Revolution! She, who will foresee Napoleon, was rudely shocked by the
fall of the Bastille. The Revolution touched her in her tenderest point.
With every year, in spite of her sentiments and cosmopolitan culture,
this Princess of Zerbst became more and more fervently autocratic and
Russian. She had jestingly asked her doctor to bleed away the last drop
of her German blood. No one ever had a more fanatical hero-worship for
the Russian himself, or a deeper enthusiasm for the greatness in his
history. It was in the political sphere that her convictions play, and
she had a vague but passionate belief in what she and Russia might do
together. Yet here were these declaimers threatening to overrun Europe,
and "Equality setting peoples at the throats of kings!" The cant about
fraternity, the catch-words and sentiments, vanish like smoke. No
anathemas on the Revolution were fiercer than those of the "_Ame
Républicaine_," who had burned to restore the ancient institutions of
Athens. The hostess of Diderot breathed fiery indignation against "these
Western atheists"; and the nationalization of church property, the very
first of her own reforms, becomes, in the men of '89, an "organized
brigandage." "There is an economy of truth," said Burke. "Semiramis,"
like Romeo, "hung up philosophy," and the bust of her "preceptor,"
Voltaire, accompanied Fox to the basement!
"_Enfin tout philosophe est banni de céans,
Et nous ne vivons plus qu'avec les honnétes gens._"
The advantage of women in affairs of this sort is, that they are natural
opportunists, and care nothing for the tyranny of your system. There is
a wise inconsequence in their ideas, for the logic of the universe is
not professed from an academic chair. "_Moi_," she says, "_je ne suis
qu'un composé de batons rompus!_" Voltaire had learned from Bayle, and
Catharine tells us she had learned from Voltaire, to distrust "the men
of a system." "_Stulti sunt innumerabiles_," said Erasmus, and theirs
was but an ingenious foolishness. Diderot, on that adventurous visit of
his, was bursting with eagerness to take Russia off the wall, and put it
"in the kettle of magicians." Never before now had such projects been
seen in a government office! He gesticulated by the hour: she was
delighted to listen. He drew up scores of schemes; they were as well
ordered, as regular, as his own meals. But presently he realized that no
one had taken him seriously! Catharine once remarked herself that she
wrote on "sensitive skins, while his material was foolscap." And
finally, like Mercier de la Rivière, he departed wiser, and a little
hurt. "A wonderful man," she said afterward to Ségur, "but a little too
old--and a little too young!" His _Plan of a University for Russia_,
which had an appreciable influence on education elsewhere, "has never to
this day," says Waliszewski, "been translated into Russian."
How natural again, and with what vivid abandon, she presents herself in
her correspondence with Grimm! He lives in Paris, factotum and
confidant, passes his life in executing her commissions. To him she
talks, rather than writes, as she talks to her intimates, in
overwhelming voluble fashion, gossiping, punning, often playing the
buffoon, as she does with that little set of hers at her retreat of the
"Hermitage." Persons, even places, have their nicknames. St. Petersburg
is the "Duck-pond"; Grimm himself the "Fag," "Souffredouleur," George
Dandin, "M. le Baron de Thunder-ten-Tronck." Frederick the Great appears
as "Herod" (a palpable hit that!), the diplomats as "Wind-bags,"
"Pea-soup," "Die Perrueckirte Haeupter;" Maria Theresa becomes "Maman;"
Gustavus of Sweden, "Falstaff;" and so on. There is no question here of
making a figure; often she has nothing to say; she writes purely to give
extravagance an outlet. We have her here as though we had been present
at one of those sparkling conversations which, in old days, used to send
Grimm sleepless to his rooms, but of which nothing remained memorable,
which in truth charmed by their vivacity rather than by wit--by that
_verve_ which so often supplies the place of brilliancy. This familiar
note will appear again in her letters to the Emperor Joseph; as unlike
those addressed to Herod as the letters to Grimm are unlike those to
Madame Geoffrin or Voltaire. He was also _des nôtres_. She, who judged
men in general poorly enough, though she used them incomparably well,
not only recognized--unlike most of his contemporaries--but was
fascinated by the elements of greatness in that extraordinary man. She
used him, it is true, as she used Orloff and Patiomkin; her good-fortune
helped her as it did before, and will again; their great alliance
against the Ottoman brought her everything, and him nothing. Still, no
foreigner ever dazzled her as he, who could so little impose himself on
his age. "He will live unrivalled," she wrote in her enthusiasm; "his
star is in the ascendant, he will leave all Europe behind!" A wandering
star, alas! He will go before her to the grave, the great failure of his
generation, in the bitterness of death dictating that saddest of
epitaphs, "Here lies one who never fulfilled an aim." _Impar
congressus!_ like Michelet's Charles the Bold, "_il avait trop voulu,
des choses infinies_."
The arts were indifferent to her, and she was insensible to the
simplicity of true greatness. She idolized a Zuboff, but Kosciuszko was
immured at St. Petersburg till the day of her death, and she never even
learned his precise name. Yet she brought to society and politics much
of that protean activity which was the distinction of her teacher
Voltaire in the field of letters. She did much for education, and
something for Russian literature. She herself wrote or collaborated in
plays, whose performances the Holy Synod had to attend--and applaud--in
a body. She also published translations, pamphlets, books for her
grandchildren, a history of Russia to the fourteenth century, and even
helped to edit a newspaper. Unlike Frederick, she did not despise the
language of her country. She put her court to school, and at the
"Hermitage" so many lines of Russian were learned every day. But
Radistchev said: "Fear and silence reign round Czarkoe-Sielo. The
silence of Death is there, for there despotism has its abode." He
received the knout and Siberia, because his words were true. She lived,
as he said, remote from her people. Beggars were forbidden to enter
Moscow, lest she should see them; but a rumor ran after her return from
the South that Alexis Orloff led her into a barn where were laid out the
bodies of all who had died of hunger on the day of her triumphal entry.
Like Peter the Great, she even in some ways intensified serfdom. A
hundred fifty thousand "peasants of the crown" were handed over by her
as serfs to her lovers. Their proprietors could send them with hard
labor to Siberia; they could give them fifteen thousand blows for a
trifling offence; a Soltikoff tortured seventy-five to death. _Sed
ignoti perierunt mortibus illi!_ the day will come, but not yet.
This is not the place to describe the campaigns of Rumaintsoff,
Patiomkin, and the rest, against Sweden and the Ottomans. Her own ideas
in the field of foreign policy we have already seen. After the
Revolution another policy, that of spurring on Gustavus and the Western
powers to a crusade against France, takes the first place. It gave them
something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she "wanted
elbow-room." The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious
for "elbow-room." Schemes of the kind were common enough in the
eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by everybody
else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times
of trouble and sickness. And John Sobieski had foretold the doom of
Poland a hundred years before. But it remains a blot upon her name. For
her final fate overtook Poland, not, as is commonly said, because of her
internal anarchy--sedulously fostered by the foreign powers--but because
that anarchy seemed about to disappear. The spirit of reform had
penetrated to Warsaw, and after the Constitution of May 3d Catharine was
afraid of a revival of the national forces similar to that which had
followed the reforms of 1772 in her neighbor Sweden. She was aided by
traitors from within, _a'quali era piu cara la servitu che la liberta
della loro patria_; and on the field of Maciejovitsy they were able to
cry, "_Finis Poloniæ!_" No question has been more obscured. The fashion
of liberal thought has changed, the history, like that of town and gown,
has been written by the victorious aggressors, and Poland is become the
rendezvous of the political sophistries, as it has been the cockpit of
the political ruffianism, of all Europe. But Catharine could boast that
she had pushed the frontiers of Russia farther than any sovereign since
Ivan the Terrible. "I came to Russia a poor girl. Russia has dowered me
richly, but I have paid her back with Azov, the Crimea, and the
Ukraine."
There remains the side of her which attracted Byron, and which no one
has failed to seize. The beginnings of her moral descent are there
before us in the memoirs; ennui and solitude weighed upon her, and as
she gained greater liberty she sought distractions which, at first, were
harmless. The third stage was the infamous command of the Empress--the
Grand Duke and she have no children; the succession must be secured. If
Soltikoff, as Catharine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the
sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanoffs
only in name. From this point till her death, in 1796, she entirely
ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the
family. In the succession of her "lovers" only Patiomkin, and for a
moment Gregory Orloff, acquired a position of the first political
importance; and Patiomkin's was maintained long after his first relation
had come to an end. It has been ascribed to her as a merit that she
pensioned these worthies handsomely, instead of dealing with them after
the manner of Christina of Sweden; and that she was able to make
passion, which has lost others, coincident with her calculated
self-interest.
Certainly she entered, a child, into a society "rotten before it was
ripe." She was surrounded with a court long demoralized by a succession
of drunken and dissolute czarinas, which aped the corruption of
Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of
Louis XV, of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong: in it even a Burke
had persuaded himself that "vice lost half its evil by losing all its
grossness." The reader of Bayle and Brantôme had been introduced to a
bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the
author of _La Pucelle_ and _Jacques le Fataliste_ proceeded from the
same pen as the _University for Russia_. Diderot, indeed, whose moral
obscenity was not the whole of the man, but was, nevertheless, sincere
and from the centre, was able to compliment her on the freedom from "the
decencies and virtues, the worn-out rags of her sex." She had no fund of
theoretical cynicism on such matters, nor, on the other hand, the
slightest moral pretence. The revolutionary _Moniteur_ branded her as
Messalina. "_Cela ne regarde que moi_," she said haughtily, and the
sheet circulated throughout the empire. Such is the summary of the
gallons of printers' ink that have soiled paper on this account. It is
the aspect of her allowed to escape no one, and therefore we say no more
of it here. How easy it is to "hint and chuckle and grin" with the
"_chroniques scandaleuses!_" easier still to be incontinent of one's
moral indignation. The truth is that this back-stair gossip misses, on
the whole, that just proportion necessary if you would not only see but
also perceive. Catharine, whom her generation called "the Great," had
one absorbing passion; it was the greatness of Russia, and of herself as
ruler of Russia--"_mon petit ménage_," as she would call it, with her
touch of lightness--and she desired to be the first amateur of "_la
grande politique_" in Europe.
"_Elle brillait surtout par le caractère_," says Waliszewski, whose
volumes, collecting most of what is known about Catharine, I have freely
consulted. It is only natural that her biographer should regard her as a
strikingly complex and exceptional being. _Nous sommes tous des
exceptions._ Yet she is not essentially different from the "woman of
character" you may meet in every street. Given her splendid physical
constitution there is nothing prodigious about her except her
good-fortune in every crisis and important action of her career. In one
of his Napoleonic fits of incoherence, Patiomkin said vividly enough
that the Empress and himself were "the spoilt children of God." For
herself, she says in that introductory page, which Sainte-Beuve has well
compared with Machiavelli, that what commonly passes for good-fortune is
in reality the result of natural qualities and conduct. If that
satisfies, it is so much to her credit. Certainly, "the stars connived"
with her from the day in 1762 when she galloped in her cuirassier's
uniform through the streets of St. Petersburg. "_Toute la politique_,"
she said, "_est fondée sur trois mots circonstances, conjectures et
conjonctures_;" and like many leaders of action she was in her moments a
fatalist, for then she saw how little after all, the greatest, as
Bismarck says, can control events.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] _Macbeth_, ii, 3. That is, the nearer in relationship the heirs of
power to the source of their inheritance, the greater their danger at
the hands of bloody usurpers (like Macbeth).--ED.
CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC
A.D. 1763
E.O. RANDALL
With the fall of Quebec and De Vaudreuil's capitulation of Montreal,
Canada passed from the dominion of France to Britain, and for a time
came under military rule. In the West, around the shores of the
Great Lakes and the country watered by the Ohio, though small
English garrisons occupied the forts of the region, the French still
held posts on the Wabash and the Mississippi, and had a considerable
settlement at New Orleans. About the Lakes and in the Ohio Valley
discontent smouldered among the Indians, many of whom bewailed the
fate of their old allies, the French, while they feared the English,
whom they dreaded as likely to drive them from their hunting-grounds
and treat them with injustice or neglect.
Their fears in this respect were worked upon and disaffection among
them was fomented by French traders from Montreal and St. Louis; the
results of which were presently seen in the rising of all the
Western tribes under the wily leadership of Pontiac, chief of the
Ottawa warriors, who sought to exterminate the English and restore
the supremacy of the French and Indian races. The incidents of this
conspiracy of Pontiac are related in an edifying paper by the Hon.
E.O. Randall, of Columbus, Ohio, contributed to the _Transactions_
of the Ohio Archæological and Historical Society, and here, by kind
permission, reproduced.
The conquest of Canada left the Indians of the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys subject to British domination. The red men were repulsed but not
conquered. They were scattered over a vast territory; their total number
between the Mississippi on the west, the ocean on the east, between the
Ohio on the south, and the Great Lakes on the north was probably not in
excess of two hundred thousand, and their fighting warriors not more
than ten thousand.[45] Fort Duquesne was in November, 1758, captured
from the French by the British forces under General John Forbes. The
military posts of the French in the East, on the waters of Lake Erie and
the Allegheny, viz., Presqu'île, Le Boeuf, and Venango, passed into
the hands of the British soon after the taking of Fort Duquesne. Most of
the Western forts were transferred to the English during the autumn of
1760; but the extreme Western settlements on the Illinois, viz., Forts
Ouatanon, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Chartres, and Cahokia, remained several
years longer under French control. In the fall of 1760 Major Robert
Rogers was directed by the then British commander, Sir Jeffrey Amherst,
to traverse the Great Lakes with a detachment of provincial troops and,
in the name of England, take possession of Detroit, Michilimackinac, and
the other Western forts included in the surrender of the French.
Major Rogers, with two hundred rangers, left Montreal, ascended the St.
Lawrence, crossed Lakes Ontario and Erie, and reached the mouth of the
Cuyahoga[46] on November 7th. No body of troops under the British flag
had ever before penetrated so far west on the Lakes. Rogers and his men
encamped in the neighboring forest. Shortly after their arrival a party
of Indian chiefs and warriors appeared at the camp and declared they
were envoys from Pontiac, "ruler of all that country," and demanded, in
his name, that the British soldiers "should advance no farther" until
they had conferred with the great chief, who was rapidly approaching.
That same day Pontiac himself appeared; and "it is here," says Parkman,
"for the first time, that this remarkable man stands forth distinctly on
the page of history."
The place and date of birth of Pontiac are both matters of dispute.
There seems to be no doubt that he was the son of an Ottawa chief; his
mother is variously stated to have been an Ojibwa, a Miami, and a Sac.
Preponderance of evidence, as the lawyers say, seems to favor the
Ojibwas. Authorities also vary as to the date of his nativity from 1712
to 1720.[47] Historical writers usually content themselves with the
vague statement that he was born "on the Ottawa River," without
designating which Ottawa River, for many were so called; indeed, the
Ottawas were in the habit of calling every stream upon which they
sojourned any length of time "Ottawa," after their own tribe. The Miami
chief Richardville is on record as often asserting that Pontiac was born
by the Maumee at the mouth of the Auglaize.[48] In any event, Pontiac,
like his great successor, the incomparable Shawano chief, Tecumseh, was
a native of Ohio.
The Ottawas, Ojibwas, and the Pottawottomis had formed a sort of
alliance of which Pontiac was the virtual head. He was of a despotic and
commanding temperament, and he wielded practical authority among all the
tribes of the Illinois country, and was known to all the Indian nations
of America. Pontiac, conscious of his power and position, haughtily
asked Major Rogers, "What his business was in that country?" and how he
dared enter it without Pontiac's permission? Rogers informed the chief
that the war was over, the French defeated, the country surrendered to
the British, and he was on his way to receive the posts from the French
occupiers. Pontiac was wily and diplomatic. He received the news
stolidly, reserved his answer till next morning, when his reply was that
as he desired to live in peace with the British, he would let them
remain in his country as long as "they treated him with due respect and
deference." Both parties smoked the calumet and protested friendship.
Rogers proceeded on his errand. On November 29, 1760, the French
garrison at Detroit transferred that historic and most important Western
station to British possession.[49]
The stormy season prevented Rogers from advancing farther.
Michilimackinac and the three remoter posts of Ste. Marie, La Baye
(Green Bay), and St. Joseph remained in the hands of the French until
the next year. The interior posts of the Illinois country were also
retained by the French, but the British conquest of America was
completed. The victory of England and the transfer of the French
strongholds to British commanders were a terrible and portentous blow to
the Indian. He could not fail to foresee therein dire results to his
race. His prophetic vision read the handwriting on the wall! Expressions
and signs of discontent and apprehension began to be audible among the
Indian tribes; "from the Potomac to Lake Superior, and from the
Alleghanies to the Mississippi, in every wigwam and hamlet of the
forest, a deep-rooted hatred of the English increased with rapid
growth." When the French occupied the military posts of the lakes and
the rivers they freely supplied the neighboring Indians with weapons,
clothing, provisions, and fire-water. The sudden cessation of these
bounties was a grievous and significant calamity.
The English fur-trader and incomer was rude and coarse and domineering
as compared with the agreeable and docile Frenchman. Worse and more
alarming than all was the intrusion into the forest solitude and
hunting-ground of the Indian by the English settler, who regarded the
red man as having no rights he was bound to respect. While the rivalry
between the two white nations was in progress, the red man was courted
by each as holding in large degree the balance of power. But the war
over, the ascendant Briton no longer regarded the Indians as necessary
allies, and they were in large measure treated with indifference and
injustice. The hostility of the Indian against the British was, of
course, assiduously promoted by the French, who saw in it trouble for
the British, possibly a regaining of their lost ground. The warlike and
revengeful spirit of the Indian began to give itself vent. The
smouldering fires were bound to burst forth. During the years 1761 and
1762 plots were hatched in various tribes to stealthily approach, and,
by attack or treacherous entrance, destroy the posts of Detroit, Fort
Pitt, and others. These plots were severally discovered in time to
forestall their attempt. Indian indignation reached its height when in
1763 it was announced to the tribes that the King of France had ceded
all their (Indian) country to the King of England, without consulting
them in the matter. At once a plot was contrived, "such as was never
before or since conceived or executed by North American Indians."
It was determined and planned to make an assault upon all the British
posts on the same day; "then, having destroyed the garrisons, to turn
upon the defenceless frontier and ravage and lay waste the white
settlements." It was fondly believed by thousands of braves that then
the British might be exterminated, or at least driven to the seaboard
and confined to their coast settlements. It was the great chief,
Pontiac, who if he did not originally instigate, fostered, directed, and
personally commanded this secretly arranged universal movement. His
mastermind comprehended the importance and necessity of combined and
harmonious effort. He proposed to unite all the tribes into one
confederacy for offensive operations. At the close of 1762 he despatched
ambassadors to the different nations--to the tribes of the North on the
Lakes; to the northwest, the head-waters of the Mississippi and south to
its mouth; to the east and the southeast. The Indians thus enlisted and
banded together against the British comprised, "with few unimportant
exceptions, the whole Algonquin stock." Especially were the Ohio tribes
solicited and secured; the Shawanoes, the Miamis, the Wyandots, and the
Delawares. The Senecas were the only members of the Iroquois confederacy
that joined the league. The onslaught was to be made in the month of
May, 1763, the tribes to rise simultaneously at the various points and
each tribe destroy the British garrison in its neighborhood.
It was a vast scheme, worthy the brain and courage of the greatest
general and shrewdest statesman. The plan was divulged by individual
Indians to officers at two or three of the posts, but was either
disbelieved or its importance ignored. While this gigantic and almost
chimerical plot was being developed by Pontiac and his associate chiefs,
the treaty of peace between France and England was signed at Paris,
February 10, 1763. By this compact France yielded to England all her
territory north of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and east of the
Mississippi. The Spanish possessions on the Gulf of Mexico were ceded to
England, the territory west of the Mississippi going to Spain. France
was left no foothold in North America. While the powers of England,
France, and Spain were in the French capital arranging this result, as
Parkman remarks, "countless Indian warriors in the American forests were
singing the war-song and whetting their scalping-knives."