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

by Amanda Foreman

  Sir Percy was still seething with rage when he arrived as a prisoner at the Confederate base, where an old comrade from the Garibaldi campaign, Roberdeau Wheat, immediately recognized his voice. According to Dick Taylor, Wheat shouted, “Percy, old boy!” “Why, Bob!” the other rejoined. Wheat good-naturedly chided him for fighting on the “wrong” side, and then stepped aside so that the colonel could be brought before Stonewall Jackson.50 That evening, while the two men were chatting in Jackson’s office, news came that Turner Ashby had been shot through the heart during a later skirmish. A member of Jackson’s staff quickly led Sir Percy away so that the general could be alone.51

  By sunset on June 9, the bulk of the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley were in full retreat. A newspaper in Richmond declared: “Strange as it may appear, news from the armies within five miles of [this city] is of secondary importance. Invariably the crowds which daily flock around the bulletin boards ask first ‘What news of Jackson?’ ”52 With only 17,000 troops at his disposal, Jackson had succeeded against a combined Union force three times his strength, attacking it piecemeal, making full use of the valley’s terrain. Yet the events taking place around Richmond were just as significant; on May 31, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston had launched an attack against McClellan’s army. Known as the Battle of Fair Oaks, or Seven Pines, the campaign failed in all its objectives, but it did produce one stroke of luck for the Confederacy: the obstinate and ineffectual General Joe Johnston was struck by a bullet. President Davis replaced him with General Robert E. Lee, who had never before commanded troops in battle. He will “be timid and irresolute in action,” sneered General McClellan when informed of Lee’s appointment.53

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  Spring flooding postponed further movement by either army; and the lull had all Washington on tenterhooks. The five miles between McClellan and the city of Richmond seemed a mere hop and a skip to victory. Seward boasted to Charles Sumner that the war would be over in ninety days or less. Lord Lyons could not help wondering whether he was about to miss its most exciting moment. He had at last received permission to take a holiday and was leaving on June 18. Life in Washington was no “bed of roses,” he had often told his sister. But it was not until May that he had finally summoned up the nerve to ask Lord Russell for a leave of absence.54 Lyons had grown despondent waiting for an answer; “my chance of getting home seems less and less as I reflect upon it,” he wrote to his sister.55 By the beginning of June, he had persuaded himself that his case was hopeless. Then, on the sixth, came Lord Russell’s letter granting him three months’ leave.56

  Lord Lyons’s final week in Washington started out well with only the usual routine work.57 This satisfactory state of affairs was ruined, however, by the arrival of Lord Edward St. Maur, a younger son of the Duke of Somerset, First Lord of the Admiralty. It was Lord Edward’s older brother, Lord St. Maur, who had briefly fought as a Red Shirt under Garibaldi. Lord Lyons thought that Lord Edward was risking his career in the Foreign Service for a cheap thrill and warned him that the presence of a British cabinet minister’s son could lead to all kinds of unexpected trouble. But even he had not anticipated Lord Edward’s falling into the hands of Consul Bernal in Baltimore and his secessionist cronies. The Southern journalist W. W. Glenn remembered his first meeting with Lord Edward St. Maur very well. “He was quite young,” he wrote, “and had a great dread of having his name in the newspapers … on account of his father’s position in the English Cabinet.… He was quite Northern [supporting] too.” Glenn had plans for the youth, however.

  I determined to devote myself to giving intelligent Englishmen every facility for acquainting themselves thoroughly with the true condition of Southern affairs and the spirit of the Southern people … it might prove useful to make so intelligent a convert: Lord Lyons of course attempted to dissuade him from carrying out his project, and went as far as to tell Lord Edward that if he was caught and thrown into prison, he need expect no aid from him as Minister. Lord Lyons from the beginning did everything he could to prevent the slightest offense being given to the Federal Government.… He made later several remonstrances to me through his attachés.58

  Dread at what might happen to Lord Edward overshadowed Lyons’s otherwise joyful departure on June 18. In Washington, President Lincoln shook his hand and asked him to convey “his good intentions towards the people of Great Britain.” When Lyons reached New York, Seward stopped by his hotel to say goodbye. He promised that if anything did arise between the two countries while Lyons was away, he would place the matter on hold until his return.59 Lyons was touched by these displays, although he had no illusion that the goodwill toward him was anything other than temporary and capricious. If he, rather than Mercier, had visited Richmond to explore the views of the Confederate government, the result would have been expulsion from the country and an apology demanded from Britain. The contrast between the public’s attitude toward Britain and France also disturbed him. The French attempt to topple the Mexican government in the spring, Lyons noticed, had been accepted with an angry shrug, even though it mocked American claims to be the sole power in the region.11.3 They “are more civil to France than to England,” he asserted to Lord Russell, “partly because they never will have, do what she will, the same bitterness against her as they have against England.”60

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  Lord Edward knew that crossing the lines into Southern territory might be risky, but “there is no imprudence in what I am doing—I have asked good advice,” he assured his parents on June 19. “I do not intend to get into any chance of difficulties.”61 Nor did he; Glenn’s contacts proved their worth, and Lord Edward was safely deposited in Richmond on June 26. He did not think it odd that with the Confederacy fighting for its life, President Davis would make time to see him. Lord Edward was perhaps too young and naïve to realize what the presence of an English cabinet minister’s son would mean to Southerners. All Lord Edward had to do was say his name and government officials, staff officers, and influential citizens opened their doors to him. “There is a remarkably friendly feeling towards England … the only sign of ill-feeling that exists is on the subject of recognition,” he not surprisingly concluded. “I saw and talked to everybody, I was very kindly treated indeed.”62

  He was so well treated that other British subjects—many of whom were desperately trying to find any means of leaving the South—became quite jealous. The Confederates deliberately shielded him from the hardships and persecution often suffered by ordinary Britons. A young Scottish journalist named Gabriel Cueto, for example, had been held without charge since May.63 Lord Edward never heard about him, and Cueto’s case did not receive a mention in England either, although he would spend nine months in a Confederate prison essentially for speaking his mind.64 An English governess named Catherine Hopley, who was stranded in Richmond, thought it was outrageous that “Lord Seymour [sic] should be able to obtain a passport from the Confederate government without any trouble,” while the rest of them were left to rot in the city. “I went the first thing in the morning, to see Mr. Cridland,” she wrote, “at what the ‘blockaded British subjects’ used to call ‘anything but the Consolation Office.’ ” She also visited the Confederate secretary of war, George Randolph, and Stephen Mallory of the Confederate navy, and offered herself as a courier to Europe. But both men scarcely looked up from their papers. Their curt dismissal was especially wounding since “I was sympathising so deeply with them all, and wishing I could take messages and letters to England for them, and feeling worthy of being trusted even with the gravest secrets.”65

  The Confederates did not require Miss Hopley’s services when their own native-born women were perfectly willing to carry out dangerous operations. Rose Greenhow, the Washington hostess who had exposed herself to Northern wrath by passing military secrets to the South, had arrived in Richmond after months of house arrest and then incarceration in a Federal prison. President Davis made a point of calling at her hotel and was shocked to see the ravages wrou
ght by her ordeal. She had the air of someone “shaken by mental torture,” he wrote sadly to his wife.66 Moreover, she was homeless and penniless. Judah Benjamin promptly sent her $2,500 as a mark of the Confederacy’s gratitude.

  Lord Edward’s arrival had coincided with the beginning of General Lee’s counteroffensive against McClellan. Bored with his leaky tugboat, Francis Dawson resigned from the Confederate navy to join an artillery battery commanded by Willie Pegram, a nephew of Captain Pegram’s. On June 26, Pegram’s battery was ordered to cross the Chickahominy River, northeast of Richmond. According to Lee’s plan, the troops under General A. P. Hill (to which the battery belonged) were to form one element of a four-part attack against McClellan’s somewhat incoherently placed divisions. If all went well for Lee, the Federal invaders would be attacked on every side and could disintegrate.

  But one vital piece was missing: Stonewall Jackson and his men had not yet arrived from the Shenandoah Valley. After anxiously waiting until three in the afternoon, General Hill ordered his men to begin their assault without him. “The guns were instantly loaded, and the firing began,” Dawson recalled. “A solid shot bowled past me, killed one of our men, tore a leg and arm from another, and threw three horses into a bloody, struggling heap. This was my chance, and I stepped to the gun and worked away as though existence depended on my labours.”67 He worked feverishly until a blow knocked him off his feet. “That Britisher has gone up at last,” he heard. Dawson examined his leg and saw that a shell fragment had ripped away six inches of flesh. But strangely, he felt nothing. “I went back to my post, and there remained until the battery was withdrawn after sunset.” Of the seventy-five men in Pegram’s battery, only twenty-eight were still standing.

  Dawson managed to hobble for several miles to a field hospital. While trying to obtain some morphine for a friend, he saw surgeons, their bare arms smeared with blood, cutting and sawing into rows of limbs. Below one table lay “arms, feet, and legs, thrown promiscuously in a heap, like the refuse of a slaughter house.” Dawson decided not to stay and obtained a ride on an ambulance going to Richmond. His adventures with Willie Pegram had been brief, but he was gratified to read about himself in the Richmond Dispatch a few days later as the “young Englishman” who had “received a wound while acting most gallantly.”68 He was a hero, as tens of pretty young lady nurses told him every day.

  Dawson soon began to regret his fame. When one of his friends in the Confederate navy, James Morgan, came to visit him, Dawson begged for his help. “The day was hot,” Morgan recalled,

  and I found my friend lying on a cot near the open front door, so weak that he could not speak above a whisper, and after greeting him and speaking some words of cheer I saw that he was anxious to tell me something. I leaned over him to hear what he had to say, and the poor fellow whispered in my ear “Jimmie, for God’s sake, make them move my cot to the back of the building.” I assured him that he had been placed in the choicest spot in the hospital, where he could get any little air that might be stirring; but he still insisted that he wanted to be moved, giving as a reason that every lady who entered the place washed his face and fed him with jelly. The result was that his face felt sore and he was stuffed so full of jelly that he was most uncomfortable.… Shaking with laughter, I delivered his request to the head surgeon, who pinned a notice on Dawson’s sheet to the effect that “This man must only be washed and fed by the regular nurses.”69

  Map.9 The Seven Days, June 25–July 1, 1862

  Click here to view a larger image.

  The Battle of Mechanicsville, as Dawson’s engagement was called, was a costly disappointment for Lee. Jackson’s failure to arrive on time resulted in Confederate troops having to attack without adequate support. Lee was still feeling his way into his new command, but the one quality he did not lack was determination. The following day, General Hill’s troops once again led the assault. But by now Jackson and his men, including the Louisiana Brigade, had arrived and they too rushed into battle. Seeing his men stagger beneath a barrage of fire, Major Wheat galloped in front of the Louisiana Tigers, urging them to follow. Both he and his horse were immediately riddled with bullets. The fighting continued so hotly that Wheat’s body lay where it fell for twenty-four hours.

  For the next seven days, beginning on June 25, Lee and McClellan clashed along the Chickahominy River, around the perimeter of Richmond, in one bloody encounter after another. Although McClellan lost none of these battles, he was unnerved by Lee’s attacks and began retreating southward, away from Richmond. Lee wanted to demolish “those people,” as he referred to the Federals, with another all-out attack on July 1. By now, the Union army was entrenched around Malvern Hill, fifteen miles southeast of Richmond. The terrain favored the Federal soldiers sitting atop the 150-foot-high plateau. McClellan still had 115,000 men with 100 pieces of artillery and, unlike their general, their nerves were holding steady.

  The Confederate attack was so disjointed that isolated brigades ran forward only to be chewed up by artillery fire. This “was not war—it was murder,” a Confederate general later said of Lee’s failed assault. The Louisianans (minus Sam Hill, who was happily drawing up maps, thanks to some clever wrangling by his sister) were mauled by Irishmen in blue, including the 69th New York. The total Confederate loss on this terrible day was five and a half thousand, nearly twice the number of casualties sustained by the Federals.11.4

  About a quarter of Lee’s eighty-thousand-strong army was either dead or wounded. McClellan could have ordered a counterattack, and many of his generals urged him to do so, but he had lost the will to fight. The next morning, July 2, the mist lifted from the battlefield to reveal so many bodies that the terrain appeared to be masked by a bloody quilt. Some were dead, but many still crawled feebly like stricken insects. Despite having inflicted a stunning blow against Lee’s army, McClellan continued his retreat, and the Seven Days’ Battles were a strategic victory for Lee, despite his heavy losses. On June 3, McClellan had been five miles from Richmond; on July 3, he was thirty. The casualties for the two sides amounted to more than 35,000 men.

  McClellan left behind a treasure trove for the undersupplied Confederates. “All along the road,” wrote an English observer, “cartridge boxes, knapsacks, blankets and coats may be picked up. The rebels, as they pass, generally cast away their own worse equipments and refit.… Here were cartridge boxes, unopened and perfectly new.”70 Five days later, on the eighth, Lincoln sailed down to Harrison’s Landing on the James River in order to see the situation for himself. His impatience with McClellan was echoed all over the North. Only the general seemed to think that his withdrawal was nothing other than a “change of base.” The rest of the country called it a reckless squandering of a brilliant opportunity to capture Richmond and win the war.

  Lord Edward St. Maur set off for Washington after the Seven Days’ Battles and arrived under a flag of truce at McClellan’s camp on July 15. He had planned to stay for some time, but his admission to having observed the campaign from the “other side” provoked a reaction from the Union officers “which was really childish,” he protested to his father. Unwisely, he fell into arguments with them about the reasons for the war and other sensitive subjects. Lord Edward’s opinions had undergone a complete transformation, just as the Southern propagandist W. W. Glenn had hoped. “I did not start with any feeling one way or the other,” he insisted, “but I defy any candid man to go south, without being convinced that this war must end in separation.” If the split did not happen soon, he expected it to become a long and “very cruel war.” He had heard from Southern officers that there had been instances of Louisiania regiments killing their Northern prisoners. “This,” decided Lord Edward, “is Butler’s doing.”

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  11.1 Northerners had pointed out to Vizetelly the staggering disparities between the two sides. The last economic figures before the war showed that the Southern states had 18,026 “industrial establishments,” the North, 110,274.31

 
11.2 The Prince de Joinville excused McClellan’s performance, claiming that the general had been constantly hamstrung and interfered with by Washington.

  11.3 France’s invasion of Mexico made the presence of Joinville and the Orleans exiles politically embarrassing, and they departed from America at the end of June. But Joinville continued to defend McClellan from abroad, publishing a long pamphlet, entitled “The Army of the Potomac,” which appeared the following October.

  11.4 Among the Union wounded was a cousin of William Gladstone’s, twenty-one-year-old Herbert Gladstone, who had joined the 36th New York British Volunteers the previous year. He survived an agonizing journey back to the capital with a bullet lodged in his left leg, after which his family in England lost track of him.

  TWELVE

  The South Is Rising

  Beast Butler—Palmerston is offended—Hotze and Spence join forces—Lindsay goes too far—The Alabama escapes—Déjà vu at Bull Run