man to know all of happiness? My dear ones, why do we quarrel, boast in front of one another, remember wrongs against one another? We should go straight into the garden and make merry and romp, love and praise and kiss one another, and bless our lives.” “Paradise,” says another character in the novel, “is concealed in each one of us . . . when people understand this idea, the Kingdom of Heaven will begin for them, not in a dream, but in actual fact.”
Russians differed as to how the New Jerusalem was to be attained. Some, like the Khlysty, emphasized the importance of intensified states of being, the ecstasies of intoxication, privation, or pain. Others regarded an abnormal physical organization as closely connected to the sources of holiness and prophetic power; epileptics, the mentally infirm, deaf mutes, and those who suffered from deformity were classed as “holy fools,” and thought to live on an intimate footing with the hidden agents of grace. Old Believers (raskolniki), a group that broke with the established Church when the liturgy was reformed in the seventeenth century, attached importance to purity of ritual, while those who venerated pious hermits looked, in their quest for inspiration, to holy men who, through contemplation and ascetic discipline, had found “a way to God in their own hearts.”
In 1861 the secular ideals of Alexander’s liberal revolution collided with the millennial aspirations of Holy Rus’. To a peasant who believed that he was living on the verge of paradise, the Tsar’s liberal revolution was incomprehensible. The peasant was at heart a spiritual anarch; he regarded emancipation, not as the mundane act of a secular government, but as an apocalyptic liberation from earthly bonds. The provisions of the emancipation statute required the liberated serfs to pay for the land they acquired; but the idea of payment was to the peasant an abomination. The Tsar, the peasants said, would never have imposed such onerous terms on his people. He was God’s vicar on earth. Remote though he might be from those who labored in the land, he yet knew each peasant personally. His statute was written, not in ink, but in liquid gold, and in it he had granted his people “true liberty” Tsar’ dast, the peasant said. The Tsar will give.
The landlords, when confronted with such arguments, insisted that the edict of ink was genuine. The peasants, in response, raised their scythes. “We no longer want the landlord,” they shouted. “Down with the landlord! We have already worked enough! Now is the time for freedom!”
The refrain spread. “Volia, vol
ia,” the peasants cried. “Freedom, freedom.”
Anton Petrov was a thirty-five-year-old peasant from Bezdna, a village in the department of Kazan. He was a holy fool as well as a raskolnik, an Old Believer who repudiated the established Church; he had acquired a rudimentary knowledge of letters. He did not pronounce the Tsar’s emancipation law a forgery; but after diligent study of the document he asserted that it had been misunderstood. He was convinced that he had discovered the true meaning of its strange symbols. The figure “10%” represented, he said, the Cross of Saint Anne, “by which true volia has been secretly sealed.” After further elucidation, he concluded that the edict not only guaranteed the peasants complete and unconditional liberty, it also freed them from any obligation to pay dues and taxes.
The agreeable revelation was embraced by the local peasantry, and Petrov’s progress to power was swelled by a train of deluded rustics. His claims grew more extravagant; he was a prophet; he had entered into personal relations with the Godhead, and was privy to the secret will of the Tsar. The sovereign and the Deity had confided into his hands a plenary authority; those nobles who declined to recognize either his spiritual or his temporal magistracy were to be slain with axes. The police were driven away, and thousands of peasants rallied around the vindicator of “true liberty.”
At length a detachment of troops marched on Bezdna, where they found five thousand people resolved to die in defense of their saviour. The troops opened fire; fifty-one people fell dead. After the fourth volley, Holy Russia submitted to the will of the secular state. Petrov bid farewell to his mother and father, who blessed him. A witness watched as the holy fool, thin, small, and white as a sheet, emerged from his izba. Petrov held aloft his copy of the emancipation statute: he was convinced that the troops would not fire on a man who had invoked its iconic protection. He was wrong.
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