Fiasco at the House of Commons—Vicksburg surrenders—An economy without cotton—Rioting in New York—A summer jaunt—Rose Greenhow’s diplomatic mission
The House of Commons was full on Tuesday evening, June 30, 1863, when Henry Adams entered the Strangers Gallery, pretending not to notice the Southerners seated around him. According to the latest news from America, Lee’s army had marched without hindrance all the way to Pennsylvania. But the news appeared to be having a dampening effect on support for Roebuck’s motion—several MPs had questioned the need for a debate on recognition when the Confederacy was on the verge of winning independence without English help. It was yet one more dilemma weighing on Roebuck’s mind when he entered the Commons. Earlier that day, in the House of Lords, Russell had denied for a second time that the French emperor had written to him about recognizing the South.
James Spence had always felt uncomfortable with Roebuck as the South’s main spokesman in the Commons, but even he never imagined the extent to which the MP would self-immolate that evening. Roebuck’s speech began unpromisingly with an overflow of bile before descending into such balderdash that he alienated his listeners. There were cries of “No!” when Roebuck insisted that Negroes were worse off in the North than in the South, where “black children and white children are brought up together. I say it without fear of contradiction from any one whose contradiction is worthy of notice.… There is a kindly feeling in the minds of the Southern planters toward those whom England fixed there in a condition of servitude.” But the real damage came toward the end when he referred to his interview with Louis-Napoleon. Roebuck explained afterward that Russell’s denial had given him no choice but to bring up the matter because his own honor was at stake. But rather than simply saying in a few words that France was eager to cooperate on a policy of recognition, Roebuck gave a blow-by-blow description of their interview, including Louis-Napoleon’s complaints about double-dealing by the Foreign Office.
At that moment he was doomed, the Confederate lobby discredited. Roebuck had broken a cardinal rule: he, a backbencher, had wedged himself into the middle of Anglo-French relations. The Tories abandoned Roebuck to his fate—even MPs known to sympathize with the South expressed their disapproval of the motion, and the undersecretaries from the Home and Foreign offices were scathing in their criticism of his interference. Gladstone’s telling-off was merciful by comparison, though the cabinet was furious with Roebuck for dredging up the question of recognition. But there was more to come.
John Bright had watched his prey stagger and bleed from a thousand little cuts before he moved in for the kill. He recalled with biting sarcasm that “only about two years ago” Roebuck had stated categorically, “I have no faith in the Emperor of the French,” and yet he was appearing before the House as the emissary of “the great French ruler.” As to the confusion between Roebuck and the Foreign Office over what the emperor had actually communicated:
I will say this in justice to the French Emperor, that there has never come from him, not from any one of his ministers, nor is there anything to be found in what they have written, that is tinctured in the smallest degree with that bitter hostility which the hon. and learned Gentleman [Roebuck] has constantly exhibited to the United States of America and their people.1
Observing Roebuck’s humiliation, Henry Adams wrote that Bright “caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier.” Bright’s crushing of the MP was so complete that Henry “felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done.” A Southerner described it as “the most deliberate and tremendous pounding I have ever witnessed.”2 The House adjourned for the night, leaving Roebuck’s motion prostrate on the floor.
There was consternation in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay as to how Anglo-French policy could have degenerated so swiftly into public farce. The French foreign minister, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, dispatched a telegram to Ambassador Gros in London asking for an explanation of the British government’s denial.3 At the Foreign Office, Lord Russell asked Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador to France, whether he had knowledge of a proposal from the emperor. Russell vaguely recalled Baron Gros’s aside about the emperor’s support for Southern recognition, but it had never occurred to him to treat it as an official communiqué to the government. Just as troubling to the cabinet was the claim in Roebuck’s speech that Louis-Napoleon had complained of his peace overtures being ridiculed by the British. The Foreign Office clerks were ordered to comb through every diplomatic dispatch of the past twelve months to see if there was any truth to the allegation.
When Mason reported the debacle to Slidell, his chief concern was whether they would be able to procure written evidence to prove Roebuck’s claim. James Spence and William Gregory, on the other hand, wanted only to be rid of the controversy; they pleaded with Roebuck to withdraw his motion. “The members are 10 to 1 in favour of the South,” wrote Spence to Commissioner Mason, but the minute the emperor of France was dragged into the debate, the issue became a matter of national pride and “on this point the vote might be 5 to 1 against Southern interests.”4 Roebuck, as Spence had feared, would not be swayed, nor would he listen to Palmerston, who wrote to him on July 9 saying he was welcome to make his motions in support of the South, but he was treading on dangerous ground when he interfered in matters of state. Roebuck was defiant. That same day, The Times predicted the capture of Washington by Lee.5
On Friday, July 10, Roebuck tried to resume his motion, only to find himself blocked by his friends. William Schaw Lindsay urged him to wait until after the arrival of the Scotia in three days’ time—bringing definitive news of Lee’s victory—which would cast the debate in an entirely different light. The Confederates added their own entreaties, terrified that Roebuck was on course to destroy the South’s political chances in the Commons permanently. All Henry Hotze desired now was a “decent retreat” before the House had the opportunity to vote down Roebuck’s motion.6
The Times helped the Confederates by printing an editorial on Monday, July 13, urging Roebuck to withdraw his motion. Finally Roebuck listened to the pleas from the chorus around him. That same evening he announced to the House his decision to withdraw his motion. Benjamin Moran was in the gallery, watching as the Southern lobby squirmed during Roebuck’s speech. William Lindsay spoke immediately after, telling the members that whatever else they thought of his friend, he was not a liar; the emperor truly had told them of his desire to recognize the South. The speech was “a long rambling half mad jumble,” wrote Moran, “which the House alternately laughed and jeered at. Then Palmerston rose, and while patting the two dupes on the head, expressed the hope that the unusual proceedings … would never be repeated.”7 The Confederates were never happier to see a motion die.
Charles Francis Adams attended a reception at Lord Derby’s later that night, his recent depression almost lifted by the Confederate fiasco in the Commons. The Tories pressed him for news, forcing him to admit that, like them, he was waiting for the Atlantic steamer to arrive. But when the Scotia did come, on Thursday, July 17, the reports about the battle at Gettysburg were unclear. Adams could not tell whether Lee had suffered a defeat or merely been checked for a day or so. The Times hedged but leaned toward a momentary delay. Two days later, however, Henry Adams came down to breakfast and found his father reading the victory telegram from the State Department. “I wanted to hug the army of the Potomac,” Henry wrote of his joy at that moment. “I wanted to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I wanted to fight some small man and lick him.” The telegram announced not only Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg but also the fall of Vicksburg.
—
An uneven line of soiled white flags had signaled the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4. As the medical inspector of the XIII Army Corps, Dr. Charles Mayo was among the first wave of Federal officers sent to inspect the situation inside the town.23.1 Seven thousand mortar shells had been lobbed into Vicksburg during the forty-three-day siege. In some streets, every single house had been hit; shattered glass and wooden shards lay strewn everywhere. “The blackened ruins that had once been houses” made Mayo wonder how Londoners would fare in similar circumstances. “We knew quite well that the besieged would be unable to take charge of their own. As it was we found their sick in a most miserable plight,” he wrote. “The state of their hospitals was such that a regard for our own safety compelled us to place them in the hands of our own medical officers for instant purification and speedy abolition. They had come to the end of their resources. About 15,000 men fit for duty was all that remained of Pemberton’s army: his sick numbered 6,000 or 7,000.”8
The fighting continued, however, and although Pemberton had finally given up Vicksburg, General Johnston had no intention of surrendering the regiments under his control. He decided to make a stand at Jackson, whose citizens were still struggling to resurrect the city after its occupation in May. Frank Vizetelly reluctantly decided that it was time for him to leave the Mississippi Delta before the Federals seized control of the last railroads going east. He made it out just in time: on July 7, 46,000 U.S. troops, led by General Sherman himself, crossed the Big Black River and were only twenty miles from Jackson. But the journey quickly became a nightmare once the parched and dusty soldiers discovered that the retreating Confederates had fouled all the wells. Sherman was forced to send his mule teams back to the Big Black River to collect drinking water for his thirsty army. At Jackson, he encountered another problem: the Confederates were too well entrenched to be dislodged by anything except a sustained artillery barrage—the kind that required much more ammunition than the Federals had brought. It took less than an hour for the Union batteries to fire all their available shells. Sherman hastily sent his ordnance officers to round up all the army’s reserves. In the meantime, the guns remained silent.
Ill.42 Rebels marching out of Vicksburg and stacking arms.
Helpless until the ammunition arrived, the Union soldiers fortified their positions with heavy bales of cotton brought in from the surrounding countryside by heavily guarded wagon trains. Undaunted by the capture of the previous wagon train, Ebenezer Wells set off with his, despite having an escort that was only half strength. “I was about six miles out, riding along in front of my teams,” he wrote, when “I was startled by a shot passing close to me.” It seemed to be coming from a nearby cornfield. One of the guards became frightened and jumped into a wagon. As he landed, his gun went off, firing a bullet into Wells’s best friend. Torn between saving the wounded officer and protecting the supply train, Wells shouted for the wagons to keep moving without him and carried his friend to the edge of the road. “I knelt beside him while he told me his last message home,” he recorded. The officer begged him to send his watch and Bible home to his family. “Then, asking me to take his hand but not to move it for the pain, he told me to go as I was in danger.” Wells reluctantly galloped off after his wagons. Traveling down the same road on the return journey, he was horrified to see a large red stain where his friend had lain. “By great favour the general allowed me to have a funeral,” wrote Wells. The ammunition had arrived and the guns were firing when the burial took place, the priest’s words drowned out by the roar of the artillery.9
The next day, July 17, 1863, a lone black civilian was spotted walking away from the city carrying a white flag.10 Johnston had led his army out during the night, leaving Jackson silent and empty but for a few hundred frightened citizens. The Federals marched in and captured some Confederate stragglers, among them an Englishman named Captain Frederick Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment. Two years later, after he had escaped to England, Captain Hampson still shuddered at his treatment:
Ill.43 The surrender of Vicksburg—view of the city from the riverbank showing part of the river batteries.
When captured by the enemy I was stripped of my clothes, even my shoes then robbed of my money, watch and rings. [I] was then marched a distance of 45 miles to Vicksburg barefoot, and on the route was grossly insulted by the privates and some officers of the Federal Army: I experienced fearful suffering from hunger, exposure and thirst, not being allowed to leave the ranks, and when we bivouacked [we had] no tents or covering to protect us from the weather; it raining almost all the time.… I remained in their hands until about the middle of August, when I succeeded with two more brother officers in effecting my escape from Vicksburg, thence to New Orleans, and from there made the best of my way (via New York by water) to England.11
Ebenezer Wells had fallen victim to “Mississippi fever” and was too ill to celebrate the Federal capture of Jackson, becoming another of the delirious, groaning soldiers whom Dr. Mayo tried to keep alive long enough to be transported to the North. Mayo had more than five hundred patients in his field hospital, ninety of them under his personal care. He was no longer living in a tent, but on a steamboat next to the hospital ships. Lord Lyons’s reply to his letter reached him there. Though disappointed by the minister’s refusal to pass his resignation on, Mayo was gracious in his response, apologizing for placing him in an uncomfortable position: “Of course I had no right to expect any other reply than that which I have just received,” he replied to Lyons in late July. “Two months of sickness in a climate like this, incurred through a blunder made by a Washington office-assistant do not tend to improve a man’s temper, nor to reconcile him to his position. I intend to leave this district with or without orders, at the first opportunity.”12
—
“The fall of Vicksburg has made me ill all the week,” James Spence wrote to Mason.13 The Times downplayed the news at first, but on July 23, Charles Francis Adams noted that the paper “condescends to admit this morning that Vicksburg is taken.” Three days later, The Times was also forced to concede the Federal capture of the Mississippi River—Port Hudson had surrendered to General Nathaniel Banks on July 9 after a forty-eight-day siege.
As soon as Henry Hotze recovered from the shock of the news—no one had expected Vicksburg to surrender, let alone General Lee to falter—he began rallying his supporters in the press. It was imperative that they halt the now precipitous slide of Confederate bonds. “You will not be surprised that I am giving to my operations an extension which only the urgencies of the crisis could warrant,” he informed Judah Benjamin. Hotze had pulled off the extraordinary feat of persuading a religious publishing house to include in every publication, religious and nonreligious, for the next two months, a Southern pamphlet entitled “Address to the Christians Throughout the World.” Signed by the ninety-six clergymen of Richmond, the “Address” urged fellow Christians to protest against Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.14 Hotze estimated that it would be read by 2 million people.15 This and the obvious shock felt by the British public were his only comfort.
There was outrage in the legation at the lack of enthusiasm in England over the Northern successes. The Economist described Lee’s defeat as a tragedy because it meant a prolonging of the war.16 “The salons of this great metropolis are in tears,” Adams wrote cynically in his diary. “Tears of anger mixed with grief.” He was still smarting over the ignominious end to Mrs. Adams’s weekly parties; not even Benjamin Moran bothered to attend the final one.23.2 The assistant secretary had ceased to attend out of protest, having been cast into a jealous agony ever since George Sheffield, one of Lord Lyons’s unpaid attachés, visited the legation and innocently revealed that Lyons invited the junior diplomats to every dinner. Moran blamed Henry Adams for stealing his rightful place. Ironically, Henry had recently written to Seward’s son, Frederick, pleading for an increase in salary in recognition of Moran’s services: “He is an invaluable man,” he wrote, “a tremendous worker, and worth any ten ordinary officers to Government, but here he has borne nine tenths of the labour of the Legation for seven years, and gets for it a miserable pittance of $1500 a year; about enough to support a respectable cab-driver in this city.”17
Unaware of Henry’s intercession on his behalf, Moran behaved toward him with appalling rudeness and spite. It pained him to watch Henry slowly navigate his way into English society and start to enjoy a real life outside the legation. The younger Adams had become a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, which did not have permanent premises like Brooks’s or Boodles, but whose members were all notable figures on the literary or political stage. Henry was mystified why Lord Frederick Cavendish had championed his admission: “Whether he feels his conscience touched by the vagaries of his brother Hartington; or whether he desires to show a general and delicate sympathy with our position,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr., “I don’t know and can’t guess.” But more important even than joining a club or being proposed by a peer, Henry had finally made a genuine friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell, known as Carlo, the son of James Gaskell, a Yorkshire MP and supporter of the North. They became lifelong friends.18
—
The season was drawing to a close. “The streets are full of Pickford’s vans carting furniture from the houses, and Belgravia and May Fair are the scene of dirt and littered straw,” Henry wrote to his brother. He knew he would miss the excitement. Despite everything, he liked going about in London society, “and some day in America,” he wrote, “I may astonish myself by defending these people for whom I entertain at present only a profound and lively contempt.”19
Their father was looking forward to the summer recess: though the year had begun disastrously, none of it now seemed to matter. “The great causes of our apprehension have died away,” he wrote. “The cotton famine and Lancashire distress have not proved such serious troubles as we had feared.”20 Newspapers no longer carried alarming reports of protest meetings and “disturbances” in the mill towns. The Earl of Derby’s Central Committee was efficiently distributing almost £500,000 worth of charity, and the Poor Law Board was overseeing a £2 million public works program in Lancashire, paying the unemployed cotton workers to build sewers, pave roads, and create public parks and recreation grounds.21 Some mills were using cotton from India, even though it was of inferior quality to Southern cotton, which had almost doubled imports from 536,000 bales in 1861 to over a million in 1863. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities for workers who were willing to move away from the cotton districts. The British linen and woolen industries were enjoying a renaissance, for example, the profits from blockade running were swilling around Liverpool, and the armaments industry was having its best year ever.22 The latest figures showed that even with the dragging effects of the Morrill Tariff, the value of British trade was rising and would top £444 million for 1863. All of these developments were an encouraging counterbalance to the troubles of the cotton industry.
—
The legation was settling into its usual summer routine when Benjamin Moran noticed something strange. He wrote on July 27: “The steamer this week brought no Despatches whatever. This never occurred before in my time.”23
The abrupt silence had been caused by the complete breakdown of civic order in New York. For five days, between July 13 and 17, the city lay at the mercy of fifty thousand rioters who exacted gruesome revenge on the two classes of persons they considered most responsible for the war: Negroes and those who defended them. There had been signs of working-class resentment ever since the Draft Act became law on March 3, 1863. In theory, it provided Washington with more than 3 million potential new soldiers; in practice, it netted about 100,000 reluctant conscripts and 70,000 substitutes. The draft applied to all able-bodied white males between the ages of twenty and forty-five, but the exemptions for particular family circumstances, such as only sons with widowed mothers to support, as well as the provision that allowed a man to purchase a substitute for $300, mostly benefited the middle class and native-born Americans.24 For immigrant laborers earning an average of 85 cents a day, the sum of $300 was a cruel joke. Nowhere was the resentment greater than among the 200,000 Irish immigrants of New York, many of whom felt that they had been enticed into emigrating so that they could provide “food for [gun]powder.” The editor of the Freeman’s Journal, a popular Irish newspaper in New York, demanded to know why the Irish were expected “to go and carry on a war for the nigger.”25
Although aliens were specifically excluded from the draft, the State Department had recently tightened the rules and increased the burden of proof required from resident foreigners. Consul Archibald was struggling to keep pace with the demand for his help. There had been a sharp increase since the spring in the number of “crimpings”—kidnappings and illegal conscriptions of British subjects. The latest complaint to reach the consulate involved three Caribbean sailors who had disappeared from the Mary Harris only to reappear as unwilling seamen on board USS Tulip. Archibald wondered whether the recent strike by Irish dockworkers had something to do with the Tulip case; the shipyard owners had brought in contrabands—freed slaves—to replace the workers. The combination of the looming draft and black strikebreakers was an especially inflammable mix. The working-class Irish community was outraged that the draft applied only to whites and feared that cheaper—and better educated—black workers were out to steal their jobs.
On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the authorities chose a half-developed block of Manhattan—Forty-seventh Street and Third Avenue—to hold the first of two lotteries for the draft. Colonel Robert Nugent of the Irish 69th New York Volunteers had been asked to oversee the lottery in the hope that this would calm Irish objections. But no other preparations had been made in case the event turned violent; there were only eight hundred policemen on duty for the entire city, and almost every New York regiment was at Gettysburg with General Meade.26 The drawing of names passed without incident, however. There were a few more fires than usual over the weekend, and the crowds watching them seemed to be on the large side, but the authorities had no hint of what was about to happen on Monday.
When the famous Great Eastern—the largest passenger ship in the world—docked at New York on Sunday night, the disembarking passengers felt an air of menace from the onlookers. The financial agents John Murray Forbes and William H. Aspinwall were among them; in Forbes’s trunk were $6 million worth of bonds. He was standing on the quayside, fearful that he was about to be mugged, when an Irish cab driver recognized him from a goodwill visit Forbes had once paid to his regiment and offered to take him anywhere he wanted. “We rattled safely over the rough, dark streets, and I was soon glad to deposit my charge among the heaps in the old Brevoort House [Hotel],” wrote Forbes.27 A few hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle’s train pulled into New York from Pennsylvania. He had said farewell to his friends on July 9, when the Confederate army was still resting at Hagerstown in Maryland, and turned back toward the North. Fremantle’s steamship, the China, was scheduled to depart for England on Wednesday, July 15, and until then he had arranged to stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. Even though the city was searing hot, Fremantle walked the length of Broadway on Monday. “On returning to the Fifth Avenue,” he wrote, “I found all the shopkeepers beginning to close their stores, and I perceived by degrees that there was great alarm about the resistance to the draft which was going on this morning.” Inside the hotel he found a scene of pandemonium, with terrified guests begging the equally frightened concierges for protection. A mob had torched several blocks nearby and was holding back the fire brigade. Fremantle decided it would be better to wander around anonymously rather than be trapped in the hotel: “I walked about in the neighbourhood, and saw a company of soldiers [from the invalid corps] on the march, who were being jeered at and hooted by small boys, and I saw a negro pursued by the crowd take refuge with the military; he was followed by loud cries of ‘Down with the bloody nigger! Kill all niggers!’ ”28
The British consul was able to rescue Ann Anderson, a Barbadian ship’s cook, who was being chased down West Street by a mob. Fortunately, she had time to hammer on the doors of the consulate at No. 10 and be pulled to safety. Twenty blocks north of Fremantle’s hotel, at Forty-third and Fifth, stood the Colored Orphan Asylum, home to 237 Negro children aged twelve and under. Three thousand rioters gathered at the front, forcing the asylum superintendent hurriedly to evacuate the small occupants through the back. One little girl was left behind. She was found cowering under her bed by the rioters and beaten to death.29
Farther downtown, another mob, heavily armed and ten thousand strong, appeared in front of the police headquarters on Mulberry Street and were confronted by two hundred club-wielding policemen. After twenty minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, the mob turned tail.30 The violence was sporadic but clearly the result of direction. Small working parties cut down the telegraph poles along Third Avenue, isolating each of the twenty-six police precincts from central command. Others stopped railroad cars and pulled up the tracks. Rioters broke into the Armory at Twenty-first Street and Second Avenue, helping themselves to the rifles and carbines within. A separate mob headed over to Newspaper Row, across from City Hall Park, where the Tribune and The New York Times had their offices. The Times editor, Henry Raymond, kept the crowd at bay with three borrowed Gatling guns, but the Tribune building had only a small band of policemen guarding its entrance.31 Rioters burst through the doors to find that the staff had used bales of newspaper to barricade the stairs. Unable to push their way through, the mob set fire to the counters and went off in search of other prey.
By sunset, the orange sky was streaked with columns of black smoke. Hiding inside the St. Nicholas Hotel, the mayor of New York, George Opdyke, and the U.S. Army general in command of the Department of the East, John Ellis Wool, passed their responsibilities back and forth as a group of prominent citizens implored them to declare martial law. At 9:30 P.M. the New York head of the telegraph service, Edwin Sanford, sent a wire to Washington from Jersey City, whose station was still operating: “In brief the city of New York is tonight at the mercy of a mob whether organized or improvised, I am unable to say.… The situation is not improved since dark. The program is diversified by small mobs chasing isolated Negroes as hounds would chase a fox.”
Fires burned uncontrollably all over the city. Establishments that employed blacks as well as whites, such as bars and brothels, were particularly targeted. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell feared for her infirmary and ordered the servants to close the shutters and lock the doors. Every light was extinguished, leaving the occupants sitting in darkness as the muffled but unmistakable shouts of a lynch mob torturing its victim could be heard through the walls. Some of the white patients became hysterical, begging Dr. Blackwell to save the hospital by expelling the black occupants. She had almost succeeded in calming them down when one of the contraband patients went into labor. Terrified that the woman’s cries might be heard from outside, Elizabeth and two nurses carried her to the back of the infirmary. There, in a dimly lit room, they worked all night to deliver the baby.
Meanwhile, mobs were prowling the waterfront, attacking British vessels known to have black crew members. One black sailor was lynched and another suffered life-threatening injuries. Archibald turned the consulate into a safe house, but with limited space at his disposal he had to ask the legation in Washington for help. Although there were no carriages or omnibuses running, an intrepid secretary managed to reach Jersey City to send a ciphered telegram to Lord Lyons: “I consider a man-of-war essential here immediately to receive and protect British Black crews.” Lyons replied that HMS Challenger was on its way, but the warship would not reach New York for at least another twenty-four hours. Archibald could not wait that long. In desperation, he contacted the French consulate, which arranged for Admiral Reynaud to offer the Guerriere to British blacks. The French frigate steamed into the harbor, opened the gun ports, and let down rope ladders. The captain shouted through his megaphone that all colored Britons were to board the vessel by order of Consul Archibald. Seventy-one black British sailors clambered aboard, and a further seven British vessels moored alongside her.
The violence on Tuesday included mass looting as well as more raids on the armories. Rioters sacked Brooks Brothers, burned the 26th Precinct house, destroyed the Harlem River Bridge, demolished the Washington Hotel, and attacked the mayor’s house. Fifty to sixty thousand people were said to be out on the streets; barricades were being erected at various points in the city to hinder the movement of police. “Immediate action is necessary, or the Government and country will be disgraced,” Edwin Sanford telegraphed the War Department. The governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, declared a state of insurrection and also asked Washington for troops. A politician to his fingertips, he assured the angry crowd outside City Hall that he was their friend and supporter against the draft, but his appeal failed to stop the violence. Finally, late on Tuesday night, Washington ordered five regiments to the city.
“Wednesday begins with heavy showers, and now, (ten A.M.) cloudy, hot, and steaming,” wrote the treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, in his diary; “there will be much trouble today.”32 When Fremantle went down for breakfast he found soldiers guarding the hotel (Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, was coming home from Harvard and happened to be one of the guests). But outside, the immediate streets were deserted; the entire city appeared to be in the middle of a mass exodus. There were no carriages, and he had to walk down to the waterfront. “I was not at all sorry to find myself on board the China,” wrote Fremantle, his final memory of the city “a stone barricade in the distance, and [the sound of] firing going on.”33 The mob and the military had evidently found each other.34
At midmorning a small funeral cortège started out from West Fifty-third Street. Dr. Charles Culverwell’s wife, Emma, could no longer wait for the rioting to subside. Their three-year-old daughter had died the previous Sunday of infant cholera. Emma did not know where Charles was, although he had promised to come to them. Terrified for herself and her surviving daughter, she attempted to slink unnoticed past the rioters. They barred her way, forcing Emma to plead for permission to bury her child.35 All this time Culverwell had been begging his hospital superiors in St. Louis to grant him compassionate leave. In desperation he annulled his contract on July 16, donned civilian clothes, and headed for New York.
By Wednesday night, HMS Challenger had still not appeared; however, a U.S. warship had joined the Guerriere, training its guns on Wall Street to deter an attack on the financial district. On Thursday, rioters discovered they were fighting not just a few brave souls but ten thousand veterans of Gettysburg. During the night there was a final, bloody convulsion at Gramercy Square on Twentieth Street that left one soldier and fifteen rioters dead. But at noon on Friday, the roars and explosions ceased as suddenly as they had begun; Elizabeth Blackwell unlocked the doors of the infirmary for the first time in forty-eight hours. Edwin Sanford telegraphed Washington at 3:45 P.M. that the “city continues very quiet.” George Templeton Strong blessed the change in weather: “Rain will keep the rabble quiet tonight.”36 Early estimates put the death toll at anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people, but the physical devastation was obvious. Whole blocks had been burned and more than three hundred buildings destroyed.37 Among the homes that had been ransacked was Colonel Nugent’s—a punishment for his role in enforcing the draft.
“It is a fact that the rioters have been almost entirely Irish,” Archibald wrote to Lord Russell, and their fury toward “the poor Negro people” had not abated simply because of the presence of troops.38 HMS Challenger arrived on Saturday and accepted transfer of the refugees from the Guerriere. The seventy-one colored seamen remained sequestered below for several days. “There are, however, many lawless characters still about the wharves,” Archibald wrote on July 20, “and the masters assure me that it is not safe for the Negro sailors to return to their own vessels.”39 Although the consul was due to take his annual leave, he remained in the smoldering city until he was confident that the danger had passed.
—
Lyons had not heard from Seward during the crisis; violence had flared in other parts of New York, and the secretary’s own house in Auburn was attacked. The incident was relatively minor—a rock hurled through a downstairs window—but for several nights Frances Seward had stayed awake, waiting for the sound of breaking glass. Be prepared for the loss of our home, Seward wrote stoically to his wife; if the war brings an end to slavery, “the sacrifice will be a small one.”40
Despite Archibald’s brave conduct during the riots, British subjects “are far from being pleased either with HM Government or with HM Minister here,” Lord Lyons told Lord Russell on July 24. No one thought that the legation was doing enough to protect Britons from the rampant cheating and illegal conscriptions that accompanied the latest draft effort. The legation staff was working late into the night trying to keep abreast of the rapidly increasing number of case files. Few cases, if any, were straightforward.41 Young Frederick Farr refused to be helped; he ignored the attachés’ inquiries and would not respond to letters from his father’s friends. “That is a queer boy of yours,” one of them wrote to Dr. Farr in exasperation. “I have not been able to draw a line from him.” Farr’s commanding officer reported that the boy was “in excellent health and spirits” after Gettysburg and only wanted to be left alone.42
Ill.44 Punch accuses President Lincoln of doing nothing to save free blacks from the rioting Irish.
Lyons knew there was nothing to be gained from telling British subjects that they should count themselves fortunate to be in the North and not in the South, where the situation was far worse. In addition to being tricked or beaten into joining regular regiments, Britons were being rounded up to man “home defence militias,” and there was nothing the consuls could do about it; Judah P. Benjamin expelled Consul George Moore from Richmond in June for allegedly exceeding the limits of his purview. One of the very few British conscripts to escape to the North, a Mr. R. R. Belshaw, thanked Lyons “for the interest which you have taken in my case,” but, he complained, “thousands of British subjects are daily suffering in the Confederate army as I have done and yet there is no relief; though England speaks she says nothing.”43
Lyons did not have a satisfactory answer for Belshaw; the diplomatic situation in the South was beyond his control and yet somehow still perceived by Washington and London as his responsibility.23.3 Lord Russell pondered whether they ought to send a military agent or commissioner to Richmond, taking the same route as Fremantle in order to avoid running the blockade, but Lyons persuaded him against the idea. The North would object, and the Confederate government would no doubt ignore the agent as it did the consuls. Seward was adamant that any British attempt to contact the Southern authorities would be regarded by the United States as an act of deliberate provocation, if not war.
Lyons did not understand what drove the secretary of state. Sometimes they seemed to be in the most perfect harmony. Tucked away in the Seward archives are private letters showing that Lyons often coached Seward on how to frame his official responses to British complaints.45 But Seward was always playing more than one game at a time. In early August he asked Lyons if Britain would be prepared to join the North in fighting the French takeover of Mexico. “It would no doubt be a relief to Mr. Seward,” Lyons reported after the interview, if Britain assumed the burden of defending the Mexicans—and the Monroe Doctrine—against the emperor’s imperialist designs. But “England would run the greatest risk of being ultimately sacrificed without scruple by the United States.”46
Four days later, on August 7, Lyons was distressed to see his suspicions confirmed. “An impending quarrel with England is allowed to be put forward as a lure to Volunteers for the Army,” he informed Russell. Seward’s latest dispatch to Charles Francis Adams predicted war if the British government failed to halt the Confederates’ shipbuilding program. Seward knew that Adams would never show such a threatening letter to Lord Russell; and Lyons knew it too, telling Russell, “It will not, I suppose, be communicated to you, but will first see the light when Congress assembles in December.”47
Lyons was about to leave for a short visit to Canada when Seward waylaid him with a proposition to spend the last two weeks of August exploring northern New York State: all the foreign ministers had been invited. Lyons could think of few things less appealing than being dragged through the wilds with the very people he wished to escape. But, he confessed in a private letter to Lord Russell, Seward “has made such a point of my going with him, that it has been impossible to get off without telling him plainly that I’d not choose to travel with him. This of course I could not do; and he deserves some consideration from us.”48
Lyons would not have felt so guilty if he had known the reasons behind Seward’s invitation. The secretary of state had been entertaining for some time the idea of a summer jaunt with the diplomatic corps, which would allow him to demonstrate his charming side and the North’s booming economy all at the same time, but he only went forward with his plan when he needed a cover for visiting Judge Samuel Nelson of the Supreme Court. Opponents of the draft were mounting legal challenges and the administration wanted to be sure that the Court would make the right decision. Judge Nelson happened to live in Cooperstown, in upstate New York.
On August 15 the large party of diplomats and officials boarded a special train for New York; Lyons had brought along two attachés so he would not have to do all the talking. Contrary to his fears, Seward behaved with impeccable manners throughout the journey; ice cream was provided when it was hot, and carriages for those who preferred to explore sitting down. This rarely seen side of Seward touched Lyons. The secretary of state was incurably vain, he told Russell, but the more one knew of him, the more there was “to esteem and even to like.” The trouble lay in Seward’s tendency to overplay his hand, which required Lyons to exercise his “patience and good temper to be always cordial with him.”49
The two-week excursion ended with a visit to Niagara Falls on August 25. Seward had a long conversation with Lyons before the minister departed for Canada. He began by referring to the problem of British antipathy toward the North. Lyons assured him that pro-Southern sentiments in Britain would dissipate as soon as the war ended, since there would be “nothing to keep it alive. I told him that the important point was public opinion in the United States.” But Seward insisted that something had to be done to change British opinion: “The President could not travel, and the United States had no Princes.” Lyons listened, wondering where this was leading. Then it dawned on him that Seward was floating the idea of paying a goodwill visit to England. The prospect seemed baffling, and Lyons suspected Seward was thinking more of his domestic audience, perhaps for a future presidential run. Guessing how the cabinet would react to such a tour, Lyons gently discouraged the plan. When he heard of it, Palmerston was indeed horrified: “I hope Seward will not come here,” he wrote to Lord Russell. The visit would not change British policy—except for the worse if Seward said something silly. “He is … vulgar and ungentlemanlike and the more he is seen here the less he will be liked.” He would drink brandy with “some editors of second rate newspapers,” and be fêted by the manufacturing towns, but “I doubt whether Seward would be very well received in Society.”50 Seward soon dropped the idea—to a silent chorus of relief in England.
After the tour’s conclusion, Lyons traveled to Canada in the hope of finally obtaining some rest from his labors. But there he found that the conflict was being enacted in miniature north of the border. Crimpers and recruiters were doing a brisk business along the border towns, turning Canadian public opinion dangerously pro-Southern. The authorities suspected that the Confederates were planning to use Canada as a base for operations, although so far there was little evidence to support these fears.
The idea of launching raids from Canada had indeed been suggested to Jefferson Davis, but he remained undecided, worrying that the international community would regard such a move as a last, desperate measure. For the moment, Davis had decided to pursue an alternative course. The North was constantly sending emissaries to meet with influential members of British society, and he was sure that the South had suffered as a result. To redress the balance, Davis had asked Rose Greenhow—whom he remembered as one of the most powerful hostesses in Washington before the war—to travel to England and, as important, to France, with the express purpose of explaining the case of Southern independence. Slidell would help her gain an audience with the emperor, but the rest would be up to her own efforts.
Rose had been living quietly since her arrival in Richmond in June the previous year. Between looking after her ten-year-old daughter, also named Rose, and writing a memoir of her imprisonment in Washington, she had managed to make a semblance of a life for herself. But she had not been happy. The Southern ladies had not welcomed her into their circle; Mary Chesnut waspishly described Rose as “spoiled by education—or the want of it.”51 President Davis’s request was a welcome rescue not only from her grinding day-to-day existence, but also from the petty disapproval of Richmond society.
There were no other travelers at the Mills House Hotel when Rose arrived in Charleston during the second half of July; the other guests were all black marketeers of some description. Within hours of unpacking, she received a visit from General Beauregard. Knowing that she had a direct link to President Davis, he gave her a frank report of the situation and explained why he needed more artillery. The Federal bombardment was about to resume, and this time the Confederates expected it to continue until the city surrendered.
Rose’s next guest was Frank Vizetelly. “He gives me all that he gathers, altho’ under the seal of confidence as I told him I should tell you,” she informed President Davis. Vizetelly believed that the shortage of drinking wells around Jackson would soon exact a crushing toll on Grant’s army, having witnessed “eight men within a space of thirty feet fall down from want of water.” This fact alone, he told her, guaranteed that General Johnston would not be driven out of the city. In reality, even as Vizetelly spoke, the Confederates were retreating from Jackson, and in a few hours the city would be in flames. Vizetelly’s passionate advocacy of the Southern cause had temporarily robbed him of his critical faculties. Every judgment, every prediction he made to Rose would turn out to be wrong.
Rose soon came to the conclusion that Charleston Harbor was useless as a means of escape, and she boarded a train with little Rose for Wilmington. Her rooms at the Mills House Hotel did not remain empty for long. On August 7, Fitzgerald Ross and Captain Scheibert checked into the hotel, having left Francis Lawley behind in Richmond. The journalist had pushed himself to the brink of collapse at Gettysburg and was too weak to travel. The pressure of maintaining an optimistic tone in his Times reports had also been taking its toll on him.
Fitzgerald Ross recognized Vizetelly from Lawley’s description when the journalist showed up at the Mills House Hotel for dinner. According to Scheibert, “this hotel had the best service of any tavern” in the South. It charged the highest prices, too: $100 per person for a three-course meal.52 General Beauregard welcomed Vizetelly’s new friends when they called at his headquarters, and introduced them to the English officer on his staff. Henry Feilden was growing used to his role as Beauregard’s mouthpiece and cheerfully gave a tour of the preparations against the next phase of the Federal siege. The consuls observed with alarm that more gunships were sailing into the harbor. The city itself was obviously the next objective. The British consul, Henry Pinckney Walker, sent a message to the legation in Washington that somehow slipped through, beseeching Lord Lyons to send a British warship to rescue the “several thousand” British women and children who were in the direct line of fire.23.4 53
At 10:45 P.M. on August 21, a note from Union general Quincy Adams Gillmore was delivered to Beauregard’s headquarters announcing the imminent bombardment of the city. He had neglected to sign it, so no one took the threat seriously. Three hours later, the shelling began. “At first I thought a meteor had fallen; but another awful rush and whirr right over the hotel and another explosion beyond, settled any doubts I might have had,” wrote Vizetelly. He threw on his clothes and ran down the stairs, fighting his way past hysterical businessmen. “One perspiring individual of portly dimensions was trotting to and fro with one boot on and the other in his hand, and this was nearly all the dress he could boast of.… Another, in a semi-state of nudity with a portion of his garments on his arm, barked the shins of everyone in his way in his efforts to drag an enormous trunk to the staircase.”54 Out in the street, women were running in all directions, their heads ducked, some carrying children in their arms. Many people were stampeding toward the station in the wild hope that a train would be waiting to convey them away. Vizetelly found Ross and Scheibert coolly standing around in the Mills House bar. He persuaded them to come with him down to the promenade, where they would have a better view of the bombardment. To their surprise, a large crowd had already gathered there. For an hour they stood out under the open canopy of stars, with Vizetelly and Ross taking bets as to whether the shells would fall short and land on their heads.55
The next morning, General Beauregard sent a furious note to Gillmore demanding a halt to the firing until all the civilians could be evacuated. The British consul called on General Gillmore under a flag of truce with a similar request. The Federal commander granted a cease-fire of twenty-four hours before resuming the bombardment. After three weeks of continuous shelling, the excitement wore thin, and the three friends began to discuss their departure from Charleston. On September 14, Ross and Vizetelly bade farewell to Scheibert, who was returning to Prussia. “I fear our troubles have only begun,” Thomas Prioleau wrote to his cousin Charles Prioleau, the head of Fraser, Trenholm in Liverpool. “The fire brought against us is immense and incessant, yet we do not despair.”23.5 56
Ill.45 Downtown Charleston under fire from Union forces, by Frank Vizetelly.
23.1 While Mayo was exploring Vicksburg, he was the subject of cheerful conversation at home. On July 11, 1863, the Medical Times and Gazette reported on the dinner held by the Southampton Medical Society: “Mr. Dayman spoke at length: ‘A son of one of their old associates, Mr. Mayo, of Winchester (hear, hear), was at that moment with the army in America.’ (A deeply-toned Voice: Yes, but on the wrong side—laughter.) “There were no wrongs on the side of Surgery.” (Hear.) (A Voice: I should prefer his being in the south. Another Voice: The north is more bracing, and laughter.) ‘Their young friend, Dr. Chas. Mayo, was with the army in North America.’—(A Voice: The right man in the right place, and laughter.) ‘He was gone out as a volunteer Surgeon, taking with him no prejudiced views of the supremacy of Military Surgery, but content to carry into the field the principles which had made his father.… Might their young friend do justice, not only to Hampshire, but also to England.’ (Applause.)”
23.2 Adams had also canceled the legation’s Fourth of July celebration. The previous year’s dinner had been a desultory affair. He expected this year’s to be no better, and he feared a visit from the popular orator Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was visiting England on a lecture tour. Beecher was arousing the British public, but for all the wrong reasons, telling a gathering of temperance campaigners, for example, that the North was losing because its army officers could not stay sober.
23.3 The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, had a strangely inflated idea of Lyons’s power. It was mortifying, he complained, “the extent Lord Lyons shapes and directs, through the Secretary of State, an erroneous policy to this government.” CSS Florida had recently sailed within sixty miles of New York, leaving a trail of burning ships and bruised egos in her wake. Welles sent six cruisers to chase after the elusive Captain Maffitt and his crew, but a false lead had led them up the East Coast toward Nantucket. This, too, was somehow Lord Lyons’s fault.44
23.4 The British consul was exaggerating; the number was less than a thousand. Lyons’s chargé d’affaires, William Stuart, telegraphed Rear Admiral Milne for his advice. Milne replied in the negative. It would be unthinkable, he wrote, to send in a ship now and interfere with Federal naval plans.
23.5 Francis Lawley’s optimistic reporting about the shelling of Charleston did not deceive William Howard Russell: “Such rubbish!” he wrote in his diary on September 28. “I really believe on the U.S. question the great John Bull has lost his head and is distracted by jealousy to such an extent that it has not only ceased to be just and generous but to be moderately reasonable.”