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

Lyons did not discuss his civil cases with Evans. That week, British subjects in Memphis had protested to him about a rule that banned their employment unless they joined the Federal militia; a black Canadian had been arrested for breaking the state of Delaware’s ban on colored people; and Mary Sophia Hill had written to him from prison begging for his intercession. “Imagine, my Lord, a woman and a British subject so threatened,” she cried. “My object in writing this letter is to ask Your Lordship to see justice done me and to protect me until I am proved as not belonging to the Glorious Flag of Old England.”²

Consul Coppell admitted to Lyons that he had failed to visit the prisoner, but advised him, “From personal knowledge I do not think the case one for Your Lordship’s interference.”³ Lyons had no reason to doubt him, experience having taught the minister that cases such as Mary’s usually came with a long and tangled history of mutual antipathy between the prisoner and the authorities. He would not help her while there were others who were truly innocent and helpless. William Seward was amazed by Lord Lyons’s tenacious advocacy for such pathetic cases. The old rules of warfare had been swept away, he told him during a contentious interview. Seward pointed to the latest news from Charleston, where the Confederates had moved fifty Northern officers to a converted prison in direct range of the U.S. gunboats.

General Sam Jones in Charleston had decided it was time for the Federals to feel what the city’s civilian population had been enduring for the past eight months, and fifty Federal prisoners of war (all officers) had been moved to a converted prison in one of the most heavily shelled neighborhoods. He knew that an attempt to capture the city was still being prepared—his scouts had reported that thirteen warships and forty-six troop transports were anchored less than a hundred miles away in Port Royal Sound, which had been captured by the Federals early on in the war.⁴ But the timing of the attack remained a mystery. Captain Henry Feilden was not taking any chances: he had drawn up a will in Julia’s favor even though their wedding had not yet taken place. If he were to be killed now, he told her,

Though I do not think there is much chance of their refusing it, personally I do not care whether they do or do not [Feilden admitted]. I really look forward to the war ending this year, and if [only] we are spared to one another, we shall be able to settle so comfortably in Charleston. I will go into some business and work very hard, and then I shall have you to comfort me and inspire me. Then you will be able to amuse yourself with all your old friends and acquaintances. Dearest Julie, if I can only make you as perfectly happy as we mortals can expect to be, I shall have no other wish on this earth.⁶

Feilden’s respect for General Jones plummeted after the Federal officers were used as human shields. He had urged Jones to reconsider the order, pointing out that retaliation would probably follow. “My argument then and now was the homely adage that ‘two wrongs can never make a right,’ ” he related to Julia.⁷ Feilden was so troubled that on June 30 he went down to check on the Federal prisoners. He wore his best uniform for the visit, “to show that we are not quite ragged yet in the Confederacy.” There were five generals among the fifty officers. Feilden struck up a conversation with General Truman Seymour, who was so interesting and pleasant that he regretted the folly of General Jones all the more: “I hardly ever met a Yankee before, never a Yankee General and thought the contact would make one’s flesh crawl, but strange to say, I could not blow Seymour from a gun or hang him without a good deal of repugnance. Indeed, I felt more inclined to ask him to dinner and show him around Charleston.”⁸

The U.S. generals complained that their troops had lost their courage for frontal assaults. The men would make a show of going forward before hunkering down under cover. Grant tried one last time before he accepted the necessity for a long siege. He dispatched Sheridan on another cavalry raid with orders to attack Lee at his vulnerable points—the bridges, water tanks, and supply lines. On June 22, Grant ordered an assault against one of the five railroads. The 69th New York Volunteers were among the attackers.

Our Captain asked permission to lead us [wrote James Pendlebury]. He had been under arrest for some time and told me that he had a foreboding that in the next encounter he would be killed.… As we were entering into the charge he received a shot and fell at my side. I turned and said, “Captain, are you mortally wounded?” He said, “I am Jimmy, don’t leave.” There was one thing I had learnt always to have beside me, which I knew was most refreshing; I carried a supply of water because the first thing men who are wounded cry for is water. The captain thanked me for it and I stood beside him. I, myself, was so very thirsty that I lay down and literally slaked up every drop of water that I found in the imprint of a horse’s shoe in the clay. I forgot it was muddy I was so thirsty. I gave to my Captain many a drink during the throes of death. I turned him over many times and did all I could for him. After a while I got him on my shoulder and carried him into the shelter of the trees out of the sound of the whizzing bullets. I really thought I would never get out alive. By and by the Captain died and I got him on my back and carried him back to our works. We buried him in the breast works in front of Petersburg, Virginia.

The Confederates were no less shaken by the six weeks of relentless fighting. Francis Dawson had suffered so many near misses that he was certain the next bullet would find him.¹³ But his spirits had recovered since the return of Lawley and Vizetelly, who ran the blockade at Wilmington together on June 5. Vizetelly had brought with him a letter from Dawson’s mother. “Little did I think, when years ago, I saw drawings and sketches in the [London] Illustrated by our ‘special artist F. Vizetelli,’ or even when we had many a frolic together in the mountains of Tennessee,” Dawson wrote home on June 26, “that he, the same joyous, corpulent artist would have proved a source of such happiness to my dear parents and myself.” Dawson’s happiness was complete after Vizetelly drew a picture of his corps on a midnight march through burning woods.¹⁴

Ill.51 A corps of the Confederate army marching by night through burning woods, by Frank Vizetelly.

Ill.52 View of Petersburg from General Lee’s headquarters—watching the Federals through binoculars, by Frank Vizetelly.

Three days later, on July 1, Lee’s artillery commander, General Edward Porter Alexander, arrived at the Confederate headquarters with disturbing news. He had seen activity that convinced him the Federals were digging a tunnel under the trenches. Lawley asked him how long it would have to be to clear their works: “I answered about 500 feet,” Alexander recalled. “[Lawley] stated that the longest military tunnel or gallery which had ever been run was at the siege of Delhi, and that it did not exceed 400 feet. That it was found impossible to ventilate far greater distance.” Alexander reminded him that the average coal mine went much farther and it would not be too taxing for the Federals to ask any volunteer from the Pennsylvania mines about ventilation. Lee had no option but to wait and see who would turn out to be right.¹⁵

Lawley and Vizetelly suffered as the summer heat cast a pall over the trenches. To pass the time, Vizetelly drew portraits of Lee and his staff watching the Federals through field glasses. The biggest excitement was the arrival of a captain from the British Army, G. T. Peacocke, who reported to duty as a volunteer aide to General Pickett.¹⁶ Lawley filled his reports with stories of “African savagery” and Federal brutality toward women and children, but he neglected to describe the hunger that now afflicted Lee’s army. One of the more colorful English blockade runners, the Hon. Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, the third son of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, whose later exploits with the Turkish navy won him the title “Hobart Pasha,” visited the front lines in July. He came armed with boxes of sausages and sardines, which were eagerly gobbled up by the grateful Confederates. “For months past [they] had tasted nothing but coarse rye-bread and pork washed down with water,” wrote Hobart-Hampden. “There were several Englishmen among the officers composing the staff,” he added with surprise. “I often wonder what has become of them.”¹⁷

Hobart-Hampden saw Petersburg and Richmond, where nearly every other female was dressed in deep mourning, and even snatched a half-hour conversation with Lee himself, yet still he believed Lawley’s optimistic prediction of Southern victory. “Though a line of earthworks hurriedly thrown up in a few hours at Petersburg was nearly all that kept Grant’s well-organized army from entering the capital; though the necessaries of war, and even of life, were growing alarmingly short,” he wrote after the war, “still everyone seemed satisfied that the South would somehow or other gain the day.” Lawley he could excuse, since the journalist was “so carried away by his admiration of the wonderful pluck shown by the Southerners … whereas all of us … should have seen the end coming months before we were obliged to open our eyes to the fact it was come.”¹⁸

The Welsh army veterinarian Griffith Evans had obtained an observer’s pass from the Medical Department and was visiting the Federal lines at the same time that Hobart-Hampden was with the Confederates. He, too, had little sense that the South was struggling when he arrived at Petersburg. His first visit was to General Butler’s camp on July 3, where the flies were already a pestilence. (They were the biting kind and “are very troublesome indeed,” James Horrocks complained to his brother.)¹⁹ All day long, wrote Evans, the men sat in their fetid dugouts, sweltering in the heat, until the night shift relieved them. It was a dreadful existence, and he pitied them. Soldiers talked to him about the “fearful slaughtering” they had witnessed in vague tones, “as if they wished to forget it.”

Driving around the countryside, Evans thought he had never beheld anything so hideous, so redolent of biblical destruction: “Fences pulled down for fuel, the crops in the fields trodden down, houses deserted or occupied by troops, or burnt down, thousands of recent graves of men killed or died lately, and those so shallow that the stench from them was in places intolerable. Dead cattle and horses, men’s accoutrements, etc., strewn about, etc. etc. It was indescribable and the effect was sad and sickening.”²⁰ He could not imagine how the soldiers would tolerate their conditions for much longer.

Griffith Evans’s own return to Washington was impeded by a Confederate raid on the perimeter. The audacious attack led by Jubal Early was an attempt by Lee to force Grant into detaching part of his army to defend Washington. “There is a large Confederate force within three or four miles of Washington, and some perhaps think they will make an attempt to take the town today,” Lord Lyons informed his sister on July 13. But though there was panic in the city, the legation was not even bothering to pack up the archives. “Even if the town was taken my physical comfort would not be likely to be disturbed,” Lyons decided. “I don’t really expect to have to move, and I daresay you will hear next week that things have lapsed into their odious condition.”

Lyons was far more worried about the state of his staff. He repeatedly told the Foreign Office that it could no longer assign the same number of attachés to Washington as it did to Ulan Bator. The secretary, William Stuart, and one of the junior staff had left before the arrival of their replacements. “The heat is overpowering,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell. “I am anxiously looking out for [their] arrival … and I hope they will be immediately followed, if they are not accompanied, by one or more Third Secretaries or Attachés—otherwise the whole Legation will be knocked up.”²¹ A letter from Joseph Burnley, the new secretary, brought terrible news: he was coming out with his wife and children. “A dreadful prospect for me—and still worse for him, poor man,” wrote Lyons. No woman had disturbed the monastic peace of the legation for the past five years.²² Lyons set about trying to dissuade Burnley from bringing his family. He could, with complete honesty, describe the lonely existence of a British diplomat in Washington. With Henri Mercier gone, and the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, on leave for the summer, Lyons had received not a single invitation to dinner for weeks.²³

Griffith Evans was concerned for Lyons when he visited the legation on July 20, though the minister sheepishly declined his sympathy. Evans should reserve his pity for the country’s leaders, Lyons told him: “Mr. Lincoln is not the man to look at that he was four years ago.” The Welshman realized the truth of this statement when he visited the White House a few days later. He walked through the “Grand Reception Room,” which he thought was “very seedy looking,” into Lincoln’s office without anyone’s challenging his presence. Lincoln was so exhausted and put upon that he did not think to ask why a stranger was in his office. “He shows marks of mental overwork,” decided Evans after a few minutes’ conversation.²⁴

The pressures on Lincoln were increasing. Grant’s failure to capture Richmond and Jubal Early’s raid near Washington had shaken the cabinet’s confidence. The tense divisions between the members resurfaced in violent quarrels and a resumption of the old plots and counterplots against one another. Seward, whose son Will had been wounded while defending Washington against Early, turned some of his frustration on Lord Lyons. He rudely dismissed as exaggeration the minister’s complaints that the Central Guard House in Washington was using water punishments against alleged deserters. Lyons had evidence from six separate cases, and he was outraged by the State Department’s explanation that a cold shower was pleasant in the summer. Turning water cannons on prisoners was not “in conformity with any law or regulations,” he bluntly wrote to Seward on July 25. It was used for one reason only: “for the purpose of extorting, by the infliction of bodily pain, confessions from persons suspected of being deserters.”²⁵ Nor was this his only complaint against the army. That same week, Lyons received evidence from the New York consulate of British subjects being hung by their thumbs until they agreed to sign confessions of desertion.

Charles Francis was unaware that the five-hundred-foot tunnel at Petersburg was almost complete. In a couple more days, Grant intended to blow up the center of the Confederate lines. In preparation for the daring assault, Grant ordered a diversionary attack north of the James River, close to Richmond. The troops selected for the mission included Colonel L.D.H. Currie and the 133rd New York Volunteers, lately arrived from Louisiana. Grant wanted Lee to be caught between defending Richmond and Petersburg and, with luck, ruffled into making mistakes. But it was the Federals who ended up committing the errors by their failure to plan adequately for the assault. Colonel Currie, who had been appointed acting commander of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, discovered that many of his troops were new recruits. He became increasingly worried the more he witnessed their lethargic response to his orders. The men had been assigned to hold one of the creeks that fed the James, but at the first sign of trouble they broke cover and ran for their lives. “Colonel Currie is as much annoyed at the conduct of his troops as myself,” reported his commanding officer: “They had the most explicit instructions from Colonel Currie, who even went so far as to tell them if they broke, the troops in the rear had orders to fire on them.”²⁹

Currie’s threats could not match the actual feel of gunfire for many of these men.^30.2 General Godfrey Weitzel, the acting chief of staff of the XIX Corps, vigorously defended Currie’s conduct to his irate superiors. He “bears three honorable wounds,” Weitzel wrote indignantly, “and is promoted for gallantry. He was Major-General Smith’s adjutant-general all through the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac.” But Currie was denied the opportunity to correct the poor impression made by his raw troops. The next day, on July 27, he was ordered to take his brigade to Washington in anticipation of another attack by Jubal Early. Two days later, on July 29, the diversionary expedition was abandoned and the Federals recrossed the James River. The mine tunnel was scheduled to explode in a few hours’ time.

A hitch had been discovered, however. The troops especially trained for the mission happened to be from colored regiments, and all of a sudden it seemed politically hazardous to use them; white regiments were substituted. Notwithstanding Grant’s declaration that “they will make good soldiers,” there was still widespread resistance to the idea of blacks in uniform, as well as doubts about their abilities. “Can a Negro do our skirmishing and picket duty?” asked Sherman rhetorically. “Can they improvise bridges, sorties, flank movements, etc., like the white man? I say no.”³¹ The second-class status of the colored regiments was reflected in their pay for the first two years—which stayed at $7 a month, only just over half the $13 paid to whites—until Congress rectified the inequality. Yet the number of black volunteers was increasing, from none before 1862 to fifteen thousand in 1863 to more than a hundred thousand by the summer of 1864. Moreover, they were not only serving their country, they were dying for it, too, and at a higher rate than white soldiers. The Confederates rarely took black prisoners alive.^30.3

Francis Lawley was two miles away at Lee’s headquarters when he heard the muffled boom and saw the “dark curls of smoke” billowing from the crater. He embellished the fiasco in his report to give a false picture to British readers of white bravery and black cowardice. “The panic-struck negroes,” he lied, “crowded into the empty crater of the mine, and cowered down in abject terror.” While he was crafting his Times dispatch, a messenger arrived with the news that Jubal Early had torched the Pennsylvania town of Chambersburg. Lawley added this to the end of his report, to show that Lee still retained the ability to attack Northern targets: “Richmond never laughed more scornfully at the puny onslaught of her foe.”³⁴

“We have met with a sad disappointment at Petersburg,” Seward wrote to his wife on August 5. “And now we have to deal with a disappointed, despondent, and I fear discontented people, who expect the Administration to guarantee success.”³⁵ Lincoln traveled down to Fort Monroe for a private conference with Grant. The general blamed the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, for insisting “that defending Washington was more important than chasing the enemy, even if it allowed Early to feint and pounce wherever he chose.”³⁶ A few days after the meeting, Grant had his way and General Phil Sheridan was allowed to lead a force of forty thousand men into northern Virginia. Sheridan’s instructions were clear: to make the fertile Shenandoah Valley unfit for human habitation and destroy Jubal Early’s army. Grant’s precise words were for Sheridan “to follow him to the death.”³⁷ The key was mobility, which could only be achieved if Sheridan’s supply lines kept up with him. The “thankless and arduous” task of guarding the continuously moving wagon trains was given to Colonel Currie.³⁸

Lee had hoped that Early’s raids would force Grant to send reinforcements to northern Virginia; he was even prepared to sacrifice a whole division of his army if it diverted the Federals away from Petersburg and Richmond. Francis Dawson was among the cavalry force under General Fitz Lee, which arrived in the Shenandoah Valley on August 8. “I then realized, as never before,” wrote Dawson, “the devastation of war.… The brutal Sheridan was carrying out his fell purpose … columns of smoke were rising in every direction from burning houses and burning barns.”³⁹ Yet he prevaricated to his parents, telling them the Confederacy was “tattered but like our soldiers it stands well.”⁴⁰

The detachment of forty thousand Federal troops made little difference to Grant’s strength in southern Virginia, whereas Lee needed every man in the trenches. Grant was relentless, probing and attacking any perceived weakness in the Confederate defenses. “[He] is a man of such infinite resource and ceaseless activity,” wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., admiringly on August 13. “Scarcely does one scheme fail before he has another on foot; baffled in one direction he immediately gropes round for a vulnerable point elsewhere—that I cannot but hope for great results the whole time. He has deserved success so often that he will surely have it at last.”⁴¹

General Butler’s Army of the James finally had worse things to worry about than the biting flies. “We have had no fighting here since I last wrote,” James Horrocks admitted to his parents just before the army was deployed on August 14. “We have been remarkably quiet. I believe we have not fired a shot nor had a shot fired at us for over a month.” But Horrocks came down with typhus and did not take part in the march to Deep Bottom (so named after a deep bend in the James River about eleven miles southeast of Richmond), where Grant planned to mount a second attack—the first had ended badly on July 27—against Lee’s defenses at Chaffin’s Bluff.⁴² Horrocks’s illness saved him from participating in what turned out to be the second of three assaults at Chaffin’s Bluff. On this occasion, a lack of proper planning meant that the ships carrying the troops along the river were too big to dock at the designated landing areas. The schedule for the operations was thrown into disarray, and the Confederates succeeded in driving the Federals back to the river.

The heat that had put Robert in the hospital was reaching some of the highest temperatures in recent memory. Lawley wrote in The Times that the past twenty days had been the worst he had ever known. “Night and day the mercury of the Fahrenheit has touched 90, and has sometimes gone considerably above that figure.” Visiting Richmond, he saw that people cleaved at all times to the shady side of the streets, flitting like “pale shadows” under the harsh sun.⁴⁶ “The drought still continues to the total destruction, I fear, of all crops, especially of our vegetables,” the Confederate chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, wrote despairingly.⁴⁷ Naturally, this was not something that Lawley cared to admit, and in his next dispatch he managed to turn every adversity into a seeming virtue. “Lee has, as usual, the odds against him,” he allowed, “and yet at no moment has the confidence of Secessia in the security in Richmond and Petersburg been more serene.”⁴⁸ The true feelings of “Secessia” were more accurately expressed by Gorgas, who wrote in his diary on August 29: “Can we hold out much longer?”⁴⁹

^30.1 Sir Percy briefly attempted to run a riding academy for cavalry officers in New York. Its failure convinced him to return to Italy to serve on Garibaldi’s staff for the next couple of years. Ever the roving adventurer, he moved to Asia and started a humorous journal in India, the Indian Charivari, and a logging business in Mandalay, Burma. He was killed in Mandalay at the age of forty-nine in 1879 while demonstrating a hot-air balloon of his own design, which exploded in midair.

^30.2 Some of them were victims of crimpers, like twenty-one-year-old Edward Sewell from Ipswich, who had arrived in 1862 to work as a mechanic for a New York firm. He had been kidnapped in May while riding on the train to work: “I sat by myself in the corner and believe I began to doze [wrote Sewell]. About three or four in the afternoon I woke up and found myself on board a steam-packet on its way to Hart’s Island.… I found that I was then in uniform as a soldier, and had been robbed of my money, jewels, and clothes, except a ring on my finger.”³⁰

^30.3 A notorious example of Confederate rage against black soldiers had taken place only three months before, on April 12, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee. The Federal force of approximately 262 black and 295 whites surrendered to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, but fewer than 75 black soldiers walked out alive.

^30.4 Since the death of Livingstone’s wife, Mary, in 1862, relations between father and son had become strained to the breaking point. Dr. Livingstone had not seen his son—or any of his other children—for several years, though he continued to send them long, disapproving letters from East Africa. Robert was a restless, lonely boy—“dour, determined, impulsive,” was how one contemporary described him. Far from acceding to his father’s wish for him to train as a doctor, Robert wanted to join the army or navy. At one point, he absconded from school and became lost for a short time in the underworld of Limehouse in London, where sailors’ hostels operated side by side with opium dens and brothels.

THIRTY“Can We Hold Out?”

THIRTY
“Can We Hold Out?”