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

by Amanda Foreman

  Francis Lawley had rushed from Richmond as soon as he heard that Hooker was on the march but was disappointed that the Wilderness’s impenetrable scrub made it impossible for him to see what was happening. What blinded him also hindered Hooker’s generals as they tried to lead their men through the woods. At 2:00 P.M., after meeting relatively light pockets of resistance from the Confederates, Hooker suddenly called off the advance and ordered his army to retreat back to Chancellorsville. His commanders begged him to continue fighting. Hooker was obstinate: “I have got Lee just where I want him,” he told General Darius Couch, who walked away from the meeting convinced that “Fighting Joe” “was a whipped man.” Hooker was never able to explain his decision afterward except to say that all of a sudden he lost faith in himself.2

  That night, Lee and Stonewall Jackson discussed how to take advantage of their adversary’s hesitation. They agreed to divide their already outnumbered army into even smaller segments. Jackson would take thirty thousand men and march around Hooker’s army, relying on local guides to find a way through the Wilderness, and surprise him from the rear, while Lee remained in front with just fifteen thousand troops. In any other battle, the enemy cavalry would have spotted such a maneuver, but Hooker’s was miles away, destroying barns and canals.

  When Hooker was informed that large troop movements were taking place, he decided that it meant the Confederates were retreating back to Fredericksburg. It never occurred to him that Lee would attempt an attack from two different directions, using the same divide-and-surprise tactic that he himself had intended to employ. The next day, May 2, at five o’clock, just as the Federals were sitting down to cook their dinners, Stonewall Jackson ordered his men to charge. “Swift and sudden as the falcon sweeping her prey, Jackson had burst on his enemy’s rear and crushed him before resistance could be attempted,” wrote Francis Lawley in a sudden fit of poetry.3 The rout was so complete that an entire wing of the Union force collapsed and ran back toward headquarters, some two miles away. The first Hooker learned of the battle was when one of his staff officers happened to walk out onto the veranda and look through his field glasses. “My God, here they come!” he shouted.4 The lines between the two armies became blurred as the twilight turned to darkness.

  Hooker was not beaten yet, however. Though strangely passive with regard to his immediate danger, he had no trouble directing the operations at Fredericksburg. Furious that Sedgwick had been poking rather than smashing the Confederates’ positions, Hooker sent him a terse message demanding the capture of the town, and instructed the message bearer to stay until Sedgwick had moved into action.5 The direct order had its effect.

  Henry Hore was up early on May 3, riding hard between Sedgwick’s headquarters and the batteries. Now he saw real fighting instead of the tepid firing of the day before. It was a shock for him to discover that the rebel soldiers handled their rifles with far greater accuracy than his own side. Sedgwick’s troops were flailing until the Federal artillery unleashed its guns. There was such a long delay before the first explosions, wrote Hore, “that I thought [the rebels] would take the guns before we fired. At last came the word: ‘Depress pieces’ and I quite felt sick, they were just about fifty yards or so from my horse who was as much excited as myself.”

  The next hour was Hore’s initiation into the sordid truth of war. “Good God, my dear girl, it was awful,” he admitted to his cousin Olivia. “Their dead seemed piled heaps upon heaps, the shot went right clear through them, completely smashing the front of the columns.” Sedgwick ordered ten regiments to charge across the plain toward Marye’s Heights, the same attack formation that had decimated the Irish 69th and so many other regiments in December. But this time there was only a thin line of Confederates behind the famous stone wall, and in half an hour the attackers were up and over, lunging forward with their bayonets. Sedgwick was so excited that he tore a page from a letter meant for his wife and scribbled an order for more artillery. He gave it to Hore with the command to ride as fast as he could and return with every gun he could find. A fellow officer named Hansard, who had abjured his home state of South Carolina to support the North, offered to accompany him.

  The two officers were almost at the rear when a Confederate raiding party came crashing through the trees with terrifying whoops and yells.6 Hore wheeled his horse around, hoping that Hansard was with him. But when he looked behind him he saw one of the raiders spur his horse on and reach out to grab Hansard’s bridle. Hore made a split-second decision to turn around. As he did so, the two riders struggled and fell to the ground. Hansard landed on his back. While he lay helpless, a Confederate cavalryman whipped out his sword and plunged it into his chest. Hore watched, aghast, as the raider leaned forward and tore off Hansard’s shoulder straps. The rebel locked eyes with Hore and shook the straps at him. “I now felt as if he or I must be killed,” wrote Hore. Time slowed and each movement became exaggeratedly clear in his memory. He pulled out his revolver and galloped toward the cavalryman: “I had made up my mind I would kill him if I could.” The rebel either had no gun or forgot he had one. When Hore was sure he would not miss, he fired straight at him: “This did not take 30 seconds,” he wrote, “not near so long as it takes me to write. I sighted him along the barrel of my revolver and if I had not killed him the first time would have shot again, for H[ansard] was a good friend to me.”7

  Map.14 Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863

  Click here to view a larger image.

  Hore remembered little else of that day. Once the Federal army had breached Marye’s Heights, the Confederates pulled back toward Chancellorsville, making a new stand in the woods around Salem Church. Though still outnumbered, the Confederates managed to hold down Sedgwick’s troops. Hore was confused and thought that the Confederate retreat meant another victory. “They have not gained (the Rebels I mean) a single yard,” he wrote, “and we don’t mean they shall,” not realizing that in Hooker’s plan, Sedgwick should have been at Chancellorsville by now, helping to smash Lee’s little army. By this time, Hooker was sorely in need of Sedgwick. Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of the third, a Confederate cannonball had smashed into the veranda of Chancellor House, knocking Hooker unconscious. Though still groggy after coming to, he insisted on resuming command, much to the dismay of his staff. Contrary to his commanders’ wishes, Hooker ordered a general retreat.

  Shortly after Hooker’s departure, Chancellor House went up in flames.20.1 Lee trotted up to the burning house as Confederates came running toward him, cheering and shouting wildly. Behind them the Wilderness had been transformed into a roaring furnace, trapping the lost and wounded. Men closest to the conflagration could see figures waving in the inferno. Union and Confederate soldiers braved the searing heat to pull out anyone they could. Two enemies fought together to rescue a trapped youth: “The fire was all around him,” recalled the Federal soldier. They could see his face: “His eyes were big and blue, and his hair like raw silk surrounded by a wreath of fire.” In vain, they burned their hands trying to reach him. “I heard him scream, ‘Oh Mother, O God.’ It left me trembling all over, like a leaf.” The defeated rescuers fled the forest. Although it was agony to open their fingers, “me and them rebs tried to shake hands.”8

  There was no cathartic pain for Henry Hore. On the night of the fourth, taking advantage of the full moon, he led a burial party to look for Hansard’s body. They found him lying next to the dead rebel. Hore dug a grave and buried Hansard, but he deliberately left the Confederate raider to rot out in the open. “My dear Cousin you must think me quite savage,” he wrote afterward in the bleak surroundings of a dark, filthy barn, “but the carnage of this frightful war and the horrid sights I see every day made me indifferent to human life. At one time I should have never thought of killing anyone, but now can shoot a man without a shake of my hand. I think I am writing to you more as if you were a hard hearted man than a very pretty girl.”

  On May 5 the balmy weather was replaced by lashing wind
and rain. The Confederate commanders informed Lee that another attack was beyond their men’s strength. The storm provided the Union army with perfect cover as it slowly crawled back over the Rappahannock River. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s cavalry regiment was on the other side, part of the skeleton force of mounted troops Hooker had kept behind. He initially discounted the tales from the abject stragglers who stopped to ask for food or shelter, but “in the afternoon came the crusher,” he told his father. They received the order to saddle up and return to their old camp. They found it “deserted, burned up, filthy, and surrounded with dead horses. We tied up our horses and stood dismally round in the pouring rain.”9

  Henry Hore arrived at Fortress Monroe on Hampton Roads a few days later, on May 9, a young man no longer.10 The magnitude of Hooker’s defeat was numbing: 17,000 casualties to Lee’s 13,000, without gaining the slightest moral or tactical advantage. Lincoln was horror-struck when he read the telegram, exclaiming, “My God, my God, what will the country say?” The press was predictably harsh: “Everybody feels,” wrote Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, and a close friend of the president’s, “that the war is drawing to a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”11 The New York World railed that the “gallant Army of the Potomac” had been “marched to fruitless slaughter” by “an imbecile department and led by an incompetent general.”12

  The country’s frustration with its leaders made the gratitude felt toward the volunteers all the deeper and more profound. A flotilla of boats swarmed the troopship carrying the 9th New York Volunteers as it approached the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Thousands of well-wishers lined the pier, throwing flowers and waving flags, and a military band escorted the soldiers along Broadway to Union Square. The men were still wearing their filthy uniforms from the siege at Suffolk, but their disheveled appearance seemed to delight the crowds. This was the enthusiastic reception that the seven hundred survivors of the regiment had been imagining for weeks. On May 20, 1863, George Henry Herbert handed over his weapon at the armory, shook hands with his comrades one last time, and walked away. After a disastrous beginning that had made him the butt of the regiment’s jokes, Herbert had grown to love his life in the army. He sailed for England richer by $400, ready to start life afresh.

  —

  Lee had maintained a sanguine demeanor throughout the battle—until the moment he learned that Stonewall Jackson had been shot. Jackson had been reconnoitering positions when he accidentally galloped into his own picket line. The nervous Confederate guards shot blindly at the group, killing several riders and striking Jackson. Two bullets tore through his left arm; another hit his right wrist. He was also dragged along by his horse and dropped by his stretcher bearers. The damage to his left arm was irreparable; the limb had to be amputated the next morning. Lee sent Jackson a message via the chaplain begging him to recover quickly, adding, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm.” As soon as doctors deemed he could be moved, Jackson was loaded onto an ambulance and taken on a twenty-seven-mile journey to a plantation at Guinea Station.

  Francis Lawley followed behind, arriving at the plantation on May 7. Jackson had been moved to the estate office, where he could recuperate in private. “With a beating heart I rode up to ask after him,” wrote Lawley. The doctor stepped outside so that he could speak plainly; the general’s wife and infant daughter were inside. Jackson had appeared to be recovering, but late the previous night the classic signs of pneumonia had set in. Lawley knew what this meant: “I gave up all hope of his recovery.”13

  Lawley could not bear to wait for the end, so he boarded one of the trains taking the wounded back to Richmond. On May 8 he sent a letter to the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, warning him of Jackson’s desperate condition. Two days later, on the tenth, Jackson died. Lee cried when he learned the news; there was not a man or woman, North or South, who failed to understand the meaning of Jackson’s death or his vital importance to the Confederacy.20.2

  The loss of Jackson posed a dilemma for Lawley. If he made too much of it in his reports, readers might think that the South had suffered a mortal blow. Yet here was an opportunity to create a mythic figure whose heroic end would elevate the entire Southern cause. Lawley did his best, eulogizing Jackson as both an earthly saint and a military genius whose death would only inspire the South to “deeds of more than mortal valor.” (Unfortunately, the blockade was playing havoc with Lawley’s dispatches; his obituary of Jackson reached London before the news of his shooting.)15

  Lawley was so concerned about presenting Jackson’s death in the best possible light that he deliberately obscured the gravity of the situation out west. On May 19, 1863, he finally revealed to the English public that Vicksburg might not be impregnable after all. The news was “contrary to my own and the general anticipation,” Lawley admitted at the end of yet another article on Stonewall Jackson. General Grant had won a series of tactical victories, beginning with a successful night raid by the Union navy on April 16 that enabled the fleet to steam up the Mississippi River past Vicksburg’s thirty-one guns. Grant stopped all the useless digging and canal building and set his army loose against the Confederates. On May 1 his troops crushed the small force holding the town of Port Gibson, thirty miles south of Vicksburg. Suddenly it was as though the wind was at their backs. The Federal army raced toward Vicksburg, fighting four battles in seventeen days, swatting aside the Confederates’ resistance. General Sherman razed most of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, on May 14, in a fiery portent of what was to come in 1864.

  Grant’s success frightened Richmond, but there was no agreement on how he should be stopped. Longstreet thought they should provoke a battle against the Union Army of the Cumberland, which was stationed in Tennessee. This, he argued, would force Grant to divide his forces between the two theaters. Jefferson Davis wanted to send reinforcements to the two Confederate generals defending Mississippi, John Pemberton and Joseph E. Johnston (now fully recovered from his bullet wound). But Lee had his own plan, one so bold and risky that its very audaciousness made any other suggestion appear timid and lackluster. He proposed to lead his army north again—for an invasion of Pennsylvania. The state was unprotected. Hooker would have to withdraw from Virginia to defend Washington. At the very worst, the North would look vulnerable to its own citizens, and possibly, in the eyes of the international community, incapable of winning the war. The Confederate cabinet debated Lee’s proposal for two days and at last agreed, with only the postmaster general, John Reagan, dissenting. Davis decided that Vicksburg would have to be reinforced with regiments from all parts of the South except Virginia.

  —

  In May 1863, Frank Vizetelly was on board one of the relief trains carrying troops to Vicksburg. He was going out west, Vizetelly informed his readers, because “the campaign in the valley of the Mississippi will, I believe, decide the duration of the war.”16 He offered no explanation as to why he had missed the Battle of Chancellorsville. Given the state of his debts and his propensity to fall off the wagon, Vizetelly’s absence and his sudden decision to go to Vicksburg were probably connected. The train juddered slowly across Georgia and Mississippi, the track so worn and buckled in places that it was derailed three times. On the last, Vizetelly was thrown hard against the carriage and suffered a concussion. For an hour or two he thought his arm was broken and was relieved to find it only badly bruised. The engineers managed to keep the train going until they reached Jackson, Mississippi, forty-five miles east of Vicksburg. Sherman’s departure was so recent that the city was still burning. Nothing of any value was intact, certainly nothing that might repair the damaged train. “The Yankees were guilty of every kind of vandalism,” Vizetelly wrote with indignation. “They sacked houses, stole clothing from the negroes, burst open their trunks, and took what little money they had.”

  Ill.37 Train with reinforcements for General Johnston running off the tracks in the forests of Mississippi, by Frank Vizetelly.
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br />   Now he was not sure where to go. The news from Vicksburg was ominous. The Federal army had surrounded the hilltop town; Confederate general John Pemberton’s army of thirty thousand men was holed up inside, along with three thousand luckless civilians. The Confederate army had enough rations to last sixty days. The fatherless families who cowered in its midst, on the other hand, had only their gardens, their fast-emptying cupboards, and, in the final resort, their pets. Vizetelly decided he had no choice but to stay in and around Jackson. His exploration of the surrounding countryside revealed dozens of dismal encampments, where women and children had clustered together for protection. It was an unexpected sight, he wrote. “Ladies who have been reared in luxury” were living rough like country peasants, “with nothing but a few yards of canvas to protect them from the frequent thunderstorms which burst in terrific magnificence at this season of the year over Mississippi.”17

  Only two months before, Northern newspapers had branded Grant a failure and a drunk. But since then, he had marched 130 miles and won every battle. Charles A. Dana, the observer sent by Lincoln and Stanton to Grant’s headquarters, had seen much that troubled him: the callous, even brutal, attitude toward the sick appalled him, but he never saw Grant incapacitated. In fact, closer acquaintance made Dana appreciate the general’s particular genius for waging war without ever faltering or second-guessing himself. This determined quality stood Grant well once he reached Vicksburg: his first assault on May 19 was a dismal failure. A thousand Federal soldiers fell in the attack, but not a foot was gained. On the second attempt, three days later, he lost another three thousand men. Grant insisted that the army remain where it was. But he also refused to request a flag of truce to allow the wounded to be collected. The injured lay strewn among the dead for two days. The only witness to their suffering was the harsh sun, which putrefied the dead and flayed the living. Finally driven mad by the screams and stench from the ditches, the Confederates sent a message to Grant, begging him “in the name of humanity” to rescue his men.18