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

by Amanda Foreman

  The fertile cotton plantations along the Red River were too enticing for the administration to ignore. Lincoln also liked the idea of keeping troops in Texas just in case the Confederates attempted to join forces with the French in Mexico. The fall of Mexico City in June 1863 had effectively ended the Franco-Mexican War, although the victorious French army was still fighting the defeated Juarist regime in parts of the country. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, had been cajoled by Louis-Napoleon into accepting the imperial crown of Mexico and was due to arrive in the country sometime in April.28.2 Even though Grant did not think either reason was sufficiently compelling to deprive him of the forces he needed for an attack against Mobile, Alabama—which he considered a vital stepping-off point for capturing the rest of the state—Lincoln and Halleck went ahead with their plan anyway.

  On March 12, General Nathaniel Banks’s troops began slogging from Franklin, Louisiana, toward Shreveport, the Confederate capital of Louisiana since the capture of Alexandria in 1863. The campaign was a joint army-navy expedition, with Admiral David Dixon Porter leading a flotilla up the Red River to converge with Banks at Shreveport. Some of the infantry regiments were only two months old. The 17th Infantry Corps d’Afrique, for example, was made up of freed slaves from Nashville, Tennessee. Its officers were white volunteers from across the North, among them Dr. Charles Culverwell from New York.28.3 The generous signing bonus of $227 had persuaded him to apply for the post; part of it paid for his photograph in a new uniform purchased specially for the expedition. Many years later, he made light of his participation in the Red River campaign, joking that he had expected to show off his crisp new jacket to the inhabitants of captured Confederate towns, only to find that the opportunity never came.

  Few excursions in the war encountered so many mishaps or ended so ignominiously as Banks’s Louisiana campaign. The start had been exceptionally smooth; he reached Alexandria on March 26 and immediately began to organize elections for the new pro-Union state legislature. But after that, nothing went right. This plan to revive economic ties between Southern plantation owners and the North was undone by Admiral Porter’s officers, who seized all the cotton for themselves before the official cotton brokers, who accompanied Banks, had a chance to transact any legitimate business. Even the Red River turned against him; instead of rising to its usual winter levels, it began to shrink at a rapid rate. Porter just managed to haul his vessels over the rapids above Alexandria before the fast-emerging rocks made the journey impossible. The U.S. fleet ground to a halt near Grand Ecore, a small trading town perched atop a ninety-foot bluff, more than seventy miles from Shreveport. Banks was able to push his army a little farther upriver, but the single-track route he had chosen turned the journey into a slow-moving haul through foul slurry.

  The Confederate general Richard “Dick” Taylor ended Banks’s advance at the Battle of Mansfield on April 7, some forty miles south of Shreveport. Taylor had only 8,000 men against 12,000 Federals, but he was one of the ablest generals in the South and had already demonstrated his aggressive fighting skills while serving under Stonewall Jackson in 1862. In this campaign, Taylor also benefited from having several excellent subordinates, including the French aristocrat Prince Camille de Polignac (affectionately dubbed “Prince Polecat” by his Texan troops), who had volunteered for the South in 1861. The Confederates cost the Federals 2,000 men at Mansfield; the loss shattered Banks’s confidence in the mission, and he ordered a general retreat, much to the chagrin of his own troops. His men never forgave him for making them look like cowards, and whenever he passed by marching columns he was greeted with rude songs and catcalls. Prevented from fighting the real enemy, Federal soldiers instead punished the surrounding communities, leaving a swath of burning homesteads all the way back to Alexandria. Porter’s fleet was now stranded above the rapids, forcing Banks to stay put with his glowering army until the Red River rose or someone found a way to carry the ships over the rocks.

  Toward the end of April, with Porter’s ships still floating in three feet of water rather than the usual nine, Colonel Joseph Bailey, the acting military engineer of the xix Corps, devised a complex plan for damming the river to create a surge over the falls. “This proposition looked like madness, and the best engineers ridiculed it,” wrote Admiral Porter in his report. But Bailey convinced his superiors that the plan would work. On April 30, three thousand Federal troops began hacking and sawing. “Trees were falling … quarries were opened; flat-boats were built to bring stone down from above, and every man seemed to be working with a vigor I have seldom seen equalled,” wrote Porter. He singled out a few officers and regiments for praise, in particular the 133rd New York and its English colonel, L.D.H. Currie, adding that “the noble men who succeeded so admirably in this arduous task, should not lose one atom of credit so justly due them.”4 With his wounds healed, Currie had decided against transferring to another command and was back once more with his men, guiding them through the perils of Banks’s final campaign.

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  On March 1, Confederate troops near Richmond stopped a bold attempt by a small Union cavalry outfit to liberate the Federal prisoners in Belle Isle camp on the James River. One of the leaders of the expedition, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, was killed during the retreat. Southerners were appalled that Dahlgren, who had strong family ties to the Confederacy, would turn against his own. Even more shocking was the discovery of papers on his body that outlined a plan to massacre the entire Confederate cabinet.5

  The days of “Rosewater chivalry” were at an end, declared the Richmond Enquirer on March 5; henceforth the Confederacy must fight “barbarity with barbarity.”6 A week after Dahlgren’s raid, Davis summoned Captain Thomas Hines, who had masterminded the prison escape of the Kentucky raider General John Hunt Morgan, to a secret meeting in Richmond. He ordered Hines to travel to Canada via Chicago and other cities in the Northwest to recruit propagandists and fighters for the South. Once in Canada, his mission was to collect the scattered survivors of Morgan’s command, plus any displaced Southerners or former prisoners of war, and encourage them to rejoin the Confederate army. Hines could, in the carefully chosen words of the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, by “any fair and appropriate enterprises of war” engage in “any hostile operation” against the North.7

  Hines presented Colonel Grenfell with a dilemma after he invited his former comrade to join his operations in Canada. At first, Grenfell felt honor-bound to keep his promise to serve Morgan as his adjutant general.8 But the offer of adventure proved too enticing, and two weeks after Captain Hines received his departure orders, Grenfell resigned his commission and announced he was leaving the Confederacy. The resignation was obviously a contrivance, both to extricate him from his commitment to Morgan and as part of a scheme to make it appear that he was disenchanted with the South. His official disengagement from the Confederacy would theoretically enable Grenfell to travel without hindrance through the North, picking up information for Hines all the while.9

  The Confederate government’s willingness to violate British neutrality in Canada had increased after the unexpected arrival on April 1 of a special messenger sent by Lord Lyons carrying a letter from Lord Russell to Jefferson Davis. Seward had permitted this first and only direct communication between London and Richmond, no doubt amused by its humiliating content for the South. Russell had written a remonstrance to Davis for using British ports to build Confederate warships, and in his inestimable way he had managed to prick every sensitive part of Southern pride. The worst insult for Davis was Russell’s continual references to “the so-called Confederate States.” It was a week before Davis could bring himself to answer Russell’s letter, and even then he was so offended that he had his private secretary write on his behalf. In future, Davis dictated to the secretary, any communication containing the phrase “so-called Confederate States” would be returned without a reply. British neutrality, he raged, was nothing more than �
�a cover for treacherous, malignant hostility.”10

  That same day, April 7, Davis sent a wire to Colonel Jacob Thompson, a former cabinet secretary under President Buchanan and a veteran of Vicksburg, who had returned to his plantation in Oxford, Mississippi, after its surrender. It read: “If your engagements will permit you to accept service abroad for six months, please come here immediately.”11 Thompson arrived a few days later and accepted the appointment of “Commissioner for Special Service in Canada.” The post was quite unlike Mason and Slidell’s in Europe. Davis was not interested in playing diplomatic games. Instead, Thompson’s mission was to foment anti-Northern feeling in Canada until it created a crisis in Anglo-American relations. Davis also wanted him to supervise Thomas Hines’s propaganda operations in the Northwest. The existence of the secret pro-Southern society the Knights of the Golden Circle and its recent offshoot, the Sons of Liberty, had convinced Benjamin and Davis that there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of disaffected Midwesterners who, with the right encouragement and sufficient funds, would take up armed resistance against the Republican administration.12

  Jacob Thompson was an intelligent man but a poor judge of character and given to impulsive behavior. With proper oversight and a sufficiently large organization behind him, he might have been a good choice for the post. But the deputy selected by Davis was Clement C. Clay, a popular Alabama senator before the war, whose poor health and obsession with appeasing his spoiled wife made him an unsuitable candidate for any sort of clandestine operation. Thompson needed a stronger and steadier hand than Clay’s, someone with more caution and a more cynical attitude toward the self-described Confederate agents currently making a nuisance of themselves in Canada. Davis had also entrusted Thompson with $1 million in gold, far too large a sum to be under the control of one person.

  Thompson and Clay ran the blockade at Wilmington on May 5 without encountering any particular difficulty, despite Judah P. Benjamin’s indiscreet letter to Slidell in Paris. “We have sent Jacob Thompson of Mississippi and Clement C. Clay of Alabama to Canada on secret service,” he had written on April 30, “in the hope of aiding the disruption between the Eastern and Western States in the approaching election at the North. It is supposed that much good can be done by the purchase of some of the principal presses, especially in the North-West.”13

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  A second important decision Jefferson Davis made in April was to recall General Beauregard from Charleston. Although Davis still loathed the Creole general, he had bowed to his friends’ urgings to make use of Beauregard’s popularity as the victor of First Manassas (Bull Run). Davis’s own popularity had suffered since Bragg’s defeat at Chattanooga, emboldening his enemies in the Confederate Congress. Davis could not afford to allow politically connected generals like Beauregard to remain disaffected.14

  The news that he was being transferred to the command of the military operations in North Carolina and southern Virginia below Richmond caught Beauregard by surprise. Although he had felt sidelined in Charleston, he was anxious about leaving when the Federals were building up their fleet for another assault. He had so little confidence in his replacement, General Sam Jones, that he decided not to take all his staff with him in the hope that some continuity would be maintained. The English volunteer Captain Henry Feilden, whose admiration for the departing commander bordered on hero worship, was crestfallen to learn that he was one of those staying behind. The general called him to his office on April 19 to explain the situation, promising to send for Feilden if his new appointment became permanent. “I don’t think I have any chance of getting to Virginia with him for some time, though I flatter myself that he has too much regard for me to debar me from sharing the privations and dangers of the field with him,” Feilden wrote after the meeting.15

  This was not what the recipient of the letters wished to hear. Feilden had recently become engaged to twenty-six-year-old Julia McCord, the daughter of the late congressman David James McCord—known in his day as “Handsome Davy”—who had been a powerful figure in South Carolina politics during the 1830s. Julia should have been brought up amid great comfort and security, but the early death of her parents had robbed her of both. Before meeting Feilden she had lived quietly and obscurely with a spinster cousin in Greenville, South Carolina.

  Julia had fallen in love with Feilden when she visited his office in June 1863 to obtain a military pass to visit her half-brother. (She preserved the little piece of paper for the rest of her life.) Her effect on Feilden was equally dramatic: “I have only one thing to say and that is you must have no doubts of my love for you, darling,” he promised in one of his earliest letters to her.16 His protectiveness toward her extended to playing down the dangers that faced Charleston. “Don’t be alarmed about my overworking myself, the business of the office is already decreasing,” he lied on April 30. As soon as various troop movements had been completed, “we shall have a very quiet summer.”17 But with Beauregard gone, a Federal fleet of almost fifty ships gathering outside the harbor, and General Jones so short of manpower that the city’s fire brigade was being used in place of real soldiers, there was no chance of a quiet or peaceful summer.18

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  “I doubt whether people in Europe are aware of the extent of the progress of this country in military strength,” Lord Lyons had written to Russell during Grant’s Chattanooga campaign. In answering Russell’s question as to whether Britain could still defeat the United States in a war, Lyons had replied that any British invading force would be outnumbered “by five to one” and would have no chance of winning. But he did not “think the government here at all desires to pick a quarrel with us or with any European power.”28.4 19 Lyons’s conviction that an Anglo-American war was now unlikely did not mean that he was any less dispirited by his failure to change U.S. attitudes toward Britain. “It is not my purpose here to explain the bitter feelings of the great majority of the American people against England,” he wrote to Russell on April 25. “The feeling is the less to be combated, because it is utterly unreasonable and utterly regardless of facts or arguments.”20 Recently, The New York Times had speculated with undisguised glee on the hope of a war between Britain and Germany. A new German navy would arise, the newspaper predicted, “manned, equipped, and armed” in American ports.21

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  Lyons was not sure that he could stand living in Washington for much longer. He particularly missed the company of Henri Mercier, who had returned to France on New Year’s Eve. (“His wife was so miserable here that she could bear it no longer,” Lyons told his sister.)22 Without the Merciers, Lyons’s intimate social circle had contracted to the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, and his American wife, Elisa. More seriously, Lyons had grown to dislike his work at the legation. In early spring Lyons wrote a frank letter to Lord Russell expressing concern that he was no longer fit for the post. “I am worn out, and utterly weary of the whole thing,” he confessed. “The people here too are beginning to get very tired of me; and I feel that if I can by any means get through this summer without breaking down in health, and without getting in to any very serious scrape, it will be as much as I shall be able to do.”23 Russell replied sympathetically and emphatically that Lyons belonged in Washington.

  The legation staff were also tired, and demoralized by their inability to help or make contact with British subjects in the South. The anguish of ignorance was a common lament among families in Britain with relatives in Confederate prisons. Dr. William Farr had tried every possible approach to obtain news of his son, Frederick, who had been captured the previous December. After being informed by the legation that there was no communication between Washington and Richmond, he had befriended the Confederate community in England in the hope that someone would be able to pass along information. In late February, an agent working with the purchasing agent Caleb Huse wrote to the assistant commissioner of exchange in Richmond, Captain William Hatch, saying that “a good friend of our cause” was seeking to k
now if his son was still alive.24 There were more than twenty prisons in and around Richmond. It would take some time for Captain Hatch to discover the whereabouts of Private Frederick Farr and, even if he was found, to convey the news to England. While the Farrs waited for news, not even knowing if the search was indeed under way, young Frederick became ill with typhus—a disease endemic in the filthy and overcrowded Southern prisons—and died on March 23, 1864.

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  “Suppose I were ill for a week,” Lyons’s attaché Edward Malet wrote despairingly to his mother. “I think it is rather hard upon me, for a Legation ought not to be left in such a condition that it cannot get on without one man.”25 The Foreign Office had refused to increase the number of attachés and yet had denied them holiday leave on the grounds that the legation was dangerously overstretched.26 Most of the new work was coming from a steep rise in forced enlistment cases and arrests of British subjects for desertion. “Every effort has been made by us to obtain redress for those which have appeared to be well founded,” Lyons assured Lord Russell. “In few cases, however, have our efforts produced any satisfactory results.” The form was always the same:

  The remonstrances addressed by me to the Sec of State are duly acknowledged and transmitted to the War or the Navy Department. The Department orders an investigation.… I do my best to elicit the truth, and to obtain evidence—a controversial correspondence between the US government and me ensues. The Department always claims that the men were willing volunteers; the Government accepts the statement, and the men are retained.27