Double Death

by Gavin Mortimer

  The man appointed to replace Moore couldn’t have been more different. Frederick Cridland—he preferred Fred—was thirty-six years old and altogether more robust than his predecessor. Cridland liked America from the moment he arrived in 1845 to start work as a clerk in the consulate at Norfolk, Virginia. The food, the landscape, the weather, the women, everything appealed to him.

  Cridland was already well acquainted with Richmond, having acted as an unpaid vice-consul in the city during the 1850s, but that now seemed a lifetime ago. He had spent 1860 working as the secretary to the consul general in Venice, Italy, while gleaning what information he could from the European newspapers about the calamitous events in America. But nothing could have prepared Cridland for the shambolic state of affairs he found in Richmond in May 1861.

  When Sarah Jones arrived at the consulate in the first week of July “Mr. Cridland begged me to be seated and requested my patience while he dispatched the business of those already waiting … there were British subjects, and subjects of all nations in all sorts of emergencies, all seeking the aid of the consul.” Frightened men and women shouted over one another in their desperation to attract Cridland’s attention. “I have waited so long for an opportunity of getting across [into the North], that I have resolved to foot it,” yelled one British subject. “I shall try and fight my way through,” said another, “but what can I do with my luggage?” “I was arrested as a spy as I came through Washington,” cried a third. “My trunks were seized and searched for contraband articles, and were retained after I was released. How can I obtain them?” “When shall we receive our English letters?” “When can we send our English despatches?” “How am I to be redressed for the loss of my property?” Cridland was pounded by questions from every side.

  When it was Jones’s turn she was informed by a ruffled but still courteous Cridland that unless her journey was necessary, he would strongly advise her not to attempt it as it was too perilous. Jones persisted, and Cridland promised to see what he could do. Day after day she returned to the consulate, on each occasion battling her way past a motley crowd of people all shouting at Cridland “expecting him to do some impossible thing.”

  His resourcefulness was being tested in other ways, too, as he explained to Jones during one of her many visits to his office. “Look at the paper I am obliged to use!” he exclaimed, dangling a miserable-looking sheet between thumb and finger. “Even a tailor would not send a message to his cobbler on such a piece at home. And as for envelopes and seals, why, I cannot even find a piece of colored paper in the city for my official stamp.”

  Jones got her pass eventually and took possession of it with a promise to Cridland that she’d never forget his kindness. For Pryce Lewis, however, trapped 230 miles northwest of Richmond, the name Cridland meant nothing; he was pinning his hopes on George Moore and the letter Sam Bridgeman had mailed on the evening of Sunday, June 30.

  *Wise ordered Brown’s execution, but was not his actual executioner.

  *The village of Big Bethel was the scene of the first major land battle in Virginia on June 10, 1861. Though the Confederates won a resounding victory, casualties were light on both sides with eighteen Union soldiers killed and only one rebel fatality.

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  “Grossly Insulting to Some of the Officers”

  EVEN AS HIS SOLDIERS dug themselves in on Kanawha Two Mile General Wise reported to his superiors that “the grass of the soil we are defending is full of the copperhead traitors; they invite the enemy, feed him and he arms and drills them.” Worse, Wise was convinced that “a spy is on every hill top, at every cabin, and from Charleston to Point Pleasant they swarm.”

  A consequence of Wise’s belief was that dozens of Virginians were arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of being in some way involved in the Federal cause. On Monday, July 1, as Lewis went for his morning constitutional through the streets of Charleston, he learned that the town’s small jail was full of Union men. Suddenly he saw the general approaching on horseback, flanked on either side by a coterie of Confederate officers. Lewis stepped to one side as Wise rode by without a second glance at the troublesome Englishman.

  For the next couple of days Lewis spent little time out and about; it was left to Bridgeman to frequent the town’s saloons and stand a soldier a drink or two as he mocked the Yankees. Lewis divided his time between his room, where he read or looked discreetly out of the window, and the landlord’s office. Mr. Wright rarely talked of war, much less the military might of the South, preferring to hear tales of England and the empire.

  The longer Lewis remained at liberty in Charleston, the more his confidence grew. And if he became too reclusive, might not that arouse curiosity? He decided to visit the barroom of the Wilson House Hotel and enjoy a game of billiards. A game was in progress when he walked in, so Lewis ordered a whiskey and stood at the bar. Two Confederate officers entered, and Lewis, in the process of paying for his drink, invited the pair to join him. They accepted and asked for whiskeys, then one of the men said he’d also take a cigar. No, please, said Lewis, allow me, and he took out his cigar case with the ivory British lion.

  The rebel officer saw the lion and smiled, saying England was the right protector to have because “she always protects her subjects.”

  The three fell into conversation, and Lewis soon made it plain “how natural it was for Englishmen of good birth to sympathize with the South and how likely it was that England’s guns would soon be heard if the North didn’t keep her hands off the South.” That was what the officers wanted to hear! More whiskey, they demanded from the bartender.

  They talked and laughed, united in whiskey kinship, and when the moment was right Lewis mentioned that he had seen service in the Crimea. My God! interjected one of the men, who had introduced himself a major and the son-in-law of Mr. Wright, the landlord of Lewis’s hotel, in that case “we should like you to come down to camp with us, and show you our troops. Of course, you have seen finer in the British army, but I think you will be surprised at the precision of our drill.”

  Lewis was grateful for the offer but explained he couldn’t accept. Why ever not? they asked. Lewis looked about him and then, lowering his voice, explained about his encounter with the ornery General Wise. He rather feared the general suspected he was a Union spy, and if he turned up at their camp the general might have him arrested. The officers looked at each other, then at Lewis, and burst out laughing. Lewis was confused. What was so funny?

  The soldiers grinned as they told Lewis that they were already aware of his background. Apparently Wise had summoned Colonel Patton to Charleston for “a consultation” about the mysterious visitor. Patton’s glowing endorsement of Lewis had reassured Wise that he was indeed just a harmless Englishman with a strange choice in vacation destinations. But anyway, one of the men added, take no notice of Wise, “he’s a fussy old fellow,” and what’s more he’d left Charleston for a few days to oversee the construction of defensive fortifications at Ripley, forty miles northwest. Cheered by the news, Lewis ordered another round of drinks, and they parted with a promise that the following afternoon he would visit the camp.

  The officers arrived at the hotel at four o’clock the next day, and Lewis was waiting with a bottle of champagne and three cigars. The soldiers were young and inexperienced, “more impressed by the exalted position I had held in the British army than by anything else.” He fed them further stories of the Crimea as they attacked the champagne, and later they “started off to camp in a merry mood, as if going to a picnic.”

  The camp was about two miles away, and in the carriage they discussed such topics as drills and dress parades. As well as the anecdotes gleaned from the history books, Lewis had a collection of polished military terms, an amusing nickname here, a peculiar expression there, that every now and again he dropped into the conversation. He was “always careful to avoid details [but] danger, I discovered, made my faculties wonderfully accurate.”

  Once they arrived a
t the camp Lewis was treated to a drill and then a dress parade. Most of the enlisted men wore their own clothes, the overalls of farmers and laborers, but despite the lack of uniform, there was a sharpness to their bearing that impressed the Englishman. Later he had drinks with a group of officers, and a vigorous debate ensued about how an army should feed its men. Lewis left the camp with a detailed knowledge of the rebels’ rationing system. Back in the hotel he and Bridgeman “compared notes and planned modes of escapes.”

  Lewis had learned that the mail service between Charleston and Richmond “was so irregular that it might take from ten to fourteen days before an answer to my letter could reach me.” Bridgeman had more encouraging news: he had discovered a possible way out. About ten miles east of Charleston on the road to Richmond was the village of Browntown (present-day Marmet). It lay on the south side of the Kanawha River at the mouth of Lens Creek, and Bridgeman had been told that there was a track that led up the creek from Browntown to Boone County, on to Logan County and then across the state line into the safety of Kentucky’s Pike County. The trail was rough and steep, but there were few rebels in the vicinity. They decided to remain in Charleston for another week or so; then if they had heard nothing from Consul Moore in Richmond, they’d try and escape.

  There was an alternative to fleeing Charleston by road, however, which came to Lewis as he strolled by the green and glassy water of the Kanawha River. The opportunity to examine the feasibility of escaping by boat arose through another of Lewis’s newfound friends. He had made the acquaintance of a veterinary surgeon in the parlor of the Kanawha House Hotel, and the man suggested they hire a boat and have an outing on the river. Apparently there was much wildlife to be seen.

  The Kanawha River, or Great Kanawha River (the Little Kanawha River is farther north), originates thirty-five miles southeast of Charleston, at Gauley Bridge. A confluence of the Gauley River and the New River, which rises in the mountains of North Carolina, the Kanawha meanders ninety-seven miles from Gauley Bridge until it meets the Ohio River at Point Pleasant. A steamboat first tried to navigate the river in 1819 but came to grief at the Red House Shoals, approximately thirty miles west of Charleston. That prompted the Virginia legislature to approve a bill for “cutting chutes through the river’s shoals, building wing dams and removing snags,” and so began the era of the Kanawha steamboat service, as tourists and traders proceeded serenely down the river agog at the beauty of the scenery.

  When war broke out the rebels acted swiftly to guard against a Union attack. Allan Pinkerton had reported to General McClellan in early summer that “the rebels have sunk two boats laden with stone … near the Red House shoals, twenty or thirty miles from Charleston, and they are now erecting a battery of two six pounders concealed by bushes.” Colonel Patton established Camp Tompkins farther east along the river, and smaller outposts were scattered the length of the Kanawha.

  Lewis had been briefed by Pinkerton about the defenses at the Red House Shoals, but he hoped it might be possible to steal a small, flat-bottomed boat and row the fifty or so miles west to Point Pleasant. He and his veterinary friend set off on a beautiful summer’s day, the latter at the oars. They were soon challenged by a sentry on the bank. The soldier recognized the vet and with a cheery wave let him pass, but a little farther on they encountered a second guard, who ordered them to turn around.

  Lewis discarded the idea of a waterborne escape as he returned to the hotel. It would be impossible, even at night, to avoid detection. At the reception desk Lewis asked a bellboy to summon Sam Bridgeman, but he was informed the servant had gone out for a drink. There was still no sign of him after supper, nor while Lewis sat in the parlor with a port and a newspaper. Finally he retired to bed, not unduly concerned at his companion’s absence.

  The next morning Lewis was intercepted on his way to breakfast by a flustered landlord, who ushered the Englishman into his office and described in graphic detail the return the previous evening of Sam Bridgeman. He’d crashed through the front door reeling drunk and was then “grossly insulting to some of the officers here [and] talking recklessly about the war.”

  Lewis blanched. Even if the information confirmed his suspicion that Mr. Wright was a Union man, it also bore out his concern that Bridgeman’s nerves were fraying. He thanked the landlord for the warning, assured him that it wouldn’t happen again, and set off to give Bridgeman a piece of his mind. He found him in his room, still half drunk and utterly disheveled. Lewis damned him as a fool and reminded him their lives were at stake. They were staying in the same hotel as General Wise, who had just returned from Ripley, and if Bridgeman didn’t get himself in order he would surely be hanged. Bridgeman mumbled an apology and promised it wouldn’t happen again, but three days later it did.

  This time a furious Lewis forbade Bridgeman from entering any saloon and billiard room, and to reinforce his order he discontinued his accomplice’s daily allowance. A contrite Bridgeman blamed it on their situation, pleading with Lewis to take to the woods. No, replied Lewis, they must remain for another few days. Privately, however, Lewis was becoming ever more disturbed. It was now Wednesday, July 10, and they had been in Charleston for a week and a half. In that time they had collected important information on the rebel forces, but there was still no word from the British consulate in Richmond and Lewis began to wonder if perhaps Consul Moore was making inquiries about the mysterious English visitor. Lewis “passed a miserable day reviewing every plan of escape … [and] went to bed at night fully determined to take some action the next day—no matter how desperate. Further anxiety was insupportable.”

  Lewis lay awake until long after midnight, his head too full of thoughts for sleep. Outside his window Charleston dozed without a sound. But then a noise, a far-off sound, too faint, at first, to be distinguishable. Lewis listened, then sat up with a start. It was a horse, and its rider was in a hurry. The clatter of hooves came nearer and nearer, right up to the hotel entrance. Lewis heard the horseman descend, heard him bound up the front steps, heard him banging on the hotel door and then he “heard some one ascending the stairs with clanking saber and coming toward my room. Then a rap.”

  The only sound now was Lewis’s heart, pounding, it seemed, with more force than any galloping horse. Suddenly he realized the rap wasn’t at his door but the one opposite: General Wise’s. He slid out of bed and listened at the keyhole. He heard Wise open the door to the horseman but couldn’t catch the words being spoken. All he made out was the final sentence, “Call Colonel Tompkins.” Lewis remained where he was for several minutes, a spectral vision in a white nightdress crouched by the door. He heard Wise emerge from his room and stride purposefully along the corridor and down the stairs. Now all the activity was beneath Lewis’s window as horsemen came and went.

  Eventually Lewis tiptoed back to bed and fell into a broken sleep. He rose at five o’clock and stole downstairs, the soft groaning of the floorboards underfoot emphasizing the “unusual quiet [that] seemed to pervade the place.” Mr. Wright emerged from his office and asked Lewis if he’d heard the news. No, he hadn’t. Wright explained that Union forces were advancing south from Parkersburg and “Wise has gone to meet them.” Lewis pressed the landlord for more details, but Wright knew only that Wise had taken the bulk of his force, leaving a couple of hundred men to guard Charleston under the command of Colonel Tompkins.

  Lewis sat down stupefied, trying to work out what this meant for him and Bridgeman.

  Wright went to fetch a coffee for the Englishman, but before he left his office he turned to Lewis and with a smile as wide as the Ohio River declared, “The Yankees will give him hell!”

  General McClellan had arrived at Parkersburg on June 21 and, as was his way, dithered. Two days after his appearance on the Ohio River, while Wise was still bringing his men to Charleston, McClellan promised Washington an attack would soon be launched. But for the next few days the general, who encouraged comparisons between himself and Napoleon Bonaparte, sat on his hands. He cont
inued to augment his army, so that by the end of June, as Wise’s men threw up their earthworks at Kanawha Two Mile, nearly twenty thousand Union soldiers assembled in the north of Virginia: six companies were at Parkersburg, eleven companies on the railroad at the Cheat River bridge; there were regiments at Clarksburg, Weston and Grafton, and a force of fifty-one companies and one battery under Brigadier General Thomas Morris was at Philippi. In the meantime McClellan intended that a combined force of some three thousand men—composed of soldiers from Kentucky and Ohio—under the command of General Jacob Cox should advance up the Kanawha River as far as possible and hem in Wise at Charleston.

  On Friday, July 5, McClellan was asked by Washington when he was going to attack. Soon, he said, pledging to “repeat the movement of Cerro Gordo” (a comprehensive victory for American troops in 1847 during the war with Mexico). The following day a brigade under Alexander McCook overran a Confederate picket between Buckhannon and Rich Mountain, nearly one hundred miles northeast of Charleston, and on Tuesday, July 9, and Wednesday, the tenth, soldiers from McClellan’s army probed the enemy’s strength on the lower slopes of Rich Mountain and brought back favorable reports.

  Finally, late on the day of July 10, McClellan had the confidence to order the invasion to begin. As General William Rosecrans marched his men toward Rich Mountain to the north of Charleston early on the eleventh, Cox was ordered into action.

  Since the initial order from McClellan, Cox’s instructions had changed. He was no longer to “remain on the defensive” in Kanawha County containing General Wise, but instead his five regiments were ordered to push deep into western Virginia in a three-pronged attack. The sharpest prong comprised the Eleventh, Twelfth and Twenty-first Ohio, which were instructed to thrust east from Point Pleasant toward Charleston. To the north and south of this force was the First and Second Kentucky regiments. The First, under the command of Colonel James Guthrie, was tasked with taking Ripley, forty miles northwest of Charleston; the Second was to follow the route taken by Lewis and Bridgeman from Guyandotte toward Charleston, clearing pockets of resistance they encountered on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. McClellan had told Cox to “punish” the Confederate forces and “drive Wise out and catch him if you can. If you do catch him, send him to Columbus penitentiary.”