A great gamble—Death of Stonewall Jackson—Grant reaches Vicksburg—Arthur Fremantle meets the famous Colonel Grenfell—Feilden in love
The discovery that Hooker had divided his army and was planning to crush him like a nut between two hammers came as a tremendous shock for Lee, who was unused to being tricked by his Federal opponents. Having weighed the various risks and options for his army, Lee decided that the greatest danger came from Hooker’s advancing forces rather than the 47,000 Federals still remaining at Fredericksburg. Fortunately, Lee had avoided the trap of dispatching part of his army to defend Richmond, having correctly guessed that the Federal cavalry raids around the capital were nothing more than a feint. Even so, Lee could afford to leave only 10,000 men to hold Fredericksburg. The remaining 52,000 he ordered to turn around and take up defensive positions just beyond Chancellorsville. Lee planned to attack Hooker’s troops as they emerged from the Wilderness, using the advantage of surprise.
The fighting began on May 1, 1863. At Fredericksburg, General Sedgwick fired some artillery at the Confederates and engaged in a few skirmishes. It was hardly the aggressive movement envisaged by “Fighting Joe” Hooker, but to the raw and untested second lieutenant Henry George Hore, it seemed as though he had participated in a marvelous triumph. Hore had joined Sedgwick’s staff only a few weeks earlier, having sailed from England to do his part in freeing the slaves. “We are victorious and captured [the Confederates’] batteries, men and all,” Hore wrote in the afternoon to his cousin Olivia; it had been “the Battle of Fredericksburg the Second.”1
Francis Lawley had rushed from Richmond as soon as he heard that Hooker was on the march but was disappointed that the Wilderness’s impenetrable scrub made it impossible for him to see what was happening. What blinded him also hindered Hooker’s generals as they tried to lead their men through the woods. At 2:00 P.M., after meeting relatively light pockets of resistance from the Confederates, Hooker suddenly called off the advance and ordered his army to retreat back to Chancellorsville. His commanders begged him to continue fighting. Hooker was obstinate: “I have got Lee just where I want him,” he told General Darius Couch, who walked away from the meeting convinced that “Fighting Joe” “was a whipped man.” Hooker was never able to explain his decision afterward except to say that all of a sudden he lost faith in himself.2
That night, Lee and Stonewall Jackson discussed how to take advantage of their adversary’s hesitation. They agreed to divide their already outnumbered army into even smaller segments. Jackson would take thirty thousand men and march around Hooker’s army, relying on local guides to find a way through the Wilderness, and surprise him from the rear, while Lee remained in front with just fifteen thousand troops. In any other battle, the enemy cavalry would have spotted such a maneuver, but Hooker’s was miles away, destroying barns and canals.
When Hooker was informed that large troop movements were taking place, he decided that it meant the Confederates were retreating back to Fredericksburg. It never occurred to him that Lee would attempt an attack from two different directions, using the same divide-and-surprise tactic that he himself had intended to employ. The next day, May 2, at five o’clock, just as the Federals were sitting down to cook their dinners, Stonewall Jackson ordered his men to charge. “Swift and sudden as the falcon sweeping her prey, Jackson had burst on his enemy’s rear and crushed him before resistance could be attempted,” wrote Francis Lawley in a sudden fit of poetry.3 The rout was so complete that an entire wing of the Union force collapsed and ran back toward headquarters, some two miles away. The first Hooker learned of the battle was when one of his staff officers happened to walk out onto the veranda and look through his field glasses. “My God, here they come!” he shouted.4 The lines between the two armies became blurred as the twilight turned to darkness.
Hooker was not beaten yet, however. Though strangely passive with regard to his immediate danger, he had no trouble directing the operations at Fredericksburg. Furious that Sedgwick had been poking rather than smashing the Confederates’ positions, Hooker sent him a terse message demanding the capture of the town, and instructed the message bearer to stay until Sedgwick had moved into action.5 The direct order had its effect.
Henry Hore was up early on May 3, riding hard between Sedgwick’s headquarters and the batteries. Now he saw real fighting instead of the tepid firing of the day before. It was a shock for him to discover that the rebel soldiers handled their rifles with far greater accuracy than his own side. Sedgwick’s troops were flailing until the Federal artillery unleashed its guns. There was such a long delay before the first explosions, wrote Hore, “that I thought [the rebels] would take the guns before we fired. At last came the word: ‘Depress pieces’ and I quite felt sick, they were just about fifty yards or so from my horse who was as much excited as myself.”
The next hour was Hore’s initiation into the sordid truth of war. “Good God, my dear girl, it was awful,” he admitted to his cousin Olivia. “Their dead seemed piled heaps upon heaps, the shot went right clear through them, completely smashing the front of the columns.” Sedgwick ordered ten regiments to charge across the plain toward Marye’s Heights, the same attack formation that had decimated the Irish 69th and so many other regiments in December. But this time there was only a thin line of Confederates behind the famous stone wall, and in half an hour the attackers were up and over, lunging forward with their bayonets. Sedgwick was so excited that he tore a page from a letter meant for his wife and scribbled an order for more artillery. He gave it to Hore with the command to ride as fast as he could and return with every gun he could find. A fellow officer named Hansard, who had abjured his home state of South Carolina to support the North, offered to accompany him.
The two officers were almost at the rear when a Confederate raiding party came crashing through the trees with terrifying whoops and yells.6 Hore wheeled his horse around, hoping that Hansard was with him. But when he looked behind him he saw one of the raiders spur his horse on and reach out to grab Hansard’s bridle. Hore made a split-second decision to turn around. As he did so, the two riders struggled and fell to the ground. Hansard landed on his back. While he lay helpless, a Confederate cavalryman whipped out his sword and plunged it into his chest. Hore watched, aghast, as the raider leaned forward and tore off Hansard’s shoulder straps. The rebel locked eyes with Hore and shook the straps at him. “I now felt as if he or I must be killed,” wrote Hore. Time slowed and each movement became exaggeratedly clear in his memory. He pulled out his revolver and galloped toward the cavalryman: “I had made up my mind I would kill him if I could.” The rebel either had no gun or forgot he had one. When Hore was sure he would not miss, he fired straight at him: “This did not take 30 seconds,” he wrote, “not near so long as it takes me to write. I sighted him along the barrel of my revolver and if I had not killed him the first time would have shot again, for H[ansard] was a good friend to me.”7
Map.14 Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863
Click here to view a larger image.
Hore remembered little else of that day. Once the Federal army had breached Marye’s Heights, the Confederates pulled back toward Chancellorsville, making a new stand in the woods around Salem Church. Though still outnumbered, the Confederates managed to hold down Sedgwick’s troops. Hore was confused and thought that the Confederate retreat meant another victory. “They have not gained (the Rebels I mean) a single yard,” he wrote, “and we don’t mean they shall,” not realizing that in Hooker’s plan, Sedgwick should have been at Chancellorsville by now, helping to smash Lee’s little army. By this time, Hooker was sorely in need of Sedgwick. Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of the third, a Confederate cannonball had smashed into the veranda of Chancellor House, knocking Hooker unconscious. Though still groggy after coming to, he insisted on resuming command, much to the dismay of his staff. Contrary to his commanders’ wishes, Hooker ordered a general retreat.
Shortly after Hooker’s departure, Chancellor House went up in flames.20.1 Lee trotted up to the burning house as Confederates came running toward him, cheering and shouting wildly. Behind them the Wilderness had been transformed into a roaring furnace, trapping the lost and wounded. Men closest to the conflagration could see figures waving in the inferno. Union and Confederate soldiers braved the searing heat to pull out anyone they could. Two enemies fought together to rescue a trapped youth: “The fire was all around him,” recalled the Federal soldier. They could see his face: “His eyes were big and blue, and his hair like raw silk surrounded by a wreath of fire.” In vain, they burned their hands trying to reach him. “I heard him scream, ‘Oh Mother, O God.’ It left me trembling all over, like a leaf.” The defeated rescuers fled the forest. Although it was agony to open their fingers, “me and them rebs tried to shake hands.”8
There was no cathartic pain for Henry Hore. On the night of the fourth, taking advantage of the full moon, he led a burial party to look for Hansard’s body. They found him lying next to the dead rebel. Hore dug a grave and buried Hansard, but he deliberately left the Confederate raider to rot out in the open. “My dear Cousin you must think me quite savage,” he wrote afterward in the bleak surroundings of a dark, filthy barn, “but the carnage of this frightful war and the horrid sights I see every day made me indifferent to human life. At one time I should have never thought of killing anyone, but now can shoot a man without a shake of my hand. I think I am writing to you more as if you were a hard hearted man than a very pretty girl.”
On May 5 the balmy weather was replaced by lashing wind and rain. The Confederate commanders informed Lee that another attack was beyond their men’s strength. The storm provided the Union army with perfect cover as it slowly crawled back over the Rappahannock River. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.’s cavalry regiment was on the other side, part of the skeleton force of mounted troops Hooker had kept behind. He initially discounted the tales from the abject stragglers who stopped to ask for food or shelter, but “in the afternoon came the crusher,” he told his father. They received the order to saddle up and return to their old camp. They found it “deserted, burned up, filthy, and surrounded with dead horses. We tied up our horses and stood dismally round in the pouring rain.”9
Henry Hore arrived at Fortress Monroe on Hampton Roads a few days later, on May 9, a young man no longer.10 The magnitude of Hooker’s defeat was numbing: 17,000 casualties to Lee’s 13,000, without gaining the slightest moral or tactical advantage. Lincoln was horror-struck when he read the telegram, exclaiming, “My God, my God, what will the country say?” The press was predictably harsh: “Everybody feels,” wrote Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, and a close friend of the president’s, “that the war is drawing to a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”11 The New York World railed that the “gallant Army of the Potomac” had been “marched to fruitless slaughter” by “an imbecile department and led by an incompetent general.”12
The country’s frustration with its leaders made the gratitude felt toward the volunteers all the deeper and more profound. A flotilla of boats swarmed the troopship carrying the 9th New York Volunteers as it approached the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Thousands of well-wishers lined the pier, throwing flowers and waving flags, and a military band escorted the soldiers along Broadway to Union Square. The men were still wearing their filthy uniforms from the siege at Suffolk, but their disheveled appearance seemed to delight the crowds. This was the enthusiastic reception that the seven hundred survivors of the regiment had been imagining for weeks. On May 20, 1863, George Henry Herbert handed over his weapon at the armory, shook hands with his comrades one last time, and walked away. After a disastrous beginning that had made him the butt of the regiment’s jokes, Herbert had grown to love his life in the army. He sailed for England richer by $400, ready to start life afresh.
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Lee had maintained a sanguine demeanor throughout the battle—until the moment he learned that Stonewall Jackson had been shot. Jackson had been reconnoitering positions when he accidentally galloped into his own picket line. The nervous Confederate guards shot blindly at the group, killing several riders and striking Jackson. Two bullets tore through his left arm; another hit his right wrist. He was also dragged along by his horse and dropped by his stretcher bearers. The damage to his left arm was irreparable; the limb had to be amputated the next morning. Lee sent Jackson a message via the chaplain begging him to recover quickly, adding, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm.” As soon as doctors deemed he could be moved, Jackson was loaded onto an ambulance and taken on a twenty-seven-mile journey to a plantation at Guinea Station.
Francis Lawley followed behind, arriving at the plantation on May 7. Jackson had been moved to the estate office, where he could recuperate in private. “With a beating heart I rode up to ask after him,” wrote Lawley. The doctor stepped outside so that he could speak plainly; the general’s wife and infant daughter were inside. Jackson had appeared to be recovering, but late the previous night the classic signs of pneumonia had set in. Lawley knew what this meant: “I gave up all hope of his recovery.”13
Lawley could not bear to wait for the end, so he boarded one of the trains taking the wounded back to Richmond. On May 8 he sent a letter to the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, warning him of Jackson’s desperate condition. Two days later, on the tenth, Jackson died. Lee cried when he learned the news; there was not a man or woman, North or South, who failed to understand the meaning of Jackson’s death or his vital importance to the Confederacy.20.2
The loss of Jackson posed a dilemma for Lawley. If he made too much of it in his reports, readers might think that the South had suffered a mortal blow. Yet here was an opportunity to create a mythic figure whose heroic end would elevate the entire Southern cause. Lawley did his best, eulogizing Jackson as both an earthly saint and a military genius whose death would only inspire the South to “deeds of more than mortal valor.” (Unfortunately, the blockade was playing havoc with Lawley’s dispatches; his obituary of Jackson reached London before the news of his shooting.)15
Lawley was so concerned about presenting Jackson’s death in the best possible light that he deliberately obscured the gravity of the situation out west. On May 19, 1863, he finally revealed to the English public that Vicksburg might not be impregnable after all. The news was “contrary to my own and the general anticipation,” Lawley admitted at the end of yet another article on Stonewall Jackson. General Grant had won a series of tactical victories, beginning with a successful night raid by the Union navy on April 16 that enabled the fleet to steam up the Mississippi River past Vicksburg’s thirty-one guns. Grant stopped all the useless digging and canal building and set his army loose against the Confederates. On May 1 his troops crushed the small force holding the town of Port Gibson, thirty miles south of Vicksburg. Suddenly it was as though the wind was at their backs. The Federal army raced toward Vicksburg, fighting four battles in seventeen days, swatting aside the Confederates’ resistance. General Sherman razed most of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, on May 14, in a fiery portent of what was to come in 1864.
Grant’s success frightened Richmond, but there was no agreement on how he should be stopped. Longstreet thought they should provoke a battle against the Union Army of the Cumberland, which was stationed in Tennessee. This, he argued, would force Grant to divide his forces between the two theaters. Jefferson Davis wanted to send reinforcements to the two Confederate generals defending Mississippi, John Pemberton and Joseph E. Johnston (now fully recovered from his bullet wound). But Lee had his own plan, one so bold and risky that its very audaciousness made any other suggestion appear timid and lackluster. He proposed to lead his army north again—for an invasion of Pennsylvania. The state was unprotected. Hooker would have to withdraw from Virginia to defend Washington. At the very worst, the North would look vulnerable to its own citizens, and possibly, in the eyes of the international community, incapable of winning the war. The Confederate cabinet debated Lee’s proposal for two days and at last agreed, with only the postmaster general, John Reagan, dissenting. Davis decided that Vicksburg would have to be reinforced with regiments from all parts of the South except Virginia.
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In May 1863, Frank Vizetelly was on board one of the relief trains carrying troops to Vicksburg. He was going out west, Vizetelly informed his readers, because “the campaign in the valley of the Mississippi will, I believe, decide the duration of the war.”16 He offered no explanation as to why he had missed the Battle of Chancellorsville. Given the state of his debts and his propensity to fall off the wagon, Vizetelly’s absence and his sudden decision to go to Vicksburg were probably connected. The train juddered slowly across Georgia and Mississippi, the track so worn and buckled in places that it was derailed three times. On the last, Vizetelly was thrown hard against the carriage and suffered a concussion. For an hour or two he thought his arm was broken and was relieved to find it only badly bruised. The engineers managed to keep the train going until they reached Jackson, Mississippi, forty-five miles east of Vicksburg. Sherman’s departure was so recent that the city was still burning. Nothing of any value was intact, certainly nothing that might repair the damaged train. “The Yankees were guilty of every kind of vandalism,” Vizetelly wrote with indignation. “They sacked houses, stole clothing from the negroes, burst open their trunks, and took what little money they had.”
Ill.37 Train with reinforcements for General Johnston running off the tracks in the forests of Mississippi, by Frank Vizetelly.
Now he was not sure where to go. The news from Vicksburg was ominous. The Federal army had surrounded the hilltop town; Confederate general John Pemberton’s army of thirty thousand men was holed up inside, along with three thousand luckless civilians. The Confederate army had enough rations to last sixty days. The fatherless families who cowered in its midst, on the other hand, had only their gardens, their fast-emptying cupboards, and, in the final resort, their pets. Vizetelly decided he had no choice but to stay in and around Jackson. His exploration of the surrounding countryside revealed dozens of dismal encampments, where women and children had clustered together for protection. It was an unexpected sight, he wrote. “Ladies who have been reared in luxury” were living rough like country peasants, “with nothing but a few yards of canvas to protect them from the frequent thunderstorms which burst in terrific magnificence at this season of the year over Mississippi.”17
Only two months before, Northern newspapers had branded Grant a failure and a drunk. But since then, he had marched 130 miles and won every battle. Charles A. Dana, the observer sent by Lincoln and Stanton to Grant’s headquarters, had seen much that troubled him: the callous, even brutal, attitude toward the sick appalled him, but he never saw Grant incapacitated. In fact, closer acquaintance made Dana appreciate the general’s particular genius for waging war without ever faltering or second-guessing himself. This determined quality stood Grant well once he reached Vicksburg: his first assault on May 19 was a dismal failure. A thousand Federal soldiers fell in the attack, but not a foot was gained. On the second attempt, three days later, he lost another three thousand men. Grant insisted that the army remain where it was. But he also refused to request a flag of truce to allow the wounded to be collected. The injured lay strewn among the dead for two days. The only witness to their suffering was the harsh sun, which putrefied the dead and flayed the living. Finally driven mad by the screams and stench from the ditches, the Confederates sent a message to Grant, begging him “in the name of humanity” to rescue his men.18
It then dawned on Grant that all he had to do was be patient and starve out the inhabitants. Inside the town, no one believed such a calamity would come to pass. General Pemberton and his men were waiting for General Johnston to lead his army to their rescue. But the cantankerous Johnston had warned Pemberton not to retreat to Vicksburg, and now that it had happened he wrote off the town and the army as lost. Nothing, not even the urgent telegrams from President Davis and Secretary of War Seddon, could make Johnston change his mind and risk his small force of 24,000 men against a Federal army three times the size. His one concession was to send out a request for volunteers to sneak supplies through the Federal lines into Vicksburg. Vizetelly accompanied some of the missions. These forays were exceedingly dangerous. The scouts had to crawl on their hands and knees in the dark for miles, “avoiding every gleam of moonlight, and prepared at any moment to use the revolver or the knife.” Many previous attempts, Vizetelly informed his readers, had ended with the volunteers being either captured or shot. During one particular mission, the intrepid band scrambled along gorges and through pathless woods until they were twelve miles from Vicksburg. There they left Vizetelly and disappeared into a ravine. “As I lay on the ground in the calm, quiet night I could distinctly hear sounds of musketry between the loud booming of mortars,” he wrote. Whether that meant success or failure he could not tell and would not know until the next day.19
Shells continually rained down on Vicksburg, shaking nerves and buildings alike. Parishioners of St. Paul’s Catholic church attended mass even though the church was dangerously situated on one of the highest points of the town. On one occasion a shell crashed through a window and exploded above the altar. Stunned but unhurt, Father John Bannon calmed his screaming congregation and continued with the service.20 The townspeople retreated to their cellars and to caves dug deep into the hillside, but there was no respite from the thunderous noise. Afterward, witnesses wrote in wonder at the little touches of comfort people added to their caves. As the siege went on, rugs, chairs, even beds were dragged underground. But bravado, enterprise, and fortitude ultimately gave way to hunger, fear, and despair.
The barrage was not all one way. As long as they had shells, the gunners in Vicksburg had their choice of sitting targets outside. Each time he led his wagon trains out to forage, Ebenezer Wells, the English wagon master of the 79th New York, bade farewell to his friends. On several occasions he returned to camp with bullets lodged in his saddle and blanket. “Our over-tasked mule-teams,” wrote an officer, “were obliged to drag all the supplies under a broiling sun from the reeking banks of the Yazoo, or over the long road that wound through the hilly and desolate region.”21 Sometimes Wells’s teams made it back to the camp but not the sorely needed supplies, which had to be left behind along with the wounded or dying mules.
Among the Federal soldiers who held their breath as cannonballs whizzed over their heads was the British doctor Charles Mayo. He was furious to be at Vicksburg. One of his former patients, Major General George Hartsuff, had invited him to join his headquarters at Louisville, Kentucky. Mayo received permission for the transfer and was set to leave when he discovered that a clerk had written down the wrong department on his orders, sending him to General Grant instead of General Burnside. Hartsuff advised Mayo to go to Vicksburg anyway and wait for him to sort out the clerical error with the surgeon general.
Mayo caught typhus as soon as he arrived on June 1. He put on a brave face for his family’s sake, telling them that he had a nice tent “pitched with that of the Medical Director of the Corps, under a pair of fine beech-trees on a hill,” neglecting to mention that there were nine others in the tent. He had been placed as staff surgeon-major and medical inspector of the XIII Army Corps, with 25,000 men under his care. Mayo found the survivors of the May 22 assault in a miserable state, many having been left to the care of unwilling and unsympathetic civilians. Ever practical, he immediately set about imposing some order on the shambolic situation. He had all the wounded collected and placed together under an open shed made of rough poles and boards. For beds, he copied an innovation found in a deserted Confederate camp and used cane poles and strips of bark braided together to make a mat. The contraption was strong enough to support a man’s weight and flexible enough to conform to his body.
Ill.38 Confederate scouts with percussion caps for the garrison of Vicksburg, running the Federal pickets, by Frank Vizetelly.
The army medical department was more of a hindrance than a help to him. But “we had one excellent and trustworthy friend,” he wrote, “namely, the Sanitary Commission.” The volunteer organization had depots and agents for every army in the field. “The principal agent with Grant’s army was a thoroughly good fellow, and consequently was of very great use to us, indeed without the aid of his supplies the sick must have suffered far more than they did,” Mayo wrote. The medical department always had an excuse, and whatever it did send was never enough. By contrast, the Sanitary Commission agent was so determined to secure the very best for the injured that he even managed to haul ice from Cincinnati to the camp, an unimaginable luxury in the searing heat. “But no man alive could have counteracted the effects of that climate,” wrote Mayo. “Malaria, salt pork, no vegetables, a blazing sun, and almost poisonous water, are agencies against which medicine is helpless. They soon began to tell on myself, as they did on others much more nearly accustomed to the climate. The hope of being recalled also vanished.”22
Mayo’s sense of duty kept him at his post, but by the middle of June he realized that if he did not do something about his situation he would be dead by the autumn. He had become used to the constant shelling, but the malarial conditions were sapping his strength. “Vicksburg still holds out,” he wrote miserably to his sister on June 19. A week later, Mayo had become so desperate that he sent a plea for help to Lord Lyons. It embarrassed him to write to the minister, particularly as Lyons had urged him not to accept an officer’s commission since it would put him beyond the help of the legation: “I was led to believe that I should have no difficulty in getting an order of transfer to a climate in which I could be of some use; if I had thought that they had intended to leave me here I would have left the service rather than come. Now, however, I cannot pass the lines of the army.” Mayo begged Lyons to give his letter of immediate resignation to the secretary of war.23
While Mayo looked to Washington for deliverance, the wilting Federal army turned its eyes to the South. Grant had been expecting General Banks to steam up the Mississippi River; he was meant to have taken Port Hudson by now and opened the way for joint river operations against Vicksburg. Where was he? Washington had been asking the same question. General Henry Halleck sent two angry letters to Banks, expressing his disappointment “that you and General Grant are not acting in conjunction.”24 Banks had captured Alexandria, the state capital of Louisiana, but Halleck dismissed this as a selfish quest for glory. The judgment was unduly harsh; Banks was trying to devise a way of capturing Port Hudson that did not require a river attack. His first attempt on May 27 had resulted in almost 2,000 casualties compared to a Confederate loss of only 235. The total repulse mirrored Grant’s disaster at Vicksburg a few days earlier, but Banks, at least, was prompt in retrieving the wounded.
Staff at Banks’s headquarters noticed a precipitous drop in morale after the failed attack. The men had lost faith not only in their general but also in themselves. Banks, on the other hand, saw no reason why he should not be more successful the second time around. He brought in additional artillery so that by June 11 he had more than 130 guns. Ever punctilious, he sent a letter to Confederate general Franklin Gardner inside the fort at Port Hudson suggesting that he surrender to “avoid unnecessary sacrifice of life.” Gardner declined even though his men were already exhausted and starving.
On the fourteenth, Banks attacked Port Hudson for the second time. Colonel Currie’s luck ran out at a place called Priest Cap. His division commander, General William Emory, was hit first; the Englishman took his place, shouting “Get on, lads” as he ran toward the fort. Within minutes Currie was struck by bullets in both arms. Almost a hundred members of the 133rd went down behind him. Some four thousand Federals were either killed or wounded that day.
Currie was rescued by his own men and dragged back to safety. His wounding came as a terrible blow to the regiment. He was no longer considered alien but eccentric; his English manner of speaking was regarded as quaint rather than foreign. A hospital ship transported Currie down to New Orleans, where he remained for a few weeks until he was well enough to be sent to Philadelphia to recuperate. It would be several months before he rejoined his regiment.
The survivors of the 133rd went about their duties without enthusiasm. “I think the hope of taking the port without force is a forlorn one,” wrote the regiment’s assistant surgeon. “General Banks has offered a promotion and medals to one thousand who will volunteer to storm their works.… We can see their camps and their soldiers and also the Secesh flag very plainly. We have the Fort completely surrounded but I suppose they have enough provisions inside to last them probably a year.” When the regiment left Baton Rouge there were 800 men and officers; “now we scarcely number 400.”25 But Banks had no intention of withdrawing until Port Hudson surrendered.
The Northern and Southern forces remained in their respective fortifications, slowly shrinking through disease and malnutrition. The only general with the ability to move was the Confederate Joseph Johnston, and he was in a state of passive dejection. He had repeatedly urged Pemberton to evacuate Vicksburg, arguing that the town could always be retaken but his army was irreplaceable. Grant’s siege made escape impossible now; an English army officer traveling through Mississippi asked Johnston about his plans. The general “was too weak to do any good, and he was unable to give me any definite idea as to when he might be strong enough to attack Grant.”26 The officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, had arrived in the South on April 8. This was the first time he had encountered anything less than total confidence and determination from a Confederate general. Fremantle’s initial response to the war had been one of casual interest. “In common with many of my countrymen, I felt very indifferent as to which side might win,” he wrote, “but if I had any bias my sympathies were rather in favour of the North, on account of the dislike which an Englishman naturally feels at the idea of slavery.” His support for the North did not, however, survive Seward’s early misfires in international diplomacy: “Soon a sentiment of great admiration for the gallantry and determination of the Southerners, together with the unhappy contrast afforded by the foolish bullying conduct of the Northerners, caused a complete revulsion in my feelings, and I was unable to repress a strong wish to go to America and see something of this wonderful struggle.”27
The twenty-six-year-old officer applied for a leave of absence from his regiment, the Coldstream Guards, which had been stationed in Canada since the Trent affair. In contrast to many of his fellow officers, Fremantle was prepared to enter the South only in a manner that did not violate the rules of neutrality. This ruled out running the blockade or slipping through Federal lines from the North. Such circumspect behavior was typical of the young man. A keen sense of military honor was engrained in the Fremantle family; his grandfather and father had both served in the army, and all his brothers were officers, too.
Fremantle had been posted to Gibraltar as the assistant military secretary to the governor when the U.S. Navy chased Commander Raphael Semmes in his first commerce raider, CSS Sumter, into port in January 1862. Semmes vividly remembered their meeting. The governor had sent Fremantle to present a memorandum to Semmes that outlined the strict rules of neutrality the authorities intended to observe toward both navies while the Federals and Confederates remained at Gibraltar. Having warned Semmes that no breach would be tolerated, Fremantle then confessed to him “that he was an ardent Confederate, expressing himself without any reserve, and lauding in the highest terms our people and cause. He had many questions to ask me, which I took great pleasure in answering.”28 Semmes probably gave Fremantle the idea of reaching the Confederacy via Mexico, where there was no blockade and therefore no laws against crossing into Southern territory.
Map.15 Vicksburg campaign, May 18, 1862–July 4, 1863
Click here to view a larger image.
The route from Matamoros through the Texas desert to San Antonio was exceptionally arduous. Fremantle might have chosen the most honorable way, but it was also the most dangerous. The law, where it existed at all, was rough and imprecise, and Fremantle was careful to travel in company. His first act on reaching San Antonio was to sell his heavy trunk, along with most of his belongings. It made him less likely to be robbed, and it was obvious he was not going to need any formal attire.
Fremantle was ninety miles from Alexandria on May 10 when he encountered a pathetic trail of refugees fleeing the city after its capture by Banks. Having grown anxious that he might become trapped on the west side of the Mississippi, he made a dash across the river. A Confederate steamboat took him part of the way, but for the final thirty miles he had to paddle upstream in a skiff with six other men. Fremantle finally reached Jackson on May 18. By now he had only a small bag and the clothes on his back. As he walked past the still smoldering Catholic church and the ruins of what had once been Jackson’s principal hotel, he fell into the hands of local vigilantes who were eager to hang someone. Fremantle was saved by an Irish doctor who pushed his way through the crowd, saying, “I hate the British Government and the English nation, but if you are really an officer in the Coldstream Guards there is nothing I won’t do for you.”29
Once the mob was satisfied that Fremantle was not a spy, he was allowed to continue on his way. He reached General Johnston’s headquarters a couple of days after Grant’s first assault on Vicksburg. Johnston seemed a little detached: “He talks in a calm, deliberate and confident manner,” wrote Fremantle; “to me he was extremely affable, but he certainly possesses the power of keeping people at a distance when he chooses, and his officers evidently stand in great awe of him.” When Johnston told Fremantle that they had nothing compared to the Federals, the British officer realized that he was speaking the literal truth. “At present his only cooking-utensils consisted of an old coffee-pot and frying pan—both very inferior articles.” When they sat down to eat, Fremantle discovered “there was only one fork (one prong deficient) between himself and Staff, and this was handed to me ceremoniously as the ‘guest.’ ”30
Fremantle encountered the same polite behavior wherever he went. The Confederates were curious about him, and he was constantly peppered with questions, such as whether the Coldstream Guards really wore scarlet into battle. Inevitably someone would ask him whether he thought British soldiers could fight as well or better. During one train journey there was a lively debate in the carriage as to whether the British could have defeated Lee at Fredericksburg.
It was May 28 when Fremantle arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where General Bragg and his long-suffering army were encamped. He was not the only visitor at Bragg’s headquarters. The staff introduced Fremantle to an unexpected guest: three days earlier, Clement Vallandigham, the dissident Democrat and leader of the so-called Copperheads, had been unceremoniously dumped in front of Confederate pickets and ordered by his Federal guards not to turn back.
The exiled politician was outraged at his treatment by the U.S. government. On May 1 he had attended a rally in Ohio where he gave one of his usual antiwar speeches. It was a deliberate provocation, and General Burnside—who had been transferred to run the Department of Ohio, which oversaw all military matters across seven states from Wisconsin to West Virginia—fell into the trap. On May 4 Burnside sent soldiers to Vallandigham’s house in Dayton. They smashed down his back door and dragged the politician off to a waiting train. Vallandigham’s arrest had the effect that he was hoping for: newspapers throughout the Midwest declared him a martyr to free speech and freedom of conscience. Burnside hastily assembled a military tribunal of eight army officers to “try” the case. It was a farce, Vallandigham indignantly told Fremantle; one of the officers was not even American. (The unknown officer was Colonel John Fitzroy De Courcy, who had returned to duty and was anxious to be of use to Burnside in the hope it would lead to his reinstatement with the 16th Ohio.)
The tribunal listened to the evidence for two days and came to a unanimous agreement on the defendant’s guilt. They had more difficulty deciding what to do with him. One thought he ought to be shot; another suggested exile; eventually they agreed he should be imprisoned in a fort somewhere.31 But the ensuing national uproar over Vallandigham’s trial severely embarrassed the administration, and Lincoln swiftly commuted the sentence to banishment. But Vallandigham had no more wish to be in the South than the rebels had to receive him. He had been made, in Fremantle’s words, “a destitute stranger” in his own country. General Bragg was puzzled as to how to treat his reluctant visitor; Vallandigham’s platform of compromise and reunion was no more popular in the South than Lincoln’s policy of forced reunion. He was relieved to learn that Vallandigham wished to travel to Bermuda, where it would be possible for him to take a ship to Canada. Vallandigham preferred not to mix with his hosts while they waited for permission from Richmond to allow him to travel to Wilmington. He did not consider himself a Confederate sympathizer and was not interested in meeting foreign supporters of the South; he politely declined an introduction to the sole English volunteer on Bragg’s staff.
Colonel Fremantle, on the other hand, was delighted to meet his compatriot. “Ever since I landed in America, I had heard of the exploits of an Englishman called Colonel St. Leger Grenfell,” he wrote on May 30, two days after his arrival at Bragg’s headquarters. “This afternoon I made his acquaintance, and I consider him one of the most extraordinary characters I ever met. Although he is a member of a well-known English family, he seems to have devoted his whole life to the exciting career of a soldier of fortune.” Grenfell was Bragg’s inspector general of cavalry, having left the raiding outfit led by the Confederate guerrilla John Hunt Morgan the previous Christmas. Fremantle was surprised to learn that Grenfell was fifty-five years old and that he had a wife (who had thrown up her hands some years before and was running a successful girls’ school in Paris) and two grown-up daughters.32 Grenfell told Fremantle that he had fought the Barbary pirates in Morocco, followed Garibaldi in South America, and joined the Turks against the Russians in the Crimea. The last was undoubtedly true, as he had been Colonel De Courcy’s brigade major in the Turkish contingent.33 Neither Grenfell nor De Courcy ever knew that their paths had again crossed during the Federal occupation of the Cumberland Gap.
“Even in this army,” wrote Fremantle,
which abounds with foolhardy and desperate characters: [Grenfell] has acquired the admiration of all ranks by his reckless daring and gallantry in the field. Both Generals Polk and Bragg spoke to me of him as a most excellent and useful officer, besides being a man who never lost an opportunity of trying to throw his life away. He is just the sort of a man to succeed in this army, and among the soldiers his fame for bravery has outweighed his unpopularity as a rigid disciplinarian. He is the terror of all absentees, stragglers and deserters, and of all commanding officers who are unable to produce for his inspection the number of horses they have been drawing forage for.34
Grenfell always wore a red cap, which made him conspicuous in battle and therefore more esteemed among the officers.
Grenfell took Fremantle on a tour of the outposts. During the ride he was frank about the army’s deficiencies, as well as his own troubles: “He told me he was in desperate hot water with the civil authorities of the State, who had accused him of illegally impressing and appropriating horses, and also of conniving at the escape of a negro from his lawful owner, and he said that the military authorities were afraid or unable to give him proper protection.” Three days later, on June 3, “Grenfell came to see me in a towering rage,” wrote Fremantle. He had been arrested. “General Bragg himself had stood bail for him, but Grenfell was naturally furious at the indignity. But, even according to his own account, he seems to have acted indiscreetly in the affair of the Negro, and he will have to appear before the civil court next October. General Polk and his officers were all much vexed at the occurrence.35 Bragg’s surety was misspent. A week later, Grenfell packed his bags and disappeared. No one heard anything of him for three months.
By then, Fremantle had already left for the east. After another tortuous train ride, which had the single distinguishing feature of a female soldier in their midst, he arrived at Charleston.20.3 One of the first people to greet him was Captain Henry Feilden. Fremantle was amazed to come across another English volunteer. “A Captain Feilden came to call upon me at 9 A.M.,” he wrote in his diary. “I remember his brother quite well at Sandhurst.”36 The younger Feilden seemed entranced with the South. Naturally, Fremantle could not know of the momentous event that had taken place in Feilden’s life that week: Miss Julia McCord of Greenville, South Carolina, had visited the office, seeking a military pass to visit her brother.
20.1 Mrs. Chancellor and her six daughters were rescued by one of Hooker’s aides, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Dickinson. He disobeyed orders and remained with the women until they were safely across the Rappahannock, earning their eternal friendship and gratitude.
20.2 In his history of the Civil War, Winston Churchill wrote: “Chancellorsville was the finest battle which Lee and Jackson fought together. Their combination had become perfect.”14
20.3 While Fremantle was in Charleston, the local newspapers reported: “The Western army correspondent of the ‘Mobile Register’ writes as follows:—‘The famous Colonel St. Leger Grenfell, who served with Morgan last summer, and since that time has been Assistant Inspector-general of General Bragg, was arrested a few days since by the civil authorities.… If the charges against him are proven true, then there is no doubt that the course of General Bragg will be to dismiss him from his Staff; but if, on the contrary, malicious slanders are defaming this ally, he is Hercules enough and brave enough to punish them. His bravery and gallantry were conspicuous throughout the Kentucky campaign, and it is hoped that this late tarnish on his fame will be removed; or if it be not, that he will.’ ”
