Richmond, Virginia, July 1861
MRS. DAVIS came into the room so softly that Mary Chesnut did not know, at first, that she was there.
“A great battle has been fought,” the First Lady of the Confederacy said as she leant over and kissed Mary Chesnut. “Your husband is all right.” Varina Davis proceeded to relate what she knew or fondly imagined of the battle of Manassas, talking in “that calm desperate way” people have “when under greatest excitement.” “Jeff Davis led the center,” she said—a delusion or an unskillful fabrication; her husband reached the field only after the rout of the Union Army had begun. She went next to Louisa Bartow’s room. Mrs. Bartow sat up in her bed, ready to leap to her feet at the entrance of the President’s wife. But there was something in Mrs. Davis’s face that took the life out of her.
“Is it bad news for me?” Louisa Bartow asked. “Is he killed?” But she knew the answer as soon as she saw Mrs. Davis’s face—“knew it all in an instant.”
She covered her face with her shawl.
Washington and Virginia, July 1861
“WHERE IS THE PRESIDENT?” the Secretary of State demanded when he came to the White House.
“Gone to drive,” he was told by one of the ushers.
“The battle,” Seward said, “is lost.”
Lincoln returned from his drive and was given the news of the disaster that had befallen his army. He betrayed no emotion, and went at once to army headquarters. There he followed accounts of the débâcle.
On the battlefield, the 11th New York Infantry—a Zouave regiment, dressed in the exotic colors of Algeria—attempted to give cover to Captain Ricketts’s advancing artillery. But the Zouaves were unprepared for the charge of the Confederate horse. In a moment the 1st Virginia Cavalry—Jeb Stuart’s Black Horse riders, with black ostrich plumes in their hats and black Hussar’s bars sewn into the facings of the coats—were upon them. Stuart himself rode into the fight, in tall boots and a yellow sash, the very image, one observer thought, of a dashing Cavaliero. Stuart’s eyes, light blue in repose, seemed to acquire a darker tinge under excitement, as he went for the kill.
The battle had turned. The Cavalier spirit played a part in shifting the tide, but railroads and telegraphs were as decisive. Unbeknownst to the Union generals, General Joe Johnston had, by a series of swift and devious marches, succeeded in moving the greatest part of his army from Winchester to the rail line that connected the Valley of Virginia with the east. Johnston himself appeared on the field. He was fifty-four years old, with a high forehead and a Van Dyke beard. He was muscular and well-built, amiable in manner, molded in the traditions of Virginia chivalry. Under his direction the reinforcements bore down on the Union positions. McDowell’s men, tired, hot, and thirsty, were unequal to the fresher spirit of the Army of the Shenandoah. Panic set in. “Halt and form,” the Union officers cried. McDowell rode among his men and exhorted them to hold fast. But his efforts were in vain; the Union line gave way.
Entire regiments broke and ran. A crowd of Union dignitaries who had come from Washington to enjoy a picnic on the turf overlooking the fight found themselves caught up in the path of blood and history. Opera glasses and parasols lay scattered in the grass as elegant ladies raised their petticoats and raced to their carriages. The retreat became a rout. Supply wagons and artillery caissons crowded the road to Washington. Ambulances dripping with blood advanced by inches along the turnpike. Soldiers, their throats parched beyond endurance, fell on their hands and knees to lap the bloody water that filled the roadside ditches. One soldier lay dead with his canteen still at his lips. Another pleaded for a place in a wagon that was full to overflowing. Those soldiers who were too tired to walk unassisted clutched the tails of horses, knowing that sleep, for them, very probably meant death.
The hour was late when President Lincoln left army headquarters and returned to the White House. He went, not to his bed, but to his office, where he lay on a couch.11 A bloody war had begun in earnest. Lincoln was still in the room when the sun, obscured by clouds, rose over the capital. A tropical rain fell. In something like desperation he telegraphed to George Brinton McClellan and ordered him to report to Washington.
Lübeck, Baden-Baden, and Hinter Pomerania, July 1861
BISMARCK HURRIED WESTWARD, riding the train from Russia. He was flushed with excitement. Roon had stated, in his letter, that the conflict between Prussia’s two antagonistic parties was reaching a crisis, and the assertion had had its effect. The lion was roused. Here, Bismarck thought, was his chance. He would personally explain to King Wilhelm his plan to break the free-state opposition in Parliament.
On the ninth, he reached Lübeck; it was five in the morning when the train pulled into the station. The only newspaper he could lay his hands on was Ystädter, the Swedish daily. From it Bismarck learned that the King had left Berlin to take the waters at Baden-Baden. He laid his plans accordingly, and on July 10, weary from travel, he was admitted to the presence chamber. The King was “unpleasantly surprised” to see his Ambassador. Bismarck nevertheless rallied his energies and proceeded to unfold his plan to smash the free-state men.
The plan was not original; it was a variant of the program of militant nationalism which the grandees at Saint Petersburg wanted the Tsar to embrace, and which Seward, in Washington, hoped to persuade Lincoln to take up. The King, Bismarck said, must put Prussia at the forefront of efforts to unite the German people in one nation. If he did so, Germans everywhere—even free-state Germans—would hail him for his boldness. The King could then do as he pleased; no assembly would dare to stand in the way of a man who promised to be the deliverer of his people.
The King, however, was slow to grasp the plan. Bismarck once compared his master to a horse that shinnies at every new object. How could German nationalism—the creed of dreaming revolutionists—enable him to crush the free-state opposition? The King asked Bismarck to draw up a memorandum explaining the paradoxical idea. Bismarck did so. It was really very simple. The pressure of Prussia’s internal steam, Bismarck observed, was high. Open, a little, the valve of nationalism, and it could be dissipated harmlessly.
The King, once he began dimly to comprehend Bismarck’s plan, seems to have felt only disgust for its Machiavellian ingenuity. Wilhelm was a simple soldier, formed in the old Prussian school. The last thing he wanted was to have at the head of affairs a man “who is going to turn everything upside down.” Altogether the King thought Manteuffel’s plan for a march on Berlin the more palatable alternative. The troglodytes he understood.
What was no less fatal to Bismarck’s chances, the Queen detested him. Where Wilhelm was simple-minded, Augusta, his consort, was clever. She had passed her girlhood in Weimar, where she had seen the aged Goethe. She worshipped at the altar of Kultur; and although Bismarck was himself one of the most cultivated statesmen of his generation—a man who was at home in four or five languages, and who lived on intimate terms with Shakespeare and the Bible—Augusta nevertheless developed a passionate aversion to his character. Her feelings of dislike were fully reciprocated by Bismarck. Augusta’s admiration for the civilization of France and England exasperated a man who cherished an ideal of German greatness. The Queen, he said, “preserved from her youthful days in Weimar to the very end of her life the idea that French—and even more English—authorities and personages were superior to those of her own land.” He was almost beside himself when Augusta secured for her son, Crown Prince Friedrich, an English bride—and no less a bride than the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, “Vicky,” the Princess Royal. When, in 1857, the marriage was celebrated, Bismarck was gloomy, and was heard to mutter about the “stupid admiration” for English “lords and gentlemen.”
The Queen had obtained, Bismarck believed, an almost complete ascendancy over the mind of her husband. Every morning at breakfast she worked the poor man over. Letters and newspaper articles lay upon the table, apparently at random, but in fact carefully placed by the Queen for their usefulness in pro
moting whatever cause was just then dear to her heart. These items she obtruded upon her husband’s notice while he drank his coffee. Yet when Bismarck once hinted to the King that his breakfast table was manipulated, Wilhelm waxed indignant. The King, with “his knightly spirit,” defended his consort, even though appearances were against her.
At Baden-Baden Wilhelm was, after his initial fit of bad humor, perfectly cordial. He invited Bismarck to dine with him, a signal mark of favor. But nothing was said about the ministry. The next day the disappointed Junker boarded a train and went north, where he was to spend August and September at Reinfeld, the ancestral seat of his wife’s family near Stolp (Slupsk) in Hinter Pomerania, at the northeastern edge of the German world. Bismarck’s cleverness had once again failed in its effect; the King, he said, “thought me crazier than I was.”
Scarcely had he arrived in Pomerania, however, when an event occurred which put the advice he had given the King in a new light. One morning in July, King Wilhelm went for his daily walk in the streets of Baden-Baden. Count Flemming, the scion of an old East Prussian family, alone accompanied him; neither bodyguards nor detectives were in attendance on the sovereign. As the two men strolled in the Lichtenthal Alley, they heard the report of a pistol. There was a smell of powder, and the King felt a burning sensation about his neck.
Peterhof and Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, June 1861-December 1861
IN JUNE Tsar Alexander removed to Peterhof, the summer palace which Peter the Great had reared on a bluff overlooking the Gulf of Finland, a fantastic collection of cascades, fountains, and richly adorned façades constructed in the emulation of Versailles. It was the close of the triumphant emancipation spring. The dark and despotic past, many Russians dared to hope, had been buried forever.
But the débris of ten centuries cannot be suppressed by an edict. The disturbances which followed the appearance of the emancipation manifesto were, it is true, mild in character; Prince Orlov was in this respect disappointed. There were a few hundred revolts, and a deluded peasant named Petrov was taken out and shot. But the country had not embraced the Tsar’s revolution. Holy Russia operated on the tactics to which the Tsar’s uncle, the first Tsar Alexander, had resorted after the invasion of Napoleon: it rarely gave battle, but instead withdrew, unbowed, into its infinite space. The Russian state had expelled the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, and the French, but it had never mastered the primitive power of its own people. The Romanovs co-opted the established Church, but they never converted the millennial yearnings of the country into a bulwark of the régime.
Alexander, though he was a shrewd tactician, did not know how to stir men’s blood. The lawgivers of antiquity, who built for permanence, sought the sanction of the oracle for their revolutions. Russia was as rich as Delphi in spiritual metaphors, but the Tsar never pressed them into the service of reform. It would have cost him little to paint the struggle for freedom in the colors of millennial liberation. But Alexander was without pictorial capacity; his language revealed no gift of figure. He was unable to captivate Holy Russia, or make the people his partners in revolution.
In other ways the Tsar was more astute. Scarcely had the ink on the emancipation manifesto dried when he sacrificed the leading reformers to the vengeance of the party of coercion. Grand Duchess Hélène was frozen out. Her once brilliant drawing room went dark, and she herself went abroad. Nicholas Milyutin, the principal architect of the emancipation legislation, was dismissed by Alexander from his post in the Interior Ministry. Milyutin left Russia to travel in France and Italy.
To all appearances the Tsar was at the height of his prestige. A young American diplomat who saw him at Peterhof that summer was filled with admiration for the “Tsar-Liberator.” William Goodloe of Kentucky was led by an equerry with enough “feathers in his hat to make an ostrich” through a series of halls and chambers. At last he reached a portal guarded by four gigantic Moors, arrayed in the livery of the Orient. The Moors threw open the doors, and the Tsar himself appeared, dressed in a sky-blue uniform and calf-skin boots, the very image, Goodloe thought, of a king, handsome of face, commanding of figure, his eyes “a beautiful light blue.” Alexander spoke a few gracious words, and in a moment he was gone.
Yet his brightest days were behind him. When the euphoria that followed the appearance of the emancipation manifesto subsided, everyone was as discontented as ever. Many peasants continued to ask when true volia was coming. “Rumors have reached me,” Alexander told a gathering of village elders, “that you are waiting for some other volia. There will not be any other volia than what I gave you.”
Part of the problem was money. The Tsar was a tightfisted emancipator. Concerned for the fiscal integrity of the state and anxious over a recent banking crisis that had wrecked his Empire’s primitive credit mechanisms, he threw the onus of paying for liberation on the people, particularly the peasants. As Russians awoke to a new burden of debt, high interest rates, and insufficient liquidity, the mood of the country darkened.
Alexander himself was irritable. His greatest displeasure was reserved for his oldest son. The Tsarevitch Nicholas was a charming young man, and yet. . . there was something not quite right about him. “Niks,” as he was called, was handsome—perhaps, Prince Kropotkin thought, “even too femininely handsome.” But his good looks and agreeable temper were deceptive; at heart the heir to the throne was “profoundly egoistic.”
More troubling to the Tsar, Niks was insufficiently manly. He evinced no enthusiasm even for those activities which, to more normal specimens of Romanov manhood, were the greatest part of life. To take the salute of Cossack horsemen in Palace Square, or to go on maneuvers with the Chevaliers Gardes on the plains at Krasnoye Selo—such occupations, so delightful to Alexander, unaccountably failed to rouse up the blood of his son. The Tsarevitch, it appeared, would rather linger in the corridors of the palace, gossiping with the pages, than ride with the Horse Guards or drill with the Foot Guards. Alexander himself attended Nicholas’s military examinations that summer. The Tsarevitch showed himself incapable of managing the parade ground—a signal failing in a prince descended from both the Romanov and the Hohenzollern stocks. Alexander did not conceal his anger. When Niks made yet another blunder, his father reproved him in a loud voice. “Even that,” he shouted, “you could not learn!”
From the days of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus to those of the English Georges, with their recalcitrant princes of Wales, the history of relations between sovereigns and their eldest sons has been little more than a repetition of scenes of jealousy, distrust, and estrangement. The more vigorously the monarch attempts to mold the character of his heir, the more intractable does the material become; and in his attempts to strengthen the flimsy will of Nicholas, Alexander succeeded only in exacerbating his son’s natural softness and timidity. Thus did the daily round of dynasty and empire distract the Tsar from the largest questions of his revolution. The peasants, a Russian reformer wrote, “suffer much, their life is burdensome, they harbour deep hatreds, and feel passionately that there will soon be a change.” They were waiting “for the revelation of what is secretly stirring in their spirits. They are not waiting for books but for apostles—men who combine faith, will, conviction, and energy. . . . The man who feels himself to be so near the people that he has been virtually freed by them from the atmosphere of artificial civilization; the man who has achieved the unity and intensity of which we are speaking—he will be able to speak to the people and must do so.”
The Tsar could not do this. Might Count Tolstoy? It seemed not impossible. No high-caste in Russia had done more than Tolstoy to fathom the aspiration and potential of the common people. One night, when the clouds hung low in the sky over Yasnaya Polyana, the squire and three of his serf pupils went out into the white darkness. They crunched along in the snow. One of the students, who was called Semka, began ah-ou-ing as though he were a wolf. He was a big, strong boy, full of good sense. Fedka came too; Tolstoy was much taken with his “tender, receptive,
poetic, yet daring nature.” Fedka touched Tolstoy’s sleeve with his own, then clasped two of his teacher’s fingers in his hand. Pronka, the smallest of the three boys, walked behind them, careful to keep out of the bigger boys’ way. He was a “sickly, mild, and very gifted lad,” Tolstoy said. He lived in one of the poorest izby in the village—a black, dirty hut. He had not enough to eat, but he was sensitive and intelligent.
They went on in the darkness. “How was it. . . your aunt had her throat cut?” Fedka asked Tolstoy.
“Tell us! Tell us!”
Tolstoy told them the story. One of his aunt’s peasants, a cook, had gone into his mistress’s bedroom one night with a knife, intent on killing her. (Some half a dozen landowners were murdered by their serfs in Russia each year.) The peasant, gazing on his mistress’s sleeping face, was seized by feelings of pity and shame. He went back to the kitchen and drank two glasses of vodka. He returned and slit his mistress’s throat. But she continued to breathe; he had failed to sever the artery. The peasant went into the drawing room and smoked a cigarette; when he returned to the bedroom, he finished the old lady off.
Such was the peasant in the eyes of many well-to-do Russians—a semi-savage being whose brutish qualities gave the lie to the free-state idea that all men are created equal. “Human feelings,” a Russian nobleman said, “were not recognized, not even suspected, in the serfs.” But Tolstoy had looked more closely at the peasant than most of his peers. He had seen promise in his serf pupils—had seen in them what he called “the mysterious flower of poetry,” the hope of a new and better Russia.
Could the Tsar’s revolution build on that hope?
Tolstoy and his boys reached a thicket and stopped. Semka took up a stick and struck the trunk of a lime tree. The hoar frost fell from the tree on their coats and hats.
“Why are there lime trees?” Semka asked.
“Yes,” Tolstoy said, “why are there lime trees?”
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