On the issue of a constitution, the young idealists heartily agreed that it was needed, but that there was no way of framing it without encroaching on the emperor’s autocratic power. As for emancipation, the Committee of Friends concluded that serfdom was evil, but the group reckoned little could be done about it for fear of alienating the nobility. Alexander and his short-lived committee talked the talk, but weren’t prepared to walk the walk.
During the course of the early deliberations and those that followed, Alexander corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, whom he held in high regard. “I would be extremely grateful to you,” he wrote to his former tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, “if you would be helpful to make my closest acquaintance with Jefferson.” As a youth, he had read the Declaration of Independence and he knew that the singular document came from the pen of this one man. In June 1776, the thirty-three-year-old Virginian had been in Philadelphia to attend the fateful Continental Congress and rented the two second-floor rooms of a modest home belonging to a bricklayer, on the corner of Market and Seventh Streets. And there, at the urging of his congressional colleagues, Jefferson isolated himself for ten hot summer days, working and reworking the reverberating words that came to affect the world so profoundly. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another …”
Alexander I.
Stefan Semjonovitsj Stjukin. Oil. 1808. Museum of Pavlovsk, Russia.
Alexander I and Thomas Jefferson made an interesting pair. One of them was a youthful, idealistic, and naive autocrat, newly come to the throne; the other was an elderly, pragmatic, and experienced republican with decades of service to his country. They were two visionaries from radically dissimilar worlds. Jefferson’s devotion to a constitution and democratic principles was as firmly fixed as his abhorrence of slavery (although he, himself, owned slaves). What was good for him was equally good for his friends, and he considered the tsar a friend. “A more virtuous man, I believe, does not exist,” he wrote. “Nor one who is more enthusiastically devoted to better the condition of mankind.” The elderly statesman was paternalistically solicitous of the young sovereign and he sought to encourage him. To the American representative in St. Petersburg, Jefferson wrote, “The Emperor entertained a wish to know something of our Constitution. I have therefore selected the two best works we have on the subject for which I pray you to ask for a place in his library.” Deep down, however, Jefferson harboured grave doubts that a constitution could be had in Russia — the populace simply was not prepared for it. It would be “an Herculean task,” he wrote to a friend, to attend “to those who are not capable of taking care of themselves. Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government.” This was vintage Jefferson, and words that resonate today around the world.
Thomas Jefferson.
Gilbert Stuart, c. 1898. Oil. Library of Congress.
The young Alexander was indeed the virtuous man Jefferson said he was, and without a doubt he embraced the idea of “bettering the condition of man.” Emotionally and psychologically, however, he was a person of contradictions: complex and elusive — “the sphinx,” he was called, or “the enigmatic tsar” — he often seemed not to know his own mind. “Something is missing in his character,” commented Napoleon, “but I find it impossible to discover what it is.” One of his more conspicuous shortcomings was indecisiveness, especially with respect to controversial or unpopular issues. Emancipation and constitutional talk were indeed controversial and unpopular — certainly among the wealthy and influential. All such discussions came to naught. The emancipation of the serfs had to wait until 1861. A constitution with any degree of credibility was not produced until after perestroika took hold in the 1980s and ’90s.
The Committee of Friends, as well as similar groups in the imperial reigns that followed, clearly identified Russia’s problems, but they lacked the capacity or the will to address them except under extreme pressure. Alexander and his successors were well aware not only of the issues at hand but also of the solutions. Furthermore, this line of autocrats possessed the power to force solutions, but the fibre to do so simply was missing. The tragedy of that massive and magnificent country was that it lacked the collective will to tackle such reform challenges head on.
During Alexander’s twenty-four-year reign, the benign and supportive relationship between Russia and the United States blossomed and held for a century thereafter.
Chapter 5
The Admiral and the Prince
It would be proper at this juncture to deviate somewhat from the principal thread of our narrative to consider the intriguing stories of two colourful individuals who unquestionably are part of the overall fabric. One was an American in the service of Russia and the other a Russian in the development of the United States.
In the summer of 1788, the fourth of the century’s Russo-Turkish wars began with Catherine’s attack of Ochakov, a strategically situated fortress on the Black Sea that controlled the mouths of the Dnieper and Bug Rivers, the key to the Crimea. The fort had been lost earlier to the Ottomans and the empress now sought to regain it.
As the Russian forces engaged the Turks, King Gustav III of Sweden grasped the moment to launch an attack against Russia through Finland, and he was soon predicting the imminent capture of St. Petersburg, what with the Russians fighting a war in the south and a war in the north. Catherine found her military resources were being stretched to their limits, and the navy’s in particular. It was clear that that the fleets had to be strengthened, especially the Baltic Sea fleet. To assist in the work, she invited a noted Dutch naval officer, Admiral Jonkeer Jan Hendrick van Kinsbergen, to enter her service, but he graciously declined. The empress then turned to her second choice: Admiral John Paul Jones, the celebrated American hero who in time came to be known as the “founder of the United States Navy.”
The compelling story of this singular individual is as inspiring as it is pathetic. Jones’s naval career had been brilliant, but his personal life was punctuated with difficulties and disappointments. John Paul (the Jones would come later) came from Kirkbean, Scotland, on England’s border, where his father served as a landscape gardener to a nobleman. At age twelve in 1759, he entered the British merchant navy as cabin boy and within seven brief years found himself the chief mate of a slave ship operating out of Jamaica. By 1770, he was master of his own vessel making several voyages to Tobago, and it was on the final run that he suffered the greatest misfortune of his life. While anchored in a West Indian port, a mutinous crew member engaged him in a deadly contre temps, insisting on a denied shore leave. In the course of the blistering exchange that took place on deck, the hot-headed sailor raised a threatening bludgeon against his superior, which Captain Paul thwarted by running the attacker through with a sword. Self-defence or not, the sensational death called for an arrest and a hearing. Rather than risk facing an admiralty court, John Paul fled to North America, to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where his brother had a small estate. He was now a fugitive from justice, a wanted man, and in an effort to conceal his identity he assumed the surname of Jones.
With the outbreak of the American Revolution, John Paul Jones travelled to Philadelphia, where friends in the Continental Congress secured for him a commission as senior lieutenant in the continental navy. The term navy is perhaps a misnomer — what later developed into a proper navy was in Jones’s time simply a small collection of lightly armed vessels whose role was to harass British shipping. It was George Washington who recognized the need for a bona fide fleet and it was he who effectively pushed the Continental Congress into such investment; the country’s first president was also the founder of the United States Navy.
In 1776, Jones took command of the Providence, a 110-foot sloop of twelve guns. He first sailed to Bermuda, where he inflicted extensive damage on the ships in harbour, and then moved on to Nova Scotia. At Canso and Arichat Harbours, Jones