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

by Amanda Foreman

  to burn one of the chief cities of the enemy, say Boston, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati. If we are asked how such a thing can be done, we answer, nothing would be easier. A million of dollars would lay the proudest city of the enemy in ashes. The men to execute the work are already there. There would be no difficulty in finding there, here, or in Canada, suitable persons to take charge of the enterprise and arrange its details.… New York is worth twenty Richmonds. They have a dozen towns to our one; and in their towns is centered nearly all their wealth. It would not be immoral and barbarous. It is not immoral nor barbarous to defend yourself by any means or with any weapon the enemy may employ for your destruction.43

  The Confederacy’s mood of despair and outrage would soon be reflected in its new cipher key, which would be altered from “Complete Victory” to the more ominous-sounding “Come Retribution.”

  * * *

  33.1 The fourth Viscount Monck exceeded all expectations when he took up the governorship. He had only accepted the post because his Irish estates were so encumbered with debt that it was either Canada or bankruptcy. He had never displayed the least talent for politics or administration before; yet Palmerston had seen something in Monck that he liked, and his perspicacity was rewarded. Monck was a diligent, discreet, and scrupulously honest public servant who led the way to the British North American provinces’ becoming the Canadian Confederation in 1867.

  33.2 The vessel was the Night Hawk, which had confused the pilot on board the Condor. Thomas Taylor was the “supercargo,” the officer in charge of a ship’s cargo. Though only twenty-four, Taylor had the highest success rate of any English blockade runner. But his luck had run out the night before the Condor’s arrival. The Night Hawk was chased onto a sandbar and boarded by Federal sailors, who “acted more like maniacs than sane men, firing their revolvers and cutting right and left with their cutlasses,” recalled Taylor. After beating up the crew, they set fire to the ship and left, not caring whether the blockade runners burned or drowned. Taylor had wanted to fight the flames, but his men dragged him onto a rowboat, “though the boiling surf seemed more dangerous to my mind than remaining on the burning ship.”18

  33.3 Feilden promised the family he had stayed with in Florida that he would send them a reward if they ever found the ring. Two years after the end of the war, he received a small package with the ring inside. He kept his promise and sent all the money he could afford.

  33.4 During a battle on September 24, 1864, at Front Royal, an English volunteer substitute, Private Philip Baybutt (1844–1907), seized the regimental flag of the 6th Virginia Cavalry. The prize enabled him to receive the only Medal of Honor awarded to a British subject during the Civil War.

  33.5 Sheridan ordered his troops to hang prisoners of Mosby’s Rangers rather than treat them as prisoners of war, and six were executed on September 22, 1864. Mosby retaliated and executed five Union prisoners, chosen at random, on November 6. A week later he wrote to Sheridan suggesting that they call a truce on the executions.

  33.6 The colored troops in the Darbytown Road engagements received fourteen of the sixteen Medals of Honor awarded to black soldiers during the Civil War.

  33.7 Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, a French journalist and liberal politician, was in New York on a similar cultural voyage as Stanley. He observed: “Between Broadway and the Hudson River there exists a filthy, rundown neighborhood inhabited by Irish immigrants and colored people exclusively. It is impossible to imagine anything more depressingly poor.… From time to time one sees with amazement a trolley car ride by which carries a sign: ‘Colored People Admitted.’ What in the world can be the meaning of this? Are there separate laws here for Negroes? No, but public prejudice persecutes them more powerfully, more tyrannically even than law.”39

  33.8 For example, the English volunteer Thomas Beach, who had adopted a new identity as a Frenchman named Henri Le Caron, was able to leap from being a private in the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry to a lieutenant in the 15th U.S. Colored Infantry.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “War Is Cruelty”

  The Confederates invade Vermont—Colonel Grenfell’s mistake—War at sea resumes—The impact of Lincoln’s reelection—March to the sea—Death in a prison camp

  Instead of feeling restored by his holiday in Canada, Lord Lyons felt incapacitated by intense bleakness. Nothing inappropriate had taken place between him and Feo Monck; nor did he expect ever to see her again. But she had awakened something in him, a half-realized sense of liberty that would not be stifled and yet could not be indulged, and the prospect of Washington now seemed intolerable. Lyons could no longer avoid the truth: he did not belong in America, where his quiet eccentricities were out of step with the harsher rhythms of the young republic. The legation had been a haven for the past four years, but even this was about to be taken away from him, as it was time for his staff, including Edward Malet, to be transferred to new posts. In a couple of months Lyons would have to start all over again with a new set of faces.

  Lyons’s visit to New York in mid-October was uneventful until the night of the twentieth, when he attended a dinner party at which the guests included General John Dix, the military governor of New York State. Suddenly a messenger burst into the room and handed a telegram to the general, who read it and rushed out. He returned half an hour later to berate the astonished Lyons: twenty or so Confederate raiders had crossed the border from Canada and had attacked the Vermont town of St. Albans, looting more than $200,000 from its three main banks, setting fire to the square, and killing one citizen. He told Lyons that he had sent a force back across the border with orders to capture the raiders dead or alive. The news immediately conjured up in Lyons’s mind the specter of another international crisis: if the North crossed the Canadian border and invaded British soil to seize the Confederates, the British government would have to protest and demand an apology along with restitution of the prisoners. The United States would refuse, forcing the government into an ultimatum—probably followed by a declaration of war.

  Lord Monck, foreseeing the same catastrophic chain of events, had ordered the Montreal police to find the Confederates before they fell into the Northerners’ hands. Thirteen raiders were caught within forty-eight hours, but the U.S. posse found their leader, Bennett Young, hiding in a farmhouse. Young—who had participated in the Chicago convention plot—might have swung from a tree were it not for the intervention of a British Army officer who happened upon the scene and persuaded the furious Northerners to escort the prisoner to the local garrison. Monck telegraphed the news to Seward, assuring him that the Confederates would remain in custody while the courts examined the case for their extradition. He hoped this swift action would forestall any thoughts of Northern retaliation.

  The St. Albans raid had been organized by the Confederate commissioner Clement C. Clay without the knowledge of Jacob Thompson, who was furious that it had been kept from him. Thompson’s own plots were nearing fruition and promised to be far more destructive and violent than mere banditry against a U.S. border town. He feared that this further violation of British neutrality would lead to increased cooperation between the Canadian and Northern authorities and create more obstacles for his operatives. As far as Thompson could tell, Canadians remained broadly supportive of the South, and he wanted nothing to jeopardize their goodwill. Halifax was still “intensely Southern,” according to Georgiana Walker, who had arrived with her family on October 11. (For her, Rose Greenhow’s death overshadowed the actions of a few hotheads. “My thought flew at once to the poor little orphan at the Sacré Coeur, now bereft of Father, Mother, Friends,” she wrote, “truly [reliant] on the cold charities of the world.”)1

  General Sheridan was expanding the definition of “total war” to include deliberate starvation and the destruction of civilian property. Jacob Thompson was taking it in another direction: that of terror and mass murder. He was far more systematic than any of the other Confederate agents working in Canada, and he had the men and resourc
es to mount large-scale campaigns.34.1 2 Thompson had several schemes under way in late October, including a second attempt against USS Michigan by John Yates Beall and Bennet G. Burley, which involved the purchase and arming of a civilian steamer; but Thompson’s chief plot was an undertaking in conjunction with the Northern Sons of Liberty to start a revolution on November 8, Election Day.

  Two more members from General John Hunt Morgan’s defunct brigade had been sent by Jefferson Davis to help Thompson: Lieutenant Colonel Robert Maxwell Martin and Captain John William Headley. They had originally hoped to lead the supposed uprising talked up so persuasively in June by Vallandigham, but Copperhead enthusiasm for conspiracies had subsided once Sherman and Sheridan’s victories exposed the weakness of the Confederacy. By the beginning of November, the number of cities involved in the Confederate Sons of Liberty plot had shrunk to just two: Chicago and New York. “We were told that about 20,000 men were enlisted in New York under a complete organization,” recalled Captain John Headley. “It was proposed by the New York managers to take possession of the city on the afternoon of Election Day and, in order to deter opposition, a number of fires were to be started in the city.” As in the Chicago plot, the prisoners at Fort Lafayette would be freed, and the city’s authorities, both military and civilian, would be either murdered or thrown in prison.3 The Confederates expected the rest of New York State to follow or be taken as easily as the city.

  Lord Monck was throwing the meager resources at his disposal into surveillance operations against the Confederates, but his system was grossly inferior to the Federals’. Alerted by the U.S. consul in Halifax, Seward was able to telegraph General Dix on November 2: “This department has received information from the British Provinces to the effect that there is a conspiracy on foot to set fire to the principal cities in the Northern States on the day of the Presidential election.” The warning was followed by the dispatch of General Butler and five thousand troops, who marched into New York on November 7. The New York Copperheads met Thompson’s guerrillas that day and told them to go back to Canada, as no subversive would dare show his face while Butler was in town. But Martin and Headley would not be put off that easily, and they extracted from the Copperheads a new date for the uprising: Evacuation Day, November 25, so called because it was the day the British Army had been evacuated from Manhattan during the Revolutionary War.

  Although the New York plotters had postponed their plan, the Chicago conspiracy was still in play, despite the arrest of John Castleman, Captain Thomas Hines’s deputy, on October 2. Castleman’s place was taken by the English volunteer Colonel Grenfell. “We have all got to live a certain time,” Grenfell wrote to his daughter on October 11, “and when the end comes what difference will it make whether I lived in London or Illinois?”4 The new plan relied on the help of twelve hundred Copperheads—a much smaller number than before—to launch a four-pronged attack on Camp Douglas. Once armed and liberated, the Confederate prisoners were supposed to break open the other prison camps in the state while the Copperheads, led by Grenfell, created a diversion throughout Chicago with fires and incendiary bombs. Hines expected to raise an army of 25,000 Confederate prisoners of war to capture Illinois.

  The commandant of Camp Douglas, Colonel Benjamin Sweet, had informants inside the prison who were keeping him abreast of the conspiracy, but he did not know the full details of the plot until a Confederate turncoat named Maurice Langhorne called at his office on November 5 and offered to go undercover for him. Langhorne had briefly served under Confederate general Morgan and knew he would have no difficulty reconnecting with his former comrades. Grenfell was particularly incautious, freely discussing the plot not only with Langhorne but also with a second informant who was sent by Colonel Sweet to verify the information.

  Shortly after midnight on November 7, Union troops arrested the leader of the Copperheads; another detachment went after Thomas Hines, although he managed to hide. A third went to the Richmond House hotel in search of Grenfell. A fellow conspirator had managed to get a note to him first, which read: “Colonel—you must leave tonight. Go to Briggs House,” but Grenfell ignored the warning. The arresting officers found the note when they entered his room. He was sitting by the fire, fully dressed, though he could have run from the hotel at any time during the previous three hours.5 Whether he was feeling ill (he was still recovering from influenza) or was simply overconfident, his inaction led to his becoming an inmate of Camp Douglas rather than its liberator. He was put in a special cell reserved for spies and irregular combatants—next to the latrines.

  The legation read about the arrests on the morning of the election, but Lord Lyons himself was unaware of the failed plot. He had collapsed on November 6. “Two days after you left,” George Sheffield wrote to Edward Malet, “Lord Lyons gave up the work of the legation to Burnley, and I am sorry to say, has been seriously ill.”6

  —

  Lord Lyons’s last act of business before his collapse had been to speak to Seward about the problem of Confederate operations out of Canada. Seward believed his assurances that Lord Monck was trying his best to discourage them, and as a show of good faith he gave Lord Lyons a copy of the government’s vehement protest before it was sent to Charles Francis Adams in London. Lyons was grateful, since foreknowledge would allow Lord Russell sufficient time to compose his response before it was officially delivered. “He said that it would be impossible to resist the pressure which would be put upon the government … if these incursions from Canada continued,” Lyons reported confidentially to Lord Russell on October 28.7 A way had to be found to stop Thompson and his agents.

  Seward’s protest to Lord Russell arrived at the legation while Adams was out of London. The family had moved to Hanger Hill House, a handsome Georgian mansion in the village of Ealing.34.2 The apparent certainty of a Democratic victory had made Charles Francis Adams lackadaisical about coming in to London, conduct that exasperated Benjamin Moran.

  “Mr. Adams got a letter this morning from Mr. Dudley reporting a suspicious vessel,” Moran recorded on October 8. “I thought we should send the Niagara after her, but he said no.” Moran reveled in injured silence when it was discovered that the vessel had been carrying the crew for the Shenandoah, James Bulloch’s replacement for the Alabama.

  The forced sale of the French ships had provided Bulloch with a large reserve of cash that he used to purchase a ready-built steamer.8 The greatest challenge for Bulloch was how to assemble the Confederate officers in one place without someone talking or being discovered. In order to forestall potential leaks, Bulloch had furnished each crew member with explicit instructions. “You will proceed to London by the 5 o’clock train this afternoon,” Bulloch informed 1st Lieutenant William Whittle on October 6, 1864,

  and go to Wood’s Hotel, Furnival’s Inn, High Holborn. Take a room there and give your name as Mr. W. C. Brown if asked. It has been arranged for you to be in the coffee room of the hotel at 11 o’clock a.m. precisely to-morrow, and that you will sit in a prominent position, with a white pocket handkerchief rove through a buttonhole of your coat, and a newspaper in your hand. In this attitude you will be recognized by Mr. Richard Wright, who will call at the appointed hour and ask you if your name is Brown. You may say yes, and ask his name; he will give it, and you will then retire with him to your room, hand him the enclosed letter of introduction, and then, throwing off all further disguise, discuss freely the business in hand.9

  Whittle and his fellow Confederates obeyed their orders, and the Shenandoah sailed secretly from London on October 8. But after the transfer of arms and crew had been made in neutral waters on the nineteenth, the new commander of the cruiser, James Waddell, discovered that the stabilizers for the gun carriages were missing. Without them, the guns would go crashing backward every time they were fired. But this was the least of Captain Waddell’s problems. He had only 43 officers and men for a ship designed to carry a crew of 150.10 The equipment had been salvaged from other Confederate ships, and in th
e rush to acquire guns and ammunition, ordinary necessities such as tables and chairs had been forgotten. Waddell was so concerned about the shortages that he contemplated abandoning the cruise, but his small crew persuaded him that they would be able to manage. Most were used to far worse deprivations, especially the transfers from the Alabama. “Every officer and man ‘pulled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves,’ ” recalled Lieutenant Whittle, “and with the motto, ‘do or die,’ went to work at anything and everything.” They captured their first prize, the Alina, from Maine, on October 30. With a little encouragement, seven sailors from the Alina agreed to serve on the Shenandoah, giving hope to the overworked crew that more would follow.

  James Bulloch argued that his little navy’s record was spotless and that his raiders had attacked the Northern shipping trade without ever harming passengers or crew.11 But there was nothing heroic about commercial warfare, and in real engagements the Confederate cruisers fared badly. On October 7, USS Wachusett had captured CSS Florida—the last of the original three commerce raiders—in the Bay of San Salvador, Brazil, without firing a shot.12 Bulloch’s real contribution to the South was his supply operation, which, under the steady direction of the Confederate agent Colin McRae, was working twenty-four hours a day. Since the beginning of autumn, McRae and Bulloch had sent the Confederacy more than five miles of wire, eight pairs of engines, six torpedo boats, four steamers for the navy, three British engineers, and a large quantity of miscellaneous goods including three unmarked boxes sent by Matthew Maury that contained the parts for a new kind of electromagnetic mine.13

  Maury had “locked myself down” in his “experimental establishment of my own,” as he told Louisa, the sister of the Reverend Francis Tremlett.34.3 But he did take one day off to visit the Confederate bazaar in aid of the Southern Prisoners’ Relief Fund.14 Despite James Spence’s fear that the bazaar would have too many contributors and not enough buyers, more than two thousand visitors crammed into Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall on October 18. Inside the neoclassical building were twelve stalls, representing the twelve Confederate states (though the twelfth, Kentucky, had actually remained in the Union). Confederate flags and portraits of Southern generals lined the walls. “This is purely an enterprise gotten up by English gentlemen and ladies, sympathizers with the South and of their own prompting,” James Mason told his wife with great pride.15 Spence had accumulated an extraordinary array of donations, from Robert E. Lee’s pipe to wooden crosses made from the wreckage of Fort Sumter. In addition to persuading local businesses to donate all the food and drink, he arranged for a number of concerts to take place throughout the four days.16 (Raphael Semmes had departed for the South on October 3, or Spence would have tried to make use of him as another attraction.) Encouraged by the large crowds, the organizers extended the fair from four to five days. Even after deducting expenses, their final profits were more than £17,000.