The Confederates invade Vermont—Colonel Grenfell’s mistake—War at sea resumes—The impact of Lincoln’s reelection—March to the sea—Death in a prison camp
Instead of feeling restored by his holiday in Canada, Lord Lyons felt incapacitated by intense bleakness. Nothing inappropriate had taken place between him and Feo Monck; nor did he expect ever to see her again. But she had awakened something in him, a half-realized sense of liberty that would not be stifled and yet could not be indulged, and the prospect of Washington now seemed intolerable. Lyons could no longer avoid the truth: he did not belong in America, where his quiet eccentricities were out of step with the harsher rhythms of the young republic. The legation had been a haven for the past four years, but even this was about to be taken away from him, as it was time for his staff, including Edward Malet, to be transferred to new posts. In a couple of months Lyons would have to start all over again with a new set of faces.
Lyons’s visit to New York in mid-October was uneventful until the night of the twentieth, when he attended a dinner party at which the guests included General John Dix, the military governor of New York State. Suddenly a messenger burst into the room and handed a telegram to the general, who read it and rushed out. He returned half an hour later to berate the astonished Lyons: twenty or so Confederate raiders had crossed the border from Canada and had attacked the Vermont town of St. Albans, looting more than $200,000 from its three main banks, setting fire to the square, and killing one citizen. He told Lyons that he had sent a force back across the border with orders to capture the raiders dead or alive. The news immediately conjured up in Lyons’s mind the specter of another international crisis: if the North crossed the Canadian border and invaded British soil to seize the Confederates, the British government would have to protest and demand an apology along with restitution of the prisoners. The United States would refuse, forcing the government into an ultimatum—probably followed by a declaration of war.
Lord Monck, foreseeing the same catastrophic chain of events, had ordered the Montreal police to find the Confederates before they fell into the Northerners’ hands. Thirteen raiders were caught within forty-eight hours, but the U.S. posse found their leader, Bennett Young, hiding in a farmhouse. Young—who had participated in the Chicago convention plot—might have swung from a tree were it not for the intervention of a British Army officer who happened upon the scene and persuaded the furious Northerners to escort the prisoner to the local garrison. Monck telegraphed the news to Seward, assuring him that the Confederates would remain in custody while the courts examined the case for their extradition. He hoped this swift action would forestall any thoughts of Northern retaliation.
The St. Albans raid had been organized by the Confederate commissioner Clement C. Clay without the knowledge of Jacob Thompson, who was furious that it had been kept from him. Thompson’s own plots were nearing fruition and promised to be far more destructive and violent than mere banditry against a U.S. border town. He feared that this further violation of British neutrality would lead to increased cooperation between the Canadian and Northern authorities and create more obstacles for his operatives. As far as Thompson could tell, Canadians remained broadly supportive of the South, and he wanted nothing to jeopardize their goodwill. Halifax was still “intensely Southern,” according to Georgiana Walker, who had arrived with her family on October 11. (For her, Rose Greenhow’s death overshadowed the actions of a few hotheads. “My thought flew at once to the poor little orphan at the Sacré Coeur, now bereft of Father, Mother, Friends,” she wrote, “truly [reliant] on the cold charities of the world.”)1
General Sheridan was expanding the definition of “total war” to include deliberate starvation and the destruction of civilian property. Jacob Thompson was taking it in another direction: that of terror and mass murder. He was far more systematic than any of the other Confederate agents working in Canada, and he had the men and resources to mount large-scale campaigns.34.1 2 Thompson had several schemes under way in late October, including a second attempt against USS Michigan by John Yates Beall and Bennet G. Burley, which involved the purchase and arming of a civilian steamer; but Thompson’s chief plot was an undertaking in conjunction with the Northern Sons of Liberty to start a revolution on November 8, Election Day.
Two more members from General John Hunt Morgan’s defunct brigade had been sent by Jefferson Davis to help Thompson: Lieutenant Colonel Robert Maxwell Martin and Captain John William Headley. They had originally hoped to lead the supposed uprising talked up so persuasively in June by Vallandigham, but Copperhead enthusiasm for conspiracies had subsided once Sherman and Sheridan’s victories exposed the weakness of the Confederacy. By the beginning of November, the number of cities involved in the Confederate Sons of Liberty plot had shrunk to just two: Chicago and New York. “We were told that about 20,000 men were enlisted in New York under a complete organization,” recalled Captain John Headley. “It was proposed by the New York managers to take possession of the city on the afternoon of Election Day and, in order to deter opposition, a number of fires were to be started in the city.” As in the Chicago plot, the prisoners at Fort Lafayette would be freed, and the city’s authorities, both military and civilian, would be either murdered or thrown in prison.3 The Confederates expected the rest of New York State to follow or be taken as easily as the city.
Lord Monck was throwing the meager resources at his disposal into surveillance operations against the Confederates, but his system was grossly inferior to the Federals’. Alerted by the U.S. consul in Halifax, Seward was able to telegraph General Dix on November 2: “This department has received information from the British Provinces to the effect that there is a conspiracy on foot to set fire to the principal cities in the Northern States on the day of the Presidential election.” The warning was followed by the dispatch of General Butler and five thousand troops, who marched into New York on November 7. The New York Copperheads met Thompson’s guerrillas that day and told them to go back to Canada, as no subversive would dare show his face while Butler was in town. But Martin and Headley would not be put off that easily, and they extracted from the Copperheads a new date for the uprising: Evacuation Day, November 25, so called because it was the day the British Army had been evacuated from Manhattan during the Revolutionary War.
Although the New York plotters had postponed their plan, the Chicago conspiracy was still in play, despite the arrest of John Castleman, Captain Thomas Hines’s deputy, on October 2. Castleman’s place was taken by the English volunteer Colonel Grenfell. “We have all got to live a certain time,” Grenfell wrote to his daughter on October 11, “and when the end comes what difference will it make whether I lived in London or Illinois?”4 The new plan relied on the help of twelve hundred Copperheads—a much smaller number than before—to launch a four-pronged attack on Camp Douglas. Once armed and liberated, the Confederate prisoners were supposed to break open the other prison camps in the state while the Copperheads, led by Grenfell, created a diversion throughout Chicago with fires and incendiary bombs. Hines expected to raise an army of 25,000 Confederate prisoners of war to capture Illinois.
The commandant of Camp Douglas, Colonel Benjamin Sweet, had informants inside the prison who were keeping him abreast of the conspiracy, but he did not know the full details of the plot until a Confederate turncoat named Maurice Langhorne called at his office on November 5 and offered to go undercover for him. Langhorne had briefly served under Confederate general Morgan and knew he would have no difficulty reconnecting with his former comrades. Grenfell was particularly incautious, freely discussing the plot not only with Langhorne but also with a second informant who was sent by Colonel Sweet to verify the information.
Shortly after midnight on November 7, Union troops arrested the leader of the Copperheads; another detachment went after Thomas Hines, although he managed to hide. A third went to the Richmond House hotel in search of Grenfell. A fellow conspirator had managed to get a note to him first, which read: “Colonel—you must leave tonight. Go to Briggs House,” but Grenfell ignored the warning. The arresting officers found the note when they entered his room. He was sitting by the fire, fully dressed, though he could have run from the hotel at any time during the previous three hours.5 Whether he was feeling ill (he was still recovering from influenza) or was simply overconfident, his inaction led to his becoming an inmate of Camp Douglas rather than its liberator. He was put in a special cell reserved for spies and irregular combatants—next to the latrines.
The legation read about the arrests on the morning of the election, but Lord Lyons himself was unaware of the failed plot. He had collapsed on November 6. “Two days after you left,” George Sheffield wrote to Edward Malet, “Lord Lyons gave up the work of the legation to Burnley, and I am sorry to say, has been seriously ill.”6
—
Lord Lyons’s last act of business before his collapse had been to speak to Seward about the problem of Confederate operations out of Canada. Seward believed his assurances that Lord Monck was trying his best to discourage them, and as a show of good faith he gave Lord Lyons a copy of the government’s vehement protest before it was sent to Charles Francis Adams in London. Lyons was grateful, since foreknowledge would allow Lord Russell sufficient time to compose his response before it was officially delivered. “He said that it would be impossible to resist the pressure which would be put upon the government … if these incursions from Canada continued,” Lyons reported confidentially to Lord Russell on October 28.7 A way had to be found to stop Thompson and his agents.
Seward’s protest to Lord Russell arrived at the legation while Adams was out of London. The family had moved to Hanger Hill House, a handsome Georgian mansion in the village of Ealing.34.2 The apparent certainty of a Democratic victory had made Charles Francis Adams lackadaisical about coming in to London, conduct that exasperated Benjamin Moran.
“Mr. Adams got a letter this morning from Mr. Dudley reporting a suspicious vessel,” Moran recorded on October 8. “I thought we should send the Niagara after her, but he said no.” Moran reveled in injured silence when it was discovered that the vessel had been carrying the crew for the Shenandoah, James Bulloch’s replacement for the Alabama.
The forced sale of the French ships had provided Bulloch with a large reserve of cash that he used to purchase a ready-built steamer.8 The greatest challenge for Bulloch was how to assemble the Confederate officers in one place without someone talking or being discovered. In order to forestall potential leaks, Bulloch had furnished each crew member with explicit instructions. “You will proceed to London by the 5 o’clock train this afternoon,” Bulloch informed 1st Lieutenant William Whittle on October 6, 1864,
and go to Wood’s Hotel, Furnival’s Inn, High Holborn. Take a room there and give your name as Mr. W. C. Brown if asked. It has been arranged for you to be in the coffee room of the hotel at 11 o’clock a.m. precisely to-morrow, and that you will sit in a prominent position, with a white pocket handkerchief rove through a buttonhole of your coat, and a newspaper in your hand. In this attitude you will be recognized by Mr. Richard Wright, who will call at the appointed hour and ask you if your name is Brown. You may say yes, and ask his name; he will give it, and you will then retire with him to your room, hand him the enclosed letter of introduction, and then, throwing off all further disguise, discuss freely the business in hand.9
Whittle and his fellow Confederates obeyed their orders, and the Shenandoah sailed secretly from London on October 8. But after the transfer of arms and crew had been made in neutral waters on the nineteenth, the new commander of the cruiser, James Waddell, discovered that the stabilizers for the gun carriages were missing. Without them, the guns would go crashing backward every time they were fired. But this was the least of Captain Waddell’s problems. He had only 43 officers and men for a ship designed to carry a crew of 150.10 The equipment had been salvaged from other Confederate ships, and in the rush to acquire guns and ammunition, ordinary necessities such as tables and chairs had been forgotten. Waddell was so concerned about the shortages that he contemplated abandoning the cruise, but his small crew persuaded him that they would be able to manage. Most were used to far worse deprivations, especially the transfers from the Alabama. “Every officer and man ‘pulled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves,’ ” recalled Lieutenant Whittle, “and with the motto, ‘do or die,’ went to work at anything and everything.” They captured their first prize, the Alina, from Maine, on October 30. With a little encouragement, seven sailors from the Alina agreed to serve on the Shenandoah, giving hope to the overworked crew that more would follow.
James Bulloch argued that his little navy’s record was spotless and that his raiders had attacked the Northern shipping trade without ever harming passengers or crew.11 But there was nothing heroic about commercial warfare, and in real engagements the Confederate cruisers fared badly. On October 7, USS Wachusett had captured CSS Florida—the last of the original three commerce raiders—in the Bay of San Salvador, Brazil, without firing a shot.12 Bulloch’s real contribution to the South was his supply operation, which, under the steady direction of the Confederate agent Colin McRae, was working twenty-four hours a day. Since the beginning of autumn, McRae and Bulloch had sent the Confederacy more than five miles of wire, eight pairs of engines, six torpedo boats, four steamers for the navy, three British engineers, and a large quantity of miscellaneous goods including three unmarked boxes sent by Matthew Maury that contained the parts for a new kind of electromagnetic mine.13
Maury had “locked myself down” in his “experimental establishment of my own,” as he told Louisa, the sister of the Reverend Francis Tremlett.34.3 But he did take one day off to visit the Confederate bazaar in aid of the Southern Prisoners’ Relief Fund.14 Despite James Spence’s fear that the bazaar would have too many contributors and not enough buyers, more than two thousand visitors crammed into Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall on October 18. Inside the neoclassical building were twelve stalls, representing the twelve Confederate states (though the twelfth, Kentucky, had actually remained in the Union). Confederate flags and portraits of Southern generals lined the walls. “This is purely an enterprise gotten up by English gentlemen and ladies, sympathizers with the South and of their own prompting,” James Mason told his wife with great pride.15 Spence had accumulated an extraordinary array of donations, from Robert E. Lee’s pipe to wooden crosses made from the wreckage of Fort Sumter. In addition to persuading local businesses to donate all the food and drink, he arranged for a number of concerts to take place throughout the four days.16 (Raphael Semmes had departed for the South on October 3, or Spence would have tried to make use of him as another attraction.) Encouraged by the large crowds, the organizers extended the fair from four to five days. Even after deducting expenses, their final profits were more than £17,000.
Although many newspapers accepted the organizers’ claim that the bazaar was an exercise in charity rather than political propaganda, Northern supporters were not deceived. Benjamin Moran prayed to heaven that retribution would fall upon the English. “When the day of reckoning comes,” he wrote to Dudley on November 1, “I hope I shall be oblivious of mercy towards this government.”17 Moran’s desire to be merciless was granted a week later when Samuel Hardinge, Belle Boyd’s new husband, paid an unexpected visit to the legation. He came “begging for a loan today,” Moran recorded in his diary on November 7, 1864. “He looks like a traitor—is tall and about 21 years of age. He professes to be loyal.” Moran triumphantly turned him away, but Hardinge returned the next morning, offering to spy for the Federals. Moran was supercilious: “I gave him no encouragement. He is evidently in very straightened [sic] circumstances, and wants money. After associating with rebels and marrying a spy, it is rather cool impudence in him to come here to beg. His coming here is proof to me that the rebels are in very great pecuniary troubles in London.”18 Hardinge returned to America shortly afterward—without Belle. He was arrested on his arrival in the North and taken to the Old Capitol prison, where he was told he would remain at the discretion of Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war.
The irony for the Confederates was that the bazaar had been too successful. The outpouring of support for the South by the British public would make it impossible for the U.S. government—had Seward been so inclined—to allow the distribution of the fund to Confederate prisoners without suffering a loss of face. “It would be a great relief to us if we could get permission to act openly,” Spence wrote to Lord Wharncliffe on November 2, after he realized that the fund was in danger of turning into a thankless burden.34.4 19 He suggested that they write a letter to Charles Francis Adams asking leave to send “an accredited agent” on a tour of Northern prisons. At the very least it would demonstrate the organizers’ good faith to the British public. The bazaar committee had already purchased two thousand blankets, ten thousand socks, and five thousand shirts, which were boxed and ready to be shipped. Wharncliffe duly wrote to Adams on November 9 begging him to show pity on “the suffering of American citizens, whatever their State or opinions.”20 Adams tersely replied that the matter was for the State Department to decide, not the legation, and he refused to answer any further correspondence on the subject. (Adams did not feel the least guilty about turning away the pro-Southern supporters; he had his hands full with cases he considered to be far more deserving.)
Henry Hotze was too absorbed by his own troubles to help Spence. His plan to step back from the day-to-day running of the Index had backfired in spectacular fashion.34.5 The staff had revolted against John Witt, the new editor, imperiling Hotze’s plan to expand his operations.22 Nor had anything come of his attempt to create a recruiting scandal in Ireland. Hotze had in fact discovered a genuine fraud in England involving three con artists from New York who enticed several hundred workers over to America on a false glass-manufacturing contract. But the press had shown only perfunctory interest in the case. The Tories were content to let it alone as well; Lord Derby ordered the party “to sit still” and allow the government to tear itself apart.23
Palmerston was not in the least interested in petty recruiting scandals, except as a counterargument to Northern complaints about the Alabama; he was only concerned with the Civil War insofar as it revealed a new military threat to Britain. “If the Americans go to war with us,” Palmerston wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Somerset, “they will send out a swarm of fast steamers … sturdy enough to escape from our cruisers, and strong enough to capture any merchantman.”24 When Russell received Seward’s protest about the Confederates’ use of Canada on November 10, Palmerston reacted as though it was only a matter of time before the U.S. Navy’s new Monitor-class gunboats seized control of the Great Lakes. Worried that the Americans could close off access to the St. Lawrence River, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, he suggested to the war secretary, Lord de Grey, that the river be protected by “floating batteries and heavy guns” powerful enough to “smash and sink monitors.”25 “Any Reduction of our real Naval Force,” Palmerston warned Somerset, “in the face of all the warnings we have of contingent hostility on the part of the Federal States of North America would be taking upon ourselves a very dangerous responsibility.”26
Adams, too, was worried by the aggressive language in Seward’s protest to Lord Lyons. He knew the foreign secretary well enough now to be certain that the dispatch would be counterproductive. Unaware that Russell had already received an unofficial copy of the protest via Lord Lyons, Adams decided to rephrase Seward’s letter before delivering it to the Foreign Office.
Adams was still struggling to find the right tone for the “improved” dispatch when the Canada arrived on November 21, bringing the results of the presidential election. Lincoln had carried all but two states, though a few went Republican by the slimmest of margins, including New York State by less than 1 percent of the popular vote. “Thus has the country passed safely through the most grave of its trials since the first outbreak of the war,” wrote Adams with relief in his diary.27 The British press concentrated on Lincoln’s victory and ignored the Confederate government’s latest message to Europe, which came in the form of a manifesto demanding immediate recognition. The South’s request for “justice” from Great Britain, while it was deploying guerrillas and agents provocateurs in Canada, received a cold response from Lord Russell.28 Under the circumstances, James Mason was fortunate to have any response at all. France, Sweden, and the Papal States were the only other countries to acknowledge receipt of the manifesto.29
Adams felt liberated. For the past three years, his life had been blighted by fear and anxiety. Lincoln’s reelection—which would not have happened if the war were still going badly—seemed to herald the end of perpetual crisis. “The responsibility attending this post declines steadily with the progress of the war,” Adams wrote in his diary. He felt that the change justified his asking Seward “about the possibility of my being relieved in the spring.” When Henry Adams heard the news of the election, he feared his father would be too reticent in his request, and asked Charles Francis Jr., “Should you go to Washington, try and have a talk with Seward about our affairs.”30
Adams delivered his amended version of Seward’s protest on Confederate Canadian operations to Lord Russell on November 25. His lingering misgivings about deserting the legation fell away once he learned that Russell had not only received Seward’s protest via Lord Lyons but also had already replied. “Mr. Adams is very angry with Mr. Seward about his conduct,” reported Benjamin Moran. “His labor was all thrown away and he is made to look like a fool. It was a trick that no man but Seward could have played with Mr. Adams.”31
—
“This election has relieved us of the fire in the rear,” Charles Francis Jr. wrote to Henry Adams on November 14, “and now we can devote an undivided attention to the remnants of the Confederacy.”32 The Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House had been upended by the twin victories of Sherman at Atlanta and Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Grant’s tenacity had made the Copperheads appear defeatist, if not unpatriotic, and the same message of “peace now” that had been so popular during the summer had alienated all but the Democrats’ core supporters in the autumn. Ordinary Federal soldiers shared Charles Francis Jr.’s determination to finish the war; 78 percent had voted for Lincoln. The Democratic candidate, General McClellan, had counted on the army without considering the psychological cost to men who were fighting for victory rather than for peace. Even many Federal prisoners of war “voted” for Lincoln. James Pendlebury had been a prisoner at Andersonville, considered to be the worst of the Confederacy’s prisons, since his capture in June. Unable to cope with the sheer number of prisoners, the commandant of Andersonville, Henry Wirz, had allowed a small delegation to travel to Washington with a petition to resume the exchange system.33 The failure to gain a response led to a second prison being built nearby to take some of the overflow. “We moved to Millen and while there I voted for Abraham Lincoln,” Pendlebury wrote in his memoirs. “Our Captains allowed us to as they were anxious to carry McLennon [sic] because Abe Lincoln was a Republican and McLennon a Democrat. Now 19 out of every 20 voted for Lincoln so we were all ‘docked’ rations.”34.6 The defiance shown by Pendlebury was all the more remarkable given that the Federal soldiers knew Lincoln had refused to resume prisoner exchanges until the Confederates treated white and black prisoners on an equal basis. On some days, there were more than 150 burials at the prison: “We would fight like wild beasts that we might carry out the body of a fellow prisoner, because on those occasions we would get into the woods and come back with a supply of firewood with which to do our cooking.”35 After the prisoners were forbidden to go into the woods, they fought for the “privilege” of taking the bodies to the carts, since it was their only opportunity to scavenge for clothing.
Ill.57 The Federal Phoenix rises again, according to Punch, from the flames of states’ rights, free press, and the Constitution.
The needless suffering of prisoners was a frequent accusation hurled at both administrations. But Lincoln and Grant were also blamed for deliberately sacrificing thousands of Northern soldiers in order to prevent the South from replenishing its empty ranks. The Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, Goldwin Smith, was on a lecture tour of the United States and took the opportunity to visit a Union-run prison camp in Chicago and a prison hospital in Baltimore. He thought neither unduly harsh, whereas the sight of returning Federal prisoners from Andersonville made him shudder: “I put my finger and thumb round the upper part of a large man’s arm,” he wrote. “It must be said that Grant was partly responsible, if, as was understood, he refused to exchange prisoners. No laws of war surely can warrant the retention of prisoners whom a captor cannot feed.”34.7 36
Goldwin Smith’s popularity in the United States was second only to John Bright’s on account of his vigorous pamphleteering in support of the North, and he was entertained during his tour by a plethora of senators and generals.37 Before the election, he stayed with Charles Sumner, who ranted so obsessively about Seward’s blunders as secretary of state that Smith was glad to escape. Afterward, when Smith was in Washington, he stayed with Seward and realized that not all of Sumner’s criticisms were unfair. Seward had fallen into the old habit of drinking and talking too much; he is “the least cautious of diplomatists,” recorded Smith. With regard to Lincoln, Smith noted that the English perception of the president as an “ungainly and grotesque” figure was largely correct, “but on the face instead of levity, sat melancholy and care.”38
The escalating tension along the Canadian border was a significant factor in Seward’s return to bad habits. He needed to talk to Lord Lyons and was frustrated by his mysterious illness. In the beginning he had heard that it was typhoid; then the diagnosis changed to neuralgia or dyspepsia or a combination of both. Whatever it was, the minister was unable to leave his room or receive visitors. Seward had taken Lyons for granted for so long that he was shocked to discover how quickly matters could deteriorate when the British minister was absent. Seward broke protocol by writing directly to Lord Monck, rather than via the British legation in Washington, urging him to act swiftly and publicly before John Yates Beall’s latest Lake Erie venture—known to be centered on an armed and reinforced steamship—created a mini-war on the Great Lakes.39 Monck did not appreciate being accused of dilatoriness when he was devoting the greater part of his day to thwarting the Confederates (he even sent a chronology to Lyons showing how and when he had responded to each event), but he was not as attuned to Northern public opinion as Seward. The secretary of state knew there was trouble brewing long before The New York Times came out in favor of a retaliatory war: “Let it come,” declared the newspaper. “We were never in better condition for a war with England.”40 Seward could only hope that his letters were being put into Lord Lyons’s hands.41
Seward could at least take satisfaction from the growing dissension within the Confederate Congress over the war; calls for peace were appearing in the Southern press with increasing frequency. He was heartened, he wrote to his wife, “in the discovery that division is at last breaking out among the rebels.”42 Davis had been traveling through the remnants of the Confederacy giving speeches to the public and meeting with state governors in private, several of whom were on the verge of withdrawing their cooperation. Desertion was endemic, yet 85 percent of Mississippi’s white adult male population was in the army, which made a mockery of Davis’s exhortation to Confederate women in his speech to the congress on November 7 to “use your influence to send all to the front.”43 Varina Davis discerned a greater willingness in Richmond to cabal against her husband. “The temper of Congress is less vicious,” she wrote, “but more concerted in its hostile action.”44 The Confederate Congress had reacted angrily as a body to Davis’s proposal to appropriate forty thousand slaves as a supplement to the army. They would be diggers, cooks, and porters rather than soldiers, but their contribution would be significant enough to earn them their freedom after the war. The War Department clerk John Jones took Davis’s proposal as a sign that normal life in the Confederacy was disintegrating.45 Wood was $100 a cord and coal cost $90 a load, both beyond the means of a civil servant. When Confederate soldiers received their pay, which was not often, they encountered the same frustrating experiences as Jones. Captain Francis Dawson’s monthly salary of $150 allowed him to purchase new trousers for $100, but not a new pair of boots, which cost $350. Dawson prayed that his current boots would see him through the final weeks of the autumn campaign. “After the 15th November, Richmond is safe,” he informed his mother, for then the weather would be the Confederacy’s best defense.
The Army of Northern Virginia was stretched like an elastic band along mile after mile of trenches and fortifications. Lee had already moved his headquarters to be closer to Petersburg, where Grant had made the greatest gains in territory. Dawson’s prophecy was accurate almost to the day. The Federals settled into their winter dugouts during the second week of November. Private James Horrocks and the 5th Battery, New Jersey actually built little wooden cabins, complete with windows and brick chimneys.
Thank goodness I have a nice, warm log shanty to live in [he wrote to his parents]. Already the winter of Virginia begins to commence. This season is characterized chiefly by perpetual rain, and penetrating cold that pierces through one’s clothing and makes one shiver. Mud of a sticky character takes one up to the knees and it is no rare occurrence to get up to the middle in it.… The state of the ground renders the movement of Artillery almost impossible.46
General Longstreet occasionally ordered a round of artillery fire to keep the Federals on their toes, but his batteries were no less mudbound than those of his opponents. The relative quiet enabled him to reorganize his staff. There were several promotions and requests for transfers, including one by Francis Dawson. Longstreet had never shown the least interest in the Englishman, but he was suddenly indignant when Dawson was appointed chief ordnance officer on General Fitzhugh Lee’s staff. “General Fitz Lee heard of me through some of our mutual English friends and made application for me,” Dawson explained to his mother. Dawson was delighted to be able to say goodbye to his uncongenial messmates. “Although I have suffered but little,” he wrote to his mother on November 24, “it is useless to deny that there is considerable jealousy displayed towards an Englishman.”47
Dawson felt welcomed by his new mess officers from the beginning. “A better set of fellows on Fitz Lee’s staff it would have been difficult to find,” he wrote. “There was no bickering, no jealousy, no antagonism.” The camaraderie he had craved—“we lived together as though we were near relatives”—made up for the hardship of his new post. Dawson had to work twice as hard with a smaller staff and no logistical support: “I found that it was no joke to organize the Ordnance Department of a couple of Divisions of Confederate Cavalry, but I adapted myself to circumstances.”48
Lee had sent his nephew to reinforce Jubal Early’s shattered army in the Shenandoah Valley, where there was clearly going to be no winter lull. General Sheridan’s reputation so terrified civilians that the women of Harrisonburg had petitioned the government for the right to organize themselves into a regiment for local defense.49 Their bravery inspired Dawson to chide his mother for complaining about his father’s debts: “Tell him for me to keep a stout breast,” he wrote. “Only think of the misery and desolation of this fair land and all will seem light by comparison.”50
—
In Georgia, General Sherman had initiated his own version of scorched-earth tactics. The Federal Army of the Tennessee had occupied Atlanta since September 2; finally, on November 15, Sherman gave the order to evacuate. His next destination was the city of Savannah, 285 miles to the east. He did not expect much resistance from Lee, who could not afford to detach a single regiment from the siege around Petersburg; nor was he frightened of General Hood and his little Army of Tennessee, which was lurking somewhere in the countryside. Before he left Atlanta he set the city on fire and expelled its remaining residents, telling the mayor, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”51 Five thousand houses were burned to the ground in a single night. “Behind us lay Atlanta,” Sherman recalled in his memoirs as the army began to march, “smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.”
Sherman’s plan for Georgia was effective and simple. He divided his army into two wings and cut a devastating trough more than fifty miles wide through the state. Foragers, known as “bummers,” had broad orders to do as they pleased short of mass rape and murder. Fearful that the Federals might first head south toward Andersonville, which was only 120 miles from Atlanta, Confederate prison commandant Wirz sent hundreds of Union prisoners on forced marches to various locations around the state. He could not feed them all anyway; James Pendlebury received a pint of corn for a four-day march. “A poor fellow asked if he could lie beside me and in the morning he was dead,” he wrote. “During that march I don’t think beasts could have been more savage.”
The economic catastrophe caused by Sherman’s march sent immediate ripples across the South. At Salisbury prison, North Carolina, where Robert Livingstone had been sent in October, ten thousand prisoners were living outdoors in a large pen. “Some dug holes in the ground to shelter themselves from the cold winds at night,” wrote Archibald McCowan, a Scotsman who arrived at the same time as Livingstone. As the rations grew smaller and smaller, the prisoners feared that the Confederates would starve them to death before the war ended. Walking past the prison well on November 24, McCowan noticed a small group of prisoners lounging around, each carrying a club made from a tree branch. “One of these men was very conspicuous on account of his uniform; the red breeches and Turkish cap of a Zouave regiment.” Suddenly, the group attacked the prison sentries. “Each of the other conspirators knocked down his man and with the arms thus obtained they rushed to the large gate which generally stood open to allow teams to pass in and out,” wrote McCowan.52 The other prisoners joined in. Two of the guards were killed before the sentries on the other side of the pen realized what was happening. In a few minutes, every prisoner was running toward the gates. McCowan had intended to join the mêlée, but a friend grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down. “Stay where you are you damn fool,” he said. The commandant climbed to the roof and turned the prison’s howitzer onto the crowd below. McCowan waited until all was silent before raising his head. He saw a number of bodies sprawled on the ground. “I learned later that 15 prisoners were killed and about 60 wounded, not one of whom knew anything about the matter.” Robert Livingstone had tried to run away with the others and been shot down. He lived for ten days before dying of his wounds on December 4, when his body was dumped in a trough alongside the other casualties of the failed rebellion.
34.1 A completely separate operation led by a Kentucky doctor, Luke P. Blackburn, had been inspired by the yellow fever epidemics in Bermuda. Dr. Blackburn was an expert on the disease and twice in 1864 offered his services to the Bermudan authorities, once in the spring and once in the autumn. Believing, mistakenly, that yellow fever could be transmitted via the clothes of deceased victims, Blackburn nursed the dying patients and then stored their belongings in large trunks. He had these transported to Halifax, where another agent shipped them to Washington to be auctioned off to unsuspecting civilians. Blackburn’s ignorance that yellow fever is spread via mosquito bites rather than human contact spared the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Blackburn’s plot was exposed after the war, but he escaped punishment and became governor of Kentucky in 1879.
34.2 Formerly the home of Lady Byron, Hanger Hill was advertised by its current owners as a healthy retreat from London with the convenience of being only six miles from the city’s center. Henry Adams liked Hanger Hill’s aristocratic pretensions, but the unrelieved proximity to his family was a trial. Mary was weak and querulous, and “Loo will bore herself to death,” he told his brother Charles Francis Jr.
34.3 Maury was working on improvements to his mines and what he termed “torpedoes,” which were immobile electrical mines intended to detonate upon contact. Unfortunately, he failed to take into account the impracticality of using new technology that could not be easily replicated or repaired. Stephen Mallory could not afford to waste his dwindling resources on such rarified warfare. But the British Army had plenty of resources, and General Sir John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers supplied Maury with acid, batteries, insulated wire, and all other necessary ingredients for mine manufacturing without asking too many questions about how much was actually required for experimental use.
34.4 Spence had already assumed the task of unraveling Rose Greenhow’s estate on behalf of her daughters and balked at taking on any more work. “She had faults, but who has not,” Spence had written to Wharncliffe after learning of her death. His reference to her “faults” was a delicate allusion to the distrust she inspired in Francis Lawley and others as a shameless manipulator of men. Varina Davis, President Davis’s wife, could only feel so much pity for Rose, “her poor wasted beautiful face all divested of its meretricious ornaments and her scheming head hanging helplessly upon those who but an hour before she felt so able and willing to deceive.”
34.5 Percy Gregg, a writer whom Hotze had always suspected of being slightly unhinged, had started the trouble by refusing to allow Witt to edit his copy. Witt had retaliated by dropping his stories altogether—with good reason: they were the ravings of a violent racist. “Of the passages altered or omitted there is scarcely one that I would have let stand,” Hotze admonished Gregg on his return from Germany. “There are some I could mention to you which I should consider almost fatal to the paper.” Hotze had never intended for the Index to be a pulpit for slavery. He was trying to massage, not bludgeon, public opinion. “It is a matter of real disappointment to me that one of my chief calculations, resting upon you, threatens to fail.”21
34.6 Hundreds of Federal prisoners took part in the sham vote. According to an early chronicler of Kansas state history, “When Sherman started on his march to Savannah the rebel authorities believed that a detachment of the Federal army would be sent to release the prisoners at Andersonville. Accordingly, in October 1864, [several Kansan prisoners] were taken to Milledgeville, Georgia, and from there to Savannah. While at Milledgeville, the Union prisoners went through the form of casting their votes at the general election. The soldiers in the field were given the privilege of voting for President.… The rebels were very much interested in the outcome, and advised those who wanted the war to come to a speedy close to vote for McClellan. However, the result of this balloting was about two to one in favor of Lincoln.”34
34.7 By the middle of 1864 the South had become so desperate for men that Davis agreed to a simple exchange—soldier for soldier—without regard to race. Prison exchanges resumed in November, albeit slowly.