Colonel De Courcy wins and loses—Longstreet arrives at Chickamauga—The Confederate generals’ revolt—Two English travelers—Contrasting goodwill tours—“They are all down on us”
The timing of Longstreet’s arrival in Chattanooga depended on eastern Tennessee’s remaining under Southern control. If the railroads or the road through the Cumberland Gap stayed open, Longstreet would be able to reach General Bragg in a matter of days. If these were closed, the only other possible train route went south through the Carolinas, west through Georgia, and finally north to Chattanooga, taking at least a week, if not two. However, Federal forces led by General Burnside captured Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 2, 1863, cutting the Virginia–Tennessee rail link. This left the Cumberland Gap, which had been guarded by a garrison force of 2,500 Confederates since starvation drove out Colonel De Courcy in 1862. The new Confederate commander at the Gap, Brigadier General John Frazer, was struggling. Only two regiments were in a fit state for duty; the other two had been so depleted by illness and desertions that they were in a state of near mutiny. Frazer had been receiving conflicting orders about whether to evacuate or defend the fort. In the end, he decided to fight.1
Burnside did not want to be caught up in an arduous struggle for a single pass when he had an ideal candidate for the task in Colonel De Courcy, whose familiarity with the area was unmatched. Burnside assigned to him an independent brigade of 1,700 men, with orders to attack the Confederates from the northern side of the Gap. For De Courcy, the command signaled that his rehabilitation was complete, his reputation no longer tainted by the accusations of cowardice at Chickasaw Bluffs.
De Courcy’s happiness was shortlived. He discovered after the expedition had begun that he was leading a brigade that consisted of the flotsam and rejects of Burnside’s army; one regiment was just three months old, another a mere two weeks. Worse still, the ordnance supplies had failed to arrive on time. His artillery regiment had lost most of its guns; his two cavalry regiments had no revolvers; and the infantry regiments were down to thirty bullets per man. Their bread ration was enough to last them for four days, perhaps seven if cut in half. De Courcy ordered a slow march, hoping that the rations and munitions would catch up with them along the way. None came. By September 7, De Courcy had grown so outraged by the lackadaisical incompetence of Federal headquarters in Kentucky that he was bombarding them with hourly messages demanding to know, in the strongest language possible, when he could expect the arrival of his supplies. His brigade had now crossed the Cumberland Ford, and the Gap was less than half a day’s march away.2
When he learned that no wagons had been dispatched because the commissary officer in Kentucky had been on a drunken spree for several days, the best and worst aspects of De Courcy’s character came to the fore. “What is to be done?” he wrote to a member of Burnside’s staff on September 7. “My men will begin to get sick before many hours for want of bread. Little corn here, and I have only ammunition enough to bluster with and persuade the enemy to evacuate or capitulate if he be so inclined but I cannot make a serious attack.”3
De Courcy’s first instinct was to telegraph his resignation. But as he thought about his predicament, he realized that the Confederates had no means of knowing the state of his forces. This gave him the idea of deceiving the Confederates into thinking his brigade was four times its actual size—by having his men march in a continuous loop within earshot of the fort. Thus heartened, he made the fatal mistake of falling in love with his cleverness, and when help arrived in the form of a cavalry brigade under General James M. Shackelford, De Courcy became fearful that he would interfere. He should have dispatched a messenger to explain his intentions. Instead, he sent a letter asking Shackelford to stay out of the Gap because “I fear you have not been made acquainted … that I am fully acquainted with all the roads and locations on both sides of the gap, and further that I have been in the military profession almost continuously since my sixteenth year.” Shackelford ignored De Courcy and sent a message to General Frazer ordering him to surrender, which he refused to do.
Between his furious telegrams to Kentucky and his tactless behavior with Shackelford, De Courcy was leaving a trail of ill will.4 On September 8, De Courcy sent a polite communication to General Frazer. The situation was hopeless, he said. The fort was surrounded, and any attempt to fight their way out would only result in “a cruel loss of life.” All this time, the same Federal regiments had been marching around and around, making it seem as though the Confederates were facing several thousand men. De Courcy naturally hedged when Frazer replied asking to know the number of Federal troops opposing him. For twenty-four hours the Confederate general held firm, but after a day of absolute stillness—De Courcy would not even allow the men to load their rifles in case one of the new recruits accidentally pulled the trigger and started a firefight—Frazer’s nerve started to buckle. De Courcy thoughtfully sent back the Confederate go-between with a gift of two gallons of good whiskey. He followed up with a note: “It is now 12:30 P.M., and I shall not open fire until 2 P.M., unless before that time you shall have struck all your flags and hoisted in their stead white flags in token of surrender.”5
During these tense negotiations, General Burnside had marched up from Knoxville, Tennessee, with an additional infantry brigade. He, too, sent a demand for surrender to General Frazer. By now the Confederate had received three orders in three days from three separate forces. As far as he knew, tens of thousands of Federal troops were poised to blow his position to pieces. Frazer drank De Courcy’s whiskey and considered his options. In the meantime, an irritated Burnside tried to assert his authority over the situation. He was incensed to learn that De Courcy had ignored Shackelford’s command. Ignorant of the colonel’s plan and the reasons behind it, Burnside regarded his action as veering close to insubordination.
At three o’clock on September 9, Frazer ordered his staff to run up the white flag. De Courcy’s troops fell into line and marched into the fortified camp, singing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The Confederates were unaware that their Federal captors were carrying unloaded rifles. The soldiers looked at the small force with astonishment; one shouted, “Where are the rest of the men?”6 De Courcy went to find Frazer, who was sitting in his tent, the last of the whiskey in one hand, his snuffbox in the other. In the meantime, a quarter of the Confederates quietly slipped away from the gap, taking their guns and knapsacks with them. De Courcy was not interested in the loss of four hundred or so prisoners. He had captured the pass without firing a single bullet. He savored the moment. “The whiskey worked,” he remarked, according to one of his aides.7 When Richmond learned of the surrender, Josiah Gorgas recorded in his diary that the Cumberland Gap had been given away by “a drunken Brigadier, named Frazer.”8
Burnside trotted up the road an hour later, expecting to see the Confederates in formation and Frazer standing at the front, ready to hand over his flag. The sight of De Courcy walking around as though he owned the place made Burnside snap. Enraged, he ordered two officers to escort the colonel back to his camp. The following day, De Courcy was taken to Kentucky under armed guard. The charge was insubordination, but the rumor swirling through the ranks was that he had colluded with General Frazer to let the prisoners escape. No charges were actually brought against him, but once again he was in limbo and his character under suspicion. On September 18, 1863, De Courcy wrote to the assistant adjutant general on Burnside’s staff pleading for a court of inquiry so he could clear his name. An investigation “has now become absolutely necessary to save my character—as an officer and a gentleman.”9
Down in Louisiana, the 16th Ohio Volunteers received a vague report that De Courcy was no longer on detached duty with Burnside. They still missed him. “Hear that Col. De Courcy is ordered back to his regiment,” wrote the regiment’s drummer in his diary on September 21, 1863. “Hope it is true.”10 In Kentucky, Burnside’s harsh treatment of De Courcy won the colonel a large degree of sympathy. “It is stating the case very mildly to say that the officers of De Courcy’s brigade were highly indignant at this summary way of dealing with the leader—a leader whose sterling qualities they had seen occasion to admire,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Robert McFarland of the 86th Ohio Infantry. The officers wrote a protest on De Courcy’s behalf and sent it to President Lincoln. Even Burnside’s own staff felt that the summary arrest without charge was an overreaction to the incident. One of the assistant adjutant generals, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Loring, added his voice to the clamor: “I feel for him that he would suffer under very grave imputations if the circumstances of the case be not made publicly known.”11 But the protests only annoyed Burnside all the more. He refused to grant De Courcy’s request for a court of inquiry. Instead, on September 29, Burnside distributed a public letter that lambasted De Courcy for his arrogant behavior.12
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The detour forced on Longstreet by the capture of the Cumberland Gap meant changing trains at least ten times to reach Chattanooga. “Never before were such crazy cars—passenger, mail, coal, box, platform, all and every sort, wobbling on the jumping scrap-iron—used for hauling soldiers,” recalled one of his aides.13 The men were not bothered by their unorthodox conveyances, however, and even enjoyed themselves. “When we reached South Carolina we received attentions which had long ceased to be common in Virginia,” wrote Francis Dawson. “A number of ladies were waiting for us on the platform, armed with bouquets of flowers and with well filled baskets of cake, fruit, and more substantial fare. There was an abundance, too, of lemonade for the dusty soldiers.”14 But to Mary Chesnut, who caught a glimpse of the rumbling cavalcade, the sight was macabre. Miles of flatcars cars passed by, with “soldiers rolled in their blankets lying in rows with their heads all covered, fast asleep. In their grey blankets, packed in regular order, they looked like swathed mummies.” The sight made her sad: “All these fine fellows were going to kill or be killed. Why?”15
The imminent arrival of more Confederate troops renewed Bragg’s confidence. A battle was imminent, but he would no longer be fighting a numerically superior enemy. Rosecrans had divided his army into three isolated forces. If Bragg could lure each of them in turn into one of the deep valleys that marked the terrain around Chattanooga, he might be able to destroy the entire Federal army. His plan depended on General Burnside’s remaining in Knoxville, and on his own generals’ following his exact orders. Burnside obligingly fiddled and fussed, but Bragg’s second requirement proved to be impossible. The Confederate commander had made himself so despised that his generals ignored him, allowing opportunities to attack to slip through their grasp. Bragg desperately needed Longstreet, if only to restore order and spirit to his army.
When news of Longstreet’s departure for Tennessee reached Charleston, Frank Vizetelly and Fitzgerald Ross took the first available train to Georgia, accompanied by a British Army officer named Charles H. Byrne, who had run the blockade in order to join the staff of the renowned Irish Confederate general Patrick Cleburne. The travelers arrived in Augusta on September 15. The town owed its prosperity to the Savannah River; “most of the goods which run the blockade into Charleston and Wilmington are sold by auction here, whence they are dispersed all over the interior,” reported Ross, whose appetite for running after the action remained strong despite the misery of Gettysburg. “We found several English friends in Augusta engaged in the blockade-running business.” An invitation to stay proved too tempting to resist, and the three companions had such a merry time that they were caught by surprise when Longstreet’s train passed through on September 19. Realizing that they were in danger of missing the battle, they begged a ride on the next train. On the twentieth they lurched to a halt outside Ringgold, several miles south of Bragg’s army, unable to travel any farther because of broken track. It was obvious from the crowded pens of Federal prisoners in the middle of the town that the battle for east Tennessee had already begun.
Longstreet arrived at Bragg’s headquarters near the Chickamauga River (“River of Death” in Cherokee) just before midnight on September 19; the bulk of his troops were with him, although the artillery train carrying Francis Dawson was still en route. Bragg had mismanaged the first day of fighting, making uncoordinated attacks that were readily crushed by the Federals. For the morrow, he told Longstreet, the army was to be divided into two, with Longstreet commanding one wing and General Bishop Leonidas Polk the other, in order to hit Rosecrans in synchronized blows, left and right.16 The blows did take place, but, because of a combination of undelivered orders, misunderstood directions, and the difficulty of operating in a thickly wooded terrain that screened parts of the fighting, the synchronization did not. Even so, Longstreet was magnificent. While Bragg was panicking and calling the battle lost, “Old Pete” realized that the Federal line had split and sent in his wing to exploit the opportunity. The Confederates almost succeeded in breaking Rosecrans’s entire army. But one U.S. general, George H. Thomas—who was henceforth known as “the Rock of Chickamauga”—held his position and prevented a total Federal disaster.
It was late afternoon when Vizetelly and Ross heard about Longstreet’s assault. Vizetelly wanted to rush to the front, appalled that he was missing the battle. They did not arrive at Longstreet’s camp until evening: “We had walked a dozen miles,” wrote Ross, “and, not knowing where to find our friends, we concluded to stay where we were all night.” They had missed one of the most dramatic and bloody days of the war. Longstreet’s attack had spread mass panic among his opponents, reminiscent of the Federal flight during the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Rosecrans’s army, and indeed Rosecrans himself, had fled to Chattanooga, leaving the Confederates in possession of his deserted headquarters. As soon as it was light, the companions resumed their search for Longstreet. “We had been very much disappointed at being too late for the battle,” wrote Ross, “but I think what we saw today rather moderated our regret.” In all, 36,000 men had been killed or wounded during the two-day fight, nearly a third of the total who had taken part. During the night, while Ross and Vizetelly slept, the battlefield had been a hive of activity as small details of soldiers and civilians searched for survivors, holding their lanterns aloft to avoid treading on hands and feet.
Map.17 Chickamauga, September 20, 1863
Click here to view a larger image.
The Confederate private Sam Watkins had helped to carry the wounded to the field hospitals. “Men were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body,” he wrote afterward. “Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled upon the ground beside them, and they were still alive.” He passed a group of women who had been looking for relatives. One of them cradled a dead soldier’s head on her lap, crying, “My poor, poor darling! Oh, they have killed him, they have killed him!” He turned away, but there was nowhere to look without being assaulted by gore and terror. A man whose jaw had been torn away, leaving his tongue lolling from his mouth, tried to talk to him. Another stumbled past with both his eyes shot out, though one was still hanging down his check. “All through that long September night we continued to carry off our wounded,” he recorded.17
Bragg was transfixed by the bloodshed. Longstreet argued, even pleaded with him to be allowed to launch another attack on the Federals before they had time to fortify Chattanooga and briefly thought he had persuaded the general to follow up his victory. But Bragg saw the thousands of corpses, the dead horses and shattered wagons, and despaired. He ordered the entire army to take up a new position along the crest of Missionary Ridge, which overlooked Chattanooga. Rather than endure another battle, he planned to starve Rosecrans into surrender, just as Grant had done to the Confederates at Vicksburg. Vizetelly and Ross realized that they were in the midst of an uproar in the camps and that the troops were furious with their leader. “I do not know what our Generals thought,” wrote Sam Watkins. “But I can tell you what the privates thought.… We stopped on Missionary Ridge, and gnashed our teeth at Chattanooga.”18 Watkins would have been gratified to know that Bragg’s commanders shared his outrage. Several of them were discussing with Longstreet whether they should risk their careers by sending an official complaint to Richmond.
Vizetelly was circumspect in his report of the Battle of Chickamauga for the Illustrated London News. He made no mention of the generals’ revolt against Bragg, or that Longstreet was leading the cabal.19 His shame at having arrived late may have pushed him to exceed his usual exuberance in camp. Every night he sang songs and entertained the senior officers as though his life depended on their enjoyment. The Confederates were mystified by their riotous visitor who could drink them all under the table, but were deeply appreciative of his efforts. “It was no uncommon thing to see a half dozen officers, late at night, dancing the ‘Perfect Cure’ which was one of the favorite songs … in the London music halls, and was introduced to our notice by Vizetelly,” wrote Francis Dawson, who was thrilled to share his tent with him.20 Years later, Longstreet’s artillery chief, Edward P. Alexander, could still remember Vizetelly teaching them the words to “Tiddle-i-wink.”25.1 “He was really a man of rare fascination and accomplishments,” reminisced Alexander. “He made great friends everywhere, but especially in Longstreet’s corps.”21
The evening frolics could not mask the fact that the Confederate Army of Tennessee was in crisis. Bragg had suspended two popular generals, Bishop Leonidas Polk and Thomas Hindman, for their failure to carry out his orders during the battle. Longstreet had secretly sent an official complaint to Richmond against Bragg and was waiting for a reply. The fourteen other senior generals were on edge, as Francis Dawson discovered. He had been made acting chief of ordnance while his superior, Colonel Peyton T. Manning, recovered from a head wound, and his temporary promotion gave him a seat at the staff dinners. One night, Major Walton,
who I had always disliked heartily [wrote Dawson], said that when the Confederate States enjoyed their own government, they did not intend to have any damned foreigners in the country. I asked him what he expected to become of men like myself, who had given up their own country in order to render aid to the Confederacy. He made a flippant reply, which I answered rather warmly, and he struck at me. I warded off the blow, and slapped his face.
The next morning, Dawson asked Ross to deliver his challenge to Major Walton. Ross had relished the prospect of a duel, but he was deprived of the spectacle by Walton’s offer of a written apology. Dawson waited for two days. When none came, he sent Ross to see Walton again. The major informed him that he had changed his mind. Delighted, Ross responded that the major must choose his weapons, since the challenge still held. “This brought Walton to terms,” wrote Dawson, “and he made the apology I required.”22 Dawson felt vindicated, but he still had to dine with Walton every day.
The tensions in Bragg’s army increased until, on October 5, twelve generals signed a petition asking for him to be removed from his command. Francis Lawley hoped that Longstreet would take over from General Bragg. “I have done my very utmost to get him to the helm,” he wrote to a friend. “The disappointment and indignation of his own corps, if he is put under Bragg, will be great and dangerous.”23 Lawley was still feeling weak as well as unappreciated by his employers; he had recently received a reprimand from Mowbray Morris at The Times, who, in a momentary pang of editorial responsibility, had asked him to tone down his “extravagant partiality to the Southern Cause.”24
Lawley arrived from Richmond just as Bragg learned of the attempted coup against him. He was unsurprised by the “heartburning recrimination” that had infected all ranks of Bragg’s army.25 When Jefferson Davis arrived at the camp on October 9, Lawley assumed that the president had made the difficult journey expressly to remove the unpopular general. “The conclusion is irresistible,” Lawley told Times readers in his new spirit of semi-impartiality, “that General Bragg failed to convert the most headlong and disordered rout which the Federals have ever seen … into a crowning victory like Waterloo.” Cold, driving rain accompanied Davis’s visit. Francis Dawson had to dig a trench around their tent to keep the water from flooding in during the night. The rain did not deter wild hogs from feeding on the dead, but most other activity ceased. The guns could not be moved, as the wagons became stuck. “Few constitutions can stand being wet through for a week together,” wrote Ross. They were fortified, however, by the box of provisions Lawley had brought with him from Virginia. He had also arrived with a spare horse, which enabled the observers to follow President Davis as he visited the different headquarters. Davis stayed for five days, and every day the generals, the travelers, indeed the entire army, expected an announcement.
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On September 22, 1863, the telegraph office in Washington had erupted into frenzied activity as the first reports came through from Chickamauga. The message from General Rosecrans was blunt: “We have met with a serious disaster.”26 The news was bewildering to the cabinet. Their most recent message from Rosecrans had announced his effortless capture of Chattanooga. Although Lincoln and General Halleck had been concerned that General Burnside was taking too long to march from Knoxville to join forces with Rosecrans, it had never occurred to them that the Army of the Cumberland was in any real danger from Bragg. Tennessee had appeared to be falling like a neat row of dominoes, especially now that the Gap was in Federal hands. Indeed, Lincoln was so confident that he had started to make plans to strengthen Tennessee’s pro-Northern state government.27
The rest of the cabinet had shared Lincoln’s optimism. William Seward had been feeling sufficiently cheerful to allow his work to be interrupted by a visit from Leslie Stephen. The Englishman had arrived in Washington with a letter of recommendation from John Bright. The future editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (and father of Virginia Woolf) was, at the age of thirty-one, entering the final months of his career as an Anglican clergyman. Recently, Stephen had suffered a crisis of faith and was on the verge of leaving the Church and his academic post at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His wild red hair and unkempt beard made him an alarming figure, but his combination of being a friend of John Bright and the cousin of the pro-Northern journalist Edward Dicey overcame Seward’s resistance. He invited Stephen to accompany him to the White House. A cabinet meeting was slated to begin in half an hour, but in the intervening time Seward introduced Stephen to Lincoln as a friend of the “great John Bright.” “Bright’s name is a tower of strength in these parts,” Stephen wrote in surprise to his mother:
They all talked of him with extraordinary admiration, and I was obliged to conceal the very distant nature of my relations to him by ingenious prevarication. I said that I had not seen him since the end of the Parliamentary session, as I had been absent from England since that time, and I did not let on that I had only seen him once, two years before that epoch, and then from the gallery of the House of Commons when he was on the floor.28
British descriptions of Lincoln had led Stephen to expect a clumsy, elephantine figure of bizarre proportions, not the “benevolent and hearty old gentleman” who laughed and smiled so readily. “I felt quite kindly to him,” Stephen recorded. He thought Lincoln was far more impressive than Seward, whose initial good impression was undermined by his fatal propensity to swagger. “He is a little, rather insignificant-looking man, with a tendency to tell rather long-winded and rather pointless stories,” wrote Stephen dismissively. “He rather amused me by the coolness with which he talked about government affairs to me as a total stranger. Within five minutes after he saw me he said that if England permitted the rebel rams to start, they would declare war.”29
Taking advantage of the military pass Seward had written out for him, Stephen had visited General Meade’s headquarters in Virginia, where no one, either during the journey or in Meade’s camp, believed him when he said that England remained unconvinced that slavery was the real cause of the war. “They perfectly laugh at me,” Stephen wrote to his mother after he had arrived in New York at the end of September. “I might as well tell them that in England we did not think the sun is the cause of daylight.” Nor did Americans believe him when he tried to explain the confusion that had led many Englishmen to support the South. “Assuming that Englishmen had really understood the nature of the quarrel, I should feel ashamed of my country myself. Of course, I know they didn’t,” he added, “but it is no use trying to drive that into Americans, it only produces shrugs of their shoulders and civil grins.”30
Exasperation with English attitudes to the war had also led an acquaintance of Stephen’s, Henry Yates Thompson, to visit America in order to gain firsthand knowledge about the situation. His own family had fallen victim to the fashionable moralizing that dismissed the North as an empire-seeking nation of hypocrites and elevated the South as the last bastion of a preindustrial paradise. “I am quite staggered by your letter,” he had written crossly to his mother from Philadelphia on September 19 in response to her comment that Northern racism was as bad as, if not worse than, Southern slavery. “If you really think slavery pleasanter, all I say is you don’t know what slavery is,” he raged. “I am so certain myself of the good to humanity of this War that, if the North were not winning, I should be inclined to volunteer myself, and have a shot at some of those accursed people you are all praising so loudly.”31
Thompson arrived in Washington at the beginning of October, shortly after Stanton had ordered twenty thousand reinforcements to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga. He visited Seward on the second: “I was quite shocked by his appearance: he was so bowed,” he wrote to his brother Sam. “I was told afterwards that he has a son very ill just now with one of the armies. If I had known that before, I should not have gone.… The photographs of Seward look quite different from how he really appears now.”32 Thompson did not feel comfortable bothering Seward for a pass to Meade’s headquarters, nor did he try to impose himself on the president. His only sight of Lincoln was a glimpse of a cadaverous face through the window of a carriage, its wheels churning such a cloud of pale dust that the cavalry trotting behind looked like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Thompson was right to avoid the White House; the Lincolns were in silent mourning for the unmentionable side of Mary’s family. Her brother-in-law, Confederate general Todd Helm, had been killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. Three of Mary’s brothers had already died for the South.33 Thompson stayed only a few days in the city and then headed out west.
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Henry Yates Thompson’s departure from Washington coincided with the return of Lord Lyons from his holiday in Canada. The minister had spent the previous week in New York, taking the temperature of the city. “It is a pity I cannot come here oftener,” he told Lord Russell. “This is so much the best place for obtaining a knowledge of what is going on in the political world.”34 It was a strange time for Lyons to make a visit. Tiffany and Co. was flying the Russian flag on the front of its building, and American and Russian flags lined the whole of Broadway.
Two weeks earlier, four Russian warships had sailed into New York Harbor. Their appearance took the country by surprise. The press speculated that Czar Alexander II had sent the fleet as a goodwill gesture to the North. Some people even wondered whether the czar was making a covert offer of military aid—“Thank God for the Russians,” wrote Gideon Welles in his diary. But when Seward questioned the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, about the fleet’s visit, the baron was vague. The real reason the czar had sent his fleet to North America was in order to keep it ready in case Russia resumed hostilities against England and France. The Russian admiral of the fleet had orders to give every impression of military support short of actually lying.35
The city organized a parade and an elaborate banquet in honor of the Russian visitors. In the midst of the excitement, the arrival of Admiral Milne on the flagship HMS Nile was hardly reported in the press. It was the first visit by a British admiral since the War of 1812, and a genuine gesture of goodwill that Milne and Lyons had been planning for several weeks. But the Russian presence crushed their hopes of making a strong impression on the American public. In contrast to the throngs who visited the Russian ships, not a single vessel approached the Nile. The closest Milne came to a public honor was a dinner party given for him and his wife at Cyrus Field’s house in Gramercy Park. The admiral did not mind the indifference shown to his visit, though Lyons was disappointed, given the multiple occasions on which Milne had restrained his officers and punished those who displayed less than strict neutrality in the conflict. Milne instinctively warmed to the energy and spirit of the North.36
Before the end of Milne’s visit, the commander of the Brooklyn Navy Yard came to his senses and invited the admiral for a tour. Milne was introduced to Major General Irvin McDowell of Bull Run fame and other official dignitaries. “Although on our arrival there was evidently much coolness,” Milne reported to the Duke of Somerset, “yet before we left the tide in our favour had evidently turned.” As Lyons had discovered for himself during their first meeting in Canada, it was impossible not to like and respect the admiral.
Washington was more welcoming toward Admiral Milne. Seward once again set aside his work for the mixed pleasure of escort duty, and Gideon Welles suspended his loathing of Britain for the hour he sat next to Milne at a dinner at Willard’s. The navy secretary had a good memory for courtesies as well as slights: the previous July, HMS Phaeton had happened to sail past the U.S. Virgin Islands on Independence Day. Mindful of Milne’s order to show respect when in American waters, the captain had surprised the Federal warship moored in the harbor by hoisting the U.S. flag and firing a twenty-one-gun salute.
Admiral and Lady Milne sailed back to Canada on October 12. “I believe my visit has done much good in many ways, and I would strongly recommend that such visits should be repeated,” he wrote to the Duke of Somerset.37 The British weekly newspaper in New York, the Albion, thought Milne deserved official praise for his courage in forcing the issue. “And now that the ice is broken, we trust that hereafter and in happier times, the British Admiral commanding … may make frequent visits to this port.”38 He could see that Americans cared about British opinion to an astonishing degree. Yet this vital part of diplomatic relations was left solely to the whim of the press. If nothing else came from Milne’s visit, his sober assessment of Britain’s unpopularity gave credibility to Lyons’s repeated warnings to the Foreign Office. As if to underline the point, the treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, made a bizarre speech in Ohio shortly after Milne’s visit about wanting to seize “Old Mother England by the hair” and give her a good shaking.
Lyons and, lately, the Foreign Office had come to believe that Seward was Britain’s best hope for keeping relations level between the two countries, and both were rooting for him in his ongoing battles with Gideon Welles and Charles Sumner.39 (No one outside the British government knew that Seward was giving Lyons off-the-record advice on how to forestall some of the congressional attacks on British interests.)40 Contemplating the immediate future, Lyons saw only dangerous corners and looming obstacles now that he knew for certain “that Mr. Sumner and the ultras will make another onslaught on Mr. Seward when Congress opens.”41 Worse still was Baron Mercier’s revelation that he had requested a leave of absence. His wife had put up with Washington for his sake, Mercier explained to Lyons, but she could stand it no longer. Lyons could not help himself, but he hoped that the French Foreign Ministry would share his anxiety and consider Mercier too important to be replaced.
When trouble for Lord Lyons did come, it was from the South rather than the North. On October 23, he read in the National Intelligencer that the four remaining British consuls had been ordered to leave the Confederacy in retaliation for Britain’s alleged support for the North.42 The consuls’ unceasing efforts on behalf of conscripted Britons had been an irritant to the Confederate State Department for more than a year, and they made convenient scapegoats that Judah Benjamin had no scruple about using. Acting consul Allan Fullarton in Savannah had provided the excuse when on October 3 he sent to Richmond a belligerent protest on behalf of six drafted British subjects. Four days later, on October 7, Benjamin convened a special cabinet session to discuss the consuls. Jefferson Davis was conveniently in Tennessee with General Bragg and therefore protected from any international outcry that might follow. The decision to expel them was apparently unanimous.43 If Benjamin did not gain any popularity by the move, at least he did not lose any, and he doubted that the Confederacy would suffer, either.
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The troubles endured by the Scotsman William Watson showed the importance of the consuls to the British community. Tired of struggling to find work in the South after leaving the Confederate army, Watson had decided to try his hand at blockade running. During the summer he sailed from New Orleans to Belize. There, fear of the Confederate commerce raiders had led to a glut of cheap U.S.-owned ships for sale. He bought a flat-bottomed vessel, christened her Rob Roy, and headed for the Gulf of Mexico. When Watson eventually reached Galveston, he discovered that the city was barely functioning. “It was now virtually in ruins, and the grass was growing in the streets,” he wrote. Anarchy and martial law ruled simultaneously.
Watson was powerless to prevent a local commander from impounding the Rob Roy for defense duty. But he had faith in Consul Arthur Lynn. “When I saw that gentleman and reported the matter he was a little surprised, but said he would scarcely be much astonished at anything these people—the Confederates—would do. They were now desperate, and would not let any regard for international law or individual rights interfere with any project they meant to carry out.”44 In the face of Consul Lynn’s protests, Confederate general John B. Magruder promised that he would release the Rob Roy if an alternative vessel could be found.45 Naturally disappointed by this response, Watson went to Magruder’s headquarters himself. The officers were sarcastic toward him until he was recognized by a former member of the 2nd Texas Regiment. “I was quite astonished at the great effect which this little incident had upon the demeanor of the officials towards me,” wrote Watson. The Rob Roy was returned, and Watson was again free to face the ordinary hazards of blockade running.46
Several weeks passed before Consul Lynn learned of Benjamin’s order for the British consuls to leave, and when he read the order itself, he noticed that his name had been left off the list. He decided to remain at his post until circumstances changed. Consul Frederick Cridland in Mobile had also escaped Richmond’s notice and was determined to stay. Every white male between the ages of sixteen and sixty was being conscripted. “Letters are received and applications are made to me daily by British subjects to interfere and prevent their being forced into military service, but I cannot assist them,” he wrote on November 14. Yet he hoped that his presence still retained some moderating effect. Cridland’s letter caused much indignation in the Foreign Office over the plight of Britons in the South; it sickened Lord Lyons each time a letter appeared from the Confederacy pleading for help that he was unable to give.25.2 47
Most Southerners did not believe that British residents were suffering at all. Southern newspapers rarely, if ever, reported when Britons were chained to wagons and dragged through towns to encourage “volunteering,” or hung upside down and repeatedly dunked in water, or threatened with being shot through the knees.48
25.1 The Confederates loved this song, which Vizetelly composed himself: “ ’Twas in the Atlantic Ocean in the equinoctial gales; / A sailor he fell overboard, amid the sharks and whales. / And in the midnight watch his ghost appeared unto me; / Saying I’m married to a mermaid in the bottom of the sea. CHORUS: Singing Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves. / Britons never, never, never will be slaves.”
25.2 When HMS Virago eventually made it through to Mobile in January 1864, Consul Cridland told the captain that he had not heard from the Foreign Office for six months. Later, in April, a pathetic message from Consul Lynn miraculously arrived in Washington, begging for guidance: “If I am however, to remain at my post it would afford me sincere gratification if Your Lordship would direct me what course to pursue.” The consuls in the South could not know of the extraordinary efforts made by the Foreign Office in trying to reach them. Lyons pleaded unsuccessfully with Seward to allow a special envoy through the blockade so that Britain could make a direct protest to the Confederate government.