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

by Amanda Foreman

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  In Georgia, General Sherman had initiated his own version of scorched-earth tactics. The Federal Army of the Tennessee had occupied Atlanta since September 2; finally, on November 15, Sherman gave the order to evacuate. His next destination was the city of Savannah, 285 miles to the east. He did not expect much resistance from Lee, who could not afford to detach a single regiment from the siege around Petersburg; nor was he frightened of General Hood and his little Army of Tennessee, which was lurking somewhere in the countryside. Before he left Atlanta he set the city on fire and expelled its remaining residents, telling the mayor, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”51 Five thousand houses were burned to the ground in a single night. “Behind us lay Atlanta,” Sherman recalled in his memoirs as the army began to march, “smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.”

  Sherman’s plan for Georgia was effective and simple. He divided his army into two wings and cut a devastating trough more than fifty miles wide through the state. Foragers, known as “bummers,” had broad orders to do as they pleased short of mass rape and murder. Fearful that the Federals might first head south toward Andersonville, which was only 120 miles from Atlanta, Confederate prison commandant Wirz sent hundreds of Union prisoners on forced marches to various locations around the state. He could not feed them all anyway; James Pendlebury received a pint of corn for a four-day march. “A poor fellow asked if he could lie beside me and in the morning he was dead,” he wrote. “During that march I don’t think beasts could have been more savage.”

  The economic catastrophe caused by Sherman’s march sent immediate ripples across the South. At Salisbury prison, North Carolina, where Robert Livingstone had been sent in October, ten thousand prisoners were living outdoors in a large pen. “Some dug holes in the ground to shelter themselves from the cold winds at night,” wrote Archibald McCowan, a Scotsman who arrived at the same time as Livingstone. As the rations grew smaller and smaller, the prisoners feared that the Confederates would starve them to death before the war ended. Walking past the prison well on November 24, McCowan noticed a small group of prisoners lounging around, each carrying a club made from a tree branch. “One of these men was very conspicuous on account of his uniform; the red breeches and Turkish cap of a Zouave regiment.” Suddenly, the group attacked the prison sentries. “Each of the other conspirators knocked down his man and with the arms thus obtained they rushed to the large gate which generally stood open to allow teams to pass in and out,” wrote McCowan.52 The other prisoners joined in. Two of the guards were killed before the sentries on the other side of the pen realized what was happening. In a few minutes, every prisoner was running toward the gates. McCowan had intended to join the mêlée, but a friend grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down. “Stay where you are you damn fool,” he said. The commandant climbed to the roof and turned the prison’s howitzer onto the crowd below. McCowan waited until all was silent before raising his head. He saw a number of bodies sprawled on the ground. “I learned later that 15 prisoners were killed and about 60 wounded, not one of whom knew anything about the matter.” Robert Livingstone had tried to run away with the others and been shot down. He lived for ten days before dying of his wounds on December 4, when his body was dumped in a trough alongside the other casualties of the failed rebellion.

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  34.1 A completely separate operation led by a Kentucky doctor, Luke P. Blackburn, had been inspired by the yellow fever epidemics in Bermuda. Dr. Blackburn was an expert on the disease and twice in 1864 offered his services to the Bermudan authorities, once in the spring and once in the autumn. Believing, mistakenly, that yellow fever could be transmitted via the clothes of deceased victims, Blackburn nursed the dying patients and then stored their belongings in large trunks. He had these transported to Halifax, where another agent shipped them to Washington to be auctioned off to unsuspecting civilians. Blackburn’s ignorance that yellow fever is spread via mosquito bites rather than human contact spared the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Blackburn’s plot was exposed after the war, but he escaped punishment and became governor of Kentucky in 1879.

  34.2 Formerly the home of Lady Byron, Hanger Hill was advertised by its current owners as a healthy retreat from London with the convenience of being only six miles from the city’s center. Henry Adams liked Hanger Hill’s aristocratic pretensions, but the unrelieved proximity to his family was a trial. Mary was weak and querulous, and “Loo will bore herself to death,” he told his brother Charles Francis Jr.

  34.3 Maury was working on improvements to his mines and what he termed “torpedoes,” which were immobile electrical mines intended to detonate upon contact. Unfortunately, he failed to take into account the impracticality of using new technology that could not be easily replicated or repaired. Stephen Mallory could not afford to waste his dwindling resources on such rarified warfare. But the British Army had plenty of resources, and General Sir John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers supplied Maury with acid, batteries, insulated wire, and all other necessary ingredients for mine manufacturing without asking too many questions about how much was actually required for experimental use.

  34.4 Spence had already assumed the task of unraveling Rose Greenhow’s estate on behalf of her daughters and balked at taking on any more work. “She had faults, but who has not,” Spence had written to Wharncliffe after learning of her death. His reference to her “faults” was a delicate allusion to the distrust she inspired in Francis Lawley and others as a shameless manipulator of men. Varina Davis, President Davis’s wife, could only feel so much pity for Rose, “her poor wasted beautiful face all divested of its meretricious ornaments and her scheming head hanging helplessly upon those who but an hour before she felt so able and willing to deceive.”

  34.5 Percy Gregg, a writer whom Hotze had always suspected of being slightly unhinged, had started the trouble by refusing to allow Witt to edit his copy. Witt had retaliated by dropping his stories altogether—with good reason: they were the ravings of a violent racist. “Of the passages altered or omitted there is scarcely one that I would have let stand,” Hotze admonished Gregg on his return from Germany. “There are some I could mention to you which I should consider almost fatal to the paper.” Hotze had never intended for the Index to be a pulpit for slavery. He was trying to massage, not bludgeon, public opinion. “It is a matter of real disappointment to me that one of my chief calculations, resting upon you, threatens to fail.”21

  34.6 Hundreds of Federal prisoners took part in the sham vote. According to an early chronicler of Kansas state history, “When Sherman started on his march to Savannah the rebel authorities believed that a detachment of the Federal army would be sent to release the prisoners at Andersonville. Accordingly, in October 1864, [several Kansan prisoners] were taken to Milledgeville, Georgia, and from there to Savannah. While at Milledgeville, the Union prisoners went through the form of casting their votes at the general election. The soldiers in the field were given the privilege of voting for President.… The rebels were very much interested in the outcome, and advised those who wanted the war to come to a speedy close to vote for McClellan. However, the result of this balloting was about two to one in favor of Lincoln.”34

  34.7 By the middle of 1864 the South had become so desperate for men that Davis agreed to a simple exchange—soldier for soldier—without regard to race. Prison exchanges resumed in November, albeit slowly.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “The British Mark on Every

  Battle-field”

  The plot against New York—A parting of friends—Congress retaliates—A Christmas gift—Wilmington falls—One last attempt

  Despite the failure of his agents on Lake Erie and in Chicago, the Confederate leader of clandestine operations in Canada, Jacob Thompson, remained confident in his designs for a campaign of terror. He had particular faith in John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley, and believed that their new scheme—to purchase a
steamer and convert it into a warship—had a far greater chance of succeeding than the ill-fated attempt to seize the Philo Parsons. Burley had been working at a foundry in Guelph, Ontario, overseeing the construction of the cannon and torpedoes that were to be fitted onto the converted steamship. “Everything is going on finely and I anticipate having the things finished early, perhaps this week,” he had reported in October.1 Beall was waiting to captain the vessel as soon as it was delivered to Canada’s Port Colborne, at the southern end of the Welland Canal on Lake Erie, some thirty miles west of Buffalo.

  Beall’s plan called for the steamer, renamed CSS Georgian, to receive its battering ram and cannon at Colborne. The ram was designed to sink USS Michigan, and the cannon was to be used against the undefended cities along Lake Erie from Buffalo to Detroit. But when the Georgian sailed onto Lake Erie on November 1, it seemed as though every household within a two-hundred-mile radius of Colborne knew of her arrival. “The whole lake shore was a scene of wild excitement,” Thompson wrote to Judah P. Benjamin. “At Buffalo two tugs had cannon placed on board.… Bells were rung at Detroit.… The bane and curse of carrying out anything in this country is the surveillance under which we act.”2 To make matters worse, the Georgian’s propeller broke and a replacement had to be brought from Toronto. But the conspirators believed they were safe after the authorities searched the vessel and, since the weaponry had not yet been delivered, found nothing suspicious.

  By November 16, 1864, the Georgian had been repaired and was sailing west toward Sarnia on Lake Huron to pick up the rest of her weaponry when Monck’s agents finally achieved their first success against the Confederates. They intercepted the shipment before it reached Sarnia and found a large quantity of arms in three boxes marked “potatoes.” The trail led straight back to Burley, who was arrested in Guelph the following day and taken to Toronto to face a trial for extradition to the United States. At first, the detectives thought they had captured Beall, and their confusion enabled him to go into hiding before they realized their mistake. The rest of the Georgian’s crew also scattered, leaving only Burley to take the blame for the plot. Thompson was prepared to kill civilians for the cause of Southern independence, but he was less insouciant about risking the lives of his own men. He hastily wrote to the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, asking him to forward documents proving Burley’s naval commission so that the charge of piracy—which carried a death sentence—could not be made against the Scotsman.35.1 3

  Disappointed by the sudden unraveling of the Lake Erie plan, Thompson waited anxiously for the outcome of the plot to set New York afire on November 25. There had been no word from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin or Captain John Headley since their aborted attempt on the seventh. But the departure of General Butler and his Federal troops on November 15 gave Thompson hope that they would still carry out the mission. The small Confederate cell was more determined than ever “to let the Government at Washington understand that the burning homes in the South might find a counterpart in the North,” as Headley recalled.4 They were planning to use a new kind of incendiary bomb based on Greek fire—a mixture of phosphorus and carbon bisulfate—which could be transported easily in small bottles and produced a powerful explosion when exposed to air. The targets were New York City’s hotels. The conspirators were to travel around with large satchels, and one by one leave the bottles in prebooked bedrooms.

  On November 24, the day before the attack, Headley picked up the chemical concoction from a Southern sympathizer and carried it in his suitcase on a streetcar up the Bowery:

  I soon began to smell a peculiar odour—a little like rotten eggs—and I noticed the passengers were conscious of the same presence. But I sat unconcerned until my getting off place was reached, when I took up the valise and went out. I heard a passenger say as I alighted, “there must be something dead in that valise.”5

  Only six of the original eight took part in the plot on the twenty-fifth, two having lost their nerve. Each man put ten bottles of the Greek fire in a satchel and spread out through the city. They visited nineteen hotels in all, as well as two theaters and Barnum’s Museum. But the Confederates had ignored the basic rule of arson—that fire requires oxygen to burn—and had planted the Greek fire in locked bedrooms and closed cupboards, causing the flames to peter out of their own accord.

  One of the hotels set on fire, the Lafarge, was adjacent to the Winter Garden Theatre at Broadway and Thirty-first, where the three Booth brothers, Edwin, Junius Brutus, and John Wilkes, were playing together for the first and last time in their careers, giving a charity performance of Julius Caesar to raise money for the Shakespeare statue fund for Central Park; John Wilkes Booth was playing Mark Antony, and his more famous brother Edwin was Brutus. John Wilkes, a member of the Sons of Liberty, was already deep into his own plot, although at this time the scheme was limited to kidnapping Lincoln and forcing the release of all Confederate prisoners in exchange for his freedom. Booth had been meeting Confederate agents in Canada, but the fragmented structure of their operations meant that he knew nothing about the New York conspiracy, and the arsonists were unaware of whose life they were risking when they set fire to the Lafarge. As news rippled across the auditorium that the hotel next door was burning, there were screams from the audience and people began to rise from their seats. “The panic was such for a few moments that it seemed as if all the audience believed the entire building in flames,” reported The New York Times. But in that split second between calm and a stampede, Edwin Booth stepped forward and reassured the audience that the theater was not itself on fire: “In addition … Judge McCunn rose in the dress circle, and in a few timely remarks admonished them all to remain quietly in their places, and at the same time tried to show them the danger which would attend a pell-mell rush for the doors, and especially the uselessness of it.”6

  The fires caused mass panic throughout the city, but no recorded deaths. By the following evening, newspapers were carrying full descriptions of the six suspects, who all decided to leave for Toronto on the eleven o’clock train. They slipped into their berths and waited, fully dressed and armed, in case detectives boarded in pursuit. Much to their surprise, they reached Canada without being recognized. U.S. detectives came looking for them but returned to New York empty-handed.35.2 General Dix announced that “such persons engaged in secret acts of hostility” would be caught, tried, and executed “without the delay of a single day.”8 The treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, thought the arson attempt proved “that the South is thoroughly rotten, and the Confederacy a mere shell.”9 Such was the fear in the city that several newspapers called for Southern citizens to be rounded up and expelled, and Dix ordered all Southern refugees to register their names with the police department.

  In the midst of the public outpouring of anger against the South (and at the British for harboring the conspirators in Canada), Mary Sophia Hill turned up without warning at the New York consulate to request Archibald’s assistance. She had come to complain about her trial and banishment from New Orleans, but Consul Archibald was less interested in the dangers she had overcome to reach New York than in the threat to her safety now that she had arrived. He purchased a ticket for her on the next steamship to England and made sure that she was on it.

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  Lord Lyons had not left his bedroom for more than a month, during which time Seward had continually assumed that in one more week or so the minister would reappear, looking tired, perhaps, but otherwise well. He was shocked when Lyons informed him on December 4 that he was leaving for England in two days’ time. “I agree with you that it is best that you go away for a time,” Seward answered Lyons’s note by return messenger. “And yet I feel that my cares and difficulties will be seriously increased by your withdrawal.”10

  Lord Russell had hoped to keep Lyons in Washington for the duration of the war, and he was still counting on him making a full recovery after a month or two in England. He made it clear to Ly
ons that this was a respite rather than a transfer from his post. But the minister cared only that he was going home; he wrote to his sister, telling her to prepare an extra place for Christmas dinner.11 The doctors had diagnosed his headaches as neuralgia, and he had been warned that the pain could become worse before it went away. Fortunately, his worries about the transatlantic crossing were soothed by George Sheffield, the last of the old guard at the legation, who offered to escort the invalid home. The suddenness of the decision—there were no farewell banquets and no time to engrave a watch or some such memento—imparted a sense of crisis to the news. On December 5, the morning after he received Lyons’s note, Seward wrote to Charles Francis Adams urging him to impress on Lord Russell “how deeply this incident is regretted by this government, and how desirous we are for Lord Lyons’s recovery and return to our country.”12

  A week later, on December 12, Lyons was helped up the gangplank of the China in New York by Sheffield. Within only a few hours of the minister’s departure, Seward’s fears about his burdens increasing came true. The extradition trial in Montreal of the St. Albans raiders ended suddenly after the magistrate in charge of the case, Judge Charles Coursol, ordered their discharge on grounds so technical that the explanation introduced a new and arcane area of debate for the Canadian judiciary. The pro-Southern audience in the courtroom swarmed the prisoners, cheering and shouting as they were led down the steps. By the time the news reached Lord Monck in Quebec City, the raiders had fled the area. General Dix had no qualms about sending his troops into Canada to find them. “All military commanders on the frontier” were ordered to chase and, if necessary, shoot the Confederate guerrillas “wherever they may take refuge.” But even before Dix issued his proclamation, Monck had ordered new arrest warrants. “The police are making every effort to prevent their escape,” he informed the legation.13