William Howard Russell in New Orleans—Sam and Mary Sophia Hill volunteer—Elizabeth Blackwell inspires the U.S. Sanitary Commission—“On to Richmond”—The Battle of Bull Run—Not a fight but a stampede
“There is on the part of the South an enormously exaggerated idea of its own strength,” William Howard Russell wrote to Lord Lyons from New Orleans on May 21, 1861.1 The city was celebrating succession with parades and fireworks as though the war was already won. All the public buildings and many private houses were flying the new Confederate flag.5.1 There were no doubts here about the power of cotton. It was “not alone king but czar,” remarked the Times journalist after he was told for the dozenth time that the shipping season just past had been the most profitable in the city’s history.2
Russell was not enamored with the Deep South. The unceasing battle against mosquitoes, the crude sanitation, and the greasy food that typified Southern cuisine made him consume more alcohol than his liver could tolerate. “Too much talk, smoke & brandy & water” was becoming a frequent complaint in his diary.3 The South’s erratic postal service was also a source of torment. It had taken a month for a plaintive letter from his wife, Mary, to reach him. He knew she would assume he had not bothered to reply. “God comfort her,” he wrote sadly in his diary on May 25, “and make me worthy of her.”4
William Mure, the British consul in New Orleans, rescued Russell from many hours of lonely reflection by inviting him to stay at his house. The extensive commercial ties between New Orleans and Liverpool were reflected in the social prominence of the British consulate; Mure’s generosity gave Russell the best possible introduction to the South’s biggest and wealthiest city. New Orleans was the fourth-largest port in the world and a commercial juggernaut compared to Richmond, Virginia, which had been chosen as the Confederacy’s new capital. Known as the Crescent City because of the way it curved around a deep bend of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was the epicenter of the slave trade and the gateway not only for the majority of the South’s cotton crop, but also for its tobacco and sugar. As business opportunities came and went, so, too, did many of New Orleans’s foreign immigrants. The 1860 census had revealed that little more than half the population of 168,000 had been born in the South.5 Russell grasped at once how an outsider like Judah Benjamin could find opportunities here that were denied him elsewhere in the Confederacy.6
New Orleans had belonged first to Spain and then France until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 made it part of the United States. The original French and Spanish settlers called themselves Creoles, and their descendants still lived in the sixty-six blocks downtown known as the Vieux Carré, or the French Quarter. Here they built their houses in the Caribbean style with inner courtyards, pastel façades, and ornate balconies that allowed the occupants to see and be seen from the street. The English-speaking newcomers had congregated uptown, on the other side of the canal that ran through the city, in the so-called Garden District. They pointedly built their houses in the Greek Revival style, using red brick instead of plaster, and planted lush gardens that screened the buildings from the street.
New Orleans’s French culture was reflected in the number of volunteer regiments for the Confederate army with names such as Chasseur, Lafayette, and Beauregard in the title. Russell noticed that the foreign immigrants tended to cluster together; hence there was the Irish Brigade, the Garibaldi Legion, and the European Brigade.5.2 Russell was especially taken with the Dickens-inspired “Pickwick Rifles,” though the name itself suggested Mure had not been entirely successful in persuading Britons to adhere to the Foreign Enlistment Act.7
It was not the willing recruits that concerned Mure, however, but rather those who were forced to volunteer whether they wanted to or not.8 King Cotton ruled with a brutal hand in New Orleans. British subjects were being marched to recruiting posts by self-appointed vigilantes, “not in twos or threes, but in tens and twenties,” the consul told Russell. One woman had complained to him that her husband was held hostage and beaten for three days until he agreed to enlist; his face was so badly disfigured when they brought him home that she failed to recognize him. Dissent was treated in the same harsh manner. “Every stranger is watched, every word is noted,” Russell wrote in one of his dispatches to The Times. People who stated “their belief that the Northerners will be successful are sent to prison for six months.”9
Throughout the Confederacy intense pressure was being exerted on the 233,000 foreign residents to prove their loyalty to the South. For William Watson, a Scotsman working as a mechanic in Baton Rouge, failure to follow his friends into the Pelican Rifles of the 3rd Louisiana Infantry would have been unthinkable. “I would never take up arms to maintain or enforce slavery,” he wrote in his memoirs. But Watson’s friends told him he would be fighting for independence, a cause so worthy that he could not remain aloof “without injury” to his honor.10 A Welsh immigrant in Texas joined for similar reasons: “Every man and child that can carry a gun is a soldier in the South,” he explained to his family.11
In Arkansas, another Welsh immigrant, twenty-year-old Henry Morton Stanley (who would later achieve fame by “finding” Dr. Livingstone in Africa), was shamed into enlisting in the Dixie Grays of the 6th Arkansas Infantry by a neighbor who sent him the Southern equivalent of a white feather. He received a parcel “which I half-suspected, as the address was written in a feminine hand, to be a token of some lady’s regard,” he wrote. “But, on opening it, I discovered it to be a chemise and petticoat, such as a Negro lady’s-maid might wear. I hastily hid it from view, and retired to the back room, that my burning cheeks might not betray me.”12
Even without the threat of ostracism or harassment, there were other, more prosaic forces bearing down on the British community. The blockade was not only hurting the city financially, it was also an impediment to those who wished to leave the South. Many unemployed Britons were trapped in New Orleans; “nothing remains for them but to enlist,” admitted Russell.13 Two Anglo-Irish siblings from England, Mary Sophia Hill and her twin brother, Sam, were among the early victims of the blockade. The merchant families who sent their daughters to Mary’s seminary in the Garden District were suddenly unable to pay the fees. Six weeks after the blockade began there was not a single pupil left in the school.
Mary and Sam were an eccentric pair. She was tight-lipped, fussy, and prone to shrillness; he was quiet, absent-minded, and passive. Despite having trained as a civil engineer under Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sam had never been able to withstand the rigors of an occupation, and over the years his dependence on her had become absolute. The siblings had arrived in New Orleans in 1850 so Sam could take up yet another new position. His inevitable failure gave Mary the idea that they should start a school together. She would teach English, French, and music; Sam, if he were able, could teach mathematics.
“In my eyes,” wrote Mary, “the only blot I ever saw in the sunny South was slavery; but as a stranger, an alien, I had no right to meddle.”14 But her sympathy for the South did not extend to Sam volunteering: “I was, and still am, and ever will be, a British subject,” she wrote in her diary.15 Nevertheless, her brother had joined the Irish Brigade after a furious argument over the failure of the seminary. Mary woke up one morning in early June to discover he had packed his bags and disappeared. She had seen the placards calling for Irishmen to join the 6th Louisiana Volunteers, as the Irish Brigade was officially designated, but never once did she think that her introverted and clumsy brother might heed the call. Nor dared she imagine how the Irish Catholic volunteers would treat a Protestant whose loyalty was not to Ireland but to the Crown:
I tried all I could to get him free [Mary recalled]; went to Mr. Muir [sic], who was then Consul, to see what he could do, but with no good result. It nearly broke my heart to see my only brother and only near male relative leave me and leave the flag we were born under for a stranger, and perhaps get killed for his folly; so I concluded I would follow him to Virginia to care for him where I knew he would sadly want a woman’s care, and that I would, whenever needed, care for the wounded, the sick and the distressed. Miss Nightingale God bless her taught us, women of the British flag, this lesson of humanity.16
Sam’s regiment was in need of a nurse, and Colonel Isaac Seymour was willing to overlook the fact that Mary was unmarried, since he doubted that the forty-two-year-old spinster would interest the men. “So,” she recorded, “having no particular ties; being as the law has it, a femme sole, I made up my mind to this humane calling.” Two weeks later Mary jotted in her diary: “My brother quite miserable at the step he has taken. I am so glad I made up my mind to look after him.”17
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Mary Sophia Hill would have found it much more difficult to become a nurse in the North. There was no shortage of women wanting to help. British-born Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United States, was deluged with nursing applicants after the Federal surrender of Fort Sumter.5.3 She was cross that the same society ladies who had previously claimed to be scandalized by the infirmary were now begging to be admitted for training.18 But she soon realized there would never be a better opportunity to attract support for her medical college. With the aid of Henry Bellows, the charismatic pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church, she invited “the women of New York” to attend a mass meeting at the Cooper Institute. They expected large numbers, but not the four thousand who crammed into the hall.
The result of this historic event was the creation of the Women’s Central Association of Relief. Elizabeth envisioned it as a kind of civilian central command that would direct the various relief efforts on the home front, from the training of nurses to the distribution of woolen socks. The WCAR would work side by side with the army, ensuring that the needs of soldiers were met as quickly as possible. The Reverend Henry Bellows and a delegation of male doctors went to Washington to seek government approval for the plan. But during the thirteen-hour train journey they conceived a different idea: a national organization modeled on the British Sanitary Commission, which had been formed in response to Florence Nightingale’s exposure of army hospital conditions during the Crimean War. Bellows suggested they call it the United States Sanitary Aid Commission.19
The Army Medical Bureau resented any interference or infringement on its domain and tried to block the commission from receiving official sanction. President Lincoln shared the bureau’s doubts over the wisdom of allowing philanthropists and women to interfere with the work of professionals.20 Yet on June 18 he reluctantly signed the United States Sanitary Commission into existence, remarking as he did so that it would probably be a “fifth wheel to the coach.” The commission was awarded an office in the treasury building along with a table and some chairs. Still fighting a rearguard action, the army medical chiefs succeeded in limiting its operations to the new volunteer regiments. The sixteen thousand regulars that made up the standing army would be kept safe from the civilians.
Elizabeth Blackwell’s name did not appear in any literature put out by the Sanitary Commission. Although she had been the initial force behind the volunteer movement, neither she nor the infirmary were invited to participate. “We shall do much good but you will probably not see our names,” Elizabeth wrote to her best friend, Barbara Bodichon, on June 6:
We would have accepted a place on the health commission which our association is endeavoring to establish in Washington and which the government will probably appoint—but the Doctors would not permit us to come forward. In the hospital committee, which you will see referred to in the report, they declined to allow OUR little hospital to be represented—and they refused to have anything to do with the nurse education plan if the “Miss Blackwells were going to engineer the matter.” Of course as it is essential to open these hospitals to nurses, we kept in the background, had there been any power to support us, we would have found our true place, but there was none.21
Elizabeth and her sister Emily accepted their exclusion gracefully. Elizabeth became chair of the WCAR’s nurse registration committee, and together the two sisters began to interview and select those who showed the most promise. Each candidate received a month’s training at the infirmary, followed by a further month’s practical experience at Bellevue or New York Hospital.
Dr. Blackwell had no doubt that her nurses would prove themselves in the field, as long as the well-meaning but catastrophically inept Dorothea Dix was prevented from ruining the enterprise. The fifty-nine-year-old veteran campaigner for the mentally ill had arrived at Washington in early May to offer herself as superintendent of army nurses. A lack of candidates had given her the position by default. Miss Dix was a “meddler general” without peer, complained Elizabeth. “For it really amounts to that, she being without system, or any practical knowledge of the business.”22 She soon confirmed Elizabeth’s fears: erratic, disorganized, and quarrelsome, she was a positive hindrance to the scheme. Most applicants were turned away on ludicrous grounds, such as being too pretty or too recently widowed, but Elizabeth’s trained nurses she dared not refuse.23
“If the Doctors would only do the part they have chosen and educate that material, we should have a capital band of nurses,” Elizabeth wrote to Barbara Bodichon in June.24 She also hoped they would accept the field hospital designs sent over by Florence Nightingale, but feared that the same chauvinism and anti-British prejudice that had led to her exclusion from the Sanitary Commission might also extend to anything originating with Miss Nightingale.25 There was nothing to be gained from being associated with England since the neutrality proclamation. “To be scolded now whenever I enter a friend’s house with ‘well what do you say to England’s behaviour … ’ is a great irritation to me,” complained Elizabeth. “I have been deeply chagrined by the tone our papers have been taking towards England.”26
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The Anglophobia encouraged by Seward was growing in strength. The New York Herald was the worst offender. Its Scottish editor, James Gordon Bennett, had no qualms about printing incendiary articles if they whetted public appetite for more. The Herald had toned down its antiwar rhetoric after a mob tried to burn down the paper’s headquarters, but attacking England remained a popular alternative. New York had transformed from the ambivalent, even apathetic, city described by William Howard Russell in The Times into a noisy carnival of war. The shops along Broadway had become recruiting offices; posters and handbills advertising new regiments covered the city.
“The outbreak of the Civil War has given me a great addition of new and extraordinary duties, in the incessant applications for protection, and advice, etc,” wrote the British consul in New York, Edward Archibald.28 He was rising to the challenge with valiant enthusiasm. A career diplomat for almost thirty years, Archibald was a devoted family man who spent his Sunday afternoons visiting sick and needy Britons. Since taking up his post in 1857, he had diligently collected statistics, written reports, resolved commercial disputes, found lost relatives, sent home destitute Britons, and performed all the myriad duties, both practical and pastoral, that were a consul’s lot in a busy city like New York. Until Archibald shocked his superiors by denouncing the rebellion in an official dispatch, the Foreign Office had considered him their most reliable consul in the United States.29
Forced volunteering was not solely a Southern phenomenon, and the greatest call on Archibald’s time was the plight of Britons who had been imprisoned or punished for their refusal to join a regiment.30 His task was made more difficult by those who had joined willingly but had changed their minds and were looking for an excuse to escape.31 Despite Archibald’s efforts to publicize the Foreign Enlistment Act, Britons were volunteering in droves.5.4 The slightest hint of a conflict between the North and Britain had also encouraged thousands of Irish immigrants to join the war effort.
The language employed by Irish recruiters was so explicit that Archibald warned the Foreign Office to prepare for a new threat. Posters urged their fellow Irishmen to train in America in order to fight the British oppressors back home. At least three regiments in New York were filled with Irish recruits, the majority of whom were avowed Fenians. Michael Corcoran, the colonel of the infamous 69th Infantry Regiment—the unit that had refused to parade in honor of the Prince of Wales—was also the commander of the Fenian movement’s military wing.32 Another well-known Irish revolutionary in the 69th was Thomas Meagher, whose stature among the New York Irish community was almost godlike since his escape from a penal colony in Tasmania, where he had been banished for sedition.33 (Meagher’s friend and fellow escapee, John Mitchell, had thrown his lot with the South.)
A large number of British immigrants volunteered out of idealism, but there were just as many, like twenty-five-year-old George Henry Herbert, who joined to stave off destitution after the company that had recruited him from England went bankrupt. He had been unemployed since Christmas and was down to his last pair of socks. They were holding up well—“There is only one hole in the heel of one of them,” he had written cheerfully to his mother—but he could no longer continue without work. Such was the clamor for new recruits that even a man as short and overweight as Herbert could join a popular regiment like the 9th New York Volunteers, better known as Hawkins’s Zouaves.5.5 Unlike the majority of the new volunteers, who enlisted for ninety days, Herbert signed up for two years and in return was awarded the rank of first sergeant. He was grateful for any sort of position but harbored secret hopes of becoming an officer: “I study as much as I can,” he wrote to his mother, “and do not despair of getting a commission sometime or other.”34 Herbert’s hope of promotion would depend on his popularity with the men, since the volunteer regiments were allowed to elect their own officers.
“There is a British Regiment gotten up here,” one English immigrant, Edward Best, told his aunt Sophie in Somerset. “It seems to be very popular and I trust will carry its flag through this affair with credit to our dear old country.”35 Consul Archibald, however, was embarrassed when the recruiters for the British Volunteers opened their office in the same building as the consulate.36 He sent a letter to the main newspapers denying any involvement, though this provoked the press to label him a Southern sympathizer.
The British Volunteers started off well and could be seen training each morning in the drill room at the Astor Riding School.37 But the regiment soon became a magnet for anti-British hostility, as did a regiment in Massachusetts that called itself the British Rifle Club.38 “It is not right that British residents should be taunted and twitted without cause,” complained the Albion, a weekly journal for the British community in New York.39 The British Volunteers lost its appeal to recruits after one of the captains was accused of being a Confederate agent, a charge that was repeated in the press even after the unfortunate captain was exonerated.
By mid-June the British Volunteers’ difficulties became insurmountable and they merged with an Irish regiment to become the 36th New York Volunteers. There were frequent fights and stabbings in the new outfit between the English and Irish factions, and mealtimes could be explosive. The violence encouraged many of the former British volunteers to join the 79th New York Highlanders, which in contrast to the Irish 69th had provided the Prince of Wales’s honor guard during his visit in 1860. It was safe to be called Scots, Irish, or Welsh, but not British or English, noted Mr. Archibald.
A young Englishman named Ebenezer Wells had joined the 79th Highlanders when he arrived in New York in 1860 in order to have something to do on the weekends. “When the Civil War broke out, the regiment volunteered for the war,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I was buglar [sic] and being away from parental restraint thought it would be a splendid excursion.”40 The men were thrilled when they received their orders in early June. “It was a beautiful Sunday when we marched down Broadway amidst deafening applause,” wrote Wells. The crowds adored their tartan uniform, especially the officers’ kilts. Nothing about the occasion hinted at the hardships ahead. Their knapsacks were packed with every conceivable delicacy as though they were on a Sunday outing. But, Wells added ruefully, if they had known what lay in store for them, “how depressed instead of elated would our spirits have been.”41
Ebenezer Wells experienced his first brush with violence as the regiment passed through Baltimore. He was ambushed by a stone-throwing mob and lost his cap and blanket before being rescued by members of his company. The 79th Highlanders were tired and hungry when they finally reached Washington on June 4. The sweltering city had become a vast military camp. Rows of white tents and parked artillery occupied the green fields around the half-finished Capitol building. Long trains of covered wagons filled the dusty thoroughfares.42 At night, the city resonated with wild shouts and hoots, and thunderous fireworks were answered with rounds of gunfire.
The Highlanders were allocated temporary quarters at Georgetown University. The 69th had only recently vacated the premises, and their detritus still littered the grounds. The campus was eerily silent, all but fifty of the student body having volunteered to fight for the South. The men were nervous. The Confederate army, under the command of the hero of Fort Sumter, General Beauregard, was only seventeen miles to the west. “We lay every night with our muskets by our sides, ready cocked, and one finger on the trigger,” wrote one of the recruits from the old British Volunteers. “It is a tough life, I can tell you.”43 His sentiment was widely shared in camps around the city. No regiment was so experienced or so confident that its men did not live in fear of an ambush or a surprise raid. The roar of the bullfrog, the screech of the night owl, “every rustle of the wind among the trees,” wrote the newly arrived war reporter and artist Frank Vizetelly, “every sound that breaks the stillness of the night, is taken for the advance of the Secessionists.”44
Vizetelly had accompanied the 2nd New York Regiment to their camp on the border between Washington and Virginia. The sounds of the forest did not frighten him; the thirty-year-old Vizetelly had spent the past ten years in the midst of battles and revolutions all over Europe. He had never known any other life than journalism. His father and grandfather were both well-known printers and engravers on Fleet Street. His three brothers were also in the trade; Henry, the second oldest, was one of the founders of the Illustrated London News, which was the first weekly newspaper to illustrate its articles with eyewitness drawings.
Vizetelly’s fame in England rested on his pictures of Garibaldi’s Sicily campaign. Dispatched by Henry to provide sketches of the fighting for the Illustrated London News, Frank soon abandoned any pretense of objectivity and allied himself with Garibaldi. It was not in his nature to be impartial: his drawings were not only skillful depictions of a moment or tableau but moving narratives that engaged the emotions of the viewer. His images demanded a reaction, not unlike Vizetelly himself, whose craving to be the center of attention was insatiable. “He was a big, florid, red-bearded Bohemian,” recalled an admirer, “who could and would do anything to entertain a circle.”45 Whether sitting around a campfire or dining in an officers’ mess, Vizetelly would transfix his listeners with vivid stories, replete with voices and accents, or lead them in boisterous sing-alongs that lasted until the small hours.
Ill.7 Attack on the pickets of the Garibaldi Guard on the banks of the Potomac, by Frank Vizetelly.
William Howard Russell envied Vizetelly in just one respect: he was unmarried and could travel wherever he pleased without upsetting his family. Otherwise he pitied him. Vizetelly constantly teetered between depression and mania, and when not distracted by the thrill of danger, he became self-destructive and reckless. Vizetelly partially understood his limitations and chose to live rough with the 2nd New York Volunteers, even though the camp was infested with rattlesnakes and “myriads of bloodthirsty mosquitoes,” rather than lounge in the saloon at Willard’s.46 Sometimes he visited the camp of the Garibaldi Guard to swap stories with the handful of genuine veterans in the regiment. (The colonel there was a Hungarian con man, and most of the volunteers were not Italian but adventurers from the four corners of the globe.) On one of the few occasions Vizetelly did go to the capital, he received an invitation to dinner from Seward. He arrived expecting to regale his host with stories about the American volunteers he had encountered among Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, but Seward was interested only in the tenor of his sympathies and whether he was planning to visit the South like that villain William Howard Russell. “I disclaimed any idea of so doing,” reported Vizetelly.47
Once Seward took against a person, it was rare for him to change his mind. Russell had sensed at their first meeting that he could be a dangerous enemy. During his return journey from the South, Russell had read enough of the Northern press to warn him of the reception awaiting him in Washington. But “I can’t help it,” he wrote on June 22 to his fellow Times correspondent in New York, J. C. Bancroft Davis; “I must write as I feel and see.… I would not retract a line or a word of my first letters.” He hoped that Northern newspapers would reprint his Times reports from the South, which would show that he was not a rebel sympathizer.48
Russell arrived in Washington on July 3, 1861. This time he stayed away from Willard’s and found lodgings in a private house on Pennsylvania Avenue. He regretted the decision as soon as he unlocked the door to his room and caught the stench of the privy beneath the window. Once he had changed his clothes, Russell called on Lord Lyons to give him a report on the South, glad for the excuse to escape his lodgings, if only for a few hours. The legation was almost as dark as his bedroom, since Lyons had ordered the gas lamps to be kept unlit in order to avoid adding unnecessary heat. “I was sorry to observe he looked rather careworn and pale,” Russell wrote afterward.49 One of the attachés whispered to Russell as he was leaving that “the condition of things with Lord Lyons and Seward had been very bad, so much so Lord L would not go near State Dept. for fear of being insulted by the tone and manner of little S.”50 Ever since the neutrality proclamation had become known, Seward had been threatening and plotting to force a reversal of the South’s belligerent status. Lyons was constantly on the watch against Seward’s stratagems to weaken Britain’s leadership and Mercier’s attempts to sabotage the blockade. Try as he might, Lyons could not make Seward understand that Europe was only respecting the blockade out of deference to Britain. Russell returned to his lodgings feeling depressed by Seward’s misguided behavior toward Lord Lyons. There was no other foreign minister in Washington, Russell wrote in his diary, “who watches with so much interest the march of events as Lord Lyons, or who feels as much sympathy, perhaps, in the Federal Government.”51
“Sumner makes it appear he saved the whole concern from going smash,” Russell wrote after he bumped into him on the street and had to stand for an hour in the blistering heat while Sumner gleefully enlarged on “the dirty little mountebankism of my weeny friend in office.”52 Russell was not sure whether to believe him until he called on Seward the following day and was subjected to another of his tirades. The secretary of state informed Russell that if he wished to go anywhere near the army, his passport would have to be countersigned by Lord Lyons, himself, and General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. He ended the interview with a lecture on the impropriety of Britain’s granting belligerent status to the Confederates: “If any European Power provokes a war, we shall not shrink from it. A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire, and at the end it would not be the United States which would have to lament the results of the conflict.” Russell tried to appear serene during this outburst, but as he listened to Seward’s monologue he could not help seeing the funny side. There they were “in his modest little room within the sound of the evening’s guns, in a capital menaced by [Confederate] forces,” and yet Seward was threatening “war with a Power which could have blotted out the paper blockade of the Southern forts and coast in a few hours.”53
“Seward is losing ground in Washington and New York very fast,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., reported to his father on July 2. “Sumner has been here fiercely denouncing him for designing, as he asserts, to force the country into a foreign war.”54 It was true that Seward had not calculated on Sumner’s relentless plotting against him, or that Sumner would try to set himself up as a rival secretary of state from the Senate; but both William Howard Russell and Charles Francis Jr. had been misled by Sumner. Far from being humiliated, Seward was reemerging in triumphant form, as the crush at his parties attested. June had been a month of consolidation and reconciliation between the president and his wayward secretary; Lincoln had won Seward’s support through a combination of firmness and magnanimity in victory. Displaying more statesmanship than his detractors would admit, Seward recognized that Lincoln possessed the skills required in a president, “but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”55
The alteration in Seward’s attitude toward Lincoln was accompanied by a realization that neither bribery nor the lure of fighting Britain would make the Southern states return to the Union. The change in Seward could be discerned in early July after Gideon Welles engineered a bill through Congress that gave Lincoln the authority to close Southern ports by decree. The foreign ministers in Washington warned Seward that Europe would ignore any attempt by the North to impose legal restrictions on ports it did not physically control. If he genuinely sought a foreign war, all Seward had to do was demand compliance with these fictitious port closures, and the Great Powers would revolt. Seward believed them and persuaded Lincoln to say nothing publicly about the bill.
A few days later, on July 19, Seward paid a private visit to the legation. He “proceeded, with some hesitation,” reported Lord Lyons, “and with an injunction to me to be secret,” swearing “that he had used strong language in his earlier communications to Foreign Powers … from the necessity of making them clearly understand the state of Public Feeling here.” He added that his only motive had been to prevent disunion, not begin a foreign war. “I was not altogether unprepared for the change in Mr. Seward’s tone,” Lyons admitted; he had heard from the French legation that Seward had made a similar speech to Mercier a few hours earlier. He thought the real question was whether the change was temporary or permanent—and that would depend on the Federal army’s progress in Virginia.56
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The decision to send the army into battle rather than wait until the civilian recruits had been trained into soldiers had been made by the president’s cabinet on June 29. The military advisers at the meeting had argued against the idea: General Scott had already presented Lincoln with a strategy, derisively called the “Anaconda Plan” by critics, which aimed to minimize the bloodshed on American soil by trapping the South behind its own borders and slowly applying pressure. But Northern newspapers were demanding a battle. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune had started running the same banner headline every day: FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND! THE REBEL CONGRESS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO MEET THERE ON 20 OF JULY!, which incited newspapers in other states to follow suit.57 Lincoln explained to General Scott that it would be politically impossible to delay a fight, and even if it were not, there was the problem of the 75,000 volunteers whose ninety days were about to expire.
General Winfield Scott had fought in every American war since 1812 and was a revered national figure, although some of the younger officers in the army referred to him as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was too old and infirm to lead the troops himself, so the command of the new Federal army at Washington went to Irvin McDowell, a young officer on his staff, whose drive and intelligence had already marked him out as a future general. McDowell had not been Scott’s first choice; he had originally offered the position to Colonel Robert E. Lee, who lived in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington. But Lee declined, deciding that his loyalty belonged to Virginia and therefore the South.
McDowell was energetic, but he had never actually commanded an army, nor was Scott convinced that he would remain calm under pressure. He had sufficient experience, however, to know that the 35,000 would-be soldiers currently camping in the woods around Washington were more of a danger to themselves than to the Confederacy. His objections were dismissed by Lincoln, who told him: “You are green, it is true, but they are green, also, you are all green alike.” McDowell diligently executed Lincoln’s order to engage the enemy and devised a plan that he thought would answer the country’s wish for a quick and dramatic victory. He would march his men into Virginia to Manassas, where a Confederate army of 22,000 soldiers was stationed under the command of General Beauregard. Manassas was a small town some twenty-five miles west of Washington; though it was hardly more than a hamlet, its railroad junction linked two important rail lines going west and south into Virginia. If McDowell could smash the Confederate army blocking the way, the North would have an open route into northern Virginia, and from there it would indeed be “forward to Richmond.”
William Howard Russell liked General McDowell, whose manner, despite some personal peculiarities (Russell had never met a teetotal glutton before), he found to be engagingly frank and honest. When Russell bumped into him on July 16 at Washington Station, McDowell admitted that he was there looking for two missing batteries of artillery. The army had started its march toward Manassas that morning and already there was utter chaos at his headquarters. Even “the worst-served English general has always a young fellow or two about him,” thought Russell pityingly as the forlorn figure walked up and down the platform, poking his head into each train carriage. He was almost tempted to accept McDowell’s offer to travel with him on the train but decided it was impractical without his bags or a servant.
Over the next four days, the Federal army picnicked and pillaged its way from Washington to Manassas, leaving a trail of burning houses, discarded army kit, and stragglers that stretched for many miles. Although small by European standards, McDowell’s army was the largest ever assembled in America’s short history. He had organized it as best he could into five divisions with a total of thirteen brigades.5.6 Almost all the commanders were officers from the regular army, which gave McDowell confidence that at least he would have men who knew how to give and receive orders. The commander of the 3rd Brigade was Colonel Wil-liam T. Sherman, who would become the greatest Union general after Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman had asked for the 79th New York Highlanders and the 69th New York Irish because of the large number of European veterans in their ranks, but his hope that they would display more professional behavior than some of the other regiments was dashed from the outset. The Highlanders had refused to leave their camp because they had been given Model 1816 smoothbores instead of the modern rifled Springfields.5.7 Colonel James Cameron restored order by promising that every man would receive his own rifle as soon as possible, and since the colonel’s brother was the secretary of war, the men decided they could believe him.58 The situation was worse at the camp of the 69th, where Captain Thomas Meagher, the Irish “Prince of New York,” almost started a mutiny by arguing that their ninety days were up and that they should all be allowed to go home. Colonel Corcoran eventually managed to persuade the men to stay until after the anticipated battle.
The army’s destination was Centreville, a pretty town whose tree-lined streets promised the relief of shade to the dusty and parched soldiers. The Federal troops arrived in such a state of disarray and exhaustion that McDowell spent an entire day trying to reshuffle the various disorganized parts into some semblance of order. More regiments announced they were leaving since their ninety days had expired.59 The Confederate army was massed along an eight-mile line a little farther to the south behind a narrow, winding stream called Bull Run. Over the previous two days, General Beauregard had been receiving reinforcements from General Joseph E. Johnston’s army in the Shenandoah Valley. According to McDowell’s plan, this second army was supposed to be engaged by General Patterson in a diversionary battle so that the Confederates at Manassas would remain outnumbered. But Johnston had eluded his attackers and was, at that moment, piling his men onto trains bound for Manassas.
Generals Beauregard and McDowell had been classmates at West Point. They had studied the same military classics, learned the same tactics, and admired the same generals. Beauregard’s recent success at Fort Sumter had unleashed his Napoleonic tendencies to an unfortunate degree and given him visions of a great victory. Now, not only was his numerical disadvantage being rectified, but he had been prepared in advance for McDowell’s attack with the help of spies in Washington. Rose Greenhow, the alluring pro-Southern society hostess, had stayed behind in Washington with the express purpose of sending information to the Confederacy. She had been supplied with a cipher key for writing in code and had organized her own spy ring of pretty young women who charmed their way past Union guards to deliver messages, sewn inside their petticoats, to a Confederate contact in Virginia. The most important of Rose’s sources was Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, who swore, “You well know that I do love you—and will sacrifice anything,” which may explain how a copy of McDowell’s route ended up in her possession.60 Rose also knew the date of McDowell’s departure and when he proposed to attack.61
Although Jefferson Davis was not tied down by the Federal law that limited the service of state militias to a mere ninety days, Beauregard was hampered by other problems, including a severe shortage of arms and equipment. The 6th Louisiana Volunteers, Sam Hill’s regiment, had arrived at Manassas Junction with only their personal rifles and homemade uniforms. “The men badly off for clothes,” wrote Mary Sophia Hill in her diary. When Sam ripped his uniform she had to repair it with red flannel. “Just imagine a patch of this behind and on your knees!” she complained.62 Sam had been unable to master the most basic skills of soldiering, but his commanding officer turned down Mary’s plea to assign him to a nonmilitary function. The hard truth was that Sam fulfilled a function already, if only by being there to stop a bullet destined for someone else.
In Washington, Russell realized he had made a costly mistake by turning down McDowell’s offer at the station. He had failed to engage a servant, and there was not a horse or any kind of transport left in the city; what the army had not requisitioned had been hired by civilians who wanted to watch the spectacle. On Saturday, July 20, Russell heard from Federal officers in the city that McDowell’s attack would take place the next morning. His search for transport became frantic; Russell revisited one of the larger livery stables and begged the owner to rent him his last remaining carriage. He paid the exorbitant price demanded and rushed to General Scott’s headquarters to have his pass countersigned. “But the aide-de-camp shook his head, and I began to suspect from his manner and from that of his comrades that my visit to the army was not regarded with much favour.”63 Russell would not be able to leave until the morning.
I returned to my lodgings [he wrote], laid out an old pair of Indian boots, cords, a Himalayan suit, an old felt hat, a flask, revolver and belt. My mind had been so much occupied with the coming event that I slept uneasily, and once or twice I started up, fancying I was called. The moon shone in through the mosquito curtains of my bed, and just ere day-break I was aroused by some noise in the adjoining room, and looking out, in a half dreamy state, imagined I saw General McDowell standing at the table … so distinctly that I woke up with the words, “General, is that you?”64
By the time Russell was fully awake on the twenty-first, McDowell’s army had already marched into position and was awaiting orders. The two opposing generals had formed precisely the same plan: to trick the enemy with a feint against one side while mounting the real attack on the other. McDowell moved first, and his initiative appeared to bring rewards. Vizetelly placed himself rather precariously in a field and made sketches of the Federal regiments charging into their Confederate opponents. Both sides displayed unexpected courage and determination in their first introduction to warfare. It was the Confederates who wavered and were gradually pushed back; they ran toward the crest of a rise known as Henry House Hill, after the little white farmhouse that overlooked the ridge.
Confident that McDowell was on the verge of driving the Confederates off the field, Vizetelly galloped back to Centreville to give his first sketches to a waiting courier. A journalist for The New York Times also left and returned to Washington to write a report on McDowell’s victory. On the way back to the fighting, Vizetelly bumped into a hot and perspiring Russell accompanied by Frederick Warre, one of the more adventurous attachés from the legation. The driver of the gig had left them at Centreville and they were wandering around in search of something to eat. Vizetelly offered to share his lunch with them, and they found a shady spot on a hill overlooking Manassas.
A large crowd of sightseers, including several senators and their wives, was also on the hill to observe the battle. The smoke and haze made it impossible to see what was actually happening, although whenever there was a loud explosion a woman beside them would shout, “That is splendid. Oh my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time tomorrow.” Russell knew better: “I was well convinced,” he wrote, “no advance of any importance or any great success had been achieved, because the ammunition and baggage wagons had never moved.” On the other hand, an Englishman whom Russell did not recognize “came up flushed and heated from the plain,” saying that the Federals were behaving “most gallantly.”65 His announcement that the Confederates were retreating provoked “gutteral ‘hochs’ from the Deutschland folk and loud ‘hurroos’ from the Irish.”66
Russell’s instincts were correct. McDowell was no longer leading but reacting; when urgently asked for orders by his subordinates, he told them to wait. “For some three hours previous, we had seen long lines of dense dust rising from the roads leaving from Manassas,” wrote Vizetelly. The dust clouds were in fact the last of the Confederate brigades arriving off the trains from the Shenandoah Valley.67 One of these fresh regiments, led by a former professor named Thomas J. Jackson, ran to Henry House Hill, where the Confederate stand was starting to crumble. There, according to legend, Jackson’s firmness and bravery under fire inspired a Confederate general to rally his troops with the cry: “Look at Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!”68 So began the legend of Stonewall Jackson.
Map.7 First Bull Run or Manassas, July 21, 1861
Click here to view a larger image.
The sudden increase of firepower caught the Federal soldiers at the bottom of Henry House Hill by surprise. While Sherman was preparing his regiments to make a charge, some of the men threw themselves flat on the ground as others sought refuge behind trees. Sherman urged them to stay in formation. It was useless, he shouted, to duck after the explosions. Just then there was a loud bang above his head, causing him to duck involuntarily. “Well, boys,” said Sherman with a grin, “you may dodge the big ones.”69 The 79th was the second regiment to make the attempt. “We were met by a terrible raking fire,” recalled one of the survivors, “against which we could only stagger.”70 A second assault with the same result convinced the survivors that it was time to retreat. By the time the Highlanders had reached the safety of the river, they had suffered 198 casualties, including their colonel and half the regiment’s officers.
The field was littered with bodies when Sherman ordered the 69th to make their charge. By now it was late afternoon and many Union soldiers had reached the end of their strength. Sensing his enemies’ exhaustion, in one of his few sensible decisions that day, General Beauregard ordered the Confederates to make a countercharge. The rebels surged forward, letting out wild, whooping screams as they ran. The “rebel yell,” as it became known, froze the Union soldiers in their tracks. Just as Colonel Corcoran shouted to his men to rally to the flag, two other Federal regiments on the hill smashed into them, pursued by Confederate cavalry.
The urge to flee spread to other parts of McDowell’s army. Russell had ridden down to the turnpike bridge and was about to cross it when he saw a mob running toward him. The Union retreat had turned into a mass rout. “The crowd from the front continually increased,” he wrote; “the heat, the uproar, and the dust were beyond description. I got up out of the road and into a cornfield, through which men were hastily walking or running, their faces streaming with perspiration, and generally without arms.”71 Vizetelly was riding to Centreville to hand over another set of drawings to a waiting courier when he was forced off the road by a roaring cavalcade of horses and wagons. He turned around and saw a dense cloud, thick and impenetrable like an explosion, hurtling toward him. He quickly joined the churning sea of humanity to avoid being trampled. Soldiers and spectators became tangled in a bloody struggle to escape.
Ebenezer Wells was not far behind. “I had been detached into the transportation department, having volunteered for such, and was on my way to the front,” he wrote.
When an officer met me and ordered me to turn back saying the troops were retreating, I answered I dare not accept any orders but from Headquarters, as I had ammunition. He drew his revolver threatening to shoot me if I disobeyed.… I went on but soon found it was too true. The Army was on the retreat, and after having had a view of some of the renowned Southern Black Horse Cavalry I turned and joined in the run. And it was indeed a run, some never stopped until they reached New York. We lost more men then by desertion than all the rest of the war put together.72
Russell also became part of the flight. “What occurred at the hill I cannot say,” he wrote, “but all the road from Centreville for miles presented such a sight as can only be witnessed in the track of the runaways of an utterly demoralised army.” He asked one soldier why he was running. “ ‘I am not afraid of you,’ replied the ruffian, levelling his piece at me and pulling the trigger. It was not loaded or the cap was not on, for the gun did not go off.”73 Shaken, Russell concentrated on surviving the ride home. It was almost midnight when he reached his lodgings. Lightning played about the sky. Russell shut the door and sat down at his desk, intending to write his report before daybreak. A messenger arrived from Lord Lyons, who had become alarmed after Warre returned to Washington without him. Russell scribbled a quick note in reply, then returned to his report. But after a few minutes of writing, his pen slipped and he slumped in his chair. “I awoke from a deep sleep this morning, about six o’clock,” he wrote.
Ill.8 The stampede from Bull Run, by Frank Vizetelly.
The rain was falling in torrents and beat with a dull, thudding sound on the leads outside my window; but louder than all, came a strange sound, as if of the thread of men, a confused tramp and splashing, and a murmuring of voices. I got up and ran to the front room.… I saw a steady stream of men covered with mud, soaked through with rain, who were pouring irregularly, without any semblance of order up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol.74
Russell stayed at his desk all day, occasionally pausing to watch McDowell’s dejected army stumble past his window. Hundreds of prisoners, including Colonel Corcoran of the 69th, remained at Manassas. Mary Sophia Hill caught a glimpse of them whenever she ran between hospital tents. She had been working without a rest since the morning of the battle. “They have not half the supplies,” she wrote. “I tore down all the window blinds, and rolled them into bandages.” She cleaned, bandaged, fed, and comforted scores of wounded soldiers, all of whom reminded her of Sam. Some of the men begged for water, others pleaded with her to remove bullets from their shattered limbs. “I heard and saw it all,” she recorded, “war in its grandeur and war in its meanness.”75 Only later did she learn that Sam’s regiment never actually fired a shot.
5.1 The Confederate flag changed several times; for the moment it sported nine stars in a circle inside a blue square next to three bars of red and white.
5.2 At the beginning of the war, a Confederate regiment generally consisted of 1,100 officers and men divided into ten companies.
5.3 Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) was not only the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, but also the first female doctor to be placed on the British General Medical Council’s register. Born in England and having lived and studied in both countries, she was the quintessential British American, having lived and studied in both countries, though “I look upon England as my home, and must always do so,” she wrote to her best friend, the feminist writer Barbara Bodichon in 1860. Dr. Blackwell had been unable to raise sufficient funds to start a medical school for women in London, but since 1853 had been running the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, where her aim was to train women to become doctors in the course of serving the poor. The novelist George Eliot met Elizabeth Blackwell in 1859, recording in her diary: “Esteemable for the courage and perseverance she has shown … but very repulsive and schoolmistress-like in manner.”
5.4 Nineteen-year-old Thomas Beach, for example, was working for a British bank in Paris when the war began. “Friends and associations, many of them American, were leaving on every hand for the seat of war,” he wrote. As a lark, Beach decided to go along with a group of friends who were sailing for New York. They all joined the same regiment: “Regarding the whole proceeding more in the light of a good joke than anything else, [I called] myself Henri Le Caron.” (Under this name, during the 1870s he became one of the most notorious and successful spies in the British Secret Service.)27
5.5 The original Zouaves were an elite North African corps in the French army whose uniform of white leggings, baggy blue trousers, magenta jacket, and bright red fez made them unmistakable on the battlefield. A Chicago lawyer named Elmer Ellsworth had started the American craze for Zouave regiments in 1859. He formed his own outfit, trained the men in the complicated drills and swordplay of a Zouave regiment, and took them on a nineteen-city tour of America. Colonel Hawkins had seen a demonstration by Ellsworth’s Zouaves the previous summer, which was all the encouragement he needed to organize a New York version. His small company of Zouaves was among the first to be granted permission to recruit a full regiment, hence its designation as the 9th New York Volunteer Infantry.
5.6 A regiment was composed of around a thousand officers and men divided into ten companies; a brigade generally consisted of four to six regiments; and a division normally had three or four brigades. In theory, a division contained twelve thousand men.
5.7 The effective range of a smoothbore was about 100 yards, compared to the more deadly and accurate 1861 Springfield, which had a range of 300 yards.