Lincoln suffers at the polls—the Battle of Fredericksburg—The Senators attempt a coup—The Marquis of Hartington’s conversion—Victory or annihilation
Lord Lyons returned to Washington on November 12, 1862, having spent a few days in New York speaking to Democratic and Republican leaders. He was relieved to find that they were far more willing to share their personal views than the politicians in the capital, who were wary of appearing too familiar with him. The “Peace Democrats” had performed well in the November elections, picking up the governorships of New York and New Jersey as well as taking control of several state legislatures. Their declared aim of peace and compromise over slavery chimed perfectly with the large number of Northern voters who had felt blindsided by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. McClellan’s failure to chase after Lee following the Battle of Antietam in September had also contributed to a growing doubt in the North over whether the war was worth the enormous sacrifice in human lives. There had been nine major battles during the past eleven months, resulting in more than 150,000 casualties between the two sides, and yet there was no indication of any end in sight.
Across the Atlantic, the results of the midterm elections seemed much worse to Charles Francis Adams than they really were—the Republicans still controlled Congress by a large majority—and his bitterness toward Lincoln threatened to overwhelm his peace of mind. Benjamin Moran was shocked by Adams’s indiscreet tirades against the administration (though he secretly enjoyed them, too) and recorded each outburst with relish. “Mr. Adams had a long talk with me about Lincoln,” he wrote in his diary on November 19.
He thinks the recent political defeats a natural result of his management.… Mr. Adams regards Lincoln as a vulgar man, unfitted both by education and nature for the post of President, and one whose administration will not be much praised in the future.1
Ordinarily, Adams would never have confided in a gossipy malcontent like Moran. But despite having made a large circle of acquaintances during the past eighteen months, he felt as friendless as the day he arrived in London. The U.S. minister in Spain, Carl Schurz, pitied his social isolation. Adams “performed his social duties with punctilious care,” Schurz wrote after a brief visit to England, but was not “a shining figure on festive occasions [and] lacked the gifts of personal magnetism or sympathetic charm that would draw men to him.”2 His wife, Abigail, felt upstaged by the social success of the American expatriate Mrs. Russell Sturgis, whose soirées were a feature of the season.
The frustration and sense of alienation at the American legation were not all that dissimilar to the loneliness experienced by Lord Lyons and his staff in Washington. Lyons’s new first attaché, twenty-five-year-old Edward Malet, had been warned by his friend William Kennedy, who had been seconded to the legation in September, to prepare himself for ghastly weather and few distractions.15.1 “However,” Kennedy added, “there is lots of work to do and so one has no time to walk about or grumble, especially as we dine every night with [the minister].”3 Since Malet had been serving as an unpaid attaché at the British legation in Petropolis, Brazil, where Emperor Pedro II kept his summer residence, he could hardly wait to experience the so-called discomforts of Washington. A salary of £300, and his promotion to “the most important mission next to the Embassies,” were, Malet wrote happily to his parents, more than enough compensation.
Lord Lyons’s dislike of change, particularly with regard to his own staff, made him prickly toward Malet at first, even though the young attaché’s background echoed his own. Malet’s father, Sir Alexander, was currently serving his tenth year as minister to the German Federation, placing upon his son the same burdens of expectation and family tradition that had overshadowed Lyons’s early career.4 This unacknowledged connection between them may have been another reason why Lyons was so much harder on Malet than on the others. Malet often had his draft letters returned for rewriting, accompanied by such acerbic comments as “Brevity is the soul of wit, but I object to absolute nonsense—L.”5
Malet found that Kennedy had not been exaggerating about the long hours. “I have only visited one American house,” he wrote to his mother after a month in the capital. The glorious days of the “Buccaneers” were already over. Rarely stopping for lunch, the attachés’ first break from their desks came at 7:00 P.M., when they dashed to Willard’s to gulp down as many cocktails as they could before returning to the legation at eight for dinner with Lyons. In addition to the daily bundles of diplomatic correspondence that required copying and filing, the attachés were also handling hundreds of cases on behalf of British subjects who were seeking redress or protection from various authorities; and in the past year a large number of cases had arisen that concerned missing, conscripted, injured, or dead British volunteers. Most weeknights Malet was obliged to return to the chancery after dinner and continue working until past midnight. But his situation was different from Henry Adams’s in one important respect: the presence of ten bachelors gave the legation in Washington a rather hearty feel, not unlike an undergraduate college or an officers’ mess. There was none of the poisonous claustrophobia that infected the legation in London. Nor did Malet have to live with his parents; he was able to rent a spacious house with Kennedy just down the street from the legation, at 227 H Street North. It came with a garden and entertaining rooms large enough to inspire him to try his hand at decorating. He was quite pleased with the results: one room was pink with gold buds, the other white “with lots of small gold stars.”6 All that was lacking were the people to fill them. Malet passed his precious spare time wandering up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, watching “the queerest figures I ever saw in my life—and nearly always troops of prisoners being taken from one place of confinement to another.”7
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The latest prisoners to arrive in Washington were Confederates captured during a skirmish on November 2, 1862, at Snickers Gap, one of the three main passes in the Blue Ridge Mountains that linked the eastern part of Virginia with the Shenandoah Valley. General McClellan’s new plan involved advancing along the base of the Blue Ridge, methodically taking each gap, until he reached the Manassas Gap railroad. Once there he intended to decide whether to attack a portion of Lee’s army that was known to be only twenty-five miles away, or to avoid a fight and march east to the town of Fredericksburg, which lay along the bank of the Rappahannock River, sixty miles due north of Richmond. In his telegram to Lincoln that afternoon, McClellan made his usual plea for more men and cavalry, though “I will do the best I can with what I have got,” he added.8
Lincoln was no longer interested in McClellan’s best. He had already made up his mind to dismiss the general after the midterm elections and appoint a successor who was less preoccupied with maneuvering and more interested in attacking. On the night of November 7, McClellan was writing a letter to his wife when two visitors knocked at his door. Snow covered their clothes and their faces were raw from the cold; McClellan realized that this was not a courtesy call. The older of the two, General Catharinus P. Buckingham, had come by special train from Washington to deliver the order from Lincoln removing McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac and replacing him with General Ambrose Burnside. “I read the papers with a smile,” wrote McClellan, and “turned to Burnside [who was standing next to Buckingham] and said, ‘Well Burnside, I turn the command over to you.’ ”9 McClellan told his wife, “They have made a great mistake,” and in his heart Burnside suspected it, too. Although his victory at Roanoke the previous spring had raised his reputation with Lincoln, Burnside’s limitations as a military leader had been revealed by his muddled thinking during the Battle of Antietam. Many soldiers broke ranks and tried to touch McClellan’s boots as he rode out of the camp and into retirement on November 9. He had failed to lead them to victory, but his commitment to their welfare had touched their lives in ways that only the soldiers themselves could appreciate.
Sir Percy Wyndham was disgusted by what he considered to be incompetent army management by the War Department. He had been assigned against his wishes to General Franz Sigel’s XI Army Corps in early September and was given temporary command of the cavalry brigade, which was on guard duty in northern Virginia.10 Bored by his new command, Sir Percy asked General Samuel P. Heintzelman of the III Army Corps for his help in obtaining a transfer. He was especially annoyed that connections seemed to count far more than merit: “The names of a great many Colonels in the service have been recommended to the President for Promotion,” he wrote, but “I, not being acquainted with any political parties of person of influence, naturally have no chance of being recommended in like manner. I would consider it a lasting favour if you would use your influence in obtaining me a position, and if possible in your own command.” Heintzelman was experiencing his own difficulties with the high command and had no influence to spare; so bitter were the rivalries in Sigel’s corps that a jealous officer sabotaged Sir Percy Wyndham’s request by accusing him of disloyalty. “I hear it from a field officer of cavalry that Wyndham said to him in the presence of a private of his Regiment that he would soon as leave to fight for the Confederates as for the Union, and that he would if our Government did not give him what he wanted,” claimed the embittered informer.11
Even the jovial English lieutenant of the 9th New York Volunteers, George Henry Herbert, was becoming disillusioned, despite his recent promotion to ordnance officer for the division. “The system is radically wrong,” he complained. “With the exception of a few regiments, officers and men treat one another as equals, no punishments are inflicted. The private under you today may, if a friend of his gets into office, be a Colonel in another regiment tomorrow.”12 Herbert’s experience was confirmed by an English military observer who was fascinated by the different styles of leadership of the two armies. In the South, though many officers were just as unqualified as their Northern counterparts, the plantation system fostered a strong sense of social hierarchy. “The Regimental Officers are mostly men of Known families in the districts from whence the regiment is raised,” he wrote, “and the ‘mean whites’ look up to and obey the sons of the Great Planters.” In the North, it was not uncommon for the soldiers to disregard “their Captains and their Lieutenants, whom they regard as equals.”13
Herbert had just returned from Washington after requisitioning stores for the regiment when he heard the news about General McClellan. Apart from General George Getty, the commander of his division, who was a professional soldier, Herbert had little faith in his superiors, and certainly none in General Burnside after Antietam. “Everything is rotten to the core,” he repeated to his brother Jack. “Generals are appointed, I guess, on account of incapacity. Most or at least many are such as no gentleman can serve under and retain self-respect.”14
Burnside decided to head straight for Fredericksburg and use pontoon bridges to cross the Rappahannock River. With luck he would be on the other side before Lee even knew where the Federal army had gone. From there it would be a straight movement along the Richmond–Fredericksburg railroad. Each regiment was to have twelve days’ rations, which Burnside considered more than sufficient for the enterprise. Lincoln had some misgivings about a plan that placed so much emphasis on timing, but he acquiesced, only urging Burnside to move as quickly as possible.
First nature and then Washington, however, began to thwart Burnside at every turn. As soon as the soldiers began their march, the clouds gathered and dumped a steady, hard rain on their heads. “Talk about roads,” Herbert commented to his brother; “it would do your heart good to see this specimen of a Virginia dirt road. I suppose you have often heard of mud knee deep. You will find it literally deeper than that. It took me 2½ hours to ride seven miles. This is a singular soil. It is a crust of clay over quicksand. As soon as it is thoroughly wet the sand settles, and the first thing you know you break through the crust and down you go four or five feet.”15 Nevertheless the Army of the Potomac managed to arrive at Fredericksburg in good time on November 20, only to find that the pontoons were notably absent. Burnside refused to consider an alternative plan, and so the entire army waited for the missing pontoons for the next two weeks. Herbert was furious: “All this time was spent by the rebels in fortifying the hills in rear of the town, mounting heavy guns, etc. And a splendid job they made of it.”16 Meanwhile, the soldiers used up their rations and discovered that administrative bungling meant no more were coming. Herbert’s New York Zouaves celebrated Thanksgiving on November 27 with a feast of water: even the hardtack and coffee had run out. The misery of the army’s situation led to pilfering and fights between regiments. Ebenezer Wells’s Highlanders had a vicious struggle with the 2nd Michigan for the last remaining wooden fence in the vicinity, each desperate to chop it up for firewood.17 There was so much sickness in the camps that Herbert wondered if more than half the army was actually present for duty.
Behind the Confederate lines, Francis Dawson reported to General James “Old Pete” Longstreet’s headquarters on December 6, and realized after his brief and unceremonious meeting with the general that his history as an English volunteer held no interest for him. Longstreet maintained a professional relationship with his staff members, which, for a junior officer such as Dawson, meant almost no personal contact at all. Adding insult to his lowly status was the discovery that he was expected to do the work of three men: “Colonel Manning had no taste for anything but marching and fighting, and Lieutenant Duxberry was too fond of pleasure and show to be of much practical use,” wrote Dawson. “The whole responsibility in the Ordnance Department of Longstreet’s Corps devolved upon me.”18
Lee was incredulous that Burnside was still seriously contemplating Fredericksburg as a crossing place. He ordered Longstreet’s First Corps into position along a seven-mile range of wooded hills that overlooked Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River. The batteries were clustered thickly, ready to fire on the plain below. When Longstreet asked his artillery commander whether any more guns were needed, the officer replied, “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”19 The Confederate army was so well entrenched above the town that a Federal advance seemed completely implausible. Yet “the Yankees were in plain view on the other side” of the area and “evidently very active,” wrote Heros von Borcke, Jeb Stuart’s Prussian volunteer aide, after his reconnaissance. Union general Edwin Sumner sent orders to the mayor to evacuate all civilians. The majority of the inhabitants of the eighteenth-century town were women and children. “I never saw a more pitiful procession than they made trudging through the deep snow,” wrote a Southern artilleryman.
There were women carrying a baby in one arm, and its bottle, its clothes, and its covering in the other.… Most of them had to cross a creek swollen with winter rains, and deadly cold with winter ice and snow. We took the battery horses down and ferried them over, taking one child in front and two behind, and sometimes a woman or a girl on either side with her feet in the stirrups, holding on by our shoulders. Where they were going we could not tell, and I doubt if they could.20
Sheet ice coated the roads, making the horses fearful and skittish. Reconnaissance “was anything but pleasant,” wrote von Borcke.21 But the atmosphere at General Stuart’s camp remained almost festive. The Maryland journalist William W. Glenn had sent across two more English visitors to the Confederacy. Captains Lewis Phillips and Edward Wynne had succumbed to the temptation that was affecting so many British officers in Canada, to slip through Northern lines for a peek at the Confederate army.22 Wynne fell ill when they reached Richmond, leaving Phillips to continue by himself. Phillips found the Confederate officers touchingly keen to demonstrate to him the quality of their men. Borcke recalled the Englishman watching a shabbily dressed South Carolina brigade parade before him in a marching style that would have earned swift punishment if performed on British soil, and pronouncing with perfect sincerity that he was impressed.23
The picket lines of the two armies had come so close to each other that rebel and Federal soldiers could jokingly trade insults across the river. Sam Hill’s regiment, the 6th Louisiana, enjoyed a brief bartering system with unknown Union pickets, exchanging letters and tobacco for coffee and old editions of Harper’s Magazine. One letter actually reached its destination in New Orleans.24
On the night of December 10, word spread through the Confederate camp that ammunition was being doled out among the Yankees, indicating that a battle was imminent.25 The officers at Stuart’s headquarters nonetheless decided that there was time to take Captain Phillips to a country ball that was being held nearby. The ten-mile wagon ride to the plantation was a rash and dangerous journey to attempt—several of the Confederates were flung with their musical instruments into a snowbank when the wagon veered off the frozen road, but, laughing and bleeding, they righted the vehicle and continued. After another hour of bumps and near misses, they arrived at the house. Borcke recalled that “the mansion was brilliantly lighted up, many fair ones had already assembled and the whole company awaited, with impatience and anxiety, the arrival of their distinguished guests and promised music.” They danced quadrilles and Virginia reels until the small hours. “Our English captain,” wrote von Borcke, “entered into the fun quite as heartily as any of us.”26 By the time they had returned to camp it was almost daybreak, and muffled sounds were coming from the Federal lines.
General Burnside had ordered his engineers to begin throwing pontoons across the Rappahannock. Fog emanating from the river gave them some cover, but the soldiers remained at the mercy of Confederate sharpshooters. Burnside’s response was to shell the town, giving those who had refused to leave their homes a taste of what was to come. Having fiddled and fretted for more than two weeks, he was now impatient to move. His intelligence reports wrongly implied that Lee’s army was in poor condition, lacking in artillery and at only half its normal 72,000 strength. The Army of the Potomac was, on paper at least, almost twice its size and equipped with 350 heavy guns. Burnside’s natural optimism increased as his army began crossing the river. Lee could hamper the Federals’ progress but he lacked the firepower to mount an effective counteroffensive.
Burnside thought he could surprise Lee with a brilliant, sweeping attack.27 Lee, on the other hand, was confident that the Federal advantages in troops and artillery were more than offset by his own high defensive position above the town; all he had to do was wait for the Army of the Potomac to expose itself on the plain. By nine o’clock on the evening of December 12, George Herbert and the 9th New York Volunteers were among the fifty thousand Union troops in control of the town. Herbert was shocked to learn that a family friend was among the five hundred Confederate prisoners, but he was unable to speak to him before they were transported to the rear.28
The following morning, December 13, Captain Phillips solemnly shook hands with Jeb Stuart’s officers and set off in search of Robert E. Lee. In the meantime, the two journalists Lawley and Vizetelly were having breakfast with the general and his staff. Lee appeared calm while they waited for the dawn mist to clear from the plains below. His hat and coat were spotless and, as always, the only sign of his rank was the three stars on his collar. After breakfast, the party rode the length of the Confederate line, looking down at the Federals below as they prepared to march out of Fredericksburg. Longstreet’s First Corps remained spread out, but his artillery was massed in tight formation along a low ridge called Marye’s Heights, which faced the center of the town. The gently sloping plain would provide little cover for the Federal advance. Lawley told his readers, “It is no wonder that every Southerner from the Commander-in-Chief down to the youngest drummer-boy, understood the strength of the ground, and contemplated the coming shock of battle with serene confidence and composure.”29
As soon as the shelling began, the skyline of Fredericksburg was transformed from quaint rooftops and spires into a broken, flaming ruin. In a letter to his brother, Herbert tried to describe what happened next: “Two miles back of the town, the ground rises gradually and forms a semi-circular range of hills somewhat in this form.” He drew a rough sketch. “This semi-circle was a mass of guns. The fire of which crossed in every direction and completely swept the plain.” The range was Marye’s Heights, and at its base lay a sunken road behind a four-foot-high stone wall. Impregnable to rifle fire, the wall provided almost total cover to the Confederates crouching behind. Regiment after regiment was sent up the plain without adequate protection as generals tried to interpret Burnside’s confused battle plan. One body of soldiers crammed into the relative safety of an isolated house. When it became full, those forced outside tried to create a protective barrier with human corpses, or took refuge behind dead horses.30
Map.13 Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862
Click here to view a larger image.
“General George W. Getty, my division commander, and myself,” wrote Herbert’s brigade commander, Colonel Rush Hawkins, “were on the roof of the Slaughter house, a high residence at the lower end of the city.… From this prominent position our repeated repulses and the terrible destruction of the Union troops had been witnessed.” At three o’clock, the two officers were ordered to send in Getty’s division. “The order was obeyed but not until I had tried to induce General Getty against its obedience and general waste of life.”31 The instructions became muddled, however, as couriers failed to return and anyone with a horse was commandeered to deliver messages. Ebenezer Wells happened to be at headquarters and was beckoned over by a general. Someone handed him field glasses, and a distant spot was pointed out on the plain. He was so shocked by what he saw that he almost stumbled. “I was ordered to go and deliver my verbal despatch … and if shot it was to be my dying words for it to be carried on,” he recalled.32 Wells was one of the few who returned unscathed, but the fate of his message is unknown. George Herbert’s regiment misinterpreted their orders to mean they were to advance to a nearby battery rather than toward Marye’s Heights. As it turned out, this saved their lives—the only instance of Burnside’s inability to communicate with his officers proving to be fortuitous. The moral, declared a young British Army officer who studied the battle twenty years later, was “Let your instructions be explicit, plainly-worded and capable of no double construction.”33
Lawley and Vizetelly watched, awestruck, as six Federal advances were mowed down by a combination of Longstreet’s artillery and the rebel troops behind the stone wall. “From the point where I stood, with General Lee and Longstreet,” wrote Vizetelly, “I could see the grape, shell, and canister from the guns of the Washington artillery mow great avenues in the masses of Federal troops rushing to the assault, while the infantry, posted behind a breastwork just under the battery, decimated the nearest columns of the enemy.”34 Looking through his field glasses at the carnage below, Lee commented, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”35 Francis Dawson was stationed just out of range to hear Lee’s remark. In any case, he was almost spellbound by the battle: “Never in my life do I expect to see such a magnificent sight again,” he wrote to his mother; “the whole scene of conflict was before our eyes, and at our feet, the glorious sun shining as tho’ bloodshed and slaughter were unknown on the beautiful earth; the screaming of shells and the singing of the rifle bullets adding a fearful accompaniment to the continued booming of the heavy guns.” He saw the Federal army hurl itself at the Confederate guns. “It was thrilling to watch the long line advance, note the gaps in the array, as the wounded fell or else staggered to the rear, and see the gallant remnant melt away like snow before our withering fire,” he wrote. The Irish Brigade’s distinctive green and gold flag made its charge one of the easiest to follow from start to terrible finish. George Hart, an English volunteer in the 69th, wrote bitterly, “It was not a fight, it was a massacre.”36
Ill.29 The bombardment of Fredericksburg, Virginia, by the Federals, December 1862, by Frank Vizetelly.
The guns began to silence as night drew in. At 9:00 P.M. Colonel Hawkins interrupted the generals as they were planning the following day’s attack. “I listened until I was thoroughly irritated,” he wrote. None of them seemed to have grasped the day’s defeat. Exasperated, the commander took out his pencil and drew a diagram of what the Confederates would likely do to a second attack. This brought them to their senses. But although they were now unanimous about a withdrawal, no one wanted to go to Burnside’s headquarters with the request. Hawkins took it upon himself, riding in pitch-blackness through mud and debris to Burnside’s camp. He arrived before the general himself and waited. “As [Burnside] came through the door he said: ‘Well, it’s all arranged; we attack at early dawn, the Ninth Corps in the centre, which I shall lead in person’; and then seeing me he said: ‘Hawkins, your brigade shall lead with the 9th New York on the right of the line, and we’ll make up for the bad work of to-day.’ ” Undaunted, Hawkins launched into a calm but emphatic explanation as to why there could be no second attack. The unanimous agreement of the generals forced Burnside to concur. Strangely, there were still regiments who had yet to fire a shot; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had spent all day in the woods reading the poems of Robert Browning while he waited for orders.
“A ride along the whole length of the lines told a sad tale of slaughter,” wrote Lawley. “It is doubtful whether any living pen could do justice to the horrors.” But “when the eye had once rested upon the fatal slope of Marye’s Heights the memory became fixed upon the spot.” Fourteen Federal brigades had been thrown at the wretched stone wall. “There, in every attitude of death, lying so close to each other that you might step from body to body, lay acres of the Federal dead.”37 Vizetelly stopped counting the bodies when he neared seven hundred. Intermingled with the dead were the wounded and dying. With no truce agreed, they could not be rescued from the field. Their screams and moans filled the cold night air. The survivors huddled together in ravines, behind walls, and at the bases of trees for warmth, forbidden to light fires lest they provide a target for the enemy. As the dead stiffened in the freezing temperatures, they were propped up to look like sentries.38
All day on the fourteenth, Lee waited for Burnside to resume the offensive. But instead of fighting, Union soldiers turned what had been casual looting of Fredericksburg into a full-scale rampage. The historian of Ebenezer Wells’s regiment claims that the three terrified women discovered by the 79th in a filthy coal cellar were treated with kind respect. If so, they were among the few who were not taunted or molested. Soldiers went from house to house stripping the valuables and methodically smashing the rest. The streets became blocked with broken detritus; everything from pianos to petticoats lay in mangled heaps across the roads. The anarchy horrified and disgusted many Federal soldiers, but the destruction continued throughout the day. Even Martha Washington’s tomb was ransacked and used for target practice. At night, the madness below seemed to be reflected in the sky—the Northern Lights had never been seen so far south, and bright-red tongues of light flickered and crackled over the soldiers’ heads. When dawn came, the rising sun revealed a remarkable change on the battle plain. Hardly a shred of blue remained. The dead had been stripped naked by Confederates seeking to exchange their tattered uniforms for good Northern cloth.
Lee was still waiting on the fifteenth when Burnside requested a flag of truce for burial and retrieval. Lee acquiesced, which, according to Wolseley, was a tactical mistake of the gravest kind. In his history of the battle, written in 1889, he would describe the general’s actions as “inexplicable.” “Burnside’s army was at Lee’s mercy,” wedged tight between the Confederates and an unfordable river. Lee should have launched an all-out attack and obliterated the mighty Army of the Potomac while it remained vulnerable. Such a decisive victory, Wolseley believed, would have convinced the European Powers that neutrality was no longer an option. The Lincoln administration might well have fallen, and with it the national will to prosecute the war.39 But Lee always contended that he had no means of knowing the true extent of Burnside’s losses on December 13. The Confederates had suffered nearly five thousand casualties—a total that seemed high until they learned that the Federals had experienced another Antietam-style bloodbath, with casualties approaching thirteen thousand. While Lee hesitated, Burnside was able to carry out a rapid and silent retreat during the night. The Confederates awoke on the sixteenth to discover that they were alone.
Mary Sophia Hill went to Fredericksburg to offer her help and found it a ghost town: “If ever you saw a city of desolation it was this.”40 Every house was perforated by cannonballs; whole streets lay in rubble. But when Captain Phillips, who had been reunited with his friend Captain Wynne, went down into the town to investigate, they discovered it was far from empty. Major von Borcke accompanied them, recalling in his memoirs, “A number of the houses which we entered presented a horrid spectacle—dead and wounded intermingled in thick masses.”
As they trod carefully over human debris, Phillips suddenly grabbed von Borcke’s arm and pointed to the body of a soldier who was missing a part of his skull: “Great God, that man is still alive!” His cry caused the soldier to open his eyes and stare “at us with so pitiable an expression that I could not for long after recall it without shuddering.” Helpless, the men knelt down and stayed with him for a moment.15.2 41 Francis Lawley was gripped by similar scenes in other parts of the town. “Death, nothing but death everywhere,” he wrote afterward; “great masses of bodies tossed out of the churches as the sufferers expire; layers of corpses stretched in the balconies of houses as though taking a siesta … horrified and aghast at what I saw, I could not look.”42 Sickened by the unrelieved suffering around him, he returned to Richmond without waiting for his friends.
The first of the wounded began to arrive in Washington on December 14. These were the men who could drag themselves off the battlefield and board steamers without assistance. It was another two days before the seriously injured were brought from the field hospitals. An English military observer at one of these hospitals thought he had never witnessed anything so barbarous:
There were about 60 surgeons without coats (chiefly French, German and Irish), covered in blood and dirt, chatting, arguing, and laughing and swearing, and cutting and sawing more like the devils and machines than human beings. Large heaps of legs, and arms were piled here and there, all sizes, and stages of decomposition … I thought I could stand a good deal but … I felt myself grow pale and dared not speak for a few minutes.43
It seemed incredible that any patient could leave such a place alive.
The hospital ships disgorged thousands of stretchers along the crowded waterfront. The wounded lay on the ground for hours until ambulance drivers heaved them onto wagons and ferried them to various hospitals around the city. The new pavilion-style hospitals advocated by Florence Nightingale were being built as quickly as possible. The haste produced careless mistakes: one hospital was left without a mortuary, forcing administrators to stack the dead in an adjacent lot until burial; another was placed next to an open sewer. The newest hospital, Lincoln General, opened the week of the Battle of Fredericksburg, but even though it had a capacity of 2,575 patients, the number of casualties far exceeded the available beds: hotels, churches, warehouses, even a floor of the Patent Office were converted into makeshift wards. The novelist Louisa May Alcott had been a nurse for all of three days when a line of carts drew up outside the old Union Hotel in Georgetown. The ballroom became Ward Number One with forty beds. The filthy, blood-smeared arrivals were undressed and washed before they were allowed to lie on the sheets. Miss Alcott amazed herself by performing the task without shuddering. Then a British surgeon dressed their wounds. “He had served in the Crimea,” she wrote, “and seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment; and, turning up his cuffs, whipped out a very unpleasant looking house-wife [sewing kit], cutting, sawing, patching and piecing, with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress.”44
The vast need for surgeons and medical personnel had opened the doors to any foreign doctor with a degree and a proficiency in the English language. Though not in the same numbers as foreign soldiers, they came by their tens and hundreds to Washington. Until two months before, twenty-five-year-old Charles Mayo had been the house surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. There were loud protests from the staff and patients when the popular and well-respected doctor announced his intention to go to America to gain more medical experience.45 After seeing Mayo’s qualifications, the new surgeon general, Dr. William Hammond, who was valiantly trying to overhaul the entire system, offered him charge of 125 beds at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington. This was not what Mayo had in mind, and he politely declined the offer, preferring to take the assistant surgeon examination instead. But to his chagrin, his marks were so high that the president of the examining board put in a special request for Mayo to be stationed in the capital.
In the aftermath of Fredericksburg, Mayo worked all day and long into the night, hurrying
from place to place to the assistance of maimed and exhausted men, pursued all the while by messengers with notice of fresh arrivals … scarcely a hotel or boarding-house in the city but contained someone that required the doctor’s help. It became impossible to keep a detailed visiting list, or to remember the names of one’s patients. “Lieutenant A and five others, Colonel B and six others; Captain C and four others,” are specimens of the kind of record that had to suffice for the contents of a particular house or hotel.46
Occasionally, he remembered men by their stories; for example, a wounded officer in the Irish Brigade who was saved by the butt of his revolver, which took the full force of a minié ball. But for the most part, he was too busy to become friendly with his patients. Mayo noticed that many of them arrived dying from tetanus—the result of incompetent butchery at the field hospitals, he concluded. There was nothing he could do for these wretched men except try to ease their pain. One particular case stayed in his memory: a healthy young major with a botched amputation who lingered for several days, eventually dying in the arms of a kind and decent hotel keeper who could not bear the thought of her guest dying alone.
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Washington was in an uproar over Fredericksburg, and General Burnside was accused of criminal stupidity. “What astonishes me is that such a battle should ever have been fought,” the new attaché Edward Malet wrote to his father. “I do really think that all those men who fell were murdered.”47 Lincoln’s reputation as a war leader suffered a serious blow. The president wrung his hands as he listened to accounts of the battle, repeatedly asking, “What has God put me in this place for?”48 To many people, not just in the capital but also throughout the country, the answer was obvious: it was time for Lincoln to make way for a successor. The treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, wrote in his diary on December 18 that “Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western” jokes simply nauseated him now; “if these things go on we shall have pressure on him to resign.”49 Three days later, Strong recorded with surprise that it was Seward and not Lincoln who had resigned. “Edward Everett and Charles Sumner are named as candidates for the succession. I do not think Seward a loss to government,” he wrote. “He is an adroit, shifty, clever politician, he believes in majorities, and it would seem, in nothing else.”50
A campaign to oust Seward had been gaining momentum for several months. The previous September, Lincoln had fended off an anti-Seward delegation from New York that claimed to represent the wishes of five New England governors by declaring that the administration would collapse without the secretary of state. The statement was debatable, since Seward’s power had shrunk considerably since the heady days in December 1860 when he boasted to his wife that the future of the government rested on his shoulders.51 Seward had successfully forged a close relationship with Lincoln as his second in command and confidant, but his relations with the rest of the cabinet had actually worsened during the past two years. The other members resented the way Seward had managed to insinuate himself into Lincoln’s inner circle. They disliked arriving at cabinet meetings and finding him already there, or, when they left, watching him stay behind for a private “chat.” Gideon Welles’s diary was peppered with fulminations against Seward and his wish “to direct, to be the Premier, the real Executive.”52 The treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, whose views on emancipation were far more radical than Seward’s, loathed him so heartily that he seized every opportunity to undermine the secretary of state. He repeatedly used the phrase “back-stairs influence” when referring to Seward, until it took on a life of its own and became a universal cry.
Charles Sumner had been hoping for some time that Seward would make a mistake that would finish him permanently. He believed that such a moment had come after the publication in early December of the State Department’s diplomatic correspondence for the first half of 1862. By now the State Department was overseeing 480 consulates, commercial agencies, and consular agencies abroad, and the literature Seward offered to the public was extensive. The British section contained letters from Charles Francis Adams that the minister had never imagined would become public. Benjamin Moran arrived at the legation on December 22 to find Adams mortified to the point of tears after the London press gleefully published some of the juicier anti-British dispatches, which included his complaints about The Times “and the sympathies of the higher classes,” whom Adams accused of “longing to see the political power of the United States permanently impaired.”53
Seward’s decision to publish every letter was “almost amounting to insanity,” Moran declared savagely. “Mr. Adams thinks his usefulness at this post is destroyed.… At one time during the day I thought he seriously contemplated resigning, and I told him he could not be spared—that it was his duty to remain.… This he agreed to … but that he would be more guarded in his future Dispatches to Mr. Seward.” Where, Adams wondered, was Seward’s sense of tact or diplomacy? “I scarcely imagine it wise in diplomatic life to show your hand in the midst of the game.”54 Now that the whole country knew that he accused the aristocracy of wishing “to see the Union shattered,” Adams doubted if polite society would ever receive him again.15.3
Sumner was interested in only one letter—a dispatch sent to Adams on July 5, 1862, in which Seward betrayed his contempt for the hard-line abolitionists and their universal emancipation agenda.15.4 This, Sumner believed, would be sufficient to ruin Seward in the eyes of the radical wing of the Republican Party. All he needed was an event or catalyst to mobilize his fellow senators—which had been provided by the disaster at Fredericksburg.
On the evening of December 16, the thirty-two Republican senators gathered for a meeting in the Senate reception room to discuss their response to the defeat. Lincoln did not escape censure, but the general feeling in the chamber was that the president’s mistakes were—as Chase repeatedly charged—the direct result of Seward’s baleful influence. Ironically, Seward’s deliberate attempt to foster an aura of power and mystique about himself, which William Howard Russell had noticed in 1861, now told against him. By the end of the meeting, all but four of the senators had agreed that Lincoln should be confronted about Seward. In Sumner’s view, the secretary of state’s own words had damned him by revealing his lack of commitment to the war. But there was a deeper intent among some of the senators: Seward would be only the first casualty. The other moderates in the cabinet would follow, and then Lincoln himself, leaving the way clear for Chase to become president with a cabinet of fellow radicals.57
One of Seward’s few remaining friends on Capitol Hill had sneaked out of the Republican meeting to warn him of the impending coup. His immediate reaction was to resign first in order to deny his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him humiliated.58 By the time Lord Lyons heard about the senators’ attack, their delegation had already met with a clearly distressed Lincoln on December 18 and presented their demands for Seward’s removal and a reorganization of the cabinet.59 Lincoln had been able to parry their claim that the cabinet was divided, but he had no answer to Sumner’s accusation that Seward was sending “offensive dispatches which the President could not have seen, or assented to.”60 To buy time, he invited them to resume the discussion the following day.
Lyons still regarded Sumner as a reliable ally in Anglo-American controversies, but he thought the Republican Party as a whole combined an unhealthy mix of zealotry and ignorance that made them unpredictable. “We may have to be ready for squalls,” he wrote to Lord Russell on the nineteenth. That evening, Lincoln received the Republican delegation for the second time. But he had a surprise for the plotters. He had invited the cabinet—with the exception of Seward—to hear their allegation that the secretary of state had usurped its powers. It was an awkward moment for Chase, who, even more than Sumner, had been the prime mover behind the attempted coup. He panicked over whether to portray himself as loyal to Lincoln, which would mean denying the senators’ allegations that the cabinet was disgruntled, or to throw in his lot with the delegation and support its claims. He lost his nerve and pretended to be surprised that there were rumors against Seward. His cowardice abashed several of the senators, but not Charles Sumner, who angrily repeated his previous complaints about Seward’s record. Still, when confronted with testimonials that the cabinet was united behind Lincoln, the majority of delegation felt too embarrassed to insist on Seward’s removal. The meeting adjourned at one in the morning with nothing actually decided.
Lyons thought that the outcome would depend on whom Lincoln could least afford to lose; “a quarrel with the Republican Members of the Senate is a very serious thing for him.” As two more days slipped by without any definite news, Lyons pondered a future without his erstwhile nemesis: “I shall be sorry if it ends in the removal of Mr. Seward,” he wrote a little ruefully on Monday, December 22. “We are much more likely to have a man less disposed to keep the peace.… I should hardly have said this two years ago.”61 But that afternoon he paid a visit to the State Department, and to his relief he found Seward back at his desk, behaving as if nothing had happened. Over the weekend, just as Seward had started to accept the coup against him, and Lincoln had begun to rationalize to himself why his chief ally in the cabinet had to be sacrificed to placate the radicals, Chase had become frightened that Seward’s friends and supporters would take their revenge on him. To save himself, he offered his resignation in the hope that this would clear him of any imputation of harboring ambitions for the presidency. Lincoln realized that Chase had lost his nerve. In a deliberate show of authority, the president rejected his resignation, replied that both secretaries were indispensable, and declared all discussion about a cabinet reorganization at an end. The senators’ protest had achieved precisely the opposite effect of what they had intended. But it was obvious, Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 26, that “Mr. Seward was plainly not in a position to make any concessions at all to neutrals.”62 He would not dare risk his remaining political capital on helping Britain to obtain cotton, or indeed on helping Britain at all.
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That same day, the twenty-sixth, President Jefferson Davis told Southerners to relinquish their hope for British intervention. He was speaking to the legislature in his home state of Mississippi at the end of a morale-boosting tour through the western parts of the Confederacy. Davis did not need to rouse his listeners’ indignation—many already had firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the devastation wrought by Union armies. Nor did he need to warn them against complacency: beyond Virginia, the South was shrinking as more and more territory came under Federal control. What the lean and shabbily dressed listeners required from their president was reassurance that the North might smash their homes but not their moral purpose. Davis damned Northerners as the blighted offspring of Cromwell’s fanatical Roundheads. It was in their blood to oppress others, he declared. Their ancestors “persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” The liberty-loving South could never live in harmony with such monsters of intolerance. But having given his audience its dose of tonic, Davis proceeded to administer a series of bitter pills. The last, and most shocking to the once-mighty kings of cotton, was the fact of the South’s utter isolation. “In the course of this war our eyes have often been turned abroad,” admitted Davis:
We have expected sometimes recognition, and sometimes intervention, at the hands of foreign nations; and we had a right to expect it … but this I say: “Put not your trust in princes,” and rest not your hopes on foreign nations. This war is ours; we must fight it out ourselves. And I feel some pride in knowing that, so far, we have done it without the good will of anybody.63
The Marquis of Hartington was moved by Davis’s speech. He and his traveling companion, Colonel Leslie, had arrived in Richmond on December 23, five days after leaving Baltimore in the dead of night. Hartington had wanted to ask the U.S. government’s permission to cross into the South, but the legation had warned him against the idea. “They said they thought it was very doubtful,” he explained to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “and if we were refused there would be more difficulty in going out on our own hook.” He promised they would not resist if they were captured during the attempt.64 Fortunately, with the assistance of the ubiquitous Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, they had been able to travel from one safe house to the next without encountering any Federal patrols.
The difference between the countryside of Maryland and that of Virginia was striking. “The country looks terribly desolated,” wrote Hartington. “The fences are all pulled down for firewood, a good many houses burnt, and everything looking very bare.” The contrast between Baltimore and Richmond was even greater. The Southern capital had doubled in size in less than two years, but it was worse off in every aspect. Hartington was surprised by the shoddy appearance of all classes. “They have had no new clothes since the war began,” he wrote, “and are not likely to get any till it is over.” Yet “these people say they are ready to go on for any length of time, and I believe many of them think the longer the better, because it will widen the breach between them and the Yankees, against whom their hatred is more intense than you can possibly conceive.”65
Hartington had arrived in America in August with no strong feelings about the war. After a couple of weeks in New York, he felt “inclined to be more a Unionist than I was.” The moderation of New Yorkers impressed him, since “I believe, if they could lick them, and the South would come back to-morrow, they would be willing to forget everything that had happened, and go on as usual.” But as he saw more of the North he became less certain about the point of the war: “I understand nothing about it, and I can’t find anybody except Seward who even pretends that he does.… They mix up in the most perplexing manner the slavery question, which they say makes theirs the just cause, with the Union question, which is really what they are fighting for.”66 He found the Peace Democrats he spoke to in the North a rather unattractive lot, which made him waver: “I think their arguments are weak and their objects not by any means desirable,” he wrote from Chicago in mid-October.67
But once Hartington reached Virginia, it took less than a week for him to be won over. Like Frank Vizetelly and Francis Lawley before him, he was smitten. “I hope Freddy [his younger brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish] won’t groan much over my rebel sympathies, but I can’t help them,” he wrote to his father on December 28, 1862. “The people here are so much more earnest about the thing than the North seems to be, that it is impossible not to go a good way with them, though one may think they were wrong at first.”68 The Southerners were certainly putting on a good show for him. He was introduced to Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, who seemed like moderate and sensible men to him, fighting the laudable cause of self-determination; he had spoken with Lee and Jackson, who were modest in victory; and he had been shown a couple of carefully selected plantations. “The negroes hardly look as well off as I expected to see them,” he wrote afterward, “but they are not dirtier or more uncomfortable-looking than Irish labourers.” Southern fears of a “servile insurrection” inspired by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had proved to be unfounded.15.5 69 On the twenty-ninth, Lawley accompanied Hartington and Colonel Leslie to General Jeb Stuart’s headquarters. Forewarned by a telegram from Lawley, the officers ransacked their own belongings to provide the party with comfortable accommodation. Scarce luxuries like blankets and stoves were sacrificed for the visitors. The fattest turkey in the camp was killed and plucked for dinner. Hartington appreciated their efforts, and he endeared himself to his hosts by insisting “we should not make any change for them in our ordinary routine, but let them fare exactly as the rest.” To demonstrate his sincerity he helped to beat the eggs for “a monster egg-nog.”70 But as Hartington joined in the revelries, he suddenly realized the scale of suffering it would require to crush the spirit of rebellion. The South “can never be brought back into the Union except as conquered provinces,” he wrote, “and I think they will take a great deal of conquering before that is done.”71
15.1 The previous incumbent, William Brodie, had pleaded with the Foreign Office to send him anywhere so long as he could escape Washington.
15.2 Jeb Stuart took a grim satisfaction from Wynne and Phillips’s reports: The “Englishmen here,” he wrote to General Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, “who surveyed Solferino [the battle that inspired Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross] and all the battlefields of Italy say that the pile of dead on the plains of Fredericksburg exceeds anything of the sort ever seen by them.”
15.3 Seward’s printed correspondence provided some of the most interesting reading the Foreign Office clerks had seen in years. But Lord Lyons adopted a judicious view of the letters. “[Seward’s] tone towards the Foreign Powers has, however, become much more civil than it appeared in the correspondence printed last year,” he pointed out to Lord Russell. As for Adams and his indiscreet comments, Lyons thought he showed “more calmness and good sense than any of the American Ministers abroad. He is not altogether free from a tendency to small suspicions—but this, I think, proceeds from his position, not from his natural character—it is, too, a very common mistake of inexperienced diplomats.”55
15.4 The line that really upset Sumner was this: “The extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents were acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war—the former by making the most desperate attempt to overthrow the federal Union, the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation.”56
15.5 In New Orleans, Acting Consul George Coppell had tried to obtain permission for British subjects to arm themselves in case of a race riot against whites.