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

by Amanda Foreman

  —

  Rose Greenhow’s death was a brutal reminder to Wilmington’s inhabitants that the Federals were tightening their grip. Francis Lawley had become worried for the city’s safety after his visit in mid-September. “There is abundant cause for thinking that Wilmington is the great thorn in the flesh of the Federals at this moment,” he wrote on September 24. “We shall witness a desperate attack upon this place within the next seven weeks.”20 This was also the view of General Beauregard, who was growing exasperated by the lack of defensive preparations in both Wilmington and Charleston and had written to Captain Henry Feilden urging him to try his utmost to shake “the authorities of Charleston” out of their complacency.21

  Beauregard’s letter had been waiting for Feilden when he returned to Charleston from his secondment to General John K. Jackson. Though it was arduous and uncomfortable, the worst that had happened to him during his mission to bring back Confederate deserters from Florida was the loss of a ring given to him by Julia.33.3 She had been talking about a grand wedding after the war, but Sherman’s capture of Atlanta had convinced Feilden that it would be foolish to delay any longer. Charleston’s defenses were holding for the moment, but seventy days of continuous shelling had left parts of the city in utter ruin—Feilden was not sure where they would live after the wedding. Lieutenant James Morgan of the defunct Georgia was dismayed when he visited Charleston during Feilden’s absence and found many of the streets covered over with grasses and vines. “I felt ashamed of my new uniform,” he wrote, after seeing the ragged state of the troops guarding Wilmington and Charleston.22 Morgan had never imagined that conditions aboard his ship would compare favorably with those in the local barracks.

  Feilden was so accustomed to keeping up a positive front for Julia that a general vagueness was creeping into all his letters. He gave his family every pertinent detail about his fiancée except her surname, and Lady Feilden was obliged to send an engagement present of gloves and a parasol addressed simply to Miss Julia. Feilden laughingly reassured Julia that the omission had not been for want of love. His feelings for her would never alter, he promised, nor would he ever give her a moment’s distress by flirting or looking at another woman: “My wife will never be afraid of my misbehaving in that manner,” he wrote firmly.23

  Feilden’s steadfast nature was one of the qualities that endeared him to his superiors. He had never complained about the state of headquarters even though his commanding officer, General Roswell S. Ripley, was a drunk and his staff not much better. It was nevertheless a great relief to him when Ripley was replaced at the beginning of October. “General Beauregard has recommended that Col. Harris be promoted to the rank of Major General, and that the defence of Charleston be handed over to him,” Feilden wrote excitedly to Julia. The change in command almost certainly guaranteed his promotion:

  Col. [D. B.] Harris told me that he had told General Beauregard that he would only accept the command under certain conditions, and one of them was that he should select his own staff, and not have Ripley’s crowd palmed off on him. In that case he will apply for me as his AA General. It will be a capital thing for me if all this happens; it will give me my promotion to a Majority and put me in a position where I shall not be ranked by every ignoramus who has got influence enough to be placed on the staff of the Department of SC., Ga., & Fla. Colonel Harris is a splendid officer and just the man I should like to serve under. Charleston, with him in command, would make a splendid fight.24

  Feilden’s belief in the South was unshaken by the recent downturn in her fortunes. “I was intended to live in the midst of all these troubles,” he wrote, “for I can keep up my spirits under all circumstances.” True to form, his subsequent letters were all about their wedding.25 But the flow of letters between Charleston and Greenville ceased in early October. Yellow fever had spread to the staff headquarters, and Colonel Harris was among the first to be struck with the disease. Feilden nursed him day and night for a week, but Harris was beyond help and died on October 10. Feilden stayed up for two nights, guarding the body from the depredations of rats and dogs until Harris’s family could claim the body. He had lost not only a friend but also his best chance of promotion.

  General Beauregard’s choice to replace Harris was Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, a veteran of the Mexican War and the author of a drill manual used by both armies. Hardee had been looking for a new post since falling out with General Hood in Georgia, and he came with his own staff of trusted and experienced officers. Feilden’s friends were determined to ensure that Hardee realized he was gaining an officer of exceptional quality. Colonel Thomas Jordan, Beauregard’s chief of staff, wrote to General Hardee about Feilden on October 12: “He is of English birth and education and has seen service in the British Army. At first he was on inspection duty, but I had him transferred to my office, where he became my right-hand man—and I can recommend him as a judicious, well-informed, well trained staff officer.”26 The letter languished in Hardee’s “to consider” pile. The general was appalled by the bedraggled state of his new troops and immediately launched a campaign for supplies. The soldiers lacked blankets and coats; “very many of my men are absolutely barefooted,” he complained to Richmond on October 19.

  Francis Lawley had seen for himself the weakened state of the Southern armies. It went against the grain with him to dwell on the Confederacy’s deprivations, but he could no longer ignore the truth. “I cannot be blind to the fact, as I meet officers and privates from General Lee’s army,” he wrote to Lord Wharncliffe from Richmond on October 12, “that they are half worn out, and that, though the spirit is the same as ever, they urgently need rest.” Their diet for the past 160 days had consisted of bread and salted meat, while the enemy had at its command “all that lavish profusion of expenditure and the scientific experience that the whole civilized world can contribute.”27 However, when Lawley praised “the patience and self-denying endurance of the troops,” he was stretching an ideal already abandoned by his friends. Earlier in the week, the chief of ordnance, General Josiah Gorgas, had privately conceded that the soldiers’ spirits were almost beyond saving: “Our poor harrowed and overworked soldiers are getting worn out with the campaign. They see nothing before them but certain death, and have, I fear, fallen into a sort of hopelessness, and are dispirited. Certain it is that they do not fight as they fought at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania.”28

  Ill.55 Rendezvous of General Mosby’s men above the Shenandoah Valley, by Frank Vizetelly.

  Frank Vizetelly witnessed the battles between Jubal Early’s similarly exhausted Confederates and Sheridan’s hard-driving cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley. Early was relying on the help of John Singleton Mosby and his Partisan Rangers to harass the Federals, and at first Vizetelly was dazzled by Mosby, whose guerrilla raids reminded him of the daredevil spirit of Jeb Stuart. “His achievements are perfectly marvellous,” wrote Vizetelly after hearing how the Rangers swooped down on a six-hundred-foot-long Federal wagon train in mid-August and captured the entire contents, suffering only two casualties in the raid.29 Mosby had been able to outlast his former rival Sir Percy Wyndham, but his new opponent, the English colonel L.D.H. Currie, could not be tricked into making the sort of mistakes that had been Wyndham’s undoing. Although Currie could not prevent Mosby’s raids, he kept the wagon trains moving and intact. Nor were the raiders much help to Jubal Early in a real cavalry battle. Early had lost an entire brigade in a combined Union cavalry and artillery attack on September 24.33.4 Since then, he had been able to mount only insignificant skirmishes against Sheridan, who was carrying out Grant’s order to lay waste to the region. Vizetelly had covered many campaigns, but none that so explicitly targeted the enemy’s will to fight. The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of deliberately causing mass starvation among the civilians. Sheridan’s declaration that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” was repeated
many times in the British press. This sort of “wanton destructiveness,” asserted the editor of the Illustrated London News, is “unknown to modern warfare.”33.5 30

  There was nowhere safe for refugees anymore: families who thought they would find sanctuary in Richmond risked losing their adolescent sons to the Confederate army. Despite President Davis’s dictum against “grinding the seed corn of the Republic,” boys as young as fifteen were now being rounded up and marched to the trenches. “No wonder there are many deserters—no wonder men become indifferent as to which side shall prevail,” wrote the War Department clerk John Jones bitterly.31 Nevertheless, those who risked the journey to Richmond sometimes met with surprising generosity. “Virginians of the real old stock,” in Mary Sophia Hill’s words, gave her a corner to sleep in when she arrived ill and penniless in early October. The military tribunal in New Orleans had returned a guilty verdict with the recommendation of imprisonment for the duration of the war. But her defense lawyer, a “Union man” named Christian Roselius, had protested against the sentence and won a commutation to banishment from New Orleans. Consul Coppell also interceded on her behalf, offering to buy passage for Mary on the Sir William Peel, which was about to depart for England, but General Banks refused, saying, “She will have to run the blockade. She will have plenty of trouble; perhaps it will teach her to behave herself the rest of her days.”32

  “He had his desire,” recalled Mary. “I did have plenty of trouble.” Despite the insistence of the new legation secretary, Joseph Burnley, that “everything that could be done in this matter has been done,” Mary was carried across the picket lines into Confederate territory and left by the road to fend for herself.33 Mary never revealed how she made the one-thousand-mile journey from New Orleans to Richmond without a horse or money, but the memory would forever haunt her, driving her to seek justice years after the war.

  —

  Mary had arrived in Richmond shortly after the Federals captured another of the forts guarding the approach to the capital on September 29. The enemy, wrote John Jones on October 4, “is now within five miles of the city, and if his progress is not checked, he will soon be throwing shells at us.… Flour rose yesterday to $425 a barrel, meal to $72 a bushel.”34 Mary risked her life to look for her twin brother, Sam, who had been sent to the trenches with the other engineers in his office. While crossing a pontoon bridge she stood aside to allow General Lee to ride past. “I consider it an honor,” she wrote, “and a great one too, to have seen the General of the age, Robert E. Lee, the soldier’s friend, the Christian warrior.”35

  Lee had grown used to such hero worship; his determination to endure the same hardships as his men was widely known, though it had not deterred Southerners, particularly women, from delivering food and gifts to his tent. But another side to Lee had become apparent of late. No man, not even the great “Christian warrior,” could withstand the relentless attrition of troops, supplies, and options without showing the strain. Francis Dawson was taken to Lee’s mess and subjected to a tirade of sarcastic remarks:

  Ill.56 Punch’s terrifying depiction of the human cost of the Civil War, September 1864.

  It was the most uncomfortable meal that I ever had in my life [he wrote]. My frame of mind can be imagined when General Lee spoke to me in this way: “Mr. Dawson will you take some of this bacon? I fear that it is not very good, but I trust that you will excuse that. John! Give Mr. Dawson some water; I pray pardon me for giving you this cup. Our table service is not as complete as it should be. May I give you some bread? I fear it is not well baked, but I hope you will not mind that.” Etc., etc., etc.; while my cheeks were red and my ears were tingling, and I wished myself anywhere else than at General Lee’s headquarters.36

  Only a month of fighting weather remained. On October 7, 1864, Lee ordered his final large-scale assault of the year, sending two divisions along Darbytown Road with orders to flush the Federals out of their new position. They started off well and overran the first line of trenches, capturing more than three hundred soldiers in the process, among them the English fugitive Robert Livingstone, who had been released from the hospital on September 30 and had only rejoined the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry the day before. As Livingstone was marched away, he could hear his side responding with a massive barrage of fire. The Confederates were faltering. Lee galloped toward the retreaters, waving his hat and shouting for them to make another stand. On previous occasions the very sight of him had been enough to stem a flight, but this time the men continued to run.

  Grant was sufficiently encouraged by his troops’ handling of the Confederate attack to order a follow-up assault on October 13, but this time the Federals were driven back by the defenders. “We have had a pretty brisk little fight today,” Dawson wrote to his mother that evening. “Grant has been feeling our lines on this [North] side of the River; he made but two attacks on our ranks and each time was easily repulsed.” The setback to the Federals had an immediate effect on the Confederates’ spirits. Dawson was almost giddy: “There are croakers [pessimists] everywhere … but you must not allow any of them to persuade you that we are, as the Yankees say, ‘in our last ditch.’ ” Moreover, his commander had returned: “I am happy to say that General Longstreet reported for duty today, his right arm and hand is still paralyzed from his wound but he could not be kept back any longer … he is a tower of strength to our cause, and he returns at a good time.”37

  Dawson’s optimism was a testament to his ignorance of the true state of the Confederate defenses. He had laughed at the sight of black regiments during the recent fighting in and around Darbytown Road, considering their deployment proof of the North’s weakness. But more experienced Confederate officers acknowledged their heroism and were asking why the South did not employ their slaves to solve the manpower shortage.33.6 General Lee was considering the idea, although he did not say so in public.

  Edward Stanley was fascinated by the North’s ambivalence to Negro regiments. Even some members of the Adams family were shocked by Charles Francis Jr.’s transfer to a black regiment. “His uncle, Mr. Sidney Brooks, was I hear very disgusted that his favourite nephew would do this,” wrote Stanley. “I am glad he has done this as the more people of position take these commands, the more it tends to raise the Negro.” Stanley thought the experience would be good for Adams himself, who “was not quite free from the American prejudice against and repugnance to Negroes.” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had not regretted his decision the previous September to transfer to the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), but he shared General Sherman’s doubts that black troops would ever be the equal of white. The “Nigs” were angelic, he told Henry Adams after the regiment had sustained nineteen casualties and three dead in fighting at Petersburg on June 15. But “the rugged discipline which improves whites is too much for them. It is easy to crush them into slaves, but very difficult by kindness and patience to approach them to our own standard.”38

  Stanley had finished his tour of the North more pessimistic about the future of the freedman than when he started. Day-to-day relations between blacks and whites had the feel of an awkward jig to him. He had visited a school in Boston where a “quadroon” pupil was made to sit by herself, as though separated from the other girls by a cordon sanitaire.33.7 The sight convinced him that the racial integration of the U.S. Army was vital to reforming American society. He knew this would not happen overnight, but he had been encouraged by the number of white soldiers willing to join colored regiments, especially among the foreign volunteers who wanted to become officers.

  Private James Horrocks was among the whites applying to transfer to a colored regiment. “What do you think about it?” he asked his parents, as he weighed the army’s unequal treatment of colored regiments against the possible improvement of his prospects:

  Chances of being shot greater; accommodations and comforts generally smaller, but pay much larger than what I have now. No horse to ride but a uniform to wear. And above all—an Officer’s re
al shoulder straps and the right of being addressed and treated as a gentleman, with the advantage of better society, and if I like it, this is a position I can hold for life, being United States troops, while Volunteers will undoubtedly be disbanded when the war is over.33.8 40

  Horrocks’s confidence that peace could not be far away received a boost on October 19 at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley. The Confederates under Jubal Early surprised the Federals in a dawn attack, routing two of Sheridan’s corps and destroying their camps. But in the afternoon, Sheridan led a crushing counterattack, capturing hundreds of prisoners and most of Early’s artillery. It was the Confederate general’s third and final battle against Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Every battle had been a Federal victory, and Early could not afford to risk another encounter. “We have only pistols, sabers and old fashioned rifles,” wrote a Confederate cavalryman. “Above all, we have not enough food to keep the horses up.”41 Sheridan had achieved his purpose; the verdant Shenandoah Valley was now a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads.

  Sheridan’s success in Virginia made some newspapers uneasy. “The laying waste of the Shenandoah Valley will undoubtedly call out acts in retaliation equally terrible,” predicted the Detroit Free Press as reports began to filter through to the North of a Southern movement to exact revenge.42 On October 15 the Richmond Whig urged Davis