A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

On March 12, General Nathaniel Banks’s troops began slogging from Franklin, Louisiana, toward Shreveport, the Confederate capital of Louisiana since the capture of Alexandria in 1863. The campaign was a joint army-navy expedition, with Admiral David Dixon Porter leading a flotilla up the Red River to converge with Banks at Shreveport. Some of the infantry regiments were only two months old. The 17th Infantry Corps d’Afrique, for example, was made up of freed slaves from Nashville, Tennessee. Its officers were white volunteers from across the North, among them Dr. Charles Culverwell from New York.^28.3 The generous signing bonus of $227 had persuaded him to apply for the post; part of it paid for his photograph in a new uniform purchased specially for the expedition. Many years later, he made light of his participation in the Red River campaign, joking that he had expected to show off his crisp new jacket to the inhabitants of captured Confederate towns, only to find that the opportunity never came.

Few excursions in the war encountered so many mishaps or ended so ignominiously as Banks’s Louisiana campaign. The start had been exceptionally smooth; he reached Alexandria on March 26 and immediately began to organize elections for the new pro-Union state legislature. But after that, nothing went right. This plan to revive economic ties between Southern plantation owners and the North was undone by Admiral Porter’s officers, who seized all the cotton for themselves before the official cotton brokers, who accompanied Banks, had a chance to transact any legitimate business. Even the Red River turned against him; instead of rising to its usual winter levels, it began to shrink at a rapid rate. Porter just managed to haul his vessels over the rapids above Alexandria before the fast-emerging rocks made the journey impossible. The U.S. fleet ground to a halt near Grand Ecore, a small trading town perched atop a ninety-foot bluff, more than seventy miles from Shreveport. Banks was able to push his army a little farther upriver, but the single-track route he had chosen turned the journey into a slow-moving haul through foul slurry.

The days of “Rosewater chivalry” were at an end, declared the Richmond Enquirer on March 5; henceforth the Confederacy must fight “barbarity with barbarity.”⁶ A week after Dahlgren’s raid, Davis summoned Captain Thomas Hines, who had masterminded the prison escape of the Kentucky raider General John Hunt Morgan, to a secret meeting in Richmond. He ordered Hines to travel to Canada via Chicago and other cities in the Northwest to recruit propagandists and fighters for the South. Once in Canada, his mission was to collect the scattered survivors of Morgan’s command, plus any displaced Southerners or former prisoners of war, and encourage them to rejoin the Confederate army. Hines could, in the carefully chosen words of the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, by “any fair and appropriate enterprises of war” engage in “any hostile operation” against the North.⁷

Hines presented Colonel Grenfell with a dilemma after he invited his former comrade to join his operations in Canada. At first, Grenfell felt honor-bound to keep his promise to serve Morgan as his adjutant general.⁸ But the offer of adventure proved too enticing, and two weeks after Captain Hines received his departure orders, Grenfell resigned his commission and announced he was leaving the Confederacy. The resignation was obviously a contrivance, both to extricate him from his commitment to Morgan and as part of a scheme to make it appear that he was disenchanted with the South. His official disengagement from the Confederacy would theoretically enable Grenfell to travel without hindrance through the North, picking up information for Hines all the while.⁹

That same day, April 7, Davis sent a wire to Colonel Jacob Thompson, a former cabinet secretary under President Buchanan and a veteran of Vicksburg, who had returned to his plantation in Oxford, Mississippi, after its surrender. It read: “If your engagements will permit you to accept service abroad for six months, please come here immediately.”¹¹ Thompson arrived a few days later and accepted the appointment of “Commissioner for Special Service in Canada.” The post was quite unlike Mason and Slidell’s in Europe. Davis was not interested in playing diplomatic games. Instead, Thompson’s mission was to foment anti-Northern feeling in Canada until it created a crisis in Anglo-American relations. Davis also wanted him to supervise Thomas Hines’s propaganda operations in the Northwest. The existence of the secret pro-Southern society the Knights of the Golden Circle and its recent offshoot, the Sons of Liberty, had convinced Benjamin and Davis that there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of disaffected Midwesterners who, with the right encouragement and sufficient funds, would take up armed resistance against the Republican administration.¹²

Jacob Thompson was an intelligent man but a poor judge of character and given to impulsive behavior. With proper oversight and a sufficiently large organization behind him, he might have been a good choice for the post. But the deputy selected by Davis was Clement C. Clay, a popular Alabama senator before the war, whose poor health and obsession with appeasing his spoiled wife made him an unsuitable candidate for any sort of clandestine operation. Thompson needed a stronger and steadier hand than Clay’s, someone with more caution and a more cynical attitude toward the self-described Confederate agents currently making a nuisance of themselves in Canada. Davis had also entrusted Thompson with $1 million in gold, far too large a sum to be under the control of one person.

A second important decision Jefferson Davis made in April was to recall General Beauregard from Charleston. Although Davis still loathed the Creole general, he had bowed to his friends’ urgings to make use of Beauregard’s popularity as the victor of First Manassas (Bull Run). Davis’s own popularity had suffered since Bragg’s defeat at Chattanooga, emboldening his enemies in the Confederate Congress. Davis could not afford to allow politically connected generals like Beauregard to remain disaffected.¹⁴

The news that he was being transferred to the command of the military operations in North Carolina and southern Virginia below Richmond caught Beauregard by surprise. Although he had felt sidelined in Charleston, he was anxious about leaving when the Federals were building up their fleet for another assault. He had so little confidence in his replacement, General Sam Jones, that he decided not to take all his staff with him in the hope that some continuity would be maintained. The English volunteer Captain Henry Feilden, whose admiration for the departing commander bordered on hero worship, was crestfallen to learn that he was one of those staying behind. The general called him to his office on April 19 to explain the situation, promising to send for Feilden if his new appointment became permanent. “I don’t think I have any chance of getting to Virginia with him for some time, though I flatter myself that he has too much regard for me to debar me from sharing the privations and dangers of the field with him,” Feilden wrote after the meeting.¹⁵

“I doubt whether people in Europe are aware of the extent of the progress of this country in military strength,” Lord Lyons had written to Russell during Grant’s Chattanooga campaign. In answering Russell’s question as to whether Britain could still defeat the United States in a war, Lyons had replied that any British invading force would be outnumbered “by five to one” and would have no chance of winning. But he did not “think the government here at all desires to pick a quarrel with us or with any European power.”^28.4 ¹⁹ Lyons’s conviction that an Anglo-American war was now unlikely did not mean that he was any less dispirited by his failure to change U.S. attitudes toward Britain. “It is not my purpose here to explain the bitter feelings of the great majority of the American people against England,” he wrote to Russell on April 25. “The feeling is the less to be combated, because it is utterly unreasonable and utterly regardless of facts or arguments.”²⁰ Recently, The New York Times had speculated with undisguised glee on the hope of a war between Britain and Germany. A new German navy would arise, the newspaper predicted, “manned, equipped, and armed” in American ports.²¹

Lyons was not sure that he could stand living in Washington for much longer. He particularly missed the company of Henri Mercier, who had returned to France on New Year’s Eve. (“His wife was so miserable here that she could bear it no longer,” Lyons told his sister.)²² Without the Merciers, Lyons’s intimate social circle had contracted to the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, and his American wife, Elisa. More seriously, Lyons had grown to dislike his work at the legation. In early spring Lyons wrote a frank letter to Lord Russell expressing concern that he was no longer fit for the post. “I am worn out, and utterly weary of the whole thing,” he confessed. “The people here too are beginning to get very tired of me; and I feel that if I can by any means get through this summer without breaking down in health, and without getting in to any very serious scrape, it will be as much as I shall be able to do.”²³ Russell replied sympathetically and emphatically that Lyons belonged in Washington.

The legation staff were also tired, and demoralized by their inability to help or make contact with British subjects in the South. The anguish of ignorance was a common lament among families in Britain with relatives in Confederate prisons. Dr. William Farr had tried every possible approach to obtain news of his son, Frederick, who had been captured the previous December. After being informed by the legation that there was no communication between Washington and Richmond, he had befriended the Confederate community in England in the hope that someone would be able to pass along information. In late February, an agent working with the purchasing agent Caleb Huse wrote to the assistant commissioner of exchange in Richmond, Captain William Hatch, saying that “a good friend of our cause” was seeking to know if his son was still alive.²⁴ There were more than twenty prisons in and around Richmond. It would take some time for Captain Hatch to discover the whereabouts of Private Frederick Farr and, even if he was found, to convey the news to England. While the Farrs waited for news, not even knowing if the search was indeed under way, young Frederick became ill with typhus—a disease endemic in the filthy and overcrowded Southern prisons—and died on March 23, 1864.

Lyons cited as an example the case of sixteen-year-old Henry Usher, the grandson of Admiral Usher, who was kidnapped by crimpers while on his way to a job interview at the British consulate in New York. With the legation’s help, Consul Archibald had eventually tracked Usher down in Beaufort, South Carolina, where the boy had been enlisted in the 5th New York Heavy Artillery as “John Russell.”²⁸ This had been in January, and four months later the War Department was still dragging its feet.

If it required strenuous efforts for the overworked legation to rescue a British subject from the armed services, the circumstances had to be extraordinary for a Briton to be released from prison—such as the presidential pardon given to Alfred Rubery in December. Rubery’s guilt in the attempted seizure of the J. M. Chapman in California was undeniable, but the request to Federal authorities for his release had come from John Bright, whose photograph was currently hanging above the mantelpiece in Lincoln’s office. The official decree announcing the pardon declared that the president’s decision should be regarded “as a public mark of the esteem held by the United States of America for the high character and steady friendship of the said John Bright.” The unabashedly pro-Southern Rubery also had his $10,000 fine commuted so long as he left the country within thirty days and made no attempt to help or enter the Confederacy.^28.5

Lyons would never have championed Rubery’s release if it had been up to him; as a rule, he refused to bother Seward with cases involving self-described British Confederate volunteers. “To do so,” Lyons told Lord Russell, after the Foreign Office forwarded a protest from Private Joseph Taylor, a Yorkshireman who had been incarcerated in Fort Delaware since Vicksburg, “could in fact hardly fail to cause annoyance. There are, I am sorry to say, a very large number of British Subjects who are Prisoners of War as Mr. Taylor is, and who, like him, entered the Confederate Service in disobedience to the Queen’s commands, and in defiance of Her Majesty’s warning that they would do so at their peril.”³⁰ However, Seward was not entirely deaf or blasé about the myriad injustices created by the war. British prisoners of war in Federal hands were given the option of swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their release.^28.6 ³¹ Hundreds of British prisoners took advantage of the oath.

The lax discipline and poor attitude of the new recruits and draftees was also a problem for the Federal army. “If I was in England or in the English service I should consider that it was a shame and a sin to desert,” wrote the English volunteer James Horrocks. But here, “in the land of Yankee doodle,” desertion is “regarded universally as a smart thing and the person who does it a dem’d smart fellow.”³³ Yet Horrocks was a soldier of uncommon ability and rectitude compared to James Pendlebury, who enlisted as a private in the 69th New York Infantry on January 27. Pendlebury was an unemployed mill worker from Lancashire with a family, a drinking problem, and a gamey leg. At home he used to spend every night in the pub boring the regulars until “one day I was talking energetically about the Slaves and full of fire when my comrades said I ought to go to America,” recalled Pendlebury. “One said he would give me twopence if I would go and others also offered pennies.”³⁴

Pendlebury had found a home for himself, and despite his English nationality, his Irish comrades accepted him among their ranks, finding an alcoholic volunteer preferable to a reluctant conscript.³⁶

Edward Lyulph Stanley, the headstrong younger son of the British postmaster general, Lord Stanley, arrived in Washington on April 14, 1864, having spent three weeks in New York listening to strangers make pointed comments about England’s treachery.^28.8 He had not been the slightest bit fazed, being able to hold his own in any arena. According to family lore, when young Lyulph was five years old, “he was one day naughty and scolded by his mother; when she had finished, he said, ‘Proceed, you interest me.’ ”³⁸ “Stanley is a clever young man,” wrote Lord Wodehouse after being introduced to him in 1862, “& will be very pleasant when he has rubbed off a little juvenile conceit, which however is pardonable, as he has just taken a first class at Oxford. He is a staunch Northerner which is singular and a finer Radical. I like to see a young man begin with rather extreme opinions. They ‘tone’ down fast enough.”³⁹ But Stanley was showing no signs of toning down. He visited the Adamses before his departure and exhausted them all with his rapid, earnest talk about American politics.⁴⁰

Seward was treated to a similar verbal onslaught when he invited Stanley to dinner on April 17. In contrast to Lord Edward St. Maur, Stanley saw no need to be circumspect simply because of his father’s position in Palmerston’s cabinet, and he grilled Seward on every subject that arose. “Mr. Seward struck me as sharp and on the whole a kindly amiable man,” wrote Stanley after the encounter, “but rather shrewd than really able or wide in his views, and prone to be captious and technical instead of statesmanlike in his way of handling great questions.” He was far more impressed by Lincoln, who, he wrote, “spoke very reasonably and without any vulgarity tho’ with some quaintness and homeliness of expression.”⁴¹ The president obviously warmed to the Englishman, since he allowed his private secretary John Hay to take the next morning off to show Stanley around Washington. (They went to General Lee’s former home, Arlington, which by Stanley’s standards was “dirty and small.”) Hay’s opinion of England had been colored by Lawley’s reports, Stanley noticed with regret. He discovered, like every visitor before him, that “Americans see hardly any English newspaper but The Times, which is considered here as the true exponent of English opinion.”

Stanley had come to America to learn how British supporters might help the soon-to-be-emancipated slave population, but he was not averse to visiting the front lines, too. On Friday, April 22, he took the train to Brandy Station in Culpeper County, Virginia, to visit the Army of the Potomac. Waiting for him at the station was Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Captain Adams’s contempt for his commanding officers had finally made him accept a transfer to General Meade’s cavalry escort, which meant that he was in a position to introduce Stanley to both Meade and General Grant. The former, wrote Stanley, was “a thorough gentleman and very captivating,” the latter “very modest and unassuming in manner” but clearly a man of “character and a will of his own.” In conversations about the future of Negroes in the army, Grant was honest about his initial doubts and why he had changed his mind in their favor after observing how well they fought as soldiers at Vicksburg.

Charles Francis Jr. was not sure whether they were preparing to attack Lee or taking precautionary measures in case of a sudden move by the Confederates. “The feeling about Grant is peculiar,” he noticed; “a little jealousy, a little dislike, a little envy, a little want of confidence.” A “brilliant success will dissipate the elements,” he thought, but until then Grant would be regarded as an interloper.⁴³ Grant was also taking over at a time when the term of enlistment for thousands of soldiers was about to expire. The 79th Highlanders had only two weeks more to serve, and their dress uniforms had already been bought for the parade up Broadway. They were furious at being sent to Virginia; during a parade review, the regiment marched past Grant in silence, refusing to answer the call for three cheers.

Banks was still struggling against the Red River when Grant decided that the spring campaign should be directed against the South’s two largest armies, Lee’s and Johnston’s. There were to be no more uncoordinated battles in various parts of the South. On April 3, 1864, he ordered Sherman to leave Chattanooga and head with his 98,000 men for Atlanta, Georgia. “You, I propose to move against Johnston’s army,” Grant told Sherman, “to break it up and get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”⁴⁴ Once Atlanta had been taken, Sherman was to march across the state to Savannah and then up the coastline through the Carolinas to Virginia, where he was to join Grant at Richmond.

Pendlebury’s regiment was part of General Hancock’s II Corps, one of the first to enter the Wilderness on May 4. There was no possibility he would be able to hide from the fighting once it began. “This was my first battle and I can’t say that I was a brave man, for I wished I was at home,” he wrote in his memoir. “But after I had fired a few times I began to get accustomed to the work and soon I had no fear about me.” His baptism started at 4:00 P.M. on May 5. Lee had succeeded in placing two of his three corps inside the Wilderness even though General Longstreet was still a day’s march away. Forty thousand Confederates pitched into seventy thousand Federals. Just as Lee had hoped, the Union regiments lost their sense of direction, firing wildly into the trees and charging hither and thither. At sunset many soldiers had no idea where they were and resorted to lying behind improvised breastworks. There was nothing to see except the outlines of tree trunks. But the noises coming from the woods were terrifying. As at Chancellorsville, stray sparks lit the dry underbrush, and fires spread along the forest floor, burning everything in their path.

Longstreet’s corps had tramped through little-used tracks, taking every shortcut no matter how snarled and wild in order to reach Lee, the boom of gunfire spurring them on when exhaustion threatened. Captain Francis Dawson, who had passed his artillery examination in April, was exhilarated despite his arduous ride. “You know that until I left I had never been in the saddle in my life,” he wrote to his parents, “but in sober truth the saddle is the headquarters of a staff officer and by dint of long practice you cannot fail, however stupid, to become moderately expert.”⁵⁰ Dawson was riding with Longstreet and his staff when Lee met them. Displaying none of the hesitancy that had undermined his leadership at Knoxville, Longstreet saw immediately that the woods could aid them if he ignored conventional tactics and allowed the terrain to dictate the formation of his battle line.⁵¹ His troops ran forward, with Longstreet and his staff, including Dawson, riding ahead of the surge.

The breastworks of the Irish Brigade caught fire under the barrage of artillery, scorching some of James Pendlebury’s comrades, but the flames protected them from being overrun by the Confederate charge. But other Federal regiments turned and ran. The 79th Highlanders had been positioned at the rear of the line by General Hancock. “You have done your share,” the general told Ebenezer Wells. Relieved to be spared a fight, the Highlanders were dumbfounded when they were ordered to beat the fleeing regiments back into line. “Our men bayoneted a few,” recalled Wells, “and others of us not liking to do so to our own men, knocked them down with the butt end of the rifles.”⁵² The 79th could not prevent a general rout, however, and by late morning the Orange Plank Road belonged to the Confederates. Longstreet had smashed the Federal line with a panache that recalled Stonewall Jackson’s stunning victory the previous May at Chancellorsville. Dawson trotted up behind Longstreet as the general led a small group of staff and commanders along the road. The Confederates were congratulating one another on their signal success.

Map.19 The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5–12, 1864
Click here to view a larger image.

Though it was a date few liked to remember, it was exactly a year and a day since General Jackson had been accidentally shot while scouting three miles farther west, near the Orange Turnpike Road. The Orange Plank Road was similarly hemmed in by trees, which made it difficult for the isolated pockets of Confederate troops on either side to see one another. “There were but about eight of us together, all mounted,” described Dawson. “Without a moment’s warning one of our brigades about 2000 strong, only 50 or 60 yards distants [sic] poured a deliberate fire into us.” “Friends,” shouted one of Longstreet’s officers, too late. Seconds later, four of the eight were on the ground. Three were dead or dying; Longstreet was slumped over his saddle, choking and coughing up blood. Dawson and two others lifted him from his horse and carried him over to a large tree. “My next thought was to obtain a surgeon,” continued Dawson, “and, hurriedly mentioning my purpose, I mounted my horse and rode in desperate haste to the nearest field hospital. Giving the sad news to the first surgeon I could find, I made him jump on my horse, and bade him, for Heaven’s sake, ride as rapidly as he could to the front where Longstreet was. I followed afoot.”⁵³

Grant tried to shake Lee from Spotsylvania by sending Major General Philip Sheridan and 10,000 cavalrymen to attack the Confederate defenses in front of Richmond. The raid forced Lee to dispatch Jeb Stuart and 4,500 troopers to pursue the Federals, and the two cavalry forces clashed on May 11 at Yellow Tavern, only six miles from Richmond. Stuart received a fatal shot in his stomach as he attempted to rally his outnumbered corps. Sheridan could have destroyed Stuart’s cavalry, but Lee’s nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, known as Fitz, immediately took charge and was able to effect a skillful retreat.

When first checked by Lee, Grant had sent a telegram to General Halleck in Washington, which read in part: “I propose to fight it out on this line [of attack] if it takes all summer.” He showed his determination by launching a second attack against the Mule Shoe on May 12. The nature of the ground invited the attackers in, but getting out—especially once the earth had been churned to mud—was almost impossible. The Highlanders had escaped by a hair’s breadth on a day that cost the two armies more than ten thousand men. The brutal hand-to-hand fighting between the Federals and Confederates led to the area’s being christened “the Bloody Angle.” “Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet-thrusts, and finally sank, a mass of torn and mutilated corpses,” recalled a horror-struck member of Grant’s staff who witnessed the assault. “Then fresh troops rushed madly forward to replace the dead, and so the murderous work went on.”⁵⁶

Grant’s reaction to the failure of Sigel and Butler was to push his own soldiers to march faster and fight harder. Only four days after the fighting at the Mule Shoe, the Army of the Potomac began another move southward. The effect on the army, wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to his father, was almost the same as real victory, “when in fact it has done only barren fighting. For it has done the one thing needful before the enemy—it has advanced. The result is wonderful.… It is in better spirits and better fighting trim today than it was in the first day’s fight in the Wilderness.”⁵⁸

^28.1 At the start of the war in 1861, one dollar in gold had equaled $1.10 in Confederate dollars; three years later in 1864, it equaled $20. At the same time, in the North, one gold dollar equaled $1.55 in U.S. greenbacks in 1864.

^28.2 The emperor of the French breezily assured Maximilian that the United States was “well aware that since the new regime in Mexico is the work of France they cannot attack it without immediately making enemies of us.” But Seward had nonetheless let it be known through the U.S. minister in Paris that the United States would never recognize a French puppet regime in Mexico—which put Louis-Napoleon in a bind and complicated his relations with the Confederates. He could only support the South if its victory was assured; otherwise the new emperor of Mexico would have a powerful and vengeful United States as his neighbor.²

^28.3 After the death of his child during the draft riots in July, Culverwell had accepted a post at MacDougall Hospital in the Bronx, New York, so he could be close to his family. Still determined to try his luck as an actor, he had resigned in the autumn to join Mrs. John Wood’s company at the Olympic Theatre in Manhattan. He promised his long-suffering wife that it would be his final attempt to conquer the stage. Mrs. Wood had given him the role of the ardent young poet in the burlesque Brothers and Sisters. Culverwell had never performed such lengthy speeches before, and his nervousness grew in anticipation of the first night. His opening speech began with the line “Drunk with enthusiasm I …” On October 8, Culverwell leaped onstage and declared, “Drunk.” With that he died a thousand deaths, unable to utter another word. The next morning “Ma Wood” dismissed him, and Culverwell returned to the Federal army.³

^28.4 Lord Lyons accepted the extra burdens placed upon the legation because of the war, but he refused to spy for the Foreign Office. When Lord Russell asked him to obtain drawings of the American-made Parrott gun, a new invention that showed destructive promise, he answered: “I consider it to be of the utmost importance that not only this Legation should not be employed in such practices, but that both myself and every other member of it should be absolutely and bona fide without any knowledge of their existence.”

^28.5 Bright also used his influence to rescue seventeen-year-old Alfred Massey Richardson. Alfred had been working for the chairman of the Union and Emancipation Society of Manchester. The previous August, his head filled with ideas about freeing the slaves, Alfred and a friend, Stephen Smelt, had run off to New York. They both joined the 47th New York Volunteers, but not before being beaten up and robbed of their bounty money. “Can you undertake to obtain [Richardson’s] discharge?” Bright wrote to Sumner on the same day that Lincoln signed Rubery’s pardon. “I think Mr. Stanton will be able to spare so young a boy, if you apply to him.” Sumner took Bright’s request literally and secured the release of Richardson but neglected to mention young Smelt, to the grief of his parents.²⁹

^28.6 The North had ceased conducting prisoner exchanges with the South, ostensibly in protest against Confederate mistreatment of colored soldiers. But with 611,000 men under arms, the North could afford to have several thousand penned up, whereas the South, whose total armed force did not exceed 277,000, could not. Many British prisoners were relieved by the halt to the exchanges. Presented with the choice between a Federal prison and return to the South, they often preferred to stay in prison.

^28.7 The passenger line Cunard, for example, was losing sailors faster than it could replace them. The company’s chairman, Sir Edward Cunard, ordered his lawyers to help rescue the drafted men although he despaired at finding many of them. “The truth is that the English are in a much worse position here than any other nation,” he wrote to an MP. Cunard acknowledged that Consul Archibald was working hard, but Lord Lyons, he complained, was “entirely too easy going and diplomatic.”

^28.8 When Fitzgerald Ross arrived in New York at the end of April, he was warned by the Times correspondent Charles Mackay not to discuss the war or politics in New York because of the vicious differences in opinion. “It is considered very mauvais genre” to bring up either topic, he wrote. The safest way to begin a conversation was “to abuse England, which everyone is glad to do, and as everybody agrees on this point, there is no difference of opinion.”³⁷

^28.9 Some authorities were content to turn a blind eye to even flagrant fraternization. “Our regiment had plenty of coffee but not tobacco,” wrote James Pendlebury. “We made boats of paper and floated the boats containing the article we wished to exchange down to the other side. One day we ran short of paper and one of the Confederates offered to swim across the river if he would not be taken prisoner. This was cordially agreed upon, but the officer in charge on our side did not carry out his promise and the man was taken prisoner. He was taken to General Hancock’s quarters and the general very kindly let him go back.”

TWENTY-EIGHTA Great Slaughter

TWENTY-EIGHT
A Great Slaughter