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

by Amanda Foreman

  Washington society turned out en masse, including President Lincoln, to watch the self-styled “youngest star in the world,” John Wilkes Booth, play Hamlet at Grover’s Theatre. Dr. Charles Culverwell observed Booth’s debut in the capital. Having heard that the lesser parts were open to audition, Culverwell took a leave of absence and auditioned under the name Charles Wyndham. To his great surprise, he won the part of Osric. On the handbills for the play, Culverwell was described as “Charles Wyndham: first appearance of a gifted young actor.” After the opening night on April 14, 1863, no one mentioned Osric, but Booth received praise from every quarter. Many years later, Culverwell still retained vivid memories of his brief encounter with Booth:

  During my introductory rehearsal I wandered about the stage and finally chose an advantageous position at a little table where I could command a good view of all the proceedings. John Wilkes noticed me there and smiled.… The courtesy and kindness shown to me by John Wilkes made way for friendship between us, and we frequently were together after the play. He was a most charming fellow, off the stage as well as on, a man of flashing wit and magnetic manner. He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I have ever listened. As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic. He could hold a group spellbound by the hour at the force and fire and beauty of him … as an actor, the natural endowment of John Wilkes Booth was of the highest. His original gift was greater than that of his wonderful brother, Edwin.… He was the idol of women. They would rave of him, his voice, his hair, and his eyes. Small wonder, for he was fascinating.… Poor, sad, mad, bad, John Wilkes Booth.11

  Lord Lyons was never given the opportunity to watch Booth play Hamlet; a careless clerk in the Foreign Office had forwarded the legation’s correspondence to the printers of the parliamentary “Blue Book” without first removing the censored passages. Its arrival in mid-April caused such controversy that Lyons suffered the same hideous embarrassment that had ruined Charles Francis Adams’s Christmas. “The goodwill to me personally, which miraculously survived so long, seems at last to have sunk altogether,” wrote Lyons. The political damage was also considerable. The Blue Book had offended or alienated both supporters and enemies alike: “Unluckily the book contains just the passages in my dispatches which are most irritating to each of the parties, and which it is most inconvenient to them to have published.”12 Lyons was especially worried about how the Blue Book would affect his relationship with Seward. He had heard that the secretary was annoyed and feared that it made him appear weak in his dealings with the diplomatic corps.

  Lyons also braced himself for a difficult time over the Peterhoff affair, with Seward making public threats and statements about what the United States would and would not stand for, similar to his recent grandstanding about letters of marque. But Seward surprised him; rather than allowing the controversy to take on a life of its own, he courageously defied the objections of the abinet and returned the Peterhoff’s captured mailbag to Lyons. He even prevailed upon his rival Gideon Welles to transfer Admiral Wilkes to the Pacific Ocean, where there were fewer opportunities to cause trouble. The U.S. navy secretary grudgingly gave the order, but in secret Welles fantasized about the dire retribution awaiting Britain—“years of desolation, of dissolution, of suffering and blood.”13 Welles’s supporters started a whispering campaign against Lyons. “Among other devices,” wrote Lyons, “is that of representing me as having made the most violent and arrogant demands about the Peterhoff.” This led to an unpleasant encounter with Charles Sumner at a dinner party. The senator dragged Lyons into a corner and proceeded to rail at him for overstepping his prerogative. Lyons was dumbfounded at first, then swore he had never made anything resembling a demand. He finally offered to show Sumner copies of his correspondence with Seward.14

  Lyons wondered whether he was wasting his efforts to bolster good relations between the two countries. “One hardly knows whether to wish the North success or failure in the field,” he had written to Russell during the Peterhoff affair.15 Yet the Confederacy was equally bitter against England, Lyons learned from the diplomatic bags that occasionally made it out of the South.19.2 “It ought to have been known here from the first, but was not, that England could be no friend to the Confederacy or its cause,” declared the Richmond Enquirer, for example. “We have been long in finding out the truth and, before we would admit it, have endured some humiliations and insolent airs on the part of that Power, which surprised us very much, but ought not to have done so. At last the thing has become too clear.”17

  Southern rage against Britain placed Francis Lawley in a difficult position. He had completed his tour of the Confederacy and returned to Richmond at the end of March, but his report for The Times was taking longer than usual to compose. Anything less than unqualified praise, Lawley had discovered, was not tolerated by his hosts. He confided his exasperation to William Gregory. “I cannot impress upon you the difficulty which I find in the discharge of my present office, in avoiding topics which will be calculated to ruffle the amour propre … of the most susceptible people and government on earth.”18

  Lawley still believed in the purity of the Southern planter class as the epitome of all that was noble and intelligent in the human race. But in his opinion, the rest of the Southern population was going to the dogs: “Richmond and in a less degree, Charleston and Mobile, strike me as immense gambling booths.” He would know—many of his friends and acquaintances, including Judah Benjamin, made up the chief clientele of Richmond’s illicit “hells.” Profiteering, corruption, and hoarding were rampant. Lawley felt a visceral disappointment whenever he observed Southerners behaving like ordinary human beings in time of war, and he tried as much as possible to shut his eyes to the messy aspects of the South. He required moral clarity from the Confederates, especially now that the North was growing stronger and more aggressive. Part of him was confident that “Fighting Joe” Hooker stood no chance against Lee. But he had seen enough of the Federal army to have doubts, even if he preferred not to express them out loud. “My sole and only hope is in the demoralization of the Yankees but I have little faith in it,” he wrote to Gregory. “The truth is that the Yankee fights much better than he has been represented as fighting.”19

  On April 2, 1863, a few days after Lawley had unburdened himself to Gregory, there were bread riots in Richmond. The Confederate capital was a microcosm of the many hardships being endured across the South; hunger and disease were spreading. Smallpox had invaded the poorer neighborhoods as more refugees arrived, begging for space even if it meant sleeping outside on a porch or in a garden shed. Everything was scarce. Women who before the war bought only the finest scented soaps from France were using soap made from kitchen grease mixed with lye. Ordinary articles such as pins and buttons were so hard to come by that John Jones, the diarist in the Confederate War Department, walked to work every day with his eyes fixed on the ground hoping to find some carelessly dropped treasure in the gutter.

  Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was also suffering; the men had been on half rations for so long that many were showing the first signs of scurvy. There were still plenty of foodstuffs in southern Virginia and North Carolina, particularly in the fertile tidewater regions near the coast, but over the past year, transportation had become almost impossible. The Federal occupation of Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern—all of them strategically important towns along the southeastern seaboard—was choking the Confederate supply line. On the morning of the bread riots in Richmond, General Longstreet—Francis Dawson’s new commander—received permission to attack Suffolk. The Union garrison there was weakly held, and Longstreet believed he could take it with twenty thousand men. The Confederate general had hoped to launch a surprise attack, but an intercepted message alerted the Federals to his plan.

  Washington promptly dispatched thousands of troops to strengthen the garrison, forcing Longstreet to alter his battle plan from an attack to a siege. The no longer plump Englishman Geor
ge Herbert of the 9th New York Volunteers (“Hawkins’s Zouaves”) was among the Union reinforcements. The regiment was thunderstruck by its mobilization. The men had only six weeks left before the terms of their enlistment expired. They had expected to remain in camp at Newport News, Virginia, where the most strenuous activity of the day was a game of baseball against the 51st New York. The men “are all anxiously looking forward to our final march up Broadway,” Herbert told his mother. Few of them intended to reenlist: Herbert was already planning his future in England. “I guess I shall have somewhere about $400 when I am mustered out and the more gold falls the richer I shall be,” he mused on March 31.20

  Eleven days later, on April 11, Herbert and his comrades disembarked at Portsmouth Naval Yard. The regiment stood listlessly under pelting rain as inquiries revealed that Suffolk was already under siege by Longstreet’s forces. The trains had been canceled and there were no available wagons. The soldiers were forced to march twenty-seven miles over railroad ties, loaded down with all their equipment. It was dark by the time they reached the Suffolk camp. No one had bothered to prepare for the regiment’s arrival, so the men went from tent to tent seeking a place to sleep. The lieutenant colonel, Edgar Kimball, found an old friend from the Mexican War and spent a few hours warming himself with his tent companion’s whiskey.

  A little after 2:00 A.M., Kimball remembered his orders to report to General George Getty’s headquarters. On the way, however, he came across General Michael Corcoran, the boisterous commander of the Irish Brigade. In one version of what happened next, Kimball went to the aid of a sentry who was shouting at several men on horseback. Corcoran, on the other hand, claimed that Kimball suddenly emerged from the darkness and grabbed his bridle, demanding that the countersign be given. But according to all versions of the incident, Corcoran refused to give it, saying, “I am General Corcoran and staff.” This was not enough for Kimball, who began brandishing his sword, whereupon Corcoran shot him at point-blank range. Journalists at the camp rushed to telegraph the news of his death.

  Kimball’s insistence on the proper countersign was initially commended as a wise precaution when the guerrilla John Mosby was about: “Under the circumstances, with a Rebel force in close proximity, an enemy might have said the same thing,” wrote a New York correspondent. When the Zouaves learned of their colonel’s death, many of them picked up their weapons and started for Corcoran’s camp. Fearing a riot, General Getty had the bugle sounded for assembly, which the men instinctively obeyed. He sat on his horse in front of the regiment and made a conciliatory speech, promising that there would be an investigation into Kimball’s shooting. The soldiers calmed down as they listened. At first they were rather pleased to hear that the general was sending them away from the camp at once. A few hours later, when they had reached Fort Nansemond, the men realized that the general had ordered them to the “extreme front.” The Zouaves spent the next twenty-two days under continuous fire from Confederate rifle pits, “so fully occupied with the enemy in front,” wrote the regiment’s historian, “that if his satanic majesty had wished to brew mischief he could have found no heart or hands in the regiment to do it for him.” None of the regiment was allowed to attend Kimball’s funeral in New York on April 20.21

  As more Union troops were sent to reinforce Suffolk, Longstreet realized that his small army would soon be radically outnumbered. He saw no reason to continue the siege, since enough bacon and grain to feed Lee’s army for two months had been collected during the so-called Tidewater Campaign. Longstreet was preparing to withdraw his men when a telegram arrived on May 3, 1863, ordering his immediate return to the Army of Northern Virginia: “Fighting Joe” Hooker was on the move. Longstreet tried to move as quickly as he could without jeopardizing the safety of the long wagon trains filled with supplies.

  George Henry Herbert’s term of enlistment ended on the same day as Longstreet’s retreat. The Zoaves threatened to mutiny if they were kept at Suffolk a minute longer, sufficiently alarming the authorities into providing troop transports to take the Zouaves straight to New York.

  Longstreet doubted that he would reach Lee in time to help him stop General Hooker’s advance. Suffolk was more than 150 miles from Fredericksburg and “Fighting Joe” had been counting on this when he devised his battle plan. The two armies had passed the winter facing each other across the banks of the Rappahannock River. Hooker tried to give the impression that he was contemplating another frontal assault on Fredericksburg in order to hide the fact that he was looking for places to ford the river upstream. Richmond was still his objective, and the Confederate army was still blocking the way; but Hooker’s strategy—one of the boldest on the Union side for the entire war—involved a sophisticated deception. He intended to force the Confederates out of their entrenched position at Fredericksburg by attacking them simultaneously from several different directions. To achieve this, he needed to disguise the whereabouts of his army until it was too late for Lee to do anything other than react defensively.

  Hooker knew that the Army of the Potomac had a two-to-one advantage over Lee, whose Army of Northern Virginia numbered fewer than 65,000 men. The Union general thought he could increase the odds even more by sending his 12,000-strong cavalry corps on raids around Richmond, with instructions to “Let your watchword be fight, fight, fight.” He wanted the cavalry to isolate Richmond from the rest of the state, causing panic in the capital and, with luck, forcing Lee to detach a part of his army for its defense. Sir Percy Wyndham’s regiment had a merry time ripping up railroads and cutting communications north of Richmond, rarely encountering opposition. Predictably, Wyndham went too far and began thinking up his own assignments, which led to his arrest for insubordination; after vigorous protests by his supporters, he was released with a censure for disobeying orders.

  Hooker was in a jubilant mood once the Army of the Potomac started moving on April 29. Leaving 40,000 troops at Fredericksburg, under the capable command of General “Uncle John” Sedgwick, he ordered the rest, numbering almost 80,000 men and officers, to cross the Rappahannock River at two different places and rendezvous at Chancellorsville, nine miles west of Fredericksburg. The name applied not to a village but to a clearing in a wood that spread over seventy square miles in such dense thickets that locals simply labeled it “the Wilderness.” A crossroads cut through the middle of the clearing, passing close to the veranda of an old brick mansion named Chancellor House. Here Hooker and his staff set up their temporary headquarters, flushing the indignant female inhabitants out of the parlor to their bedrooms on the floor above. He was ready to launch his surprise attack. “My plans are perfect,” he declared on the eve of the battle; “may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”22

  * * *

  19.1 Stanton was like Seward in his inability to resist an aristocratic title. He granted a visitor’s permit to Lord Abinger, who was stationed in Canada with the Scots Guards. Abinger went down to the Army of the Potomac, was treated to a grand review, and had his photograph taken with Hooker’s staff. Owing to his discreet and affable nature, no one among his hosts had the faintest idea of his true feelings. In contrast to the neutral Crowther, Abinger was thoroughly sympathetic to the South. The previous April, he had invited Commissioner James Mason to dine at the regimental mess in Eastbourne. Mason was most gratified to have the notice of a Scottish peer and recorded every detail of the outing in his diary.4

  19.2 It was no longer the exception but the rule for British subjects to be conscripted into the army or jailed if they refused. By some miracle, Lord Lyons received a letter from a Yorkshire lad in a Southern jail in Mississippi. The writer was desperate for help: “I was, like a very dog, ordered to ‘fall in,’ ” he wrote, “and were sent to this place and placed in artillary [sic] companies. I again told my captain of my immunity from the service but it availed nothing.… I was sick from exposure and sent to hospital where I have been ever since, except the last two weeks when I was arrested and sent to Jail, where I
now write this, charged with cursing the Confederacy and trying to escape the place, which they term desertion.”16

  TWENTY

  The Key Is in the Lock

  A great gamble—Death of Stonewall Jackson—Grant reaches Vicksburg—Arthur Fremantle meets the famous Colonel Grenfell—Feilden in love

  The discovery that Hooker had divided his army and was planning to crush him like a nut between two hammers came as a tremendous shock for Lee, who was unused to being tricked by his Federal opponents. Having weighed the various risks and options for his army, Lee decided that the greatest danger came from Hooker’s advancing forces rather than the 47,000 Federals still remaining at Fredericksburg. Fortunately, Lee had avoided the trap of dispatching part of his army to defend Richmond, having correctly guessed that the Federal cavalry raids around the capital were nothing more than a feint. Even so, Lee could afford to leave only 10,000 men to hold Fredericksburg. The remaining 52,000 he ordered to turn around and take up defensive positions just beyond Chancellorsville. Lee planned to attack Hooker’s troops as they emerged from the Wilderness, using the advantage of surprise.

  The fighting began on May 1, 1863. At Fredericksburg, General Sedgwick fired some artillery at the Confederates and engaged in a few skirmishes. It was hardly the aggressive movement envisaged by “Fighting Joe” Hooker, but to the raw and untested second lieutenant Henry George Hore, it seemed as though he had participated in a marvelous triumph. Hore had joined Sedgwick’s staff only a few weeks earlier, having sailed from England to do his part in freeing the slaves. “We are victorious and captured [the Confederates’] batteries, men and all,” Hore wrote in the afternoon to his cousin Olivia; it had been “the Battle of Fredericksburg the Second.”1