New Year’s Day—Heartbreak at Vicksburg—General Banks assumes command at New Orleans—The Alabama embarrasses the U.S. Navy—Seward returns to his old ways
The English volunteer Dr. Charles Mayo finally took a break from work on New Year’s Day to attend a public reception at the White House. By the time he reached the front of the queue outside the Blue Room, Lincoln had been shaking hands for more than two hours without a break. “His presence is by no means majestic,” wrote Mayo, “and I could not but pity the poor man, he looked so miserable.”1 A journalist observing the occasion wrote that Lincoln’s gait had become “more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.”2 The president had also hosted the official reception for dignitaries, foreign diplomats, and politicians earlier in the day. It was the only occasion when the ministers were expected to wear their dress uniforms to the White House. Notwithstanding the finery on display, the atmosphere had been subdued. Seward hardly left Lincoln’s side, Lyons noticed, and made no attempt to engage his colleagues in conversation.
Once the White House had emptied, Lincoln could concentrate on the immediate problem at hand: General Burnside had called in the morning to offer his resignation. Though the president had lost confidence in Burnside’s capabilities, he was not sure that it would be right to give the Army of the Potomac its third leader in three months. Over the past few days, telegrams had been arriving from out west that filled him with anxiety. The Federal armies in Mississippi and Tennessee both appeared to be on the brink of defeat.
Ill.30 New Year’s Day reception at the White House, by Frank Vizetelly.
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Only five months earlier, Lincoln had complained that Europe concentrated far too much on the North’s failures in the East and entirely ignored the great successes it enjoyed in the West, where Federal armies were “clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country.”3 But since then, the U.S. Navy had been unable to take control of the Mississippi River, and General Grant had failed to capture the river port of Vicksburg, his next objective. For as long as Vicksburg stayed in Confederate hands, the mighty Mississippi remained the South’s most precious supply route and means of communication between its eastern and western parts. The significance of the river as the economic backbone of America was no mere story to Lincoln; during his youth he had worked on it, traveling on flatboats from Illinois down to New Orleans. “Vicksburg is the key,” he had told his generals in 1861. “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.… We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”16.1 4
Since that discussion, the Federal army had grown to just under a million men, twice the Confederate total of 464,000. Lincoln wanted this numerical superiority exploited; a week of Fredericksburgs would wipe out Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia but cause only a dent in the North’s fighting capacity.
Vicksburg was roughly equidistant between Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans; the next fort was Port Hudson, 150 miles farther south, which guarded the approach to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nicknamed the “Hill City” before the war, but now referred to as the Gibraltar of the Mississippi,16.2 Vicksburg owed its defensive strength to the spectacular geography of the Mississippi Delta. Situated along a sprawling chain of hills overlooking a sharp bend in the river, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps and densely wooded bayous whose emerald-colored waters obscured a netherworld of poisonous snakes and snapping turtles, Vicksburg afforded few approaches that could not be defended from the town. Before the war, Vicksburg had been a thriving commercial center of four thousand inhabitants, with six newspapers, several churches of different denominations, and even its own synagogue. But now its purpose was simply strategic, to be defended or captured at all costs.
The lack of progress in opening up the Mississippi River had political and military implications that Lincoln could not afford to ignore. The Democratic politician turned general John McClernand warned that if control of the river were not soon achieved, the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana might lead a second mass exodus from the Union, creating a separate Confederacy of the Northwest, which would make its own peace with the South.
There was also the problem of General Ben Butler down in New Orleans. His eight-month rule had resulted in a profoundly alienated population as well as a raft of missed opportunities to gain more of the Mississippi. Lincoln decided to replace Butler with another political general, Nathaniel P. Banks. Though his military record was not inspiring—Stonewall Jackson had thrashed his first army in the summer of 1862—Banks was a popular and respected Massachusetts politician. From humble beginnings as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, he had risen through his own talents to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Banks’s leadership qualities were not in question, nor was his honesty—an important consideration after the accusations of corruption leveled against Butler.
The immaculately dressed and well-spoken Banks (he had carefully erased all traces of his working-class roots) appeared to be the perfect choice. His political connections meant that he had no trouble working with the governors of New York and New England to recruit an entirely new army of volunteers; he had already displayed his tact and administrative skills after he was sent to quell unrest in Maryland in 1861; and he was ambitious for military glory. Lincoln gave Banks two objectives when he asked him to go to New Orleans in November 1862. Militarily, the general was to lead his army up the Mississippi, sweeping away Confederate resistance as he proceeded, until he joined forces with General Grant at Vicksburg, some 225 miles to the north. Politically, he was to ensure the election of a new, pro-Northern legislature in Louisiana that would enable the state to be readmitted to the Union.
Lincoln adopted the same pragmatic approach when General McClernand asked permission to raise an army of volunteers from the Midwest with the sole aim of attacking Vicksburg. The president believed that the political gains to the administration from McClernand’s project outweighed any potential annoyance that might be felt by the army chiefs.
However, Lincoln underestimated how much Halleck and Grant—neither of whom had any liking for enthusiastic amateurs, regardless of their political usefulness—would resent the encroachment on their authority. Grant immediately made plans to reach Vicksburg before McClernand. He ordered his trusted lieutenant William T. Sherman to take 33,000 men and sail down the Mississippi to about fifteen miles north of Vicksburg, where he was to leave the river and enter its tributary, the Yazoo. There was a bluff along a bend in the Yazoo that was easy to scale and would allow Sherman to follow an overland route to the town. Grant intended to march toward Vicksburg with the rest of the army, luring the Confederates into a battle and thus leaving the way open for Sherman. The operation began on December 20, 1862, as a fleet of troopships, floating hospitals, and gunboats set sail from Memphis. But while Sherman was traveling downriver, Confederate raiders destroyed Grant’s supply base, forcing him to turn back toward Tennessee. Sherman continued on his mission unaware that he would be facing the enemy alone.
The floating attack force came to a halt on Christmas Day, a few miles short of the proposed bluff. The sinking of a gunboat, USS Cairo, revealed the existence of underwater mines around an area of the Yazoo known as Chickasaw Bayou. Still ignorant of Grant’s return to base, Sherman decided to alter his plan slightly and disembark at Chickasaw. There was more swamp than dry land here, but above the bluffs were the Walnut Hills and a road that led straight to Vicksburg. Sherman was not fazed by his first solo mission under Grant; he knew that the Walnut Hills were largely devoid of Confederate troops, and assumed that the taking of the bluffs would be achieved in a matter of hours.
But he waited four days before launching the attack, giving ample time for the Confederates to prepare a defense. Sherman’s plan would now require the troops to cross a wide, open plain while being shot at from above, echoing Burnside’s folly at Fredericksburg. In his memoirs, Sherman described his division commander Brigadier General George Morgan cheerfully receiving the order of battle with the words “General, in ten minutes after you give the signal I’ll be on those hills.”5 Morgan’s memory of the meeting on December 28 was rather different: he had tried to dissuade Sherman from the idea, warning him that a direct frontal attack would turn the gloomy swamps of the bayou into a mass grave. But Sherman was suffering from an excess of bravado, not uncommon among generals when given their first independent command. “Tell Morgan to give the signal for the assault,” he ordered an aide. “We will lose five thousand men before we take Vicksburg, and may as well lose them here as anywhere.”6
The battle commenced the following day, December 29. Morgan was furious with Sherman. The men to be lost were his men, the survivors of Cumberland Gap and the harrowing retreat through barren wilderness. Colonel John F. De Courcy was commanding Morgan’s 3rd Brigade. His sense of duty prevented him from questioning his orders, but, knowing what was about to happen, he insisted on hearing the orders from Morgan himself: “ ‘General, do I understand that you are about to order an assault?’ To which I replied, ‘Yes; form your brigade,’ ” Morgan recalled many years later. “With an air of respectful protest he said: ‘My poor brigade! Your order will be obeyed, General.’ ” De Courcy had also been changed by his experiences at Cumberland Gap; gone was the martinet, and in his place a commander whose loyalty to his regiment was reciprocated by the men.
General Morgan watched as the brigade charged through the marshes into the freezing water. “All the formations were broken,” he wrote. “The assaulting forces were jammed together, and, with a yell of desperate determination, they rushed to the assault and were mowed down by a storm of shells, grape and canister, and minié-balls which swept our front like a hurricane of fire.”7 De Courcy raced back and forth as he tried to keep cohesion to the regiments. Some managed to cross the small river in front of the bluffs only to become trapped, others fell back, while a few remained on the near side. After the battle, Morgan and De Courcy were accused of failing to put more muscle into the attack, and Sherman was especially critical.8 Yet a survivor from De Courcy’s regiment, the 16th Ohio, wrote afterward that they were so close to the enemy that they could not retreat without being shot in the back, “so there was nothing left for us to do except to surrender.”9
Sherman was pacing up and down at his headquarters when Morgan went to see him about collecting the wounded from the field. Unable to accept the extent of his failure, Sherman at first refused a flag of truce, condemning many of the wounded to death and the rest to capture. His initiation into independent command had cost the lives of 1,800 men, half of them from De Courcy’s 3rd Brigade.10
Five days later, on January 3, De Courcy and his shattered regiments slunk into camp at Milliken’s Bend. The army was divided between those who believed Morgan and De Courcy, who hotly asserted that they did move forward (and had the casualties to prove it), and those who accepted the account of Brigadier General John Thayer, who claimed that he had passed them with his soldiers while they cowered in the first rifle pits. The dispute would never be resolved; years later, Private Owen Hopkins of the 42nd Ohio Infantry wrote that De Courcy’s brigade had followed behind his own, “but the boys pressed forward so vigorously in the daring onset that it was difficult to tell who was in the advance.”11
The growing dissension in the camp was halted by the arrival of General McClernand; in his pocket was an order inveigled out of President Lincoln assigning all of Sherman’s troops to his command. Ever mindful of his future political career, McClernand had a grand vision to implement. He informed a stunned but helpless Sherman—who had known nothing about McClernand’s visit to Washington—that the force was going to be renamed the Army of the Mississippi, with Sherman and Morgan as the two corps leaders under him.
McClernand was not as inept as his contemporaries claimed.12 He did at least recognize a superior soldier when he saw one and was willing to listen to Sherman. At the start of the Chickasaw expedition, a Confederate raid had captured one of the Federal steamers, which was taken to Fort Hindman, some forty miles up the Arkansas River, which fed into the Mississippi. Sherman now suggested to McClernand that they capture the fortification. It held no more than five thousand troops, but its strategic location enabled the Confederates to sneak onto the Mississippi at will, wreaking havoc against Federal ships before escaping back up the Arkansas. This was the time, urged Sherman, when they had 32,000 men at their disposal, to erase this Confederate menace and claim the Mississippi north of Vicksburg.
The Federals landed three miles below Fort Hindman on January 10, 1863. Morgan ordered De Courcy to hold his brigade at the rear, guarding the boats against an ambush, while the rest of the army began its assault. Admiral David Dixon Porter’s gunboats hammered their target—which was not much more than a bastioned dugout—with continuous fire for twenty-four hours. When Sherman gave the order for an all-out attack on the following day, there was only halfhearted firing from the fort. The first advance brought the soldiers to within “hand-shaking distance of the enemy,” according to Brigadier General Morgan, but “the fight continued with sullen stubbornness.” Several times a white flag appeared only to be hastily hauled down. Realizing that a little more effort would tip the scales, Morgan sent orders for De Courcy to march his brigade into action. The troops emerged from the woods along the riverbank and charged, double file, toward the fort. Within minutes, another white flag appeared on the parapet, and this time it remained.13
The attack resulted in a thousand Federal casualties, almost ten times the number inflicted on the Confederates. But McClernand and Sherman had netted nearly five thousand prisoners, depriving Arkansas of a quarter of its troops. Although Grant initially blasted the operation as a monument to McClernand’s vanity, after a few days’ reflection he accepted that it had given a much-needed victory, both tactically and psychologically, to the army.
On January 17 a snowstorm turned the blackened terrain a dazzling white as the troopships steamed back down the Arkansas River to the Mississippi. The commanders took advantage of the quiet hours during the journey to compose their reports. In his letter to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, Admiral Porter laid the entire blame for Sherman’s failure at Chickasaw on De Courcy: “But for the want of nerve in the leader of a brigade, the army should have succeeded.” Farther down the fleet, Brigadier General Morgan sat in his cabin writing precisely the opposite report: De Courcy’s “gallant brigade lost 580 men at Chickasaw Bluffs,” he observed, “and, with Blair’s brigade, bore the brunt of that hard-fought but unsuccessful day. Col. John F. De Courcy deserves promotion.”14
De Courcy tried to resign, but the request was denied. His longing to escape his present location was exacerbated by the wretchedness of camp conditions. Rain followed the snow in a gray downpour that continued day after day. The ground beneath the tents flooded, causing the camp’s rudimentary latrines to overflow and poison the water wells.15 The only dry land was occupied by hospitals and graves, which presented the men with the choice of sleeping among the dead or alongside the barely living. Yet Grant could not afford to have his army lie idle while they waited for the weather to cooperate. He had slapped down McClernand’s ambitions, taking control of the Army of the Mississippi himself so he could merge it with the other Federal forces in the area. His best course of military action was politically impossible, since it would mean starting the campaign afresh and leaving the vicinity of Vicksburg. This the Northern public would have interpreted as another defeat. So Grant had the men begin several canal projects in the somewhat forlorn hope of engineering an alternative route to the town. The men were sent out with shovels and ordered to dig. Sherman thought the whole enterprise was “a pure waste of human effort.”16
Every officer in De Courcy’s regiment fell ill with swamp fever, and De Courcy himself lasted just two weeks before suffering a total collapse. The army doctor took pity on him and recommended his removal from the camp. The patient had suffered much “both in body and mind,” he wrote on February 14, 1863, making him prey to “typho-malarial fever.” A few days later, De Courcy joined a wagon train heading east. He would not see his old regiment for many months. His destination was Cincinnati, Ohio, seven hundred miles from Vicksburg, and the long journey was almost as harrowing as the life he left behind. By the time De Courcy was examined by another doctor on March 14, his body had become almost skeletal in appearance. He was immediately placed on sick leave and declared unfit for duty for sixty days.
At the War Department in Washington, reports of Grant’s futile engineering works caused alarm, especially since there were rumors that the general was drinking again. Lincoln had already been forced to step in and countermand an order by Grant that threatened to have serious political repercussions: General Order No. 11, which Grant issued in late December, had called for the arrest and expulsion of all Jews in the parts of Mississippi and Tennessee under Union control.16.3 Lincoln revoked the order two weeks later, leaving it to General Halleck to explain to Grant about the wisdom of proscribing “an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.” But the reversal was too late for local Jewish communities, including thirty families in Paducah, Kentucky, who were driven from their homes and dumped into riverboats bound for Ohio.17
Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, decided to send Charles A. Dana, a former journalist and troubleshooter for the War Department, to Grant’s headquarters. The reason given was the department’s concern about inefficiencies in the paymaster service, but in reality Dana’s mission was to be the eyes and ears of the administration. There were too many calls in Washington for Grant’s removal for Lincoln to do nothing.
The Vicksburg campaign had assumed even greater importance since the Battle of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee on New Year’s Day. U.S. general William Rosecrans and Confederate general Braxton Bragg had fought each other to a stalemate. Each had lost a third of his army, putting both out of action for many months; crucially, neither general would be able to send reinforcements to Vicksburg. When Dana reached the main army camp at Milliken’s Bend, just above Vicksburg, Grant and his staff chose the wise course of bringing him into the military family. Dana was allowed full access to everything that was happening in the Army of the Tennessee, and soon came to admire Grant as a resourceful and determined leader.
Francis Lawley also visited the Vicksburg area during the great digging operations. Naturally, he did not go near Grant’s headquarters, and so he had no opportunity to take the measure of the man who was staking his reputation and career on Vicksburg’s capture. In Lawley’s opinion, the town was impregnable. “The swollen state of the river, the dreary wastes of oozy swamp and fen,” he wrote for The Times, were more powerful weapons “than sword or bullet.” Through his telescope he could see the parlous state of the soldiers in the Federal camps.18 Lawley departed for Atlanta confident that Grant would never succeed.
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General Banks’s army in New Orleans—which he called the XIX Corps—consisted of fifty-six regiments, many of them less than four months old and totally ignorant of military life. One of the newest regiments was the 133rd New York Infantry Volunteers, also known as the 2nd Metropolitan Guard because the recruits were mostly New York policemen—tough working-class men whose fighting skills had been honed against the feral gangs that terrorized lower Manhattan. The 133rd were bemused and dismayed to have a British Army officer as their commander.
Colonel L.D.H. Currie, as he liked to style himself, was the young officer whom William Howard Russell had referred to in his diary as laughing ruefully at the total lack of military discipline in McClellan’s army. The thirty-one-year-old career soldier and veteran of the Crimea16.4 had been sent to Brigadier General W. F. “Baldy” Smith’s division, where he quickly showed himself to be far too useful to be relegated to administrative work. By the beginning of 1862, Currie was taking part, if not the lead, in cavalry expeditions against Confederate pickets in northern Virginia.19 When McClellan was threatening Richmond in June, Currie’s unflappability stood him in good stead after his horse was killed under him. By July there was a groundswell of support for giving Currie a regiment of his own. Four generals, including McClellan, sent letters on his behalf. “I believe him capable of filling any military position which may be assigned to him,” wrote Major General William B. Franklin.20
Whether Currie was capable of commanding the unruly 133rd remained to be seen. Already furious at having been assigned to a foreigner, the regiment saw nothing positive about being in New Orleans. The women still turned their backs and scowled at the slightest provocation. The male inhabitants seemed to divide into two distinct species: those who wished to fleece them and those who were waiting for an opportunity to kill them. The city was like a poisonous flower: beautiful to behold but dangerous to touch. General Butler had cut down the murder rate, but every other vice had been allowed to flourish. General Banks was appalled to discover that many of the stories that had reached him were true. Federal officers treated private property in the Crescent City as theirs for the taking. A family might receive an eviction notice with orders to move out the same day, taking nothing except clothes and necessities. The occupier would move in the following day, and the plundering would begin.
The Scotsman William Watson observed Banks’s attempt to impose civic order on the city and almost felt sorry for him. The Northerner was, wrote Watson, “altogether too mild a man to grapple with the state of things then existing in New Orleans.”21 “Everybody connected with the government has been employed in stealing,” a horrified Banks wrote to his wife in mid-January. “Sugar, silver plate, horses, carriages, everything they could lay their hands on.” He also discovered that nothing happened without a bribe. Among his first directives was an order for all officers to leave civilian accommodation and return to army quarters.22 Mary Sophia Hill had recently returned to New Orleans carrying hundreds of messages and letters for the marooned families of Confederate soldiers, and was similarly appalled by the moral degradation that had spread through the city.
The 133rd was sent north to Baton Rouge, where Currie did his best to continue training the men, teaching them the rudiments of drill. By the end of January he was just beginning to make some headway when he learned that the War Department had received serious allegations against him. A former member of the regiment had been trying to persuade his old colleagues to make a joint protest against Currie. When he failed to whip up enough support, he went ahead on his own, concocting an absurd list of crimes allegedly committed by the colonel. Currie knew he would be exonerated if the authorities questioned his fellow officers, but he recoiled at the thought of an investigation. It would, he was sure, undermine his hard-won authority. Moreover, he found the whole affair deeply offensive. “I have been engaged in a humble way, but to the best of my ability in suppressing rebellion, and maintaining constitutional government, which is scarcely compatible with such charges,” he wrote to his superiors; “if, after a life of fourteen years of active employment in a profession of honour, my character requires defence, it is not worthy of it.” They agreed. On February 4, 1863, Currie’s commander declared that no attention should be paid to the allegations.23
Currie’s exoneration was followed by an order to lead a scouting expedition through the bayous west of Baton Rouge. After Vicksburg, the Mississippi River meandered for about 150 miles until it reached another deep bend carved into eighty-foot-high bluffs. Here the little town of Port Hudson was perched on top of the eastern bank, the perfect site for heavy artillery to bombard enemy ships as they slowed down to navigate the sharp turn. The bastion not only kept the Federal army bottled up between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, it also protected the Confederates’ chief supply route west of the Mississippi. The romantically named Red River, so called for the rust-colored clay along its northern banks, flowed from the corner of northern Texas all the way down and across Louisiana, finally emptying into the Mississippi just above Port Hudson. It passed through some of the most fertile regions of the Confederacy. If Banks could take Port Hudson, he would also have the Red River, its grains and cattle, and, most important of all, its rich cotton plantations.
Since Banks could not approach Port Hudson from the Mississippi, he wondered if he could bypass the area altogether by finding a way through the mazelike bayous and lesser tributaries that fed the river. Currie’s regiment was sent on a two-week trek through densely wooded swamps and across alligator-infested rivers. They were prey not only to the wildlife but also to local Confederates who lay in wait for them. One private was killed and two others were snatched during an ambush. The men returned at the end of February, nervous and physical wrecks. They were “used up,” in Currie’s words: “In my opinion the country is impracticable for all arms of the service.”24
There was no alternative but to face Port Hudson’s batteries. General Banks invited his naval counterpart, Admiral Farragut, to his headquarters at the palatial St. Charles Hotel to discuss a joint assault. The general knew that his troops were no match for a seasoned Confederate army, but they could provide cover for Farragut’s warships. Banks would attack Port Hudson from the land, hopefully causing enough confusion to allow the navy to steam up the river. The great question hung on Banks’s ability to deliver a solid enough diversion.25
Just how green some of his troops were had been demonstrated on February 20 when a small detachment sent to the levee to oversee the departure of Confederate prisoners bound for Baton Rouge was responsible for a disgraceful incident. As word spread through the city that rebel officers were being escorted onto steamboats, thousands of well-wishers, most of them women and children, ran down to see them off. Mary Sophia Hill was among them. Weeping and cheering, they waved red handkerchiefs in mass defiance of the order against displays of Confederate sympathy. The Union troops soon lost control of the crowd, which heaved and swayed with emotion. Panicking, the Federal officer in charge sent an urgent request for more troops, who arrived with bayonets fixed. They came “at a canter,” recalled Mary. “The guns were rammed and pointed at this helpless mass of weakness.” The women were literally beaten back from the levee. “As I never yet ran from an enemy,” she continued, “but always faced them, I walked backwards, with others, to some warehouses, where we were again chased by Federal officials in uniform.”26
No one was killed, but there were cuts and broken bones; and with every retelling the officers became more brutal and the danger more desperate. Once again the Northern occupiers had succeeded in presenting themselves in the worst light. Southern newspapers sarcastically labeled the affair “la bataille des mouchoirs” (the battle of the handkerchiefs). Banks’s reputation plunged: “Some say Banks never saw a battle, as he was always running; but he did, he won this, which is well remembered,” wrote Mary scornfully.27
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The navy was also contributing its share of frustration and disappointment to Lincoln. On January 11, 1863, CSS Alabama attacked the U.S. blockade at Galveston, Texas. Once a forsaken collection of wooden buildings along a dreary sandbar that stretched for twenty-seven miles, Galveston had become a boomtown in recent years, sporting large modern warehouses and New Orleans–style mansions. Profits from shipping cotton—three-quarters of Texas’s produce passed through the seaport—had paid for colonnades of palm trees and lush oleanders to line streets that had formerly been mud tracks in the grass. The U.S. Navy had begun blockading Galveston in July 1861, and a Federal force had briefly held the port until Confederate general John Magruder (nicknamed “Prince John” by his enemies on account of his flashy behavior in front of ladies) recaptured the town on New Year’s Day 1863. Reinforcements to the naval blockade had just arrived when Captain Raphael Semmes and the Alabama cautiously approached the Union fleet.
Ill.31 “Scene on the Levee at New Orleans on the Departure of the Paroled Rebel Prisoners,” February 1863.
In only six months the Alabama had become the most famous ship afloat. The entire English-speaking world knew her history, beginning with her audacious escape from under the noses of the British authorities. In addition to her aura of daring, she was beautiful to behold. The fifty-four-year-old Semmes had loved the Alabama from the moment he first saw her. During his thirty-seven years in the navy, he had never sailed on such a well-crafted vessel. “Her model was of the most perfect symmetry,” he wrote, “and she sat upon the water with the lightness and grace of a swan.”28 The Confederate navy agent James Bulloch had asked Lairds to build him a ship that could survive the harshest of conditions for months on end. He knew that the Alabama would never have a home port or a regular source of supply.29 The result was a 230-foot vessel with three masts, built for roving and raiding, capable of sail and steam power, equipped with two engines, a liftable screw propeller, and eight powerful guns. Her cabins could comfortably accommodate 24 officers and a crew of 120.
Semmes had been in command of CSS Sumter until the vessel required such extensive repairs that in the summer of 1862 he was forced to sell her in Gibraltar. When he and his second in command, Lieutenant John Kell, arrived in England, Bulloch realized that they were the obvious choice to take command of the Alabama. The new crew soon nicknamed their captain “Old Beeswax” on account of his highly waxed mustache. The sharpened tips—which looked both debonair and dangerous—were symbolic of the divergent nature of his character: Semmes was always perfectly correct and mild-mannered in his demeanor, but behind the mask was a stern and relentless fighter. He had strong literary and intellectual tastes, and, in contrast to many of his peers in the navy, he had no trouble adapting to home life when on furlough. During the long gaps between his deployments at sea, Semmes had established his own law practice. He was also a gifted writer, having published two well-received memoirs of his experiences during the Mexican War.
Despite frequent buffetings from rough weather and unruly sailors, Semmes soon imposed his will on the ship. The seamen were almost all British, “picked up, promiscuously,” wrote Semmes, “about the streets of Liverpool … they looked as little like the crew of a man-of-war, as one can well conceive. Still, there was some physique among these fellows, and soap, and water, and clean shirts would make a wonderful difference in appearance.”30 The officers, on the other hand, were mostly Southerners, the notable exceptions being the master’s mate, twenty-one-year-old George Townley Fullam from Hull, and the assistant surgeon, David Herbert Llewellyn, a vicar’s son who had recently completed his residency at Charing Cross hospital.31 Semmes considered the Alabama to be a ship of war rather than a privateer, and he demanded navy-style obedience from the men. “My code was like that of the Medes and Persians—it was never relaxed,” he wrote. “I had around me a staff of excellent officers, who always wore their side arms, and pistols, when on duty, and from this time onward we never had any trouble about keeping the most desperate and turbulent characters in subjection.”32 The highest wages of any fleet and the promise of fantastic amounts of prize money also helped to maintain discipline.
The Alabama scored its first capture on September 5, an unarmed whaler, which was raided for supplies and then set afire. The merchant crew was allowed to go ashore in its whaleboats. Those men were lucky; other crews were held prisoner belowdecks until Semmes could unload them at a neutral port. By Christmas, the Alabama had successfully pounced on ten U.S. ships.33 One capture often led to another, since Semmes would use the information gleaned from logbooks and timetables to chase after sister ships. But at Galveston, Semmes was offered a different opportunity—to prove to the world that the Alabama was capable of much more than merely preying on civilian ships. For the first time, she was meeting adversaries of her own class.34
As soon as Semmes caught sight of the five blockading ships in front of Galveston, he ordered the Alabama to retreat slowly, hoping to entice one of the vessels into a chase. The Federal captain of the Hatteras took the bait, believing that he had caught a blockade runner in the act, and hardly noticed that Galveston was becoming smaller and smaller in the distance. “At length,” recounted Semmes, “when I judged that I had drawn the stranger out about 20 miles from his fleet, I furled my sails, beat to quarters, prepared my ship for action, and wheeled to meet him.”35 The ships faced each other nose to nose, a mere hundred yards apart and yet only partially visible in the clear, moonless night. Using a bullhorn, the warship challenged first, ordering the unknown vessel to identify herself. Semmes cheekily shouted back, “This is her Britannic Majesty’s steamer Petrel.” There followed an awkward pause while the captain of the Hatteras pondered his next move. He had no wish to provoke the Royal Navy, but there was something suspicious about the ship floating before him. After some rapid calculation of consequences, he announced he was sending over a boarding party. Semmes called back that he was delighted, thus buying the Alabama a few precious minutes to load her guns. They heard orders being shouted and the creaking sound of a boat being lowered into the water. This was the signal for First Lieutenant Kell to cry out, “This is the Confederate States Steamer Alabama!” followed by a broadside from the cannons. The captain of the Hatteras quickly returned fire. Each time the Alabama landed a shell on her adversary, one of the sailors was heard to shout, “That’s from the ‘scum of England’!”36 In less than fifteen minutes the Hatteras was completely disabled and starting to sink. The survivors from the warship were picked up and held in the brig until the Alabama docked at Port Royal in Jamaica on January 20.
If that were not enough to shake the U.S. Navy’s morale, a week later the blockading fleet at Mobile Bay in Alabama failed to stop the midnight escape of the infamous CSS Florida, the ship originally known as the Oreto. After her hurried exit from Liverpool in March 1862, the vessel had suffered one setback after another. The British authorities in Nassau detained her for nearly four months, although the courts there finally determined that she was not in defiance of the Foreign Enlistment Act. But once free, Captain Maffitt lost half his crew to yellow fever, including his own stepson. Even when the Florida eventually sailed into Mobile in September, she continued to be dogged by misfortune. It took three months to complete the repairs to her damaged hull. Finally, on January 17, 1863, nine months after leaving Liverpool, the Florida began its long-delayed career as a Confederate commerce raider. Two days later, Captain Maffitt captured his first prize, a cargo ship bound for New York.
The Confederate gains at sea were taking place at a sensitive time for Anglo-U.S. relations. For the past two months, a group of twelve New York businessmen calling themselves the New York International Relief Committee had been soliciting donations for Lancashire’s suffering cotton workers.37 On January 9, the George Griswold set sail carrying a large cargo of provisions that included 13,000 barrels of flour and 500 bushels of corn, all paid for by the committee. The ship was bedecked with symbols of Anglo-American friendship, including the flags and pennants of the two nations. As the Griswold was towed out of New York Harbor, she received salutes from the British vessels that had gathered to see her off. Four more ships soon followed the Griswold; the irony that they could be captured and destroyed by the Alabama was not lost on the Northern press, nor on Seward.16.5 38
The secretary of state used the public’s resentment over the Alabama and the Florida to his advantage. Over the New Year, he had met with Senator James Grimes, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, and persuaded him to propose an armed response against Britain. There was nothing anti-British in Seward’s motives. His only concern was how to shore up his weak position among Republicans; with any luck, Sumner would oppose Grimes’s measures and look like an apologist for England, costing him popularity in the press. After the Galveston attack by CSS Alabama, Grimes announced that he was reviving the bill to allow President Lincoln to issue letters of marque. Arming civilian privateers was necessary, he argued, because the Confederates were building their own fleet in England. Lincoln should have the power “to let slip the dogs of war” against them.39
As Seward had hoped, Charles Sumner could not resist attacking such a poorly conceived idea. “This revival of Letters of Marque is [Seward’s] work. I have protested to the President against their issue, but I fear that I shall not entirely succeed,” he complained to John Bright. “There is not a Senator—not one—who is [Seward’s] friend politically, the larger part are positively, and some even bitterly against him.… In the House of Reps., he has no friends; nor among his colleagues of the cabinet.” Lord Lyons was crestfallen once he realized that Seward had resorted to the same anti-British line that had made the first year of the war so acrimonious and difficult. “It looks like a return to the old bluster,” he wrote sadly. “Whether he does it to recover his position with the Radical party and with the people at large … or … he really thinks he can frighten England and France with his privateers, I can not say. He is more cordial than ever with me personally, and I do my best to prevent his getting into hot water either with France or with me.”40
Sumner was speaking the truth, however, when he warned Bright that the Confederate navy program had to be stopped. “The feeling towards England runs high and I hear it constantly said that war is inevitable unless those ships now building are kept from preying on our commerce.”41 Northern newspapers were blaming the Alabama and the Florida for the precipitous decline of U.S. shipping (rather than the lack of Northern investment in the merchant marine).42 “England will be hated for it, till the last American now on the stage goes to his grave,” threatened the New York Times.43
16.1 Confederate president Jefferson Davis also had emotional ties to Vicksburg. His family home, Brierfield plantation, was only twenty miles south of the town along a part of the river known as Davis Bend. He described Vicksburg as the “nail-head that held the South’s two halves together.”
16.2 The phrase referred to the Great Siege of Gibraltar during the American War of Independence. Though vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the besieged British forces on the Rock had defied a combined Spanish and French invasion fleet for three years and seven months, one of the longest sieges in history.
16.3 Grant apparently believed that “Jewish peddlers” were to blame for the army’s supply problems.
16.4 During the Crimean War, the 19th Regiment of Foot was sent to the evocatively named Calamity Bay, where it took part in the bungled fight against the Russians for the Alma Heights. Currie was brought down by a bullet that tore a large hole through his left foot. He was rescued from the field, conscious, and therefore able to prevent the regimental surgeon from amputating his foot. For several months Currie lay festering in the notorious Scutari hospital until he was rescued by his brother, who brought him home on a stretcher. Currie made it his mission to walk again. Through sheer force of will he dragged himself on crutches to his medal ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 19, 1855. His ashen countenance so alarmed Queen Victoria that she asked to be kept informed of his recovery.
16.5 Lord Lyons naturally took heart from the Griswold, perhaps far too much. The ship was proof, he told Russell, that Americans liked to complain about Britain, but behind the posturing “there lies a deeper and more enduring feeling of good will and kindly affection, which will be a lasting bond of feeling between the two kindred nations.”