Blockade running becomes a serious business—Two cautionary tales—Seward is courageous—General Longstreet feeds an army—A murder—Hooker’s “perfect plan”
In London, Benjamin Moran laughed sourly when he read the naïve response of the British vice consul in Florida. There was no doubt that Captain Jarman had been blockade running; Moran had in his possession a copy of the subscription letter offered by the Peterhoff’s owners, which stated that the purpose of the voyage to the West Indies was to supply arms to the Confederacy in exchange for cotton. Nor could the uproar over Admiral Wilkes’s action disguise the fact that Bermuda and the Bahamas had become the chief supply depots for the South.
The Bahamas was the preferred route for commercial blockade runners because of their proximity to the Southern coast. It took only three days to sail from Nassau to the main Southern ports. The same trip from Bermuda—which was almost nine hundred miles due east of Charleston—took at least five days and sometimes more in poor weather. But by late 1862, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate chief of ordnance, had realized that Bermuda’s relative inaccessibility was an advantage for his government since the competition for docking facilities and warehouses was less fierce. The Ordnance Department’s small fleet of blockade runners used the tiny island of St. George, which lay at the top end of the archipelago. Its port was closer to the open sea than the main island’s, and the approach from the South was an easy passage through crystalline waters. On the return journey, the ordnance fleet unloaded its cargoes at Wilmington in North Carolina rather than sailing to Charleston, which was expensive and crowded. Though not as convenient as Charleston—Wilmington was twenty-five miles from the sea, on the east bank of the Cape Fear River—the port could be reached via two different approaches and enjoyed the advantage of being guarded by Fort Fisher, whose large guns could hit any blockader attempting to enter the river.
Ill.36 Unloading cotton from blockade runners at the port of Nassau, by Frank Vizetelly.
The supply system between Bermuda and Wilmington was growing so rapidly that in early 1863 the Confederate Ordnance Department appointed Major Norman Walker to oversee its operations on the island. From his headquarters at the Globe Hotel on St. George, the industrious Walker arranged for 80,000 Enfield rifles, 27,000 Austrian rifles, and 21,000 muskets to be shipped in February alone. He also filled orders for steel, copper, and saltpeter and sent hundreds of cases packed with screwdrivers, cartridges, buckles, stirrups, percussion caps, buttons, and all other daily necessities required by the Confederate armies. Soon the U.S. consul in Bermuda reported that Confederate steamers were coming and going with the regularity of mail ships.1 As he was naturally resented by the locals for his attempts to interfere with this lucrative trade, the consul’s life became a daily round of harassments both petty and great. One morning in March a group of “colored blockade running seamen” took their revenge by loudly singing Confederate songs beneath his window.2
The Globe Hotel was a three-story stone building, painted a pretty shade of pink with black shutters. Built in 1699 as a residence for the governor, it was one of the oldest houses on the island. With each change of ownership the place had become a little more run-down and frayed about the edges, and it was currently a boardinghouse run by a widow and her three spinster sisters. But “it was a Palace to me,” wrote Major Walker’s pregnant wife, Georgiana, who arrived on March 24, 1863, with three young children in tow and what remained of their belongings. (One bag contained the Confederate flag and a pouch filled with Virginia soil. Georgiana intended to give birth with the flag draped symbolically above the bed and the soil placed underneath to ensure that the baby was a true Virginian.) Desperate to join her husband in Bermuda, Georgiana had approached every blockade runner in Wilmington pleading to be taken on as a passenger, until finally the captain of the Cornubia, the leading steamer in the Ordnance Department’s squadron, had taken pity on her. Georgiana became the first woman to run the blockade.
At times, Georgiana could count as many as a dozen Confederate flags in the harbor. Some of the vessels’ captains were Southern, but many were British, usually Royal Naval Reserve officers. One, the Hon. Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, a younger son of the sixth Earl of Buckinghamshire, even resigned his commission to dedicate himself to blockade running, and there seemed to be no shortage of thrill seekers from either branch of Her Majesty’s forces. On the steamship from Halifax to Liverpool in November, Matthew Maury and James Morgan had been surprised to learn that among the passengers was a group of English army officers who had used their leave to try blockade running. The Earl of Dunmore, who became friendly with Maury and Morgan, boasted of his capture and confinement in a Northern prison. The earl had “passed through the Federal lines and gone to Richmond and thence to Charleston,” wrote a clearly impressed Morgan.
He had travelled incognito, under his family name of Murray. The boat he took passage on successfully eluded the Federal fleet off Charleston, but an outside cruiser captured her the very next day. The prisoners were of course searched, and around the body of “Mr. Murray,” under his shirt, was found wrapped a Confederate flag—the flag of the C.S.S. Nashville, which had been presented to him by Captain Pegram. Despite his protestations that he was a Britisher traveling for pleasure, he was confined, as “Mr. Murray,” in Fort Lafayette. The British Minister, Lord Lyons, soon heard of his predicament and requested the authorities in Washington to order his release, representing him as being the Earl of Dunmore, a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Life Guards. But the commandant of Fort Lafayette denied that he had any such prisoner and it required quite a correspondence to persuade him that a man by the name of Murray could at the same time be Lord Dunmore.3
Lord Lyons implored his staff to discourage their friends and acquaintances from visiting the Confederacy. Two months after Edward Malet’s midnight encounter with Lord Hartington, the legation attaché was again called to the aid of an English civilian. The Federal security measures implemented after Mosby’s raid had snared another victim. George Alfred Lawrence was famous throughout England as the author of Guy Livingstone. Published in 1857, the novel eulogized a handsome daredevil Guards officer who defies social convention to the point of blackguardism but ultimately knows right from wrong. Five years later, Lawrence’s dashing alter ego still haunted its sedentary creator. In December 1862, Lawrence shocked his wife and friends by announcing his intention to serve as a volunteer staff officer to General Lee. In contrast to the devil-may-care Guy, Lawrence had carefully planned his adventure. He obtained highly laudatory letters of introduction, including one from James Mason, made financial provisions for his family, and secured an appointment from the Morning Post as its Southern correspondent.
Lawrence was greeted with adulation by the young attachés at the legation. Lord Lyons invited him to dinner, although he was not as taken with the author as his impressionable staff, one of whom supplied Lawrence with the address of the ever-obliging pro-Southern journalist W. W. Glenn. This time, however, Glenn regretted his involvement; Lawrence was captured on April 10 a few miles from the last Federal outpost in Greenland County, West Virginia. He was high-handed with his Federal interrogator and melodramatically refused to answer questions except to say “I am the author of Guy Livingstone and other works of fiction, I took no letters from Baltimore to carry and none were found on me.”
According to the army report, hidden among Lawrence’s personal belongings was a letter from Mr. Glenn giving directions on where to find his guide, “and the route to take, the persons to trust and to avoid … it reflects a disloyal and traitorous light.” There was also a scurrilous verse in his handwriting: “Jeff Davis rides a white horse, Abe rides a mule, Davis is a gentleman, Abe a fool.” William Seward was robustly unsympathetic when Lord Lyons wrote to him about releasing Lawrence from the Old Capitol prison.
The publicity attending Lawrence’s arrest was deeply embarrassing for Lord Lyons. He also feared what the English papers would say once it became known that the “author of Guy Livingstone” was being held in prison without charge. Despite persistent prodding by Lyons to bring Lawrence to trial or else release him, Seward did nothing for two months. The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, insisted that Seward make an example of Lawrence and showed his anger by refusing to grant any more passes to British military observers, including Lieutenant Colonel James Eli Crowther, who had been sent by the British Army as an official observer.19.1
George Lawrence whiled away his time in prison writing irritable letters to Lyons swearing that there was not “a shadow of foundation” to the charge he had sought to join the Confederacy. The attachés visited him weekly bearing little care packages, which the guards kept for themselves. Lawrence loathed his loquacious cellmate, whose “narrative riches about matched those of the knife-grinder.”5 His sole consolation, he wrote, was the occasional sight of a beautiful female prisoner who once threw him a white rose from her window. Apart from this innocent little romance, Lawrence kept to himself. When Seward finally ordered his release in June, Lawrence returned to New York a chastened man. Henceforth he would continue his campaign against the North from the safety of his study.
Lord Lyons might have been more persuasive with Seward if Lawrence’s arrest had not coincided with that of another adventure-hungry Briton. Twenty-year-old Alfred Rubery was one of life’s nincompoops. The death of his father, John, the largest umbrella manufacturer in Birmingham, had given him a modest independence. Leaving his older brother to manage the family business, Alfred went to San Francisco in the summer of 1862 with dreams of making his fortune in mining. He had not been in the city for long when he fell into a barroom argument with a Federal officer. Young Rubery had visited the South before the war. Naturally, as one who owed his wealth and social position to factory smoke, he idealized Southern society and thought it the most perfect on earth. He said all this and more to the incensed Lieutenant Tompkins, who happened to be the descendant of a New York State governor. “High words followed,” according to witnesses, “and Tompkins made a remark that touched Rubery’s honor. The latter simply said, ‘You will hear from me, sir,’ and left the room.”6
The virtually friendless Rubery needed a second for his duel with Tompkins. An acquaintance put him in touch with Asbury Harpending, a Confederate veteran who had fought at Shiloh. Only a year older than Rubery, Harpending seemed to be living proof that fantasies can come true. Brought up in Kentucky, he had run away from home as a teenager and made his way to Mexico, where he discovered a gold mine, becoming rich overnight. But the chronic anarchy and violence that bedeviled Mexico soon separated Harpending from his new source of wealth. Undaunted, when the war began, he went to San Francisco with fresh schemes in mind. His first idea was to organize a chapter of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret pro-Southern society, and have each member recruit a hundred volunteers. This, he reckoned, would give him a big enough force to seize California’s government buildings and declare the state’s allegiance to the South. When that failed, he somehow got himself to Richmond, where he wrangled an officer’s commission in the Confederate navy.
Harpending returned to San Francisco with a new plan. He and a friend named Ridgley Greathouse were going to charter a ship, sail it into Mexican waters, and lie in wait for the Pacific Mail steamer and its cargo of California gold. After offloading the passengers, they would equip the steamer as a privateer and send the gold to Richmond. Thus armed, they would prey on Californian cargo ships and, with luck, disrupt the supply of gold to the North. The only hitch to the plan was the $25,000 required to see it through to execution. Harpending was therefore delighted to meet the pro-Southern and apparently well-heeled Rubery.
But first, Harpending had to rescue his friend from the duel with Tompkins. Alfred Rubery’s physical prowess lagged far behind his enthusiasm. “I tried him at pistol practice,” recalled Harpending, “and found that, with extra good luck, at ten paces he could hit a barn.” The American could fast-talk his way out of anything; he used his gift now to make the duel disappear. With Tompkins safely dispatched, the three conspirators began looking for a suitable ship. They soon happened upon the J. M. Chapman, a ninety-ton schooner that had just made a record-breaking voyage from New York. As soon as ownership was transferred to them, they proceeded to hire a crew and purchase enough firepower to make a formidable warship. “It only remained to secure a navigator who could be implicitly trusted,” wrote Harpending. When none materialized, they were forced to engage William Law, a sea captain and ex–slave trader who had been dismissed by the Pacific Mail Company. Law had only eight fingers and “was the most repulsive reptile in appearance that I ever set eyes on,” wrote Harpending. His antipathy proved well founded.
The day of departure was set for March 15, 1863. The night before, Harpending and Rubery hid in a dark alley behind the American Exchange Hotel and waited for the crew to arrive. They then divided into three squads to avoid suspicion and “slipped through the dimly lighted streets, past roaring saloons and sailor boarding houses” and reached an unfrequented part of the waterfront unnoticed, where the privateer was moored. Rubery and Harpending “were exultant.” But,
when we scrambled aboard the Chapman, Greathouse was pacing the deck in agitation. Law was not there. I experienced a shock such as a man receives when a bucket of ice water is emptied on him in his sleep. The suggestion of treachery could not be avoided. We cast loose from the wharf and anchored in the stream. But we were helpless. We could not sail without our navigator. We had nothing to do but wait.7
Shortly after dawn the three conspirators awoke to find the Chapman surrounded by U.S. gunboats. The authorities had been keeping careful surveillance for several days. Rubery and Harpending had neglected to supply the local revenue officers with a cargo manifest, thereby piquing official interest in the mysterious boxes that were being loaded in such a hurry. The luckless three were taken to Alcatraz, where Rubery was soon visited by Consul William Lane Booker, who thought him to be a rather unsympathetic, cocky youth who fully deserved his punishment. “He has nothing to complain as to his treatment,” Booker reported to Lord Russell, “beyond being deprived of his liberty.”8 The evidence against Rubery was so overwhelming that Lyons made no attempt to intervene on his behalf. While searching through Rubery’s baggage, the Federals had found a plan for capturing San Francisco’s military forts, a proclamation to the people of California urging them to join the Confederacy, and a declaration of allegiance for those who did.
Rubery’s family could not accept that their little Alfred had played a central role in the conspiracy. For the past three months he had been spinning a tale to them about a mining venture in Mexico. Determined to prove his innocence, they showed the letters to Birmingham’s two MPs, John Bright and William Scholefield. Neither shared the Ruberys’ delusion: “They seem to be wholly unaware that he can have committed himself so as to justify his arrest,” wrote Scholefield pityingly.9 “[Alfred] must be wonderfully stupid to have engaged in any conspiracy,” decided John Bright, “and yet I hear that he is sharp and clever, and was educated at the London University.” The Rubery name and fortune carried sufficient weight in Birmingham to make it impossible for the MPs to ignore the family’s request for help. John Bright reluctantly wrote to Charles Sumner, “Is it too much for me to ask you to procure his liberation on condition that he shall at once return to England?”10 It was. Rubery remained at Alcatraz.
—
Lord Lyons refused to let either George Lawrence or Alfred Rubery disrupt his enjoyment of the first days of spring. It was not only possible but also delightful to walk down streets abloom with flowering trees. The great drying-out attracted crowds of tourists and distinguished visitors to the city. Seward’s house became lively again, and nineteen-year-old Fanny Seward briefly relinquished her reserve to enjoy a brief flirtation with an English naval surgeon on leave from USS Commodore Morris.
Washington society turned out en masse, including President Lincoln, to watch the self-styled “youngest star in the world,” John Wilkes Booth, play Hamlet at Grover’s Theatre. Dr. Charles Culverwell observed Booth’s debut in the capital. Having heard that the lesser parts were open to audition, Culverwell took a leave of absence and auditioned under the name Charles Wyndham. To his great surprise, he won the part of Osric. On the handbills for the play, Culverwell was described as “Charles Wyndham: first appearance of a gifted young actor.” After the opening night on April 14, 1863, no one mentioned Osric, but Booth received praise from every quarter. Many years later, Culverwell still retained vivid memories of his brief encounter with Booth:
During my introductory rehearsal I wandered about the stage and finally chose an advantageous position at a little table where I could command a good view of all the proceedings. John Wilkes noticed me there and smiled.… The courtesy and kindness shown to me by John Wilkes made way for friendship between us, and we frequently were together after the play. He was a most charming fellow, off the stage as well as on, a man of flashing wit and magnetic manner. He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I have ever listened. As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic. He could hold a group spellbound by the hour at the force and fire and beauty of him … as an actor, the natural endowment of John Wilkes Booth was of the highest. His original gift was greater than that of his wonderful brother, Edwin.… He was the idol of women. They would rave of him, his voice, his hair, and his eyes. Small wonder, for he was fascinating.… Poor, sad, mad, bad, John Wilkes Booth.11
Lord Lyons was never given the opportunity to watch Booth play Hamlet; a careless clerk in the Foreign Office had forwarded the legation’s correspondence to the printers of the parliamentary “Blue Book” without first removing the censored passages. Its arrival in mid-April caused such controversy that Lyons suffered the same hideous embarrassment that had ruined Charles Francis Adams’s Christmas. “The goodwill to me personally, which miraculously survived so long, seems at last to have sunk altogether,” wrote Lyons. The political damage was also considerable. The Blue Book had offended or alienated both supporters and enemies alike: “Unluckily the book contains just the passages in my dispatches which are most irritating to each of the parties, and which it is most inconvenient to them to have published.”12 Lyons was especially worried about how the Blue Book would affect his relationship with Seward. He had heard that the secretary was annoyed and feared that it made him appear weak in his dealings with the diplomatic corps.
Lyons also braced himself for a difficult time over the Peterhoff affair, with Seward making public threats and statements about what the United States would and would not stand for, similar to his recent grandstanding about letters of marque. But Seward surprised him; rather than allowing the controversy to take on a life of its own, he courageously defied the objections of the abinet and returned the Peterhoff’s captured mailbag to Lyons. He even prevailed upon his rival Gideon Welles to transfer Admiral Wilkes to the Pacific Ocean, where there were fewer opportunities to cause trouble. The U.S. navy secretary grudgingly gave the order, but in secret Welles fantasized about the dire retribution awaiting Britain—“years of desolation, of dissolution, of suffering and blood.”13 Welles’s supporters started a whispering campaign against Lyons. “Among other devices,” wrote Lyons, “is that of representing me as having made the most violent and arrogant demands about the Peterhoff.” This led to an unpleasant encounter with Charles Sumner at a dinner party. The senator dragged Lyons into a corner and proceeded to rail at him for overstepping his prerogative. Lyons was dumbfounded at first, then swore he had never made anything resembling a demand. He finally offered to show Sumner copies of his correspondence with Seward.14
Lyons wondered whether he was wasting his efforts to bolster good relations between the two countries. “One hardly knows whether to wish the North success or failure in the field,” he had written to Russell during the Peterhoff affair.15 Yet the Confederacy was equally bitter against England, Lyons learned from the diplomatic bags that occasionally made it out of the South.19.2 “It ought to have been known here from the first, but was not, that England could be no friend to the Confederacy or its cause,” declared the Richmond Enquirer, for example. “We have been long in finding out the truth and, before we would admit it, have endured some humiliations and insolent airs on the part of that Power, which surprised us very much, but ought not to have done so. At last the thing has become too clear.”17
Southern rage against Britain placed Francis Lawley in a difficult position. He had completed his tour of the Confederacy and returned to Richmond at the end of March, but his report for The Times was taking longer than usual to compose. Anything less than unqualified praise, Lawley had discovered, was not tolerated by his hosts. He confided his exasperation to William Gregory. “I cannot impress upon you the difficulty which I find in the discharge of my present office, in avoiding topics which will be calculated to ruffle the amour propre … of the most susceptible people and government on earth.”18
Lawley still believed in the purity of the Southern planter class as the epitome of all that was noble and intelligent in the human race. But in his opinion, the rest of the Southern population was going to the dogs: “Richmond and in a less degree, Charleston and Mobile, strike me as immense gambling booths.” He would know—many of his friends and acquaintances, including Judah Benjamin, made up the chief clientele of Richmond’s illicit “hells.” Profiteering, corruption, and hoarding were rampant. Lawley felt a visceral disappointment whenever he observed Southerners behaving like ordinary human beings in time of war, and he tried as much as possible to shut his eyes to the messy aspects of the South. He required moral clarity from the Confederates, especially now that the North was growing stronger and more aggressive. Part of him was confident that “Fighting Joe” Hooker stood no chance against Lee. But he had seen enough of the Federal army to have doubts, even if he preferred not to express them out loud. “My sole and only hope is in the demoralization of the Yankees but I have little faith in it,” he wrote to Gregory. “The truth is that the Yankee fights much better than he has been represented as fighting.”19
On April 2, 1863, a few days after Lawley had unburdened himself to Gregory, there were bread riots in Richmond. The Confederate capital was a microcosm of the many hardships being endured across the South; hunger and disease were spreading. Smallpox had invaded the poorer neighborhoods as more refugees arrived, begging for space even if it meant sleeping outside on a porch or in a garden shed. Everything was scarce. Women who before the war bought only the finest scented soaps from France were using soap made from kitchen grease mixed with lye. Ordinary articles such as pins and buttons were so hard to come by that John Jones, the diarist in the Confederate War Department, walked to work every day with his eyes fixed on the ground hoping to find some carelessly dropped treasure in the gutter.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was also suffering; the men had been on half rations for so long that many were showing the first signs of scurvy. There were still plenty of foodstuffs in southern Virginia and North Carolina, particularly in the fertile tidewater regions near the coast, but over the past year, transportation had become almost impossible. The Federal occupation of Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern—all of them strategically important towns along the southeastern seaboard—was choking the Confederate supply line. On the morning of the bread riots in Richmond, General Longstreet—Francis Dawson’s new commander—received permission to attack Suffolk. The Union garrison there was weakly held, and Longstreet believed he could take it with twenty thousand men. The Confederate general had hoped to launch a surprise attack, but an intercepted message alerted the Federals to his plan.
Washington promptly dispatched thousands of troops to strengthen the garrison, forcing Longstreet to alter his battle plan from an attack to a siege. The no longer plump Englishman George Herbert of the 9th New York Volunteers (“Hawkins’s Zouaves”) was among the Union reinforcements. The regiment was thunderstruck by its mobilization. The men had only six weeks left before the terms of their enlistment expired. They had expected to remain in camp at Newport News, Virginia, where the most strenuous activity of the day was a game of baseball against the 51st New York. The men “are all anxiously looking forward to our final march up Broadway,” Herbert told his mother. Few of them intended to reenlist: Herbert was already planning his future in England. “I guess I shall have somewhere about $400 when I am mustered out and the more gold falls the richer I shall be,” he mused on March 31.20
Eleven days later, on April 11, Herbert and his comrades disembarked at Portsmouth Naval Yard. The regiment stood listlessly under pelting rain as inquiries revealed that Suffolk was already under siege by Longstreet’s forces. The trains had been canceled and there were no available wagons. The soldiers were forced to march twenty-seven miles over railroad ties, loaded down with all their equipment. It was dark by the time they reached the Suffolk camp. No one had bothered to prepare for the regiment’s arrival, so the men went from tent to tent seeking a place to sleep. The lieutenant colonel, Edgar Kimball, found an old friend from the Mexican War and spent a few hours warming himself with his tent companion’s whiskey.
A little after 2:00 A.M., Kimball remembered his orders to report to General George Getty’s headquarters. On the way, however, he came across General Michael Corcoran, the boisterous commander of the Irish Brigade. In one version of what happened next, Kimball went to the aid of a sentry who was shouting at several men on horseback. Corcoran, on the other hand, claimed that Kimball suddenly emerged from the darkness and grabbed his bridle, demanding that the countersign be given. But according to all versions of the incident, Corcoran refused to give it, saying, “I am General Corcoran and staff.” This was not enough for Kimball, who began brandishing his sword, whereupon Corcoran shot him at point-blank range. Journalists at the camp rushed to telegraph the news of his death.
Kimball’s insistence on the proper countersign was initially commended as a wise precaution when the guerrilla John Mosby was about: “Under the circumstances, with a Rebel force in close proximity, an enemy might have said the same thing,” wrote a New York correspondent. When the Zouaves learned of their colonel’s death, many of them picked up their weapons and started for Corcoran’s camp. Fearing a riot, General Getty had the bugle sounded for assembly, which the men instinctively obeyed. He sat on his horse in front of the regiment and made a conciliatory speech, promising that there would be an investigation into Kimball’s shooting. The soldiers calmed down as they listened. At first they were rather pleased to hear that the general was sending them away from the camp at once. A few hours later, when they had reached Fort Nansemond, the men realized that the general had ordered them to the “extreme front.” The Zouaves spent the next twenty-two days under continuous fire from Confederate rifle pits, “so fully occupied with the enemy in front,” wrote the regiment’s historian, “that if his satanic majesty had wished to brew mischief he could have found no heart or hands in the regiment to do it for him.” None of the regiment was allowed to attend Kimball’s funeral in New York on April 20.21
As more Union troops were sent to reinforce Suffolk, Longstreet realized that his small army would soon be radically outnumbered. He saw no reason to continue the siege, since enough bacon and grain to feed Lee’s army for two months had been collected during the so-called Tidewater Campaign. Longstreet was preparing to withdraw his men when a telegram arrived on May 3, 1863, ordering his immediate return to the Army of Northern Virginia: “Fighting Joe” Hooker was on the move. Longstreet tried to move as quickly as he could without jeopardizing the safety of the long wagon trains filled with supplies.
George Henry Herbert’s term of enlistment ended on the same day as Longstreet’s retreat. The Zoaves threatened to mutiny if they were kept at Suffolk a minute longer, sufficiently alarming the authorities into providing troop transports to take the Zouaves straight to New York.
Longstreet doubted that he would reach Lee in time to help him stop General Hooker’s advance. Suffolk was more than 150 miles from Fredericksburg and “Fighting Joe” had been counting on this when he devised his battle plan. The two armies had passed the winter facing each other across the banks of the Rappahannock River. Hooker tried to give the impression that he was contemplating another frontal assault on Fredericksburg in order to hide the fact that he was looking for places to ford the river upstream. Richmond was still his objective, and the Confederate army was still blocking the way; but Hooker’s strategy—one of the boldest on the Union side for the entire war—involved a sophisticated deception. He intended to force the Confederates out of their entrenched position at Fredericksburg by attacking them simultaneously from several different directions. To achieve this, he needed to disguise the whereabouts of his army until it was too late for Lee to do anything other than react defensively.
Hooker knew that the Army of the Potomac had a two-to-one advantage over Lee, whose Army of Northern Virginia numbered fewer than 65,000 men. The Union general thought he could increase the odds even more by sending his 12,000-strong cavalry corps on raids around Richmond, with instructions to “Let your watchword be fight, fight, fight.” He wanted the cavalry to isolate Richmond from the rest of the state, causing panic in the capital and, with luck, forcing Lee to detach a part of his army for its defense. Sir Percy Wyndham’s regiment had a merry time ripping up railroads and cutting communications north of Richmond, rarely encountering opposition. Predictably, Wyndham went too far and began thinking up his own assignments, which led to his arrest for insubordination; after vigorous protests by his supporters, he was released with a censure for disobeying orders.
Hooker was in a jubilant mood once the Army of the Potomac started moving on April 29. Leaving 40,000 troops at Fredericksburg, under the capable command of General “Uncle John” Sedgwick, he ordered the rest, numbering almost 80,000 men and officers, to cross the Rappahannock River at two different places and rendezvous at Chancellorsville, nine miles west of Fredericksburg. The name applied not to a village but to a clearing in a wood that spread over seventy square miles in such dense thickets that locals simply labeled it “the Wilderness.” A crossroads cut through the middle of the clearing, passing close to the veranda of an old brick mansion named Chancellor House. Here Hooker and his staff set up their temporary headquarters, flushing the indignant female inhabitants out of the parlor to their bedrooms on the floor above. He was ready to launch his surprise attack. “My plans are perfect,” he declared on the eve of the battle; “may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”22
19.1 Stanton was like Seward in his inability to resist an aristocratic title. He granted a visitor’s permit to Lord Abinger, who was stationed in Canada with the Scots Guards. Abinger went down to the Army of the Potomac, was treated to a grand review, and had his photograph taken with Hooker’s staff. Owing to his discreet and affable nature, no one among his hosts had the faintest idea of his true feelings. In contrast to the neutral Crowther, Abinger was thoroughly sympathetic to the South. The previous April, he had invited Commissioner James Mason to dine at the regimental mess in Eastbourne. Mason was most gratified to have the notice of a Scottish peer and recorded every detail of the outing in his diary.4
19.2 It was no longer the exception but the rule for British subjects to be conscripted into the army or jailed if they refused. By some miracle, Lord Lyons received a letter from a Yorkshire lad in a Southern jail in Mississippi. The writer was desperate for help: “I was, like a very dog, ordered to ‘fall in,’ ” he wrote, “and were sent to this place and placed in artillary [sic] companies. I again told my captain of my immunity from the service but it availed nothing.… I was sick from exposure and sent to hospital where I have been ever since, except the last two weeks when I was arrested and sent to Jail, where I now write this, charged with cursing the Confederacy and trying to escape the place, which they term desertion.”16