Rose Greenhow arrives in England—The British government vs. the rams—Commissioner Mason leaves his post—A new breed of volunteer—General Bragg’s justice
With Rose Greenhow and her daughter on board, the blockade runner Phantom was the only ship to escape from Wilmington on the night of August 5, 1863. “We passed the Elizabeth and the Hebe, who had each got aground, but our anxiety was too great on our own account to bestow much thought upon our friends,” she wrote in her diary; “the Yankees threw up rockets, which revealed to us the fact that we were in the midst of five of the ‘blockaders.’ ” After rounding Cape Fear with the pursuers mercifully far behind, “Capt. Porter had a mattress spread upon deck, upon which I lay,” Rose continued in her diary, “watching the moon which had risen and was shining gloriously high in the Heavens, and pitying myself as the victim of that most unfortunate infirmity of seasickness.” Little Rose also felt wretched and “crouched by my side, amidst the cotton bales which crowded the deck.”1
The Phantom sailed unmolested into St. George’s harbor, Bermuda, on August 10, 1863. Rose’s steamship to England was not leaving for three weeks, which gave her ample opportunity to study Major Walker’s shipping operation. “The entire trade of the island is Confederate,” she remarked. The willingness of the British authorities to ignore his activities was a reflection of Bermuda’s desperate plight before the war. A devout believer in “the wise and beneficial system of servile labor,” Rose hoped that the British now regretted their folly in abolishing slavery in 1833. Had it not been for the Confederate community on the island, all of whom shared her prejudices, she would have been miserable during her stay; living cheek by jowl with a free black population seemed unnatural and offensive to her. But in contrast to her treatment at Richmond, Rose was the center of attention in St. George. “She is one of the most beautiful women I ever saw,” gushed Georgiana Walker. “She knows this and like a sensible woman, does not pretend to think the contrary.”2 The fact that Rose was traveling on a diplomatic mission made her seem even more glamorous.
Rose had expected to be in Liverpool by September 11 or 12 at the latest, and she was taken by surprise when the captain announced that he was changing their destination. The Harriet Pinckney was a new Confederate steamer, he explained, and too precious to risk becoming “Yankee prey” on the return journey. They were heading south instead, to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall. “This was unexpected to us all,” Rose wrote in her diary, “and everyone set to work to know where Falmouth was and what sort of a place.”3 The captain was being overly cautious; the closest threat to the Pinckney was USS Kearsarge, which was sailing around the Azores in the hope of finding one of the Confederate raiders.
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Captain Maffitt would not have sailed the battle-scarred Florida into Brest, France, had he known that his arrival would attract the attention of Federal agents, putting in jeopardy the six Confederate raiders under construction at Nantes and Bordeaux.24.1 James Bulloch had moved his operations across the Channel after the detention of the Alexandra in the spring. The emperor had given his permission for the switch to France with the proviso that if the United States uncovered the existence of the Confederate ships, the authorities would deny all knowledge of the program.4 Lucien Arman, owner of the largest shipbuilding firm in the country, was building four Alabama-style raiders for Bulloch in Bordeaux and had also helped to arrange the contract for the two smaller ships at Nantes.
The obliging Arman—whose wealth and position had grown in step with the emperor’s desire to modernize his navy—also introduced Bulloch to the brokerage firm of Bravay and Company. Monsieur Bravay agreed to buy the Confederate rams nearing completion at Lairds shipyard in Liverpool for a nominal sum (plus a large commission) and maintain that they were destined for his client, the pasha of Egypt. The intricate web of deception had been working well until the Florida sailed imprudently into Brest with its Confederate flag flying from the mast. The foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, was furious, and proceeded to sit on Captain Maffitt’s request to use the port’s repair facilities for four days before reluctantly assenting on the condition that the visit be kept secret from the American legation.
In London, the Florida’s arrival went almost unremarked amid the furors over the imminent departure of the Lairds rams. Charles Francis Adams had warned Lord Russell that their very existence presented the greatest threat to Anglo-American relations since the Trent affair. Two ram raiders could not, of course, win the war for the Confederacy, but they could threaten the Federal stranglehold on Charleston or Wilmington. Moreover, argued Adams, if the rams were allowed to leave, there would be nothing to prevent the Confederacy from building twenty more in Britain. War between America and England would be unavoidable if the government failed to clamp down on all Confederate violations of British neutrality; and this, he was convinced, would never happen under Lord Palmerston.
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U.S. consul Thomas Haines Dudley in Liverpool had uncovered every aspect of the Confederates’ operations: how they recruited sailors, who paid them and when, how they procured supplies, and on which vessels the cargoes sailed. But he had failed to unearth a single piece of written evidence against the rams that could be presented in a court of law. The Lord Mayor of London warned the Home Office that it would be a waste of time sending government agents to investigate Lairds, since nothing would be found. But Lord Russell ignored the advice, which he believed to be tainted by the Lord Mayor’s pro-Southern bias, and sent the agents anyway. The hostility experienced by pro-Northerners in Liverpool could be overwhelming at times: “I have … done myself a great deal of damage,” complained one of Dudley’s informants.5
The Duke of Argyll noticed Charles Francis Adams’s agitation when the U.S. minister and his family went to stay in Scotland in the middle of August. One morning after breakfast, Adams had a frank conversation with the duke about the probability that the North would declare war if the government allowed the rams to depart. He was surprised to discover that he was not the first to say so. “He said that he had received a letter from Sumner,” wrote Adams on August 28, 1863, “dwelling very strongly on the danger of war.” Adams was too circumspect to discuss Seward’s latest dispatch (the threatening and bombastic letter Lord Lyons had seen earlier in August), but he hinted that there were instructions he was deliberately holding back for the moment. Adams, however, had no way of knowing that Seward was actually quite sanguine about the rams. “The English Ministry are our friends,” Seward had recently admitted to the navy secretary, Gideon Welles. The very day Adams poured out his fears to the duke, Seward told Welles to cease worrying because “the armored vessels building in England will not be allowed to leave.”6 Adams’s continual fretting about the rams ruined the enjoyment of his visit to Inveraray Castle, and he left for London on August 31 thinking he would never see Scotland again. This, he decided, would not be a great loss: “Half of it is fit only for the habitation of the beasts and the birds. The other half has nothing especial to recommend it either.”7
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Benjamin Moran was hysterical when Adams arrived back at the legation on September 3. One of the Lairds rams had actually been taken out for a test run, yet Lord Russell had replied to Adams’s latest protest with what seemed to him the usual empty assurances. The legation was reliving the escape of the Alabama. The effect on Adams was dramatic. He sent a warning to Russell that day, and a stronger one the next. On the fifth, having received nothing but a bland note in reply, he lost his temper. “This is war,” he wrote to Russell, war by stealth and deceit. If the government allowed the two rams to depart, to destroy New York and Boston at will, the United States would retaliate. If the circumstances were reversed, Adams declared, Britain would do the same. He would communicate his government’s response forthwith.8
Adams assumed that Lord Palmerston was interfering—or, worse, restraining Lord Russell from responding properly. It would have been far better for his peace of mind and the future of Anglo-American relations had he been kept informed of the strenuous efforts of the Home and Foreign office clerks to find a legal way of stopping the rams. Since June, the government had been secretly conducting an international investigation into their true ownership. The British consul in Egypt had been ordered to pry the truth out of the pasha as to how he had become mixed up with the Confederates. The information trickling in only heightened Russell’s suspicions about Bravay and Company. Palmerston agreed that he, too, was worried about “this ship building business.” Yet there was no obvious remedy: Seward’s threats and Adams’s letters made it politically impossible for them to amend the Foreign Enlistment Act without appearing to bow to U.S. pressure.
The British cabinet’s concern had increased in August after Richard Cobden shared with them his most recent correspondence from Charles Sumner. The senator, reported Cobden, had made a volte-face about England, and instead of being her chief ally in the U.S. capital was now her loudest critic. Sumner appeared to be so bent on revenge for Britain’s accumulated wrongdoings that Cobden had felt constrained to remind him, “We have been the only obstacle to what would have been almost a European recognition of the South.”24.2 10 The more Russell heard about the state of opinion in the North, the less he agreed with the advice of the law officers to wait until there was positive proof against the rams. Finally, on August 31, the Foreign Office received a telegram from the British consul in Egypt confirming that the pasha story was a ruse. Yet still the legal advisers to the Customs and Treasury departments rejected his entreaties for action.
Although he was still on holiday in Scotland, Russell telegraphed his undersecretary for foreign affairs, Austen Henry Layard, on September 3 to say that he would return to London for a confrontation with the law officers if necessary. Palmerston concurred with Russell: the Confederates were dragging the government into “neutral hostility.” He considered the possibility of having to pay damages to Lairds to be worth the risk—it would certainly be cheaper than a war with the United States.11 Layard obediently sent the detention order that day. Fearful that his telegram might lose itself—in the way that unpopular messages were wont to do in the Treasury Department—he wrote to them again two days later.12 His persistence paid off, and a customs official informed Lairds of the order.
Lord Lyons’s secretary of the legation, William Stuart, received instructions to explain to Seward that the vessels were being detained even though the government did not expect a favorable decision from the courts. Unfortunately, no one remembered to share this concern with Charles Francis Adams, or indeed to apprise him of the recent developments regarding the rams. Russell’s sudden reticence may have been prompted by a fear of leaks, or a desire to wait until he had definite news, but most likely he had become annoyed with the aggressive tone of Adams’s letters and decided that the minister could afford to wait a little while.
Over the next two weeks, there was frenetic correspondence among the members of the cabinet as they debated whether the detention order had been the right step. As if to remind the ministry how fraught the issue remained in Parliament, the Liverpool Courier declared on September 12 that a government that truckled to U.S. pressure was worthy of impeachment. The next day, Palmerston suggested to the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Somerset, that the navy should purchase the rams from M. Bravay, which would avoid the embarrassment of another legal battle. At the very least, he wrote in all seriousness, “we are short of iron clads and it takes time to build them.” The rams would be a useful addition to British naval capacity just in case “[the Federals] should be disposed and able next year to execute their threatened vengeance, for all the forbearance we have shown them.”13
In October, Captain Hoare, the Royal Navy attaché to the British embassy in Paris, visited M. Bravay with a line of credit and a list of questions. Their conversation left Hoare with no doubt of the rams’ true ownership. The Frenchman’s nods and winks were irritating but illuminating—had James Bulloch witnessed this display of self-important puffery, he would have been furious at Bravay’s indiscretion. Nevertheless, the Frenchman refused to sell the rams at any price, and Hoare returned home with nothing except a poor opinion of the Confederates’ dealings. By coincidence, British crewmen from the Florida arrived in Liverpool during the week of Hoare’s meeting with Bravay. Captain Maffitt had let them go to save money, but everyone, including Consul Dudley, assumed they were coming to take the rams out of Lairds shipyard while there was still time. This mistaken belief sent officials into a frenzy. Russell saw another Alabama incident in the making and wanted the marines to become involved; the Home Office ordered the Liverpool constabulary to keep a close watch on the sailors.14
If Lord Russell had expected gratitude from Charles Francis Adams, he was soon disabused. The U.S. minister was only just beginning to express his pent-up frustration with the British government. Ignorant of Russell’s marathon negotiation with the law officers, Adams assumed that it was his “war letter” that had frightened the English into action, and he fired another cannonade of unfortunate remarks on September 16: “If Her Majesty’s Government have not the power to prevent the harbours and towns of a friendly nation from being destroyed by vessels built by British subjects, and equipped, manned, and dispatched from her harbours,” he raged, “then … all international obligations, whether implied or expressed, [are] not worth the paper on which they are written.”15 His letter was passed around the cabinet, accompanied by various noises of disgust and outrage. “It seems to me that we cannot allow to remain unnoticed his repeated and I must say somewhat insolent threats of war. We ought, I think, to say to him in civil Terms ‘you be dammed,’ ” declared Palmerston. Russell thought the same. In his reply on September 25 he dispensed with the usual expressions of “regret and concern” and went straight to the point: “There are, however, passages in your letter,” he wrote, that “plainly and repeatedly imply an intimation of hostile proceeding towards Great Britain on the part of the Government of the United States unless steps are taken.” These threats would not be tolerated: Her Majesty’s Government will never “overstep the limits of the law” for the sake of appeasing another government, and “they will not shrink from any consequences of such a decision.”16
Adams came to his senses after he received Russell’s indignant reply and hastily apologized for his letter. Henry Adams, on the other hand, was unrepentant. “They meant to play us, like a salmon,” he told Charles Francis Jr., until their father’s threat of war ended “the little game.… Undoubtedly to us this is a second Vicksburg. It is our diplomatic triumph, if we manage to carry it through.”17 It was Russell’s fault that the legation wrongly assumed Adams had scored a victory over him. His pride had brought him the worst of all outcomes: his efforts unacknowledged, his reputation tarnished, and the government made to look weak. Adams’s apparent diplomatic coup was naturally the talk of Washington. William Stuart was so alarmed that he spoke to Seward’s son, Frederick, on September 18 to explain the real sequence of events. But the myth of the British lion cowering under the onslaught of the American eagle had already taken hold.
Seward could not resist making capital out of England’s embarrassment. He had asked Thurlow Weed to plant newspaper stories about the dangerous rams in England, so that he could fight a “battle” and emerge the victor. Gideon Welles was infuriated by the ease with which his rival manipulated the news. “I am under restrictions which prevent me from making known facts which would dissipate this alarm,” he wrote in his diary. “It does not surprise me that the New York Times … and all the papers influenced by Seward should be alarmed. [He] knows those vessels are to be detained, yet will not come out and state the fact, but is not unwilling to have apprehension excited. It will glorify him if it is said they are detained through protest from our minister.”18
Charles Sumner unwittingly played into Seward’s hands. The rage and paranoia that had recently alarmed his friends burst into public view on September 10. Several thousand people crowded into the Cooper Union in New York to listen to him deliver a four-hour tirade against Britain. “I am disappointed and disgusted with Sumner’s own conduct,” wrote Lord Lyons after he had read the speech in full.19 Its real purpose, he believed, was to strengthen Sumner’s position against Seward. If the rams were stopped, people would remember the Cooper Union speech as being instrumental in the diplomatic victory; but if the warships were allowed to set sail, Sumner would be able to point to his speech as proof that he, at least, had been willing to confront the British. The vehement denunciations of Britain were baffling to Sumner’s friends. Some attributed his excess of feeling to his old head injury, others to grief over the recent death of his brother; all agreed on the calamitous damage to his reputation. Having positioned himself as the voice of moderation, his new bellicosity made him look like the worst kind of political opportunist. Lord Lyons would never trust him again; “I had hoped better things of him,” he wrote.20 One of the few letters of approval came from Seward, who, with exquisite irony, sent Sumner his hearty congratulations.21
The Economist announced there was no hope for Anglo-American relations if a “friend” like Sumner could make such a hostile speech. His accusation that the British government was conniving with the Confederates had to be answered, which Russell duly did in a widely praised speech. Sumner became agitated by the criticism coming from the other side of the Atlantic and obstinately stuck to his position, even after he learned that Russell had detained the rams before his Cooper Union speech. Protests from English acquaintances simply made his declarations more extreme. “If Russell wants cotton, let him withdraw all support … for the Rebellion,” he ranted to John Bright who, for all his faults, pandered to no man and refused to play along with Sumner’s characterization of Russell.22
Adams was disappointed that few people in England other than his own son gave him credit for stopping the rams. But a bruised ego was the least of his worries. On September 28, Moran recorded that the legation messenger had grievously swindled the family. Letters had been intercepted, Adams’s wine cellar ransacked, money taken, even checks forged. Feeling that their sanctuary had been violated, Mrs. Adams was already pining to leave London when an anonymous letter arrived at the legation:
Dam the Federals
Dam the Confederates
Dam you both
Kill you damned selves for the next 10 years if you like; so much the better for the world and for England. Thus thinks every Englishman with any brains.
NB.PS. We’ll cut your throats fast enough afterwards for you if you aint tired of blood, you devils.23
This decided the matter. Adams found a large seaside retreat for rent in St. Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. There, he led Henry and Brooks into the slate-blue water for bracing plunges before breakfast.24 It was a relief to leave behind the chaos and discord of the legation. “My state of depression of spirits is becoming chronic,” he wrote in his diary in a rare moment of self-reflection. “This way of living does not suit me, and the condition of public as well as of my private affairs at home is not satisfactory.”25
Adams’s chief solace was that his difficulties paled beside those of the Confederates in London. Mason had announced on September 21 that he was closing the commission. Benjamin Moran was almost sorry to see him go: “Mr. Mason was the unfittest man they could have sent here, and has proved an ignominious failure.”26 Mason’s English friends had feared just such a reaction to his departure and had entreated him to stay; the press, including The Times, considered his resignation ill judged. But Mason was acting on Judah Benjamin’s instructions. The Confederate secretary of state had ordered him to relocate to France under the new designation of “special commissioner to the Continent” and to give as his reason for the move Southern dissatisfaction with Britain.27 Yet the state of affairs in France was no better for the Confederates. A disgruntled clerk at the offices of Bravay and Company had passed incriminating documents to the U.S. legation. The French authorities naturally professed to be shocked to learn that the Confederates were using their dockyards, and the foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, glibly assured William L. Dayton, the U.S. minister in Paris, that there would be a thorough investigation into the matter. The deception granted Bulloch a reprieve, but it was no guarantee that his construction program would be allowed to continue.
There was a funereal atmosphere at James Mason’s house in Sackville Street when Rose Greenhow arrived for dinner on September 17. She had seen him the day before. “He was very kind—and we had a long talk,” she wrote in her diary.28 Mason apologized for leaving her in such an awkward position. She had been expecting to make a life for herself in London as the Confederate commission’s political and social hostess, re-creating her role in Washington before the war, and his departure would deprive her of an essential platform for her mission. Mason had also performed a vital function for the Confederates and their sympathizers in England by containing the personal differences between them to a sustainable level. It had not mattered quite so much that Spence dismissed Henry Hotze’s propaganda journal, the Index, as a waste of time and money, or that Hotze considered Spence to be a deluded abolitionist, when there was a third party to keep them apart. How they would work together once he was in France had not been resolved. Spence and Hotze vied with each other to help Rose. Spence took her to Richard Bentley and Sons, Charles Dickens’s publishers, who eagerly acquired the memoir she had been writing in Richmond, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington. Hotze trumpeted Rose to the readers of the Index as one of the great martyrs of the Southern cause, a heroine whose “spirit and talent [were] not common even among women of the South.”29
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For all of Hotze’s genius at shaping public opinion, he failed to understand the gravity of the situation in Liverpool. “The Rams in the Mersey are more than ever the centers of attention. The efforts of the Government to insure their detention are really ludicrous,” he sneered to Benjamin. Bulloch, on the other hand, saw nothing amusing about the government’s actions. On October 8, Russell decided that Lairds could not be trusted, and he changed his detention order to outright seizure. The Duke of Argyll congratulated Russell and urged him not to regret defying the law officers: “They would never have advised you to do what you have so rightly done,” he wrote. “I say, three cheers for the House of Russell.”30 Palmerston agreed with Argyll that there “was no moral Doubt that [the rams] are intended for Confederate service.” Even the Queen became involved, telling Gladstone that the rams business should not be allowed “to endanger the Government.” Despite her concern, Gladstone thought “she did not appear to lean towards over-conciliation of the Federal Government.”31 James Bulloch insisted in his memoirs that he never intended the rams to sneak out of England. If that was so, Lairds had done him a disservice with their suspicious activity.
The task of guarding the rams was one of the least rewarding experiences of Captain Edward Inglefield’s career in the Royal Navy. He and his men were threatened wherever they went in Liverpool. An intelligent and empathetic officer, he realized that the anger directed toward them chiefly stemmed from a fear that the five hundred craftsmen working on the rams would lose their jobs, and he advised the Home Office to allow the work to continue until the ships were completed. Inglefield deliberately refrained from putting on a show of force: he moored his sloop at some distance from the rams, carried nothing more threatening than an umbrella, and ordered his men to remember that on this mission they were peace preservers, not war makers. It was a sensible but risky move. One ram looked primed to leave: “Her turrets are very nearly completed, and excepting stores she can be ready for sea almost any day,” he reported. “I have taken upon myself not to permit the boilers to be run up, or the fires laid even for presumed experimental purposes.”32
Bulloch was surprised that the government had seized the rams without first obtaining legal sanction or charges against Lairds. After a month went by without any sign of legal action, he began to wonder if the process was being deliberately drawn out in order to give the law officers more time to prepare their case. On October 28 “Historicus” attacked the rams in The Times (this was William Vernon Harcourt’s return to print after the death of his wife in April), condemning the Confederates’ illegal use of British shipyards and arguing for a determined response from the government. Bulloch realized that “Historicus” was preparing public opinion for the government’s clampdown on Confederate operations in England; whether or not the rams case went to court, the ships would never be allowed to leave. The following day brought more disappointing news. CSS Georgia had dropped anchor at Cherbourg in so dilapidated a state as to be on the verge of sinking.
The raider had destroyed nine ships during her six-month adventure. But according to Lieutenant James Morgan, the final weeks had resembled a gothic horror story, full of madness and savagery. Captain Maury had suffered a nervous breakdown near the Cape of Good Hope, and the enforcement of discipline had fallen to the charming but weak Lieutenant Evans. There were constant fights and several attempted mutinies: “things had gone from bad to worse than bad until one day some of the stokers discovered that a coal bunker was [all that] separated [them] from the spirit-room,” wrote Morgan;
Ill.46 The Royal Navy keeping watch over the Lairds’ rams in the Mersey.
and inserting a piece of lead pipe into the hole they got all the liquor they (temporarily) wanted. This they distributed among the crew and soon there was a battle royal going on the berth deck which the master-at-arms was unable to stop.… Here was a pretty kettle of fish! … I suddenly leaped upon the man and bore him to the deck, where, in a jiffy, the master-at-arms placed the bracelets on his wrists. The other mutineers, quietly extending their arms in sign of submission, were placed in irons, and confined below. The discipline of the ship needed as much repairing as the vessel did herself. It was time the Georgia sought a civilized port for more reasons than one.33
Clerks at Fraser, Trenholm had carefully stored the crew’s letters, to be distributed on their eventual return to port, and receiving news from home helped calm the febrile atmosphere on the ship. “There was great rejoicing for all save me,” recorded Morgan after the letters were delivered at Cherbourg. He had received two: the first told of the death of his brother George, a captain serving in the 1st Louisiana Infantry in Virginia; the second, that Gibbes, his other brother and a captain in the 7th Louisiana, had died a prisoner of war on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie. Morgan’s adventures at sea suddenly seemed trivial to him after the terrible news from home. From this moment, his one ambition was to return to the South and fight the Federals.
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In the Southwest, the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson had brought a temporary quiet to the Mississippi region. General Banks’s XIX Corps returned to camp, and the 133rd New York Volunteers, Colonel Currie’s regiment, resumed its garrison duty in Baton Rouge. Currie had recovered from his wounds, and much as he retained a fondness for his men, he loathed inaction more and had applied for a transfer. “I have at least one strong arm left,” he wrote to Thurlow Weed, “and I am only desirous that any merit I may possess … may meet with equal favor with my compeers.”34 Currie’s eagerness to be in the thick of danger was rare: most of the injured and sick wanted to be as far away from the fighting as possible.
Ebenezer Wells and Dr. Charles Mayo were both sent north, Wells to a hospital in Kentucky and Mayo to Saratoga Springs in New York to recover from typhus. His last weeks in Vicksburg had been a blur to him, but the illness saved his life in an unexpected way. On August 18, Mayo had become so unwell that a friend insisted he spend the night in town with him rather than on his ship, the City of Madison. During the night there was an explosion on the Madison that claimed the lives of all those on board. After this near brush with death, the authorities finally took pity on Mayo and shipped him out of Vicksburg. The War Department accepted his resignation from the army on September 8, although it was another two weeks before he was well enough to sail for England on the twenty-second, never to return to America.24.3
Mayo’s quiet departure contrasted with the noisy and sometimes violent integration of the thousands of new army recruits produced by the draft, many of whom were determined to desert at the first opportunity. Even the volunteers were often cynical about their situation. “As I fully intend to desert if I don’t get good treatment, I enlisted under the name of Andrew Ross,” James Horrocks wrote to his parents on September 5, 1863. The nineteen-year-old had run away from Lancashire to escape the financial burden and shame of having fathered an illegitimate child.35 Volunteering in the Federal army seemed like an excellent prospect to the prodigal son: “I shall get when mustered in $200 from the state of New Jersey, 50 dollars from Hudson City (where I enlisted) and 25 dollars from the Government. This, together with a month’s pay in advance, will make $288 cash down,” he told his parents. “I shall be able to save more money as a soldier than as a clerk with 400 dollars a year (that is a pretty good salary in New York).”36
Horrocks was surprised by the large number of foreigners who had enlisted with him. “The Company I am in is a motley assembly—Irish, Germans, French, English, Yankees—Tall, Slim, Short, and Stout. Some are decently behaved and others uncouth as the very devil,” he wrote home. One-fifth of the regiment was English, including all the sergeants. Nevertheless, he was pretending to be a Scot in order to avoid the anti-English prejudice among the Americans.37 The desertions began as soon as the men received their bounty money; but far from deserting himself, Horrocks was sent out with several others to find the absconders and returned with more than a dozen. The ecstatic spirit of patriotism and duty that had animated the first wave of volunteering in 1861 had died out; Horrocks’s desire “to keep myself pretty secure and safe” reflected the feelings of a large majority of the new soldiers, especially among the conscripts.
In the South, where there were neither untapped reserves of young men nor legions of foreigners arriving each week, part-time raiders and guerrilla outfits were playing an increasingly important role in the war effort. Northern Virginia, where Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stationed, was Mosby country. The eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, two hundred miles to the south, had become John Yates Beall country.
As with Mosby, the war had enabled the twenty-eight-year-old Beall to redefine himself. His father’s death when Beall was twenty had forced him to sacrifice a promising legal career in order to care for his widowed mother and five younger siblings. Service in the Confederate army had provided an honorable escape route from domestic responsibilities, until a bullet to his right lung seemed to cut short his military career.
Beall moved to Canada in 1862, where he tried to establish a business selling game, until a friend told him about the Confederate navy operations in England. It sounded so exciting that he wanted to “join them and take of their fortune for good and evil.”38 In the time it took Beall to reach Richmond in February 1863, he had changed his mind about going to England, however, and instead saw himself as a waterborne version of John Mosby. The Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, was skeptical of the idea. He appointed Beall acting master on March 5—the usual commission for gentleman volunteers—but gave him no other help or encouragement: Beall would have to supply his own boat, uniform, weapons, and volunteers, none of whom could be eligible for conscription. Furthermore, although they would be able to keep whatever booty they captured, they would not be paid.
Beall set about recruiting from the groups still open to him—the middle-aged, stranded foreigners, and wounded veterans like himself. By September 1863, his Confederate Volunteer Coast Guard, or “Beall’s Party,” as it was known, had grown to eighteen and included two newspaper editors and their apprentices, a couple of sailors, and two Scotsmen: Bennet Graham Burley and John Maxwell. Burley had recently been imprisoned in Castle Thunder, the converted warehouse in Richmond that housed spies and political prisoners. The twenty-three-year-old Glaswegian had arrived in the South the previous year, bearing designs for a powerful underwater limpet mine, which in theory could penetrate armor plating. (The explosive device had been invented by his father, Robert Burley, Jr., the owner of a toolmaking factory, who, unable to secure commercial interest in his invention at home, had given the plans to his son to take to America.)
Bennet Burley had chosen the South on the assumption he would have a better chance of being noticed. His hunch was correct, though for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately, the new chief of the Confederate navy’s Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography, John M. Brooke, was also an inventor. As soon as Brooke saw Burley’s plans, he knew that the youth was no spy and arranged for his release. Having regained his freedom, Burley displayed the daring and initiative that later made him one of the most famous war correspondents of his generation and persuaded Brooke to let him test the mine on a Federal ship. John Maxwell was assigned to help Burley carry out his mission, but Burley’s father had missed something in the design and at the final moment they were unable to ignite the fuse.
The mine’s failure to explode merely whetted Burley’s and Maxwell’s appetite for danger, and they officially joined Beall’s Party on August 13, 1863, the day their navy commissions as acting master came through. Having acquired two small boats, the black Raven and the white Swan, the raiders went on to harass Federal shipping around Cape Charles and Fortress Monroe so successfully that a joint U.S. military and naval expedition was ordered to find them.39 Beall’s dream of emulating Mosby had come true.
John Mosby himself had received a bullet wound in August and had only recently returned to active duty. He decided to prove his recovery by reprising his spectacular raid against Sir Percy Wyndham in March. This time the target was Francis Pierpont, the governor of pro-Union West Virginia, who was staying in temporary quarters in Alexandria. The raid was unsuccessful, but it reminded Wyndham, whose recovery from his leg wound had been reported with great excitement by local newspapers, that the contest between them was still alive.40
Wyndham’s New Jersey Cavaliers were camped at Bristoe Station, right in the center of Mosby country, but Wyndham was unable to indulge his fantasies of revenge, having again been moved up to brigade command. Union general George Meade had ordered his cavalry corps to find out where Lee was moving with the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite almost constant skirmishing with Jeb Stuart’s troops, the cavalrymen were able to report that Lee had dispatched General Longstreet and the First Corps to an unknown destination. “I should be glad to have your views as to what had better be done, if anything,” Meade asked General Halleck on September 14. Lincoln wondered what Meade was waiting for: “He should move upon Lee at once,” the president wrote impatiently to Halleck.41
Meade did indeed move, but slowly and deliberately, to the relief of the Confederates. President Davis and General Lee had decided that there was no alternative to sending Longstreet to Tennessee, which was in danger of being captured by Union general William Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. If Rosecrans succeeded, yet more vital railroads would be lost, railroads that were Virginia’s only lifeline to the much reduced Confederacy. Tennessee lay across the top of the South like an elongated anvil, touching the borders of Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia; the Confederates feared that its conquest would allow the North to carve up the South like a joint of beef. The implications of such a disaster added to the Richmond cabinet’s anguish after the summer of defeats. The chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, mourned in his diary: “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”42
During July, Rosecrans had pushed his Confederate adversary, Braxton Bragg, into the eastern corner of Tennessee. Bragg still held Chattanooga, with its all-important rail depots, but the irascible general was leading a demoralized army that had already been defeated twice in battle. Bragg’s bullying manner made him despised by his officers and loathed by the men. “I had seen men shot, and whipped, and shaved, and branded,” wrote Sam Watkins, a private in the 1st Tennessee Regiment. He thought he was used to Bragg’s ways, but at Chattanooga worse was to come. He watched the hanging of two “Yankee spies.” “I saw a guard approach,” he wrote, “and saw two little boys in their midst.… I saw that they were handcuffed. ‘Are they spies?’ I was appalled; I was horrified; nay, more, I was sick at heart … the youngest one began to beg and cry and plead most piteously.… The props were knocked out and the two boys were dangling in the air. I turned off sick at heart.”43
24.1 Maffitt could not resist lingering in the Channel in the hope of snatching a last-minute prize, and he was rewarded for his daring with the Anglo-Saxon, a U.S. ship carrying coal to New York. He removed the passengers, appropriated the coal, and burned the ship. The Royal Navy was affronted by Maffitt’s cheek at carrying out a raid so close to British waters and sent a frigate to patrol the area. But by then Maffitt had docked at Brest.
24.2 The Duke of Argyll told Sumner that he would not show his letters to Lord Russell because the foreign minister would dismiss them as gibberish. The duchess also tried to reason with him. “I like you to be quite frank with me, but wish you did not hope for what is impossible,” she wrote earnestly. “We must be neutral, as a Government.… I sent some of the newspaper extracts you sent me to Lord Russell. He replied: ‘We must be neutral.… We do not “fit out ships by the dozen,” and Mr. S. must know the allegation to be untrue. One—two—three ships may have evaded our laws, just as the Americans evaded the American laws during the Canadian Contest.… You will have seen that the Government did their best in the Alexandra case. As to the ironplated ships, there seems to be great difficulty in getting at the truth.’ ”9
24.3 Nine years later, in 1872, while taking a break between wars, an old friend from the Vicksburg campaign went down to Oxford to pay Dr. Mayo a visit. The friend was General Sherman.