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

by Amanda Foreman

  Lawley and Vizetelly watched, awestruck, as six Federal advances were mowed down by a combination of Longstreet’s artillery and the rebel troops behind the stone wall. “From the point where I stood, with General Lee and Longstreet,” wrote Vizetelly, “I could see the grape, shell, and canister from the guns of the Washington artillery mow great avenues in the masses of Federal troops rushing to the assault, while the infantry, posted behind a breastwork just under the battery, decimated the nearest columns of the enemy.”34 Looking through his field glasses at the carnage below, Lee commented, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”35 Francis Dawson was stationed just out of range to hear Lee’s remark. In any case, he was almost spellbound by the battle: “Never in my life do I expect to see such a magnificent sight again,” he wrote to his mother; “the whole scene of conflict was before our eyes, and at our feet, the glorious sun shining as tho’ bloodshed and slaughter were unknown on the beautiful earth; the screaming of shells and the singing of the rifle bullets adding a fearful accompaniment to the continued booming of the heavy guns.” He saw the Federal army hurl itself at the Confederate guns. “It was thrilling to watch the long line advance, note the gaps in the array, as the wounded fell or else staggered to the rear, and see the gallant remnant melt away like snow before our withering fire,” he wrote. The Irish Brigade’s distinctive green and gold flag made its charge one of the easiest to follow from start to terrible finish. George Hart, an English volunteer in the 69th, wrote bitterly, “It was not a fight, it was a massacre.”36

  Ill.29 The bombardment of Fredericksburg, Virginia, by the Federals, December 1862, by Frank Vizetelly.

  The guns began to silence as night drew in. At 9:00 P.M. Colonel Hawkins interrupted the generals as they were planning the following day’s attack. “I listened until I was thoroughly irritated,” he wrote. None of them seemed to have grasped the day’s defeat. Exasperated, the commander took out his pencil and drew a diagram of what the Confederates would likely do to a second attack. This brought them to their senses. But although they were now unanimous about a withdrawal, no one wanted to go to Burnside’s headquarters with the request. Hawkins took it upon himself, riding in pitch-blackness through mud and debris to Burnside’s camp. He arrived before the general himself and waited. “As [Burnside] came through the door he said: ‘Well, it’s all arranged; we attack at early dawn, the Ninth Corps in the centre, which I shall lead in person’; and then seeing me he said: ‘Hawkins, your brigade shall lead with the 9th New York on the right of the line, and we’ll make up for the bad work of to-day.’ ” Undaunted, Hawkins launched into a calm but emphatic explanation as to why there could be no second attack. The unanimous agreement of the generals forced Burnside to concur. Strangely, there were still regiments who had yet to fire a shot; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had spent all day in the woods reading the poems of Robert Browning while he waited for orders.

  “A ride along the whole length of the lines told a sad tale of slaughter,” wrote Lawley. “It is doubtful whether any living pen could do justice to the horrors.” But “when the eye had once rested upon the fatal slope of Marye’s Heights the memory became fixed upon the spot.” Fourteen Federal brigades had been thrown at the wretched stone wall. “There, in every attitude of death, lying so close to each other that you might step from body to body, lay acres of the Federal dead.”37 Vizetelly stopped counting the bodies when he neared seven hundred. Intermingled with the dead were the wounded and dying. With no truce agreed, they could not be rescued from the field. Their screams and moans filled the cold night air. The survivors huddled together in ravines, behind walls, and at the bases of trees for warmth, forbidden to light fires lest they provide a target for the enemy. As the dead stiffened in the freezing temperatures, they were propped up to look like sentries.38

  All day on the fourteenth, Lee waited for Burnside to resume the offensive. But instead of fighting, Union soldiers turned what had been casual looting of Fredericksburg into a full-scale rampage. The historian of Ebenezer Wells’s regiment claims that the three terrified women discovered by the 79th in a filthy coal cellar were treated with kind respect. If so, they were among the few who were not taunted or molested. Soldiers went from house to house stripping the valuables and methodically smashing the rest. The streets became blocked with broken detritus; everything from pianos to petticoats lay in mangled heaps across the roads. The anarchy horrified and disgusted many Federal soldiers, but the destruction continued throughout the day. Even Martha Washington’s tomb was ransacked and used for target practice. At night, the madness below seemed to be reflected in the sky—the Northern Lights had never been seen so far south, and bright-red tongues of light flickered and crackled over the soldiers’ heads. When dawn came, the rising sun revealed a remarkable change on the battle plain. Hardly a shred of blue remained. The dead had been stripped naked by Confederates seeking to exchange their tattered uniforms for good Northern cloth.

  Lee was still waiting on the fifteenth when Burnside requested a flag of truce for burial and retrieval. Lee acquiesced, which, according to Wolseley, was a tactical mistake of the gravest kind. In his history of the battle, written in 1889, he would describe the general’s actions as “inexplicable.” “Burnside’s army was at Lee’s mercy,” wedged tight between the Confederates and an unfordable river. Lee should have launched an all-out attack and obliterated the mighty Army of the Potomac while it remained vulnerable. Such a decisive victory, Wolseley believed, would have convinced the European Powers that neutrality was no longer an option. The Lincoln administration might well have fallen, and with it the national will to prosecute the war.39 But Lee always contended that he had no means of knowing the true extent of Burnside’s losses on December 13. The Confederates had suffered nearly five thousand casualties—a total that seemed high until they learned that the Federals had experienced another Antietam-style bloodbath, with casualties approaching thirteen thousand. While Lee hesitated, Burnside was able to carry out a rapid and silent retreat during the night. The Confederates awoke on the sixteenth to discover that they were alone.

  Mary Sophia Hill went to Fredericksburg to offer her help and found it a ghost town: “If ever you saw a city of desolation it was this.”40 Every house was perforated by cannonballs; whole streets lay in rubble. But when Captain Phillips, who had been reunited with his friend Captain Wynne, went down into the town to investigate, they discovered it was far from empty. Major von Borcke accompanied them, recalling in his memoirs, “A number of the houses which we entered presented a horrid spectacle—dead and wounded intermingled in thick masses.”

  As they trod carefully over human debris, Phillips suddenly grabbed von Borcke’s arm and pointed to the body of a soldier who was missing a part of his skull: “Great God, that man is still alive!” His cry caused the soldier to open his eyes and stare “at us with so pitiable an expression that I could not for long after recall it without shuddering.” Helpless, the men knelt down and stayed with him for a moment.15.2 41 Francis Lawley was gripped by similar scenes in other parts of the town. “Death, nothing but death everywhere,” he wrote afterward; “great masses of bodies tossed out of the churches as the sufferers expire; layers of corpses stretched in the balconies of houses as though taking a siesta … horrified and aghast at what I saw, I could not look.”42 Sickened by the unrelieved suffering around him, he returned to Richmond without waiting for his friends.

  The first of the wounded began to arrive in Washington on December 14. These were the men who could drag themselves off the battlefield and board steamers without assistance. It was another two days before the seriously injured were brought from the field hospitals. An English military observer at one of these hospitals thought he had never witnessed anything so barbarous:

  There were about 60 surgeons without coats (chiefly French, German and Irish), covered in blood and dirt, chatting, arguing, and laughing and swearing, and cutting and sawing more like the devils and machin
es than human beings. Large heaps of legs, and arms were piled here and there, all sizes, and stages of decomposition … I thought I could stand a good deal but … I felt myself grow pale and dared not speak for a few minutes.43

  It seemed incredible that any patient could leave such a place alive.

  The hospital ships disgorged thousands of stretchers along the crowded waterfront. The wounded lay on the ground for hours until ambulance drivers heaved them onto wagons and ferried them to various hospitals around the city. The new pavilion-style hospitals advocated by Florence Nightingale were being built as quickly as possible. The haste produced careless mistakes: one hospital was left without a mortuary, forcing administrators to stack the dead in an adjacent lot until burial; another was placed next to an open sewer. The newest hospital, Lincoln General, opened the week of the Battle of Fredericksburg, but even though it had a capacity of 2,575 patients, the number of casualties far exceeded the available beds: hotels, churches, warehouses, even a floor of the Patent Office were converted into makeshift wards. The novelist Louisa May Alcott had been a nurse for all of three days when a line of carts drew up outside the old Union Hotel in Georgetown. The ballroom became Ward Number One with forty beds. The filthy, blood-smeared arrivals were undressed and washed before they were allowed to lie on the sheets. Miss Alcott amazed herself by performing the task without shuddering. Then a British surgeon dressed their wounds. “He had served in the Crimea,” she wrote, “and seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment; and, turning up his cuffs, whipped out a very unpleasant looking house-wife [sewing kit], cutting, sawing, patching and piecing, with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress.”44

  The vast need for surgeons and medical personnel had opened the doors to any foreign doctor with a degree and a proficiency in the English language. Though not in the same numbers as foreign soldiers, they came by their tens and hundreds to Washington. Until two months before, twenty-five-year-old Charles Mayo had been the house surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. There were loud protests from the staff and patients when the popular and well-respected doctor announced his intention to go to America to gain more medical experience.45 After seeing Mayo’s qualifications, the new surgeon general, Dr. William Hammond, who was valiantly trying to overhaul the entire system, offered him charge of 125 beds at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington. This was not what Mayo had in mind, and he politely declined the offer, preferring to take the assistant surgeon examination instead. But to his chagrin, his marks were so high that the president of the examining board put in a special request for Mayo to be stationed in the capital.

  In the aftermath of Fredericksburg, Mayo worked all day and long into the night, hurrying

  from place to place to the assistance of maimed and exhausted men, pursued all the while by messengers with notice of fresh arrivals … scarcely a hotel or boarding-house in the city but contained someone that required the doctor’s help. It became impossible to keep a detailed visiting list, or to remember the names of one’s patients. “Lieutenant A and five others, Colonel B and six others; Captain C and four others,” are specimens of the kind of record that had to suffice for the contents of a particular house or hotel.46

  Occasionally, he remembered men by their stories; for example, a wounded officer in the Irish Brigade who was saved by the butt of his revolver, which took the full force of a minié ball. But for the most part, he was too busy to become friendly with his patients. Mayo noticed that many of them arrived dying from tetanus—the result of incompetent butchery at the field hospitals, he concluded. There was nothing he could do for these wretched men except try to ease their pain. One particular case stayed in his memory: a healthy young major with a botched amputation who lingered for several days, eventually dying in the arms of a kind and decent hotel keeper who could not bear the thought of her guest dying alone.

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  Washington was in an uproar over Fredericksburg, and General Burnside was accused of criminal stupidity. “What astonishes me is that such a battle should ever have been fought,” the new attaché Edward Malet wrote to his father. “I do really think that all those men who fell were murdered.”47 Lincoln’s reputation as a war leader suffered a serious blow. The president wrung his hands as he listened to accounts of the battle, repeatedly asking, “What has God put me in this place for?”48 To many people, not just in the capital but also throughout the country, the answer was obvious: it was time for Lincoln to make way for a successor. The treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary on December 18 that “Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western” jokes simply nauseated him now; “if these things go on we shall have pressure on him to resign.”49 Three days later, Strong recorded with surprise that it was Seward and not Lincoln who had resigned. “Edward Everett and Charles Sumner are named as candidates for the succession. I do not think Seward a loss to government,” he wrote. “He is an adroit, shifty, clever politician, he believes in majorities, and it would seem, in nothing else.”50

  A campaign to oust Seward had been gaining momentum for several months. The previous September, Lincoln had fended off an anti-Seward delegation from New York that claimed to represent the wishes of five New England governors by declaring that the administration would collapse without the secretary of state. The statement was debatable, since Seward’s power had shrunk considerably since the heady days in December 1860 when he boasted to his wife that the future of the government rested on his shoulders.51 Seward had successfully forged a close relationship with Lincoln as his second in command and confidant, but his relations with the rest of the cabinet had actually worsened during the past two years. The other members resented the way Seward had managed to insinuate himself into Lincoln’s inner circle. They disliked arriving at cabinet meetings and finding him already there, or, when they left, watching him stay behind for a private “chat.” Gideon Welles’s diary was peppered with fulminations against Seward and his wish “to direct, to be the Premier, the real Executive.”52 The treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, whose views on emancipation were far more radical than Seward’s, loathed him so heartily that he seized every opportunity to undermine the secretary of state. He repeatedly used the phrase “back-stairs influence” when referring to Seward, until it took on a life of its own and became a universal cry.

  Charles Sumner had been hoping for some time that Seward would make a mistake that would finish him permanently. He believed that such a moment had come after the publication in early December of the State Department’s diplomatic correspondence for the first half of 1862. By now the State Department was overseeing 480 consulates, commercial agencies, and consular agencies abroad, and the literature Seward offered to the public was extensive. The British section contained letters from Charles Francis Adams that the minister had never imagined would become public. Benjamin Moran arrived at the legation on December 22 to find Adams mortified to the point of tears after the London press gleefully published some of the juicier anti-British dispatches, which included his complaints about The Times “and the sympathies of the higher classes,” whom Adams accused of “longing to see the political power of the United States permanently impaired.”53

  Seward’s decision to publish every letter was “almost amounting to insanity,” Moran declared savagely. “Mr. Adams thinks his usefulness at this post is destroyed.… At one time during the day I thought he seriously contemplated resigning, and I told him he could not be spared—that it was his duty to remain.… This he agreed to … but that he would be more guarded in his future Dispatches to Mr. Seward.” Where, Adams wondered, was Seward’s sense of tact or diplomacy? “I scarcely imagine it wise in diplomatic life to show your hand in the midst of the game.”54 Now that the whole country knew that he accused the aristocracy of wishing “to see the Union shattered,” Adams doubted if polite society would ever receive him again.15.3

  Sumner was interested in only one letter—a d
ispatch sent to Adams on July 5, 1862, in which Seward betrayed his contempt for the hard-line abolitionists and their universal emancipation agenda.15.4 This, Sumner believed, would be sufficient to ruin Seward in the eyes of the radical wing of the Republican Party. All he needed was an event or catalyst to mobilize his fellow senators—which had been provided by the disaster at Fredericksburg.

  On the evening of December 16, the thirty-two Republican senators gathered for a meeting in the Senate reception room to discuss their response to the defeat. Lincoln did not escape censure, but the general feeling in the chamber was that the president’s mistakes were—as Chase repeatedly charged—the direct result of Seward’s baleful influence. Ironically, Seward’s deliberate attempt to foster an aura of power and mystique about himself, which William Howard Russell had noticed in 1861, now told against him. By the end of the meeting, all but four of the senators had agreed that Lincoln should be confronted about Seward. In Sumner’s view, the secretary of state’s own words had damned him by revealing his lack of commitment to the war. But there was a deeper intent among some of the senators: Seward would be only the first casualty. The other moderates in the cabinet would follow, and then Lincoln himself, leaving the way clear for Chase to become president with a cabinet of fellow radicals.57