A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  A large number of British immigrants volunteered out of idealism, but there were just as many, like twenty-five-year-old George Henry Herbert, who joined to stave off destitution after the company that had recruited him from England went bankrupt. He had been unemployed since Christmas and was down to his last pair of socks. They were holding up well—“There is only one hole in the heel of one of them,” he had written cheerfully to his mother—but he could no longer continue without work. Such was the clamor for new recruits that even a man as short and overweight as Herbert could join a popular regiment like the 9th New York Volunteers, better known as Hawkins’s Zouaves.5.5 Unlike the majority of the new volunteers, who enlisted for ninety days, Herbert signed up for two years and in return was awarded the rank of first sergeant. He was grateful for any sort of position but harbored secret hopes of becoming an officer: “I study as much as I can,” he wrote to his mother, “and do not despair of getting a commission sometime or other.”34 Herbert’s hope of promotion would depend on his popularity with the men, since the volunteer regiments were allowed to elect their own officers.

  “There is a British Regiment gotten up here,” one English immigrant, Edward Best, told his aunt Sophie in Somerset. “It seems to be very popular and I trust will carry its flag through this affair with credit to our dear old country.”35 Consul Archibald, however, was embarrassed when the recruiters for the British Volunteers opened their office in the same building as the consulate.36 He sent a letter to the main newspapers denying any involvement, though this provoked the press to label him a Southern sympathizer.

  The British Volunteers started off well and could be seen training each morning in the drill room at the Astor Riding School.37 But the regiment soon became a magnet for anti-British hostility, as did a regiment in Massachusetts that called itself the British Rifle Club.38 “It is not right that British residents should be taunted and twitted without cause,” complained the Albion, a weekly journal for the British community in New York.39 The British Volunteers lost its appeal to recruits after one of the captains was accused of being a Confederate agent, a charge that was repeated in the press even after the unfortunate captain was exonerated.

  By mid-June the British Volunteers’ difficulties became insurmountable and they merged with an Irish regiment to become the 36th New York Volunteers. There were frequent fights and stabbings in the new outfit between the English and Irish factions, and mealtimes could be explosive. The violence encouraged many of the former British volunteers to join the 79th New York Highlanders, which in contrast to the Irish 69th had provided the Prince of Wales’s honor guard during his visit in 1860. It was safe to be called Scots, Irish, or Welsh, but not British or English, noted Mr. Archibald.

  A young Englishman named Ebenezer Wells had joined the 79th Highlanders when he arrived in New York in 1860 in order to have something to do on the weekends. “When the Civil War broke out, the regiment volunteered for the war,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I was buglar [sic] and being away from parental restraint thought it would be a splendid excursion.”40 The men were thrilled when they received their orders in early June. “It was a beautiful Sunday when we marched down Broadway amidst deafening applause,” wrote Wells. The crowds adored their tartan uniform, especially the officers’ kilts. Nothing about the occasion hinted at the hardships ahead. Their knapsacks were packed with every conceivable delicacy as though they were on a Sunday outing. But, Wells added ruefully, if they had known what lay in store for them, “how depressed instead of elated would our spirits have been.”41

  Ebenezer Wells experienced his first brush with violence as the regiment passed through Baltimore. He was ambushed by a stone-throwing mob and lost his cap and blanket before being rescued by members of his company. The 79th Highlanders were tired and hungry when they finally reached Washington on June 4. The sweltering city had become a vast military camp. Rows of white tents and parked artillery occupied the green fields around the half-finished Capitol building. Long trains of covered wagons filled the dusty thoroughfares.42 At night, the city resonated with wild shouts and hoots, and thunderous fireworks were answered with rounds of gunfire.

  The Highlanders were allocated temporary quarters at Georgetown University. The 69th had only recently vacated the premises, and their detritus still littered the grounds. The campus was eerily silent, all but fifty of the student body having volunteered to fight for the South. The men were nervous. The Confederate army, under the command of the hero of Fort Sumter, General Beauregard, was only seventeen miles to the west. “We lay every night with our muskets by our sides, ready cocked, and one finger on the trigger,” wrote one of the recruits from the old British Volunteers. “It is a tough life, I can tell you.”43 His sentiment was widely shared in camps around the city. No regiment was so experienced or so confident that its men did not live in fear of an ambush or a surprise raid. The roar of the bullfrog, the screech of the night owl, “every rustle of the wind among the trees,” wrote the newly arrived war reporter and artist Frank Vizetelly, “every sound that breaks the stillness of the night, is taken for the advance of the Secessionists.”44

  Vizetelly had accompanied the 2nd New York Regiment to their camp on the border between Washington and Virginia. The sounds of the forest did not frighten him; the thirty-year-old Vizetelly had spent the past ten years in the midst of battles and revolutions all over Europe. He had never known any other life than journalism. His father and grandfather were both well-known printers and engravers on Fleet Street. His three brothers were also in the trade; Henry, the second oldest, was one of the founders of the Illustrated London News, which was the first weekly newspaper to illustrate its articles with eyewitness drawings.

  Vizetelly’s fame in England rested on his pictures of Garibaldi’s Sicily campaign. Dispatched by Henry to provide sketches of the fighting for the Illustrated London News, Frank soon abandoned any pretense of objectivity and allied himself with Garibaldi. It was not in his nature to be impartial: his drawings were not only skillful depictions of a moment or tableau but moving narratives that engaged the emotions of the viewer. His images demanded a reaction, not unlike Vizetelly himself, whose craving to be the center of attention was insatiable. “He was a big, florid, red-bearded Bohemian,” recalled an admirer, “who could and would do anything to entertain a circle.”45 Whether sitting around a campfire or dining in an officers’ mess, Vizetelly would transfix his listeners with vivid stories, replete with voices and accents, or lead them in boisterous sing-alongs that lasted until the small hours.

  Ill.7 Attack on the pickets of the Garibaldi Guard on the banks of the Potomac, by Frank Vizetelly.

  William Howard Russell envied Vizetelly in just one respect: he was unmarried and could travel wherever he pleased without upsetting his family. Otherwise he pitied him. Vizetelly constantly teetered between depression and mania, and when not distracted by the thrill of danger, he became self-destructive and reckless. Vizetelly partially understood his limitations and chose to live rough with the 2nd New York Volunteers, even though the camp was infested with rattlesnakes and “myriads of bloodthirsty mosquitoes,” rather than lounge in the saloon at Willard’s.46 Sometimes he visited the camp of the Garibaldi Guard to swap stories with the handful of genuine veterans in the regiment. (The colonel there was a Hungarian con man, and most of the volunteers were not Italian but adventurers from the four corners of the globe.) On one of the few occasions Vizetelly did go to the capital, he received an invitation to dinner from Seward. He arrived expecting to regale his host with stories about the American volunteers he had encountered among Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, but Seward was interested only in the tenor of his sympathies and whether he was planning to visit the South like that villain William Howard Russell. “I disclaimed any idea of so doing,” reported Vizetelly.47

  Once Seward took against a person, it was rare for him to change his mind. Russell had sensed at their first meeting that he could be a dangerous enemy. During his return journey from
the South, Russell had read enough of the Northern press to warn him of the reception awaiting him in Washington. But “I can’t help it,” he wrote on June 22 to his fellow Times correspondent in New York, J. C. Bancroft Davis; “I must write as I feel and see.… I would not retract a line or a word of my first letters.” He hoped that Northern newspapers would reprint his Times reports from the South, which would show that he was not a rebel sympathizer.48

  Russell arrived in Washington on July 3, 1861. This time he stayed away from Willard’s and found lodgings in a private house on Pennsylvania Avenue. He regretted the decision as soon as he unlocked the door to his room and caught the stench of the privy beneath the window. Once he had changed his clothes, Russell called on Lord Lyons to give him a report on the South, glad for the excuse to escape his lodgings, if only for a few hours. The legation was almost as dark as his bedroom, since Lyons had ordered the gas lamps to be kept unlit in order to avoid adding unnecessary heat. “I was sorry to observe he looked rather careworn and pale,” Russell wrote afterward.49 One of the attachés whispered to Russell as he was leaving that “the condition of things with Lord Lyons and Seward had been very bad, so much so Lord L would not go near State Dept. for fear of being insulted by the tone and manner of little S.”50 Ever since the neutrality proclamation had become known, Seward had been threatening and plotting to force a reversal of the South’s belligerent status. Lyons was constantly on the watch against Seward’s stratagems to weaken Britain’s leadership and Mercier’s attempts to sabotage the blockade. Try as he might, Lyons could not make Seward understand that Europe was only respecting the blockade out of deference to Britain. Russell returned to his lodgings feeling depressed by Seward’s misguided behavior toward Lord Lyons. There was no other foreign minister in Washington, Russell wrote in his diary, “who watches with so much interest the march of events as Lord Lyons, or who feels as much sympathy, perhaps, in the Federal Government.”51

  “Sumner makes it appear he saved the whole concern from going smash,” Russell wrote after he bumped into him on the street and had to stand for an hour in the blistering heat while Sumner gleefully enlarged on “the dirty little mountebankism of my weeny friend in office.”52 Russell was not sure whether to believe him until he called on Seward the following day and was subjected to another of his tirades. The secretary of state informed Russell that if he wished to go anywhere near the army, his passport would have to be countersigned by Lord Lyons, himself, and General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. He ended the interview with a lecture on the impropriety of Britain’s granting belligerent status to the Confederates: “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire, and at the end it would not be the United States which would have to lament the results of the conflict.” Russell tried to appear serene during this outburst, but as he listened to Seward’s monologue he could not help seeing the funny side. There they were “in his modest little room within the sound of the evening’s guns, in a capital menaced by [Confederate] forces,” and yet Seward was threatening “war with a Power which could have blotted out the paper blockade of the Southern forts and coast in a few hours.”53

  “Seward is losing ground in Washington and New York very fast,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reported to his father on July 2. “Sumner has been here fiercely denouncing him for designing, as he asserts, to force the country into a foreign war.”54 It was true that Seward had not calculated on Sumner’s relentless plotting against him, or that Sumner would try to set himself up as a rival secretary of state from the Senate; but both William Howard Russell and Charles Francis Jr. had been misled by Sumner. Far from being humiliated, Seward was reemerging in triumphant form, as the crush at his parties attested. June had been a month of consolidation and reconciliation between the president and his wayward secretary; Lincoln had won Seward’s support through a combination of firmness and magnanimity in victory. Displaying more statesmanship than his detractors would admit, Seward recognized that Lincoln possessed the skills required in a president, “but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”55

  The alteration in Seward’s attitude toward Lincoln was accompanied by a realization that neither bribery nor the lure of fighting Britain would make the Southern states return to the Union. The change in Seward could be discerned in early July after Gideon Welles engineered a bill through Congress that gave Lincoln the authority to close Southern ports by decree. The foreign ministers in Washington warned Seward that Europe would ignore any attempt by the North to impose legal restrictions on ports it did not physically control. If he genuinely sought a foreign war, all Seward had to do was demand compliance with these fictitious port closures, and the Great Powers would revolt. Seward believed them and persuaded Lincoln to say nothing publicly about the bill.

  A few days later, on July 19, Seward paid a private visit to the legation. He “proceeded, with some hesitation,” reported Lord Lyons, “and with an injunction to me to be secret,” swearing “that he had used strong language in his earlier communications to Foreign Powers … from the necessity of making them clearly understand the state of Public Feeling here.” He added that his only motive had been to prevent disunion, not begin a foreign war. “I was not altogether unprepared for the change in Mr. Seward’s tone,” Lyons admitted; he had heard from the French legation that Seward had made a similar speech to Mercier a few hours earlier. He thought the real question was whether the change was temporary or permanent—and that would depend on the Federal army’s progress in Virginia.56

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  The decision to send the army into battle rather than wait until the civilian recruits had been trained into soldiers had been made by the president’s cabinet on June 29. The military advisers at the meeting had argued against the idea: General Scott had already presented Lincoln with a strategy, derisively called the “Anaconda Plan” by critics, which aimed to minimize the bloodshed on American soil by trapping the South behind its own borders and slowly applying pressure. But Northern newspapers were demanding a battle. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune had started running the same banner headline every day: FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND! THE REBEL CONGRESS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO MEET THERE ON 20 OF JULY!, which incited newspapers in other states to follow suit.57 Lincoln explained to General Scott that it would be politically impossible to delay a fight, and even if it were not, there was the problem of the 75,000 volunteers whose ninety days were about to expire.

  General Winfield Scott had fought in every American war since 1812 and was a revered national figure, although some of the younger officers in the army referred to him as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was too old and infirm to lead the troops himself, so the command of the new Federal army at Washington went to Irvin McDowell, a young officer on his staff, whose drive and intelligence had already marked him out as a future general. McDowell had not been Scott’s first choice; he had originally offered the position to Colonel Robert E. Lee, who lived in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington. But Lee declined, deciding that his loyalty belonged to Virginia and therefore the South.

  McDowell was energetic, but he had never actually commanded an army, nor was Scott convinced that he would remain calm under pressure. He had sufficient experience, however, to know that the 35,000 would-be soldiers currently camping in the woods around Washington were more of a danger to themselves than to the Confederacy. His objections were dismissed by Lincoln, who told him: “You are green, it is true, but they are green, also, you are all green alike.” McDowell diligently executed Lincoln’s order to engage the enemy and devised a plan that he thought would answer the country’s wish for a quick and dramatic victory. He would march his men into Virginia to Manassas, where a Confederate army of 22,000 soldiers was stationed under the command of General Beauregard. Manassas was a small town some twenty-five miles west of Washington; though it was hardly more than a hamlet, its railroad junction linked two
important rail lines going west and south into Virginia. If McDowell could smash the Confederate army blocking the way, the North would have an open route into northern Virginia, and from there it would indeed be “forward to Richmond.”

  William Howard Russell liked General McDowell, whose manner, despite some personal peculiarities (Russell had never met a teetotal glutton before), he found to be engagingly frank and honest. When Russell bumped into him on July 16 at Washington Station, McDowell admitted that he was there looking for two missing batteries of artillery. The army had started its march toward Manassas that morning and already there was utter chaos at his headquarters. Even “the worst-served English general has always a young fellow or two about him,” thought Russell pityingly as the forlorn figure walked up and down the platform, poking his head into each train carriage. He was almost tempted to accept McDowell’s offer to travel with him on the train but decided it was impractical without his bags or a servant.

  Over the next four days, the Federal army picnicked and pillaged its way from Washington to Manassas, leaving a trail of burning houses, discarded army kit, and stragglers that stretched for many miles. Although small by European standards, McDowell’s army was the largest ever assembled in America’s short history. He had organized it as best he could into five divisions with a total of thirteen brigades.5.6 Almost all the commanders were officers from the regular army, which gave McDowell confidence that at least he would have men who knew how to give and receive orders. The commander of the 3rd Brigade was Colonel Wil-liam T. Sherman, who would become the greatest Union general after Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman had asked for the 79th New York Highlanders and the 69th New York Irish because of the large number of European veterans in their ranks, but his hope that they would display more professional behavior than some of the other regiments was dashed from the outset. The Highlanders had refused to leave their camp because they had been given Model 1816 smoothbores instead of the modern rifled Springfields.5.7 Colonel James Cameron restored order by promising that every man would receive his own rifle as soon as possible, and since the colonel’s brother was the secretary of war, the men decided they could believe him.58 The situation was worse at the camp of the 69th, where Captain Thomas Meagher, the Irish “Prince of New York,” almost started a mutiny by arguing that their ninety days were up and that they should all be allowed to go home. Colonel Corcoran eventually managed to persuade the men to stay until after the anticipated battle.