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

by Amanda Foreman

  The jailer, Mr. Laurence, took a hearty dislike to the new prisoner and her repeated declarations of British nationality. He boarded up Mary’s window, removed the sheets from her bed, and prevented her from having contact with her sister or brother. “I often wonder since [how] I kept my senses,” she wrote later, “for many have lost their reason for less cruelty.” The main charge against her, she eventually learned, was passing information to the enemy. “I wrote to Mr. Coppell, acting Consul, who wrote me word he would attend to my case: it was not necessary to see me. I differed with him. It was his duty to see me and hear what I had to say, he knowing me to be a British subject.”29.7 41 After three weeks of solitary confinement, Mary was allowed a visit from her sister and brother-in-law, who were so appalled by her condition that they forced the authorities to allow her to be seen by a doctor. “Had it not been for him, I would have died,” she wrote.42 She was held in prison without being officially charged or given a date for her trial, while she grew weaker and more desperate by the day.

  —

  Mary Sophia Hill was not the only nuisance to the Federal authorities. Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy and heroine of the Battle of Front Royal in 1862, was also in custody. Her ability to pry information out of impressionable Federal soldiers was legendary. It was only with the greatest reluctance that Stanton had sanctioned Belle’s release from prison the previous December after she contracted typhoid.

  Belle had recuperated in Mobile, Alabama, under the care of Mary Semmes, the wife of Captain Semmes, who “treated me with as much attention as though I had been her own daughter.” Mary’s tales of the Alabama inspired Belle to try a new kind of adventure, and she wrote to Judah P. Benjamin offering to carry Confederate dispatches to England. Benjamin was delighted and provided her with $500 in gold, a letter of introduction to Henry Hotze, and passage on a blockade runner out of Wilmington. As dawn broke on her twentieth birthday, May 9, 1864, the Greyhound carried Belle and two other passengers past the blockade out into the open sea. She did not get far; USS Connecticut captured the Greyhound at 1:40 P.M. on the following day.

  The U.S. naval officer in charge of taking the Greyhound to Boston, Lieutenant Samuel Hardinge, was a handsome young fellow without a girl back home. He did not know, at first, that the widowed “Mrs. Lewis” was the infamous Belle Boyd—and by the time he discovered her true identity he was so besotted that she was able to persuade him that the captain of the Greyhound ought to be released. Hardinge took Belle shopping for clothes when the Greyhound stopped briefly in New York, and finished by proposing marriage to her when the vessel docked at Boston. “So generous and noble was he in every thing,” Belle wrote later, “that I could not but acknowledge that my heart was his. I firmly believe that God intended us to meet and love.”43

  This had not, however, been the intention of the Navy Department. Gideon Welles ordered Lieutenant Hardinge’s arrest. “My dear Miss Belle, It is all up with me,” Hardinge wrote dejectedly on June 8. “The Admiralty says that it looks bad for us; so I have adopted a very good motto, viz: ‘Face the music!’ ”44 Welles and the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, were incensed that Belle had managed to make both their departments look foolish and were determined it should never happen again. The provost marshal in Boston received a telegram ordering her immediate removal to Canada, and “if I was again caught in the United States, or by the United States authorities, I should be shot,” she wrote. Two days later she was on the train to Montreal, missing Hardinge but excited at the “delightful prospect of breathing free Canadian air.”45

  Stanton had been in the midst of deciding what to do with Miss Boyd when one of his clerks informed him that an Englishman, a former volunteer in the Confederate army, was asking for an audience. The military governor of New York, General John Dix, had hesitated to accept Colonel Grenfell’s tale about his disenchantment with the South and had sent him to Washington to apply directly to the War Department for permission to travel through the North as a tourist. Annoyed at the presumption on his time, Stanton nevertheless agreed to see Grenfell out of curiosity. Two days later, on June 13, Grenfell was shown into Stanton’s office.46

  Stanton received Grenfell with a stenographer present, which ought to have been a warning that this was not the time to play games. Heedless of the danger, Grenfell behaved like a second-string actor at his grand moment. He not only offered the incredulous secretary “inside” information about Lee’s army, but he also professed himself ready to join the U.S. Army. Stanton declined the offer. But he did extract a promise from Grenfell to make no further contact with or provide any help to the Confederacy. The colonel left Stanton’s office believing that his performance had been masterful. He had received permission to travel anywhere in the North without having to register his presence with the local provost marshals. It had not occurred to Grenfell that the authorities could keep watch on him by other means. Believing his mission accomplished, Grenfell returned to New York where his new friend, Fitzgerald Ross, was waiting to begin their tour of northern New York and Canada, unaware of the sinister reason for the journey.

  * * *

  29.1 The Confederates had used every possible trick, including jury tampering, to influence the outcome of the court cases. On May 17, 1864, for example, Charles Prioleau directed one of their agents to make sure there was a favorable decision in an upcoming court case: “The enclosed list contains the names of the Juries to try the case on the 6 June. It is important to know the sympathies of as many of them as possible … find out whether any of them or how many are, by opinion or interest, enemies to the cause of the defendants or the contrary.… Any expenses incurred we will of course discharge—you have carte blanche in this respect.”4

  29.2 In current terms, about $1.6 million.

  29.3 For several days after the battle, Grant refused to call a temporary truce to allow the wounded to be retrieved. By the time he changed his mind, it was too late for many of the trapped and helpless soldiers. After the war, Grant expressed his remorse for the unnecessary suffering he had caused at Cold Harbor. Among those affected by his actions was Seward, who—for the second time in the war—spent several sleepless nights waiting to learn the fate of his son, Captain William Seward, Jr. He had read in the newspapers that two captains from his son’s corps had been wounded at Cold Harbor, but neither had been named.15

  29.4 Yet many of the details in the press were wrong. Henry Adams read that Semmes hid under a tarpaulin during the battle. Across the Atlantic, the Confederate arms agent Edward C. Anderson mistakenly believed that his son had been killed. “My worst fears are realized and my noble boy is no more,” he wrote. “According to the newspaper account which is all I have of the battle, my darling son was blown overboard by a shell, leaving his leg on deck. The news came like an earthquake upon me.… My darling boy is the only officer killed in the battle.”

  29.5 The 79th New York Highlanders had their homecoming parade up Broadway and soon dispersed. “We were mustered out of the service June 9th, 1864,” recalled Ebenezer Wells. “I stayed a few weeks in N.Y. then returned to England, being away 4 years and 5 months.” The adjustment to civilian life proved to be hard. But eventually Wells found peace through prayer and a sense of pride that he had fought on the side of justice. “[I] have marched in triumph amid the plaudits of noble hearts, have felt the throb of nobility and patriotism as I fought for country dear,” he wrote, “and have come back to my own home to receive the kiss of love.”33

  29.6 Using his stage name of Wyndham, Culverwell toiled steadily in the world of provincial theater while he built up his skill and reputation. When he visited America again in 1870, it was as Charles Wyndham, one of the leading comic actors of his generation. Shortly before he was knighted in 1902, Wyndham gave a fund-raising speech on behalf of the British soldiers fighting in the Boer War: “I served with the Federal forces during the longest and most bitter conflict of modern days. Then I learned for the first time, and at first hand, what war really means,
war—which if it does not make life worth the living, at least makes death worth the dying.”35

  29.7 Coppell had received Mary’s distress call when he was himself at a particularly low ebb. He had been working without pay since September 1861. “I should not have troubled your Lordship on this occasion but that my individual resources … are inadequate to the present large demands upon them,” he had written to Russell on May 20. Knowing it would be some time before he received a reply, he labored at his duties with waning enthusiasm. When his letter eventually arrived in London the Foreign Office was amazed that he had never said anything before. No one had bothered to check whether the legation or London was meant to be paying his salary. Russell immediately granted him £350 per annum and a £200 war allowance.

  THIRTY

  “Can We Hold Out?”

  A Welsh visitor to Washington—Tit for tat—Return of Lawley and Vizetelly—An intolerable stench—Battle of the Crater—The Negro regiments—Devastation in the valley

  On June 22, 1864, Griffith Evans, a Welsh army veterinary surgeon stationed in Canada, called at the British legation in Washington seeking advice on how to reach the front. Lyons explained that it was doubtful Seward would give him an official pass. “Lord Lyons entertained me very hospitably,” wrote Evans. “He took my hand in both his when I left, and gave it a good shaking.” Evans felt sorry for him: “He looks a kind, good natured middle-aged man who was staggering under the burden of safeguarding the rights and liberties of nearly 3 million British subjects.” Evans was shocked to learn that crimping was never punished, nor legal redress available for the victims:

  The usual mode is to drug the food or drink, whether it be alcohol or tea. The person loses consciousness and recovering some time after in a distant place finds himself dressed in the US uniform, he remonstrates but is assured he enlisted himself, finds some money in his pocket which he is told is part of his bounty, and that he has spent or lost the rest. Such are the complaints received daily. All the Embassy can do is to request the War Department to investigate the case, to give it a fair trial and report. Some are then retrieved and some not, but none of those relieved get Army compensation.1

  Lyons did not discuss his civil cases with Evans. That week, British subjects in Memphis had protested to him about a rule that banned their employment unless they joined the Federal militia; a black Canadian had been arrested for breaking the state of Delaware’s ban on colored people; and Mary Sophia Hill had written to him from prison begging for his intercession. “Imagine, my Lord, a woman and a British subject so threatened,” she cried. “My object in writing this letter is to ask Your Lordship to see justice done me and to protect me until I am proved as not belonging to the Glorious Flag of Old England.”2

  Consul Coppell admitted to Lyons that he had failed to visit the prisoner, but advised him, “From personal knowledge I do not think the case one for Your Lordship’s interference.”3 Lyons had no reason to doubt him, experience having taught the minister that cases such as Mary’s usually came with a long and tangled history of mutual antipathy between the prisoner and the authorities. He would not help her while there were others who were truly innocent and helpless. William Seward was amazed by Lord Lyons’s tenacious advocacy for such pathetic cases. The old rules of warfare had been swept away, he told him during a contentious interview. Seward pointed to the latest news from Charleston, where the Confederates had moved fifty Northern officers to a converted prison in direct range of the U.S. gunboats.

  —

  General Sam Jones in Charleston had decided it was time for the Federals to feel what the city’s civilian population had been enduring for the past eight months, and fifty Federal prisoners of war (all officers) had been moved to a converted prison in one of the most heavily shelled neighborhoods. He knew that an attempt to capture the city was still being prepared—his scouts had reported that thirteen warships and forty-six troop transports were anchored less than a hundred miles away in Port Royal Sound, which had been captured by the Federals early on in the war.4 But the timing of the attack remained a mystery. Captain Henry Feilden was not taking any chances: he had drawn up a will in Julia’s favor even though their wedding had not yet taken place. If he were to be killed now, he told her,

  I should feel as if I was leaving a wife behind in you, and it is my duty to attend to your wants. I thought of you, darling, last night whilst I was sitting out on the ground, I thought of you and felt happy to be able to render my small mite in defence of your country. You will trust me dearest, wont you, to love you ever as I do now, whatever happens if I am alive you will be protected … someone who will think of nothing else for the rest of his life but making you happy.5

  General Beauregard had recommended Feilden for promotion:

  Though I do not think there is much chance of their refusing it, personally I do not care whether they do or do not [Feilden admitted]. I really look forward to the war ending this year, and if [only] we are spared to one another, we shall be able to settle so comfortably in Charleston. I will go into some business and work very hard, and then I shall have you to comfort me and inspire me. Then you will be able to amuse yourself with all your old friends and acquaintances. Dearest Julie, if I can only make you as perfectly happy as we mortals can expect to be, I shall have no other wish on this earth.6

  Feilden’s respect for General Jones plummeted after the Federal officers were used as human shields. He had urged Jones to reconsider the order, pointing out that retaliation would probably follow. “My argument then and now was the homely adage that ‘two wrongs can never make a right,’ ” he related to Julia.7 Feilden was so troubled that on June 30 he went down to check on the Federal prisoners. He wore his best uniform for the visit, “to show that we are not quite ragged yet in the Confederacy.” There were five generals among the fifty officers. Feilden struck up a conversation with General Truman Seymour, who was so interesting and pleasant that he regretted the folly of General Jones all the more: “I hardly ever met a Yankee before, never a Yankee General and thought the contact would make one’s flesh crawl, but strange to say, I could not blow Seymour from a gun or hang him without a good deal of repugnance. Indeed, I felt more inclined to ask him to dinner and show him around Charleston.”8

  Feilden’s prophesy of retaliation was soon fulfilled. The commandant of Fort Delaware, on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River, received an order to select fifty officers from among the 12,500 Confederate prisoners and dispatch them to one of the captured forts in Charleston Harbor so that they would be in the line of Confederate fire. The inmates assumed that there would be more random selections in the future, and the thought spurred many to look for a way of escape. There was only one route out, however, through sewage drains that led to the Delaware River. Among the six prisoners willing to try was the Scotsman Bennet G. Burley, who had been captured on May 12, 1864, while planting torpedoes on the Rappahannock River. When Burley was searched, they found an unusual pass that granted him the freedom to cross Southern lines at will. Regular soldiers did not carry such passes. Burley was labeled a spy and treated accordingly.

  Burley weighed the risks and decided that his prison conditions could not significantly worsen if he tried to escape and was recaptured. One night, when the drains were full and water was seeping up through the floor, Burley and his five comrades pried open the grille in their barracks and, taking a big breath, lowered themselves into the pitch-dark pipe. Burley’s powerful physique enabled him to thrust his body along for twenty-five yards until he reached the end and could heave himself into the rushing river. Only one other Confederate managed the same feat. Burley was rescued by a passing sailboat, telling the crew that he had capsized while night fishing, which the captain either believed or chose not to question. He was taken to Philadelphia and from there he headed north to Canada, where he would be safe.

  —

  In Virginia, the Army of the Potomac was edging toward Richmond. “We must destroy this army of Grant’
s before he gets to the James River,” Lee had urged General Jubal Early on May 29. “If he gets there, it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”9 Two weeks later, on June 12, the Federals had not only reached the James but also crossed it, using pontoon bridges. Now only the small town of Petersburg, population 18,266, lay between Grant and the Confederate capital.10 The town straddled the five remaining railways and two main roads that connected Richmond to the rest of the state. From June 15 to 18, Grant ordered a continuous wave of attacks, losing more than ten thousand men over four days without breaking the Confederate defenses. “We have assaulted the enemy’s works repeatedly and lost many lives, but I cannot understand it,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote in anguish to his father on June 19. “Why have these lives been sacrificed? Why is the Army kept continually fighting until its heart has sickened within it? I cannot tell … Grant has pushed his Army to the extreme limit of human endurance.”11

  The U.S. generals complained that their troops had lost their courage for frontal assaults. The men would make a show of going forward before hunkering down under cover. Grant tried one last time before he accepted the necessity for a long siege. He dispatched Sheridan on another cavalry raid with orders to attack Lee at his vulnerable points—the bridges, water tanks, and supply lines. On June 22, Grant ordered an assault against one of the five railroads. The 69th New York Volunteers were among the attackers.