FOOTNOTES:[43]That of Professor Robinson, of Edinburgh University, who was present as a midshipman.
[43]That of Professor Robinson, of Edinburgh University, who was present as a midshipman.
[43]That of Professor Robinson, of Edinburgh University, who was present as a midshipman.
A.D.1762
"No sovereign since Ivan the Terrible," says Rambaud, "extended the frontiers of the empire by such vast conquests" as those of Catharine II. "She gave Russia for boundaries the Niemen, the Dniester, and the Black Sea." This aggrandizement, which was her own boast, was a sufficient compensation to Russia, if not to history, for the crimes charged against Catharine both at home and elsewhere in the scenes of her political and military triumphs. Her participation in the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) associated her name forever with the long and pathetic tragedy of that nation.Voltaire, whose admiration for Catharine engages Johnson's attention, seems really to have regarded her as the political teacher of Europe, for, referring to her, he said, "Light now comes from the North." The woman who so enslaved men of genius and enlarged the empire which Peter the Great had already made powerful, was not herself a Russian. She was born at Stettin, Prussian Pomerania, in 1729, the daughter of Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst and Governor of Stettin.Johnson gives an interesting account of her introduction to the court of the Empress (Czarina) Elizabeth Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great and Catharine I. His story of her marriage and sudden usurpation of the throne is a spirited picture of a dark event in her career. Above all, he furnishes a most animated and searching analysis of her character and acts, and of her relations with great personages of her day. His critical observations, happily blending with the historical review, shed a revealing light upon this famous ruler and her reign.
"No sovereign since Ivan the Terrible," says Rambaud, "extended the frontiers of the empire by such vast conquests" as those of Catharine II. "She gave Russia for boundaries the Niemen, the Dniester, and the Black Sea." This aggrandizement, which was her own boast, was a sufficient compensation to Russia, if not to history, for the crimes charged against Catharine both at home and elsewhere in the scenes of her political and military triumphs. Her participation in the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) associated her name forever with the long and pathetic tragedy of that nation.
Voltaire, whose admiration for Catharine engages Johnson's attention, seems really to have regarded her as the political teacher of Europe, for, referring to her, he said, "Light now comes from the North." The woman who so enslaved men of genius and enlarged the empire which Peter the Great had already made powerful, was not herself a Russian. She was born at Stettin, Prussian Pomerania, in 1729, the daughter of Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst and Governor of Stettin.
Johnson gives an interesting account of her introduction to the court of the Empress (Czarina) Elizabeth Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great and Catharine I. His story of her marriage and sudden usurpation of the throne is a spirited picture of a dark event in her career. Above all, he furnishes a most animated and searching analysis of her character and acts, and of her relations with great personages of her day. His critical observations, happily blending with the historical review, shed a revealing light upon this famous ruler and her reign.
It is January, 1744, and the commandant of Stettin, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst zu Dornburg, is keeping New-Year festivities at his castle of Zerbst, when suddenly couriers from Berlin, couriers from St. Petersburg, throw everyone into wild commotion. For the Czarina Elizabeth, casting about for a wife for her nephew, the young grand duke Peter of Holstein, nominated heir-presumptive to all the Russias, has accepted advice from Frederick, soon to become "the Great." She is formally desirous of a visit from the Princess of Zerbst and her daughter,Sophie Frederika, now fifteen years of age, and already noticeable for her good looks and good-sense. Not a moment is to be lost. So eastward, northward, the sleighs hurry them through the white leagues of snow, to arrive within six weeks at the Russian court, now established in Moscow; with little state or ceremony, nevertheless, for the princely house of Zerbst is poor as it is ancient. Sophie's wardrobe, she informs us herself, consists just of three, or it may be four, dresses, with twelve chemises. For here begins that singular autobiography; an unauthenticated fragment, it is true, but a self-portraiture convincing as any in literature.
At Moscow they made the best of impression; the Czarina was graciousness itself, and within eighteen months the young Princess had been received into the Greek Church as Catharine, and married to the Grand Duke, himself only seventeen years old.
But already she had learned not to expect happiness. He was, if we believe the accounts of him, senseless and boorish in the extreme. Certainly he did not pretend to the least affection for Catharine. A few days after her arrival, he had confided to her, "as his cousin," that he was "ardently in love with one of the maids-of-honor; since, however, the Empress desired it, he had resigned himself, and was willing to marry her instead!" She was forced, according to her assertion, to listen to confidences of a like nature during many years. His puerilities and eccentricities, we are told, amounted almost to madness. He was fond of drilling dogs and tin soldiers, together with his disgusted suite. But, like everyone else about the court, he lived in terror of the strong-willed, strong-drinking Czarina. His kennel must be kept a secret, and was accordingly located in his wife's bedroom. He would spend hours indoors cracking whips or emitting weird sounds on musical instruments. At night, after Madame Tchoglokoff, who was charged with the surveillance of the grand-ducalménage, had retired, under the impression that she had locked everyone up safely, he would call for lights again, like a schoolboy, and make Catharine and her attendants play with marionettes on the counterpane till one, two, three o'clock in the morning.
He had been more or less drunk, to credit his enemies, sincethe age of ten; and Catharine declares he had a mortal aversion to the bath, which it seems was then a Russian, not a German, observance. When ordered by the Empress to take one as penance during Lent, he replied that it was repugnant to his moral nature and unsuited to his physical constitution: nothing, he said, but the most vital considerations could induce him to risk the Empress' displeasure, but he was not prepared to die; and life was dearer to him than her majesty's approbation. Both were obstinate, and the dispute led to the most terrific outburst of rage on the part of the Czarina that Catharine had yet witnessed.
On another occasion his wife discovered him presiding over a court-martial in full regimentals, with a large rat in the centre of the room, which had just been suspended with all the formalities of a military execution. It appeared that the unfortunate beast had transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was furious; and she had to retire, excusing herself with difficulty on account of her ignorance of military discipline. The affair sensibly aggravated the estrangement between them.
Of Elizabeth, who led an eccentric life with her own peculiar intimates, Catharine knew little; but she was the victim of an unrelenting if petty tyranny, which kept jealous watch over every word and movement, deprived her of any attendant of whom she made a friend, and dictated every minute circumstance of her life. It was like nothing so much as a dame school, even to the various tutors and governesses ordered her by the Czarina. When her father died she was allowed a week's mourning; at the end of that time the Empress sent a command to leave off; "she was a grand duchess, and her father was not a king." But Catharine was not of the stuff from which are modelled the monuments of docility. Little by little, as her character develops, she acquires a proud and lonely self-dependence. She awakens to intellectual interests; from the first, indeed, she had flung herself with ardor into the study of Russian history and language.During these early years books are her great distraction; "dixhuit années d'ennui et de solitude," we read in a epitaph written by herself, "lui firent lire bien des livres."
After a trial in the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction, Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that incomparableverveand intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like some triumphant will-o'-the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of things. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion to ideals of monarchy expressed for her in Henri Quatre and Louis Quatorze.
After Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus, Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of theEncyclopædia. But her gay, expansive nature was not capable, for long, of purely intellectual or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth's court it was too easy for the reader of Brantôme to seek elsewhere the "love" romances had spoken of, but marriage had denied her. She was remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke saw Marie Antoinette, the morning-star of a pleasure-loving society, "full of life, and splendor, and joy." She says that she never considered herself extremely beautiful, but "she was able to please,et cela était mon fort." All contemporary testimony bears out this singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a woman such as Catharine a very perilous one.
Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism. She could be beautiful or terrible, playful or majestic, at pleasure. At St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her husband's friends of "Madame la Ressource." Despite Peter's difficult relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities, especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. "I don't understand things very well myself," he would explain to strangers, "but my wife understands everything." We observe in theAutobiographya fixed idea to "gain over" as many people as possible, to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the Czarina's circle, which gradually came to characterize the "Jeune Cour," but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband's inadequacy to his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsoff and her relations, above all with a passionate thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more precise premonitions of the memoirs, they are what would naturally appear to her after thefait accompli. Ambition, calculation looking before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the weakness of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities—these are the master traits of the Catharine of theAutobiography.
So far, then, of these earlier years, while we have the memoirs with us. We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs might be taken fromMacbeth: "The near in blood, the nearer bloody."[44]But in that sombre history there is no darker page than the conspiracy of 1762.
In January Elizabeth died and the Grand Duke ascended the throne, quietly enough, as Peter III. But the position of Catharine was worse than before. The Czar was completely under the influence of her enemies; he insulted her in public; and it seemed certain that his next step would be to divorce her, throw her into prison, and marry Elizabeth Vorontsoff. He had once already ordered her arrest, which his uncle had afterward persuaded him to retract. The very reforms with which he had begun his reign worked against him. He had made himself unpopular not only with the clergy, but with the Preobrajenski Guards, which, like the prætorians of the Roman Empire, disposed of the throne. He smoked and drank till three or five o'clock in the morning, writes the French ambassador; yet hewould be up again at seven manœuvring his troops. He would order a hundred cannon to be fired together that he might have a foretaste of war, and his eccentricities in general were intensified by absolute power. The history of thecoup-d'étatis still obscure. A considerable party, however, formed round Catharine: the brothers Gregory and Alexis Orloff won over several regiments, and the princess Dashkoff gained adherents in society. Matters were precipitated by the accidental arrest of one of the conspirators; and although their plans were incoherent, the good-fortune of Catharine carried her through. At five o'clock in the morning of July 9th Alexis Orloff entered her room at Peterhoff, and told her to set out for St. Petersburg, where she was to be proclaimed immediately. She hastened there with the Orloffs. Three regiments, to whomvodkahad judiciously been dispensed beforehand, took the oath of allegiance with enthusiasm; and others followed suit. Peter was thunderstruck. On the advice of Marshal Muennich he embarked for Cronstadt, where he was challenged, and demanded admittance as emperor. "Il n'y a plus d'empéreur!" replied the commandant, Talitsine. He hurried back again, and after agonies of indecision finally abdicated. "He had lost his crown," as Frederick said scornfully, "like a naughty child sent to bed with a whipping."
So far the revolution had been bloodless, but its darker hour was to come. "I placed the deposed Emperor under the command of A. Orloff, with four 'chosen' officers and a detachment of 'quiet' and 'sober' men, and sent him to a distance of twenty-seven versts from St. Petersburg to a place called Ropsha, 'very retired,' but very pleasant"—so runs Catharine's account to Poniatowski. On the 15th he was dead; of "hemorrhoidal colic," said the official announcement; strangled, as Europe rightly believed, by Alexis Orloff with his own hands. It is hardly possible that this hideous murder was without Catharine's at least tacit consent. She certainly condoned the crime. There was danger in a name; and her sentiment was doubtless that of Lord Essex when the fate of Stafford hung in the balance: "Stone dead hath no fellow!" Already, where the Neva turns toward the Baltic, one wretched boy-Czar languished beneath the melancholy fortress of the Schluesselburg. Two years, and he too, after having known the bitterness of life, willbe violently done to death in his turn. But Voltaire wrote to Madame du Deffand: "I am aware that people reproach her with some bagatellesà proposof that husband of hers; however, one really cannot intermeddle in these family squabbles!"
Such was the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catharine said, unpitied: a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly. But history is precise and simple; truth complex and difficult. Was there no light, no touch of nobility at all in that strange chaotic temperament? No reverence in the boy who would kneel to the picture of the great Frederick? No generosity in the Czar who sacrificed victory to a sentiment; who abolished the hateful "secret chancery," torture, monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg, "desiring rather to raise a monument in the hearts of the people"? There was something inarticulate there, surely—in the would-be musician who must shut himself up for hours to scrawk madly, passionately, on a crazy violin, and whose last request was for his confidant and instrument. "What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" Such, nevertheless, is the form and spirit of the hapless Peter as portrayed by his enemies.
This was the Catharine of Elizabeth's court, and protagonist of that revolution which first made her known to Europe. But it was the sovereign who dazzled her contemporaries, and still lives splendidly with the "Great Czar" in the annals of Russia. That exuberant personality of hers is so eloquent, so omnipresent in the sphere of politics, that one is often the most luminous illustration of the other. There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto prosaic enough in so many ways; and it communicates itself to men like the Orloffs, Patiomkin, Suvaroff. It is, I think, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who remarks that in Russia the shows of things are more important than reality. So rite, ceremonial, the spectacular, the symbolic, seem to have a power there greater than in any other people of civilization.
But stronger still was Catharine's overmastering desire to play to the applause of Europe. She had conceived herself asthe heroine of a grandiose drama. It was her ambition to be the "Grand Monarque" of the North, and to show the Paris of Louis Quinze that the age of Olympian sovereignty was not yet past. Hence her sensitiveness to Western opinion, her assiduous court to the men of intellect, her anxiety to be admired and feared in Europe. Nowhere is this pose, this consciousness of a gallery, more evident than in the sphere of foreign policy. The great Peter had fulfilled the dream of Ivan in reaching the Baltic, and so, in her wars with the Turk, Catharine realized the aim of Peter by forcing her way to the Black Sea.
But a Hellenic empire at Constantinople haunts her dreams. She stirs up Greek against Ottoman, and her trumpeter Voltaire heralds a new Sparta and Athens; she calls her grandson Constantine, and surrounds him with Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin'srégime. This extraordinary man—mountebank, writes the English envoy, "esprit réveur," says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne—a barbarian, of terrific appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater influence with Catharine than any other man of her reign. He had been created "Prince of Taurida" (the Crimea) after the conquest of the southern provinces; and was resolved to dazzle Europe and his sovereign with her new acquisitions.
In January, 1787, she set out on her triumphal journey. A huge retinue accompanied her, together with the foreign ambassadors, Cobenzl, Fitzherbert, and Ségur, the last of whom has described this strange procession. Forty miles were covered every day. There is a palace at every stopping-place; towns and villages dot what six months ago had been a howling wilderness. Painted forests seem to clothe the horizon: fertile solitudes swarm with gayly dressed peasants—imported for this occasion only. From Kiev floating pavilions carry them down the Dnieper: the prince-magician alone has a hundred twenty of his beloved musicians. Again the samemise-en-scène: operatic Cossacks rowing out from either shore, the village of yesterday in the foreground, roofless façades in the middle distance; the same reviews in successive provinces of hussars out of her own escort! The greatest of optimists saw everything and affected to see through nothing—the works of his highness surpass conception. Suddenly spring appears, glittering on the enamelled meadows and majestic river; they journey to the music of the galleys between throngs of spectators from thirty nations. Every morning a fresh scene opens, the days "travel more quickly than they themselves."
At Kanioff she is met by his majesty of Poland, none other than Poniatowski, the lover, of Peterhoff in the old days! At Kherson, on an eastern gate, appears the famous legend "The road to Byzantium"; and there it is the Holy Roman Emperor who is drawn into her train—they have already mapped out the Ottoman dominions. So with excursions and alarums eastward by Poltava of glorious memory to the new "Glory of Catharine," her city of Ekaterinoslaff; and last of all through undulating steppes to the gorgeous palace piled upon the sand at Inkerman, where after banquetings a curtain falls away, and behold—the pasteboard fortifications of Sebastopol! where a green-wood squadron anchored beneath them splutters forth its husky artillery.Splendide mendax!The West applauded frantically: never had such a travelling-show been seen in Europe.
At home, too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity and enthusiasm. "C'est presque un monde," she writes to Voltaire, "à créer, à unir, à conserver!" First comes the administration of justice, and her ukase of 1762, on its abuses, has a ring of sincerity that can hardly be mistaken. There is a real courage again in her dealings with the clergy. Four years later she summons a great assembly to Moscow to consider a new code; and her "Instruction" to the delegates, saturated as it is with Montesquieu and the rest, shows her abreast of her time. Politicians of the old school, indeed, shuddered at its array of grandiloquent maxims—"there are bombs enough in it," cried Panin, "to bring the walls about our ears." She is here, in spite of all that has been said, exactly where we invariably find her, neither a day in front of her age nor a day behind.
Reform of theex cathedrasort was just then in the air. From the Tagus to the Dnieper, and from Copenhagen to the Vatican, Europe was crowded with paternal monarchs and earnest ministers, who were willing to do almost everything for the people and nothing by them. The world had not seen statesmen so sincere, enlightened, and plausible. A generation later, on themeeting of the National Assembly, the despotic reformation of Montesquieu and Voltaire will still seem about to be translated into action. Men read their Rousseau: soon they will understand him; they will also understand thatNon de nobis sine nobis, which was the haughty motto of the Hungarian magnates.
But her attention soon became diverted. She was not, as Gunning thought, insincere, only fickle; she wanted patience and continuity of aim. The "States-General" had produced an excellent effect in the world, and, in fact, had afforded her information afterward turned to account. Her eye is on the Turk: as with the second Pitt, had it not been for this cursed war we should have seen greater things. "Beginnings—only beginnings!" exclaims an eye-witness, "there are plenty of sketches to be seen, but where is the finished picture?" Another reports that shoals of academies and secondary schools bear witness to Catharine's enthusiasm for education, but that some exist only on paper, while others seem to have everything except scholars. Things are done hastily, and without just measure or proportion; the imitative talent of the Russian does not seem to carry him quite far enough. At her death, says a historian who wrote eight years after it, most of her foundations were already in ruins; everything seemed to have been abandoned before completion. Yet we must not forget that liberal ideas were in themselves a revelation to the Russia of her days, and that after a succession of contemptible sovereigns she appeared as the first worthy successor of Peter. It was already something for a woman there to be governed by large social conceptions; has it not been said even elsewhere that the politics of women are proper names? You may say what you will: she saved the European tradition of Peter the Great, and was in a sense the creator of modern Russia.
But to her philosophic friends at Paris it mattered little whether her designs were in the parchment or any other stage. Since Voltaire had hailed her as the "Northern Semiramis," no adulation was enough to translate their enthusiasm: the "charms of Cleopatra," for example, were united in her to "the soul of Brutus." On her side she "distributed compliments in abundance, gold medals also (but more often in bronze?), and from time to time even a little money." La Harpe, Marmontel, Volney, Galiani, and many others fallen silent in these days weresharers in her bounty. She would buy the books of some specially favored and instal them at home again as "her librarians." Only one or two, D'Alembert, Raynal, stood aloof, with the mistrustful Jean Jacques, who refused the demesne of Gatschina. Diderot came to St. Petersburg in those days, declaiming for two, three, five hours with unmatched copiousness of discourse, astounding Catharine with his large argument and fiery eloquence, and entertaining her hugely by his oblivion of everything once fairly launched on his foaming torrent. The philosopher who, borne on spiritual hurricanes, would leap from his chair at Princess Dashkoff's, striding to and fro as he spat upon the floor in his excitement, forgot himself equally in the presence of "Semiramis." "In the heat of exposition he brought his hands down on the imperial knees with such force and iteration" that Catharine complained they had turned black and blue. But for all that she would egg on this strange wild-fowl. "Allons," she would exclaim, a table once set safely between them, "entre hommes tout est permis!"
As for Voltaire, his proudest title was that of "lay preacher of the religion of 'St.' Catharine." Her correspondence with him, which begins the year after her accession and continues until his death, is in truth a kind of journalism, written partly by herself, partly by others. Its object is to keep the friend of princes and dictator of literary opinionau courantwith her ideas, measures, and general policy. She is not content now, however, with the applause of her generation; she aims at commanding the sources of history itself. Here she motions posterity to take its stand behind contemporaries in the church of Voltaire's foundation, while the archpriest of Ferney prostrates himself with iterated formula, "Te Cathariniam laudamus, te Dominam confitemur." For St. Catharine was an interested reader of that correspondence of Diderot's with her sculptor Falconet, whose theme is the solidity of posthumous fame. Rulihière had already written an account of the events of 1762, of which he had been an eye-witness; she had tried first to buy him, and then to have him thrown into the Bastille. She will search Venice for a pliable historian; and her own letter on thecoup-d'état, together with her memoirs, shows how strong in her was that "besoin de parolier" analyzed by the great Pascal a century before. Catharine, be quite certain of it, is no earnest seeker after truth; rather "the plain man," with something of the acuteness as well as the insensibility of common-sense. ThePhilosopheswere the interest of the cultivated "as scholars had been in one century, painters in another, theologians in a third." They had the ear of Europe, who rest now in Mr. Morley's bosom. But Catharine confessed years after: "Your learned men in 'ist' bored me to extinction. There was only my good protector Voltaire. Do you know it was he who made me the mode?"
With what a quaint inconsequence her truer self appeared at the 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 thelogic 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!" HisPlan 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 theirvivacity rather than by wit—by thatvervewhich 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 alsodes 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 sheshould 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 anysovereign 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 ofLa PucelleandJacques le Fatalisteproceeded from the same pen as theUniversity 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 revolutionaryMoniteurbranded 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.
[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.
[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.
A.D.1763
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 theTransactionsof the Ohio Archæological and Historical Society, and here, by kind permission, reproduced.
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 theTransactionsof 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 Bœuf, 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 thathe 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 hatchedin 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 peacebetween 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."
The chief centre of Indian activity and the main point of attack was the post of Detroit, the Western head-quarters of the British government. Pontiac was personally to strike the first blow. The rendezvous of his painted and armed warriors was to be the banks of the little river Ecorces, which empties into the Detroit River a few miles below the Fort, now the city of Detroit. It was April 27th when the assembled warriors listened to the final war-speech of the great chief.
Pontiac was an orator of a high order, fierce and impassioned in style. He presented at length the injustice of the British as compared with that of the French; he set forth the danger to his race from the threatened supremacy of the British power; he predicted the awakening of "their great father the King of France," during whose sleep the English had robbed the Indian of his American possessions. In passionate appeals he aroused the vengeance and superstition of his people and warned them that the white man's civilization was poisoning and annihilating the red race. In his dramatic way he related to the superstitious Indians a dream wherein the Great Spirit sent his message that they were to cast aside the weapons, the utensils of civilization, and the "deadly rum" of the white men, and, with aid from the Great Spirit, drive the dogs in red from every post in their (Indian) country. He revealed his plans of destruction of the whites and the details of the plot to secure Detroit. He and a few of his chosen chiefs were to visit the Fort, under pretence of a peaceful visit, gain admittance, seek audience with Major Henry Gladwyn, the commandant, and his officers, and then at an agreed signal the chiefs were to draw their weapons, previously concealed beneath their blankets, raise the war-whoop, rush upon the officers and strike them down.
The Indian forces waiting meanwhile at the gate were then to assail the surprised and half-armed soldiers. Thus through this perfidious murder Detroit would fall an easy prey to the savages and Pontiac's conspiracy have a successful inauguration. His plan was approved. Just below Detroit, on the same side of the river, was a Pottawottomi village; across the river some three miles up the current was an Ottawa village; on the same eastern side about a mile below Detroit was the Wyandot village. Along each side of the river for two or three miles were houses of the French settlers. "The king and lord of all this country," as Major Rogers called Pontiac, had located one of his homes, where he spent the early summer, on a little island (Île à Pêche) at the opening of Lake St. Clair. Here he had a small oven-shaped cabin of bark and rushes. Here he dwelt with his squaws and children, and here doubtless he might often have been seen, lounging, Indian style, half naked, on a rush mat or bear-skin.
The number of warriors under the command of Pontiac is variously estimated from six hundred to two thousand. The garrison consisted of one hundred twenty soldiers, eight officers, and about forty others capable of bearing arms. Two armed schooners, The Beaver and The Gladwyn, were anchored in the river near the Fort. Pontiac's plot was revealed to Gladwyn the night before its proposed execution by an Ojibwa girl from the Pottawottomi village.[50]Gladwyn, thus warned, was forearmed. Pontiac and his six chiefs were admitted to the council-chamber. Pontiac began the harangue of peace and friendly palaver and was about to give the preconcerted signal when Gladwyn raised his hand and the sound of clashing arms and drum-beating was heard without. Pontiac feared he was foiled, and announcing that he would "call again," next time with his squaws and children, he and his party withdrew.
The next morning, Pontiac, in hopes of regaining Gladwyn's confidence, repaired to the Fort with but three of his chiefs, and bearing in his hand the pipe of peace. Offering it to Gladwyn he again protested his friendship for the British, whom he declared "we love as our brothers." A few days later, the Indians thronged the open field behind the Fort gate. It was closed and barred. Pontiac, advancing, demanded admittance. Gladwyn replied that he might enter, but only alone. The great chief, baffled and enraged, then "threw off the mask he had so long worn" and boldly declared his intention to make war. A day or two later the four tribes, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawottomis, and Wyandots, clamored about the Fort, and the attack was begun by volleys of bullets fired at the palisade walls. Thus opened the famous siege of Detroit, which lasted six months, from May 1 to November 1 (1763), one of the longest and most bitterly contested sieges in the history of Western Indian warfare.
The incomparable treachery of Pontiac in endeavoring to secure the Fort by dissemblance of friendship was further evidenced by his pretence at a truce. Pontiac declaring his earnest desire for "firm and lasting peace," requested Gladwyn to send to the camp of the chief, Captain Campbell, Gladwyn's second in command, a veteran officer and most upright and manly in character. Campbell went, was made prisoner, and subsequently was foully and hideously murdered. Pontiac neglected no expedient known to Indian perfidy, cruelty, or deviltry. He surpassed his race in all the detestable elements of their nature. His conduct from first to last was only calculated to create distrust, contempt, and loathing. His warriors murdered the British settlers in the vicinity of the Fort, burned their huts, robbed the Canadians, and committed every variety of depredation.
Pontiac, realizing the seriousness of the situation and the obstinate courage of the British garrison, prepared for a lengthy campaign. He ordered the Ottawa village moved across the river to the Detroit side, where it was located about a mile and a half northeast of the Fort, at the mouth of Parent's Creek, afterward known as Bloody Run.
The garrison bravely and patiently withstood all assaults andbided the time of rescue. By midnight sallies and other expedients they removed all exterior buildings, fences, trees, and other obstacles that lay within the range of their guns or that might afford protection to sneaking and stealthy Indians who would crawl snakelike close to the palisade and fire at the sentinels and loop-holes, or shoot their arrows tipped with burning tow upon the roofs of the structures within the Fort. Fortunately the supply of water was inexhaustible; the provisions were wisely husbanded; friendly Canadians across the river, under cover of night, brought supplies.
These Canadian farmers were also subject to tribute to the Indians, who seized their supplies by theft or open violence. They appealed to Pontiac, and about the only creditable act recorded of that perfidious chief was his agreement to make restitution to the robbed settlers. Pontiac gave them in payment for their purloined property promissory notes drawn on birch-bark and signed with the figure of an otter—the totem to which he belonged—all of which promises to pay, it is said, were redeemed.
Day after day passed with varying incidents of attack and repulse. The keen-eyed watchfulness of the Indians never for an instant abated; their vigils were tireless and ceaseless; woe to the soldier who ventured without the Fort or even lifted his head above the palisade. Pontiac's patience was strengthened with the delusive idea that the French were only temporarily defeated and would rally to his assistance. He even despatched messengers across the interior to the French commandant, Neyon, at Fort Chartres on the Mississippi, requesting that French troops be sent without delay to his aid. Meanwhile Gladwyn had sent one of his schooners to Fort Niagara to hasten promised reënforcements from the British.
Lieutenant Cuyler had already (May 13th) left Niagara with convoy of seven boats, ninety-six men, and quantities of supplies and ammunition. This little fleet coasted along the northern shore of Lake Erie until near the mouth of the Detroit River. The force attempted to land, when a band of Wyandot Indians suddenly burst from the woods, seized five of the boats, and killed or captured sixty of the soldiers. Cuyler with the remaining men (thirty-six), many of whom were wounded, escaped in theother boats and crossed to Fort Sandusky, which they found had been taken and burned by the Wyandots; the garrison had been slaughtered and Ensign Paully sent prisoner to Pontiac's camp. Cuyler with his escaping companions slowly wended his way back, where he reported the result of his expedition to the commanding officer, Major Wilkins.
At the same time the Wyandots, with the captured boats and prisoners, proceeded up the Detroit to Pontiac's quarters, arriving in full sight of the Fort's garrison, when Gladwyn, of course, learned of the destruction of the Cuyler flotilla. The disappointment to the inmates of the Fort was almost unbearable. Gladwyn's schooner, however, reached Fort Niagara and returned about July 1st, laden with food, ammunition, and reënforcements, and the most welcome news of the Treaty of Paris. Pontiac, undismayed, continued his efforts. His forces now numbered, it is recorded, about eight hundred twenty warriors: two hundred fifty Ottawas, his own tribe and under his immediate command; one hundred fifty Pottawottomis, under Ninivay; fifty Wyandots, under Takee; two hundred Ojibwas, under Wasson; and one hundred seventy of the same tribe, under Sekahos.
The two schooners were a serious menace to the movements of the Indians, and many desperate attempts were made to burn them by midnight attacks, and the floating of fire-rafts down upon them; but all to no avail. Pontiac had the stubborn persistency of a later American general who said he would fight it out on that line if it took all summer. He exerted himself with fresh zeal to gain possession of the Fort. He demanded the surrender of Gladwyn, saying a still greater force of Indians was on the march to swell the army of besiegers. Gladwyn was equally tenacious and unyielding; he proposed to "hold the fort" till the enemy were worn out or reënforcements arrived. Pontiac sought to arouse the active aid of the neighboring Canadians, but the Treaty of Paris had made them British subjects, and they dared not war on their conquerors. History scarcely furnishes a like instance of so large an Indian force struggling so long in an attack on a fortified place.
The Wyandots and Pottawottomis, however, never as enthusiastic in this war as the other tribes, late in July decided towithdraw from the besieging confederacy and make peace with the British. They did so, and exchanged prisoners with Gladwyn. The Ottawas and Ojibwas, however, still held on, watching the Fort and keeping up a desultory fusillade. The end was drawing nigh. On July 29th, Captain James Dalzell arrived from Niagara with artillery supplies and two hundred eighty men in twenty-two barges. Their approach to the Fort was bravely contested by the combined Indian forces, even the Wyandots and Pottawottomis breaking their treaty and treacherously joining in the assault. Dalzell's troops entered the Fort, and he proposed an immediate sortie. Dalzell was bravery personified, and he had fought with Israel Putnam.
On the morning after his arrival (July 31st) at two o'clock, he led a force of two hundred fifty men out of the Fort. They silently in the darkness marched along the river toward the Ottawa village just across Parent's Creek. The Indians were prepared and had ambuscaded both sides of the road. They were, Indian fashion, secreted behind trees and fences and Canadian houses. Their presence was not discovered till the van of Dalzell's column reached the bridge over the creek, when a terrible fire was opened upon the soldiers from all sides. It was still dark; the Indians could not be seen.
A panic ensued. The troops in disorder retreated amid an awful slaughter. Dalzell himself was killed, and Major Robert Rogers assumed command, and the fleeing soldiers were only spared from total destruction by two of the British boats coming to the rescue. About sixty men were killed or wounded. It was known as the Battle of Bloody bridge. Upon the retreating into the Fort of Major Rogers' survivors the siege was renewed. Pontiac was greatly encouraged over this victory, and his Indians showed renewed zeal. The schooner Gladwyn was sent to Niagara for help. On its return, it was attacked and its crew and supplies practically destroyed. Another relief expedition under Major Wilkins in September was overwhelmed in a lake storm and seventy soldiers were drowned.
But even Indian persistency began to tire. The realization that the French were beaten and time only would bring victory to the British led all the tribes, except the Ottawas, to sue forpeace. This was on October 12th. Pontiac could only hold his own tribe in line. The Ottawas sustained their hostility until October 30th, when a French messenger arrived from Neyon, who reported to Pontiac that he must expect no help from the French, as they were now completely and permanently at peace with the British.[51]Pontiac was advised to quit the war at once. His cause was doomed. The great chief who had so valiantly and unremittently fought for six months suddenly raised the siege and retired into the country of the Maumee, where he vainly endeavored to arouse the Miamis and neighboring tribes to another war upon the invading British.
Though the memorable siege of Detroit, personally conducted by Pontiac, ended in failure to the great chief, his conspiracy elsewhere met with unparalleled success. The British posts planned to be simultaneously attacked and destroyed by the savages were some dozen in number, including besides Detroit, St. Joseph, Michilimackinac, Ouiatenon, Sandusky, Miami, Presqu'île, Niagara, Le Bœuf, Venango, Fort Pitt, and one or two others of lesser importance. Of all the posts from Niagara and Pitt westward, Detroit alone was able to survive the conspiracy. For the rest "there was but one unvaried tale of calamity and ruin." It was a continued series of disasters to the white men. The victories of the savages marked a course of blood from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi.
On May 16, 1763, the Wyandots surrounded Fort Sandusky, and under pretence of a friendly visit several of them well known to Ensign Paully, the commander, were admitted. While smoking the pipe of peace the treacherous and trusted Indians suddenly arose, seized Paully, and held him prisoner while their tribesmen killed the sentry, entered the fort, and in cold blood murdered and scalped the little band of soldiers. The traders in the post were likewise killed and their stores plundered. The stockade was fired and burned to the ground. Paully was taken to Detroit where he was "adopted" as the husband of an oldwidowed squaw, from whose affectionate toils he finally escaped to his friends in the Detroit Fort.
St. Joseph was located at the mouth of the river St. Joseph, near the southern end of Lake Michigan.[52]Ensign Schlosser was in command with a mere handful of soldiers, fourteen in number. On the morning of May 25th the commander was informed that a large "party" of Pottawottomis had arrived from Detroit "to visit their relations," and the chief (Washashe) and three or four of his followers wished to hold a "friendly talk" with the commander. Disarmed of suspicion, the commander-ensign admitted the callers; the result is the oft-repeated story. The entering Indians rushed to the gate, tomahawked the sentinel, let in their associates, who instantly pounced upon the garrison, killed eleven of the soldiers, plundered the fort, and later carried Schlosser and his three surviving companions captives to Detroit.
Fort Michilimackinac was the most important point on the Upper Lakes, commanding as it did the Straits of Mackinac, the passage from Lake Huron into Lake Michigan. Great numbers of the Chippewas (Ojibwas), in the last of May, began to assemble in the vicinity of the fort, but with every indication of friendliness. June 4th was King George's birthday. It must be celebrated with pastimes. The discipline of the garrison, some thirty-five in number, was relaxed. Many squaws were admitted as visitors into the fort, while their "braves" engaged in their favorite game of ball just outside the garrison entrance. It was a spirited contest between the Ojibwas and Sacs.
Captain George Etherington, commander of the fort, and his lieutenant, Leslie, stood without the palisades to watch the sport. Suddenly the ball was thrown near the open gate and behind the two officers. The Indians pretending to rush for the ball instantly encircled and seized Etherington and Leslie, and crowded their way into the fort, where the squaws supplied them with tomahawks and hatchets, which they had carried in, hidden under their blankets. Quick as a flash, the instruments of death were gleaming in the sunlight, and Lieutenant Jamet and fifteensoldiers and a trader were struck down, never to rise. The rest of the garrison were made prisoners and five of them afterward tomahawked. All of the peaceful traders were plundered and carried off. The prisoners were conveyed to Montreal. The French population of the post was undisturbed. Captain Etherington succeeded in sending timely warning to the little garrison at La Baye; Lieutenant Gorrell, the commandant, and his men were brought as prisoners to the Michilimackinac fort and thence sent with Etherington and Leslie to the Canadian capital. The little post of Ste. Marie (the Sault) had been partially destroyed and abandoned. The garrison inmates had withdrawn to Michilimackinac and shared its fate.
The garrison at Ouiatenon situated on the Wabash (IndianOuabache), near the present location of Lafayette (Indiana), then in the very heart of the Western forest, as planned, was to have been massacred on June 1st. Through the information given by the French at the post, the soldiers were apprised of their intended fate, and, through the intervention of the same French friends, the Indians were dissuaded from executing their sanguinary purpose. Lieutenant Jenkins and several of his men were made prisoners by stratagem; the remainder of the garrison readily surrendered.
On the present site of Fort Wayne (Indiana) was Fort Miami,[53]at the confluence of the Rivers St. Joseph and St. Mary, which unite to form the Maumee. The fort at this time was in charge of Ensign Holmes. On May 27th the commander was decoyed from the Fort by the story of an Indian girl, that a squaw lay dangerously ill in a wigwam near the stockade, and needed medical assistance. The humane Holmes, forgetting his caution on an errand of mercy, walked without the gate and was instantly shot dead. The soldiers in the palisades, seeing the corpse of their leader and hearing the yells and whoopings of the exultant Indians, offered no resistance, admitted the red men and gladly surrendered on promise of having their lives spared.
Fort Presqu'île stood on the southern shore of Lake Erie at the site of the present town of Erie. The block-house, an unusually strong and commodious one, was in command of Ensign Christie, with a courageous and skilful garrison of twenty-seven men. Christie, learning of the attack on the other posts, "braced up" for his "visit from the hell-hounds" as he appropriately called the enemy. He had not long to wait. On June 15th about two hundred of them put in an appearance from Detroit. They sprang into the ditch around the fort, and with reckless audacity approached to the very walls and threw fire-balls of pitch upon the roof and sides of the fortress. Again and again the wooden retreat was on fire, but amid showers of bullets and arrows the flames were extinguished by the fearless soldiers.
The savages rolled logs before the fort and erected strong breastworks, from behind which they could discharge their shots and throw their fire-balls. For nearly three days a terrific contest ensued. The savages finally undermined the palisades to the house of Christie, which was at once set on fire, nearly stifling the garrison with the smoke and heat, for Christie's quarters were close to the block-house. Longer resistance was vain, "the soldiers, pale and haggard, like men who had passed through a fiery furnace, now issued from their scorched and bullet-pierced stronghold." The surrendering soldiers were taken to Pontiac's quarters on the Detroit River.
Three days after the attack on Presqu'île, Fort le Bœuf, twelve miles south on Le Bœuf Creek, one of the head sources of the Allegheny River, was surrounded and burned. Ensign Price and a garrison of thirteen men miraculously escaped the flames and the encircling savages and endeavored to reach Fort Pitt. About half of them succeeded; the remainder died of hunger and privation by the way.
Fort Venango, still farther south, on the Allegheny River, was captured by a band of Senecas, who gained entrance by resorting to the oft-employed treachery of pretending friendliness. The entire garrison was butchered, Lieutenant Gordon, the commander, being slowly tortured to death, and the fort was burned to the ground. Not a soul escaped to tell the horrible tale.