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

by Amanda Foreman

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  36.1 One letter came from police constable Joseph Taylor, late of Company F, 5th Louisiana, who wrote to Lord Wharncliffe on January 5: “As one who has opposed the Northern Armies from Cedar Mountain fight which took place in August 1862 up to the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, and taken prisoner the day after that great Battle had terminated, I think it my duty to make this humble protest against the assertion of Mr. Seward that the prisoners taken by the Federals are so well treated that they are suffering no privations.” Another English recipient of Lord Lyons’s aid, Captain Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment, wrote: “Looking in today’s Standard, I wish so far as lies in my power to corroborate [Taylor’s] statement in regard to the treatment of Confederate prisoners by the Federals. I have had personal experience of their kindness (!) to their fellow being whilst in their hands and prisoner.”

  36.2 In late December, Bulloch triumphantly informed Mallory that he was on the verge of a significant breakthrough. He had always assumed that the French-made cruisers were lost to them. After the emperor had ordered their sale, one had been bought by the Prussians, the other by the Danes, to be deployed at sea against each other, but the contest never took place, because the Danes were defeated before they received the ship and it became clear to Lucien Arman, the ship’s builder, that the Danes had no use for his expensive vessel when it finally arrived in Copenhagen. Rather than insisting on the sale, Arman devised an outrageous plan to sabotage the ship during her trials, thereby providing the unsuspecting Danes with a legal excuse to break the contract. He already knew, of course, of a buyer who would pay twice the amount he had agreed with the Danes for such a powerful ship. Bulloch agreed to pay an exorbitant 455,000 francs for the return of the vessel.

  36.3 A short time later, the Duke of Somerset received a parcel containing the plans of the U.S. Navy’s latest ships and their torpedoes. They had been secretly obtained by the master shipbuilder Donald McKay, who resided in New York but whose heart and family remained in Nova Scotia.

  36.4 Sala had reported on the war for the Daily Telegraph and was, like Lawley, completely pro-Southern. In the introduction he provided for Belle’s memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, he claimed that she possessed scandalous information about members of Lincoln’s administration. Whether or not this was really the case, he helped her to draft a threatening letter to Lincoln on January 24 in which she offered to suppress her memoir if Hardinge was released by the beginning of March. “I think it well for you and me to come to some definite understanding,” Belle had written boldly.38

  36.5 The former Confederate secretary of state, Robert M. T. Hunter, stated the conundrum in stark terms on March 7, 1865, during the Confederate Senate debate on whether to use slave soldiers. “To arm the negroes is to give them freedom,” he told the chamber. “If we are right in passing this measure, then we were wrong in denying to the old Government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery.” He, for one, was not prepared to be a hypocrite. But the majority of the Senate chose survival over principle. They all knew that General Lee was desperate to have the negro recruits for his army. A week later, on March 13, the Confederate House of Representatives followed suit after a raucous and bitter debate.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Fire, Fire

  Tom Conolly, MP, crosses the bar—Welly!—The last train out—Richmond burns—Grant breaks Lee’s line

  Henry Feilden reluctantly accompanied General Hardee as the Confederate army abandoned Charleston on February 17, 1865. “I cannot bear to think of leaving this dear old city which has been defended so long and gloriously,” he wrote sadly to Julia. “I have given our house to an English family who will endeavour to save it for me.” But he warned her, “We are going to see hard times.”1 His last view of the city before its fall was of golden flames flickering against the night sky as great fires consumed the wharves: the retreating Confederates had deliberately torched the remaining cotton and set fire to ships in the harbor. He was unaware that this “magnificent sight” had led to a horrific tragedy: a large crowd of civilians, mostly women and children, had been foraging in a warehouse that contained a lethal combination of food and gunpowder when it exploded, killing 150 and leaving many more to die in agony.2

  Federal troops entered Charleston on February 18 and almost immediately went on the rampage. The contents of the houses, including pianos and four-poster beds, were either plundered or destroyed, depending on the humor and taste of the invaders. Consul Henry Pinckney Walker reappeared and invited any British subjects in the city to register at the consulate, although he did not offer the building as a refuge.3 Some women were not only afraid to leave their houses, but were unable to do so, since looters had stolen their dresses.

  It was ten days before Feilden had another opportunity to write. During that time he had not changed his clothes or slept in a real bed. “I do not know how much more we have to endure,” he wrote on the twenty-eighth, “but as far as I am concerned I am a stronger Southern Man at this moment than ever I was before, and I shall not give up till the very last moment.”4 His devotion was not a universal feeling among the retreating Confederates. General Hardee had come down with typhus shortly before the order to evacuate and was barely able to walk, let alone inspire courage or fortitude among his demoralized troops. Months of defensive duties had made the soldiers unfit for forced marches, and the struggle through frozen swamps in unceasing downpours caused many to faint with exhaustion. Whole companies disappeared in the darkness.5 The officers’ ability to prevent desertion during daylight was hardly more successful, and the small army was losing almost two hundred men a day. Hardee’s destination was a small town north of Wilmington called Fayetteville, in North Carolina, an important supply base for the Confederates. General Johnston—whom Lee had recently reinstated—had ordered all available troops to meet there to make a last stand against Sherman’s advancing forces.

  Confederate regiments were already gathering at Fayetteville when Thomas Conolly, an Anglo-Irish MP from County Kildare, Ireland, arrived on March 2. Conolly had invested in the blockade runner Emily II and sailed to Bermuda with her, intending to run the blockade at Wilmington. A less eccentric character might have chosen to return home after the fall of Fort Fisher, but Conolly saw no reason to let a Northern victory get in the way of his visiting “Dixie.” Leaving the Emily II at Nassau, he persuaded Captain Maffitt, who was taking his ship, the Owl, to Havana, to make a slight detour by way of the North Carolina coast and drop him off somewhere near Cape Fear. On February 26, Conolly and two friends climbed into a skiff and rowed through the pouring rain over the sandbar and into the neck of the Shallotte River, some thirty-seven miles north of Wilmington. Soaked to the skin and hungry, they called at several houses until they found someone willing to give them shelter for the night.6

  It was only after he landed that Conolly learned of General Sherman’s arrival in South Carolina. The news made him drop his plans to tour Charleston in favor of reaching Richmond as quickly as possible. He arrived at Fayetteville on March 2 to find it mobbed with wagons and soldiers. “The bar-room of the large Hotel is crowded with men in uniform, and a fine young fellow, very handsome, is hobbling about on a new wooden leg,” Conolly jotted in his diary. The three travelers passed two days in the town while Conolly tried to negotiate the purchase of a horse. “So we make the best of it,” he wrote, “and order a banjo band and whiskey to our room and ask all the wounded officers about and have a capital evening’s amusement up to 1 o’clock dancing and singing.”7 Two days later, they ran into Frank Vizetelly, who obligingly offered to take them to Richmond.

  The small party arrived at the capital on March 8. Conolly’s penchant for bright red breeches looked incongruous amid the browns, grays, and deep mourning. “The aspect of Richmond at this time is wretched,” he wrote. “Shops with nothing in them except enough to show how miserably they are run out. Stores with open doors and empty bales and broken up packing
cases and dirty straw.” Government clerks were quietly packing their archives in anticipation of having to leave the city. Vizetelly deposited Conolly at the Ballard Hotel and went in search of Francis Lawley. The Ballard was “now miserably furnished, scarcely anything in the bedrooms except the beds and a few broken chairs,” Conolly recorded. The carpets had been torn up and sent to the army for coats. “Almost all the crockery in the Hotel is cracked and broken, and we had to buy 3 tumblers for our room at 25 dollars each.” He was annoyed to discover that a bottle of brandy set him back $60.8

  The first resident to receive a visit from Conolly was the wife of James Mason, the Confederate commissioner in London. “Plucky dear old Lady,” he wrote. She was nursing her son, James M. Mason, Jr., who was one of the few survivors of a recent skirmish against General Sheridan.9 The day had been proclaimed by Davis as one of fasting and prayer, and Conolly confined himself to muffins for tea, followed by oysters and cocktails. During the next few days he attached himself to various generals, his open and liberal purse helping to soften any objections to his presence. His persistence paid off, and on March 13, he received an invitation to supper at the Confederate White House at 9:00 P.M.

  Conolly was impressed by President Davis’s calm demeanor. “I never saw quiet determination more strikingly manifest in any person than in Jeff Davis,” he wrote. “His conversation is easy, copious in illustration from foreign countries, and rich and animated!” Varina Davis, on the other hand, was less adept at hiding her true thoughts; though obtuse at times, Conolly knew when he was being put down. “Mrs. Davis is a very different character,” he decided, “a great talker and very bitter. She is calculated to damage any cause however good.”10

  Had Conolly appeared a day later, it is unlikely that the Davises would have invited him to dinner. Lord Russell’s protest to the Confederate commissioners was delivered to Richmond on March 14, the morning after. “Britain gives us a kick while the Federal generals are pounding us,” the War Department clerk John Jones wrote bitterly.11 But by then, Conolly had already left the capital and was being entertained by General Lee at Petersburg. Conolly’s reaction to meeting Lee was similar to Colonel Wolseley’s in 1863. Even in the hour of his greatest trial, Lee still retained an aura of magnificence. “The Hope of His Country is also the handsomest man in all that constitutes the real dignity of man that I ever saw,” wrote Conolly. The general drew the line at allowing Conolly to stay the night, and General Pryor’s wife was prevailed upon to take him in. However, she was quickly won over by Conolly’s charm: “The MP proved a most agreeable guest,” she wrote, “a fine-looking Irish gentleman with an irresistibly humorous, cheery round of talk.”12 During Conolly’s final dinner at Petersburg, Lee opened a bottle of “very old Madeira.” “Excellent! Just 2 glasses,” wrote Conolly mournfully, not realizing that he had consumed all the vegetables and the only turkey in the mess. After saying goodbye to Lee, who gave him his photograph and a Confederate flag, Conolly braved a storm to attend a party at Petersburg with “some nice young fellows” and a bevy of pretty ladies.

  The Confederate Congress was holding what would turn out to be its last session when Conolly returned to Richmond on March 18. Four days earlier, the politicians had agreed to allow owners to volunteer their slaves as soldiers, having voted unanimously “to prosecute the war with the United States until … the independence of the Confederate States shall have been established.” But today the members adjourned with no thought of when they would meet again.13 The city was tense and quiet as the residents waited to learn whether General Johnston would stop Sherman’s advance now that Fayetteville had fallen to the Federals. “If Sherman cuts the communication with North Carolina,” wrote John Jones, “no one doubts that this city must be abandoned by Lee’s army.”14

  “We are falling back slowly before Sherman,” Feilden had scribbled in a penciled note to Julia on March 13. “I hope that we may have a victory over this man Sherman. I should like to pursue him from here to South Carolina.”15 None of the Confederate generals, including Hardee, had expected Sherman to make it through the Carolina swamps so quickly, if at all. The right wing of Sherman’s army was within marching distance of Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital. In desperation, Hardee deployed his outnumbered and weakened forces in a surprise attack against Sherman’s left flank on March 16.

  The ambush slowed Sherman just enough for Johnston to organize his army into battle formation at Bentonville, North Carolina. There, for three days, beginning at dawn on March 19, 1865, a force of twenty thousand Confederates struggled against an army three times its size. The disparity between the two armies was exacerbated by the Confederates’ muddled organization, but Johnston suddenly showed his critics that he could fight—and fight hard—when pressed. By March 21 Johnston’s army had suffered more than twenty-five hundred casualties, to the Federals’ fifteen hundred. Feilden was talking to General Hardee when a stray shot struck the tree beside them. The next bullet passed through Feilden’s sleeve “near enough to jar my funny bone” and hit his horse, Billy, in the leg. The wound was just bad enough to prevent him from riding the horse in the next cavalry charge. Hardee’s sixteen-year-old son, Willie, begged to take part, and in the heat of the moment, Hardee nodded his assent and kissed the boy farewell. A short while later, a Texas Ranger brought Willie back, shot through the chest. “He was a mere schoolboy,” wrote Feilden in anguish. “He was as gallant a little fellow as ever fired a musket.” The tragedy made him long to be with Julia: “Oh! My precious one, if we are only spared to meet again, and live together, what happiness it will be,” he wrote. “I don’t care how poor we may be. It will be the greatest blessing this earth can afford us.”16

  After the Battle of Bentonville, Sherman continued his march toward Richmond while the Confederates retreated to Raleigh, North Carolina—Johnston apparently too stunned to consider pursuit. He telegraphed Lee: “Sherman’s course cannot be hindered by the small force I have. I can do no more than annoy him.” Lee realized that in a few days he would be facing the combined forces of Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman, and he began planning the Army of Northern Virginia’s evacuation from Petersburg. He knew that Richmond would then fall to the Federals, but if his army remained intact, the South would still have its fighting capability. On March 25, he launched a surprise attack against the Union Fort Steadman, on the east side of Petersburg, hoping to distract Grant long enough to enable the rest of the Confederate army to retreat southward, toward North Carolina. The assault was an outright disaster, costing Lee four thousand casualties against the Federals’ fifteen hundred, without any weakening of Grant’s line.

  Thomas Conolly was in Richmond during the attack, but the news of its failure made no difference to his confidence in the ultimate outcome of the war: “Richmond thy sun is not setting, rather the Day is just about to break over your hero-crested virgin hills!” he wrote in his diary, adding for good measure: “Always darkest before the dawn! What a dawn, Independence!” Late on the twenty-fifth he received a note inviting him to visit Mrs. Mason’s house. “ ‘Welly’ is to be there!” wrote Conolly in surprise, learning for the first time that his friend Lieutenant Llewellyn Traherne Bassett Saunderson, of the British Army’s 11th Hussars, had arrived in the South at the same time as he had, hoping to volunteer on General Lee’s staff.17

  The following day, March 26, Conolly went to church, where the vicar’s sermon put him to sleep; “I hate argument, I like faith much better!” Conolly was oblivious to the fact that the city was emptying around him. Jefferson Davis had overridden his wife’s protests and instructed her to take the family to Charlotte, North Carolina, three hundred miles to the southwest, and to go farther if necessary. Their furniture was sent to auction, and Varina distributed various mementos to friends and servants. Davis also asked his private secretary to accompany the family to safety. He gave Varina all his gold save for one five-dollar piece and a small Colt pistol, which she was to use in the “last extremity.”

&
nbsp; CSS Georgia’s former lieutenant James Morgan met the Davis family at the station. In his wildest dreams he had never imagined himself as personal guard to a mother and her small children. When summoned by the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, to the Navy Department, he thought it was for some infraction: “I at once began to think of all my sins of commission and omission. To my surprise, he told me that I was to accompany Mrs. Jefferson Davis south, and added, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, that the daughters of the Secretary of the Treasury [George Trenholm] were to be of the party.” (Morgan had become engaged to Trenholm’s younger daughter, Helen, whom he met in Charleston the night of his introduction to Matthew Fontaine Maury.)

  As Morgan observed the parting between Jefferson and Varina, he realized that the Davises were behaving as though it was their final moment together as a family. The two eldest children clung to their father, crying to stay with him. Davis kissed them all again, stroked the baby that lay asleep on a bench, embraced his wife, wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls a safe journey, and walked heavily down the carriage steps. What should have been a six-hour train journey took more than four days. When the creaking train pulled into Charlotte, a furious mob surrounded the carriage:

  I closed the open windows of the car so that the ladies could not hear what was being said [recalled Morgan]. We two men were helpless to protect them from the epithets of a crowd of some seventy-five or a hundred blackguards, but we stationed ourselves at the only door which was not locked, determined that they should not enter the car. Colonel Harrison was unarmed, and I had only my sword, and a regulation revolver in the holster hanging from my belt. Several of the most daring of the brutes climbed up the steps, but when Colonel Harrison firmly told them that he would not permit them to enter that car the cowards slunk away. When the disturbance had quieted down Mrs. Davis, her sister, and her children left the train.