A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
The two observers were still dodging shells when Longstreet finally ordered his corps to prepare for the attack. The Federal guns had stopped firing, leading him to assume that his own barrage had successfully destroyed their defense. He did not know that his artillerists’ aim had been slightly off, or that the Federals were simply conserving their ammunition for the expected assault. The Confederates, on the other hand, had used up all their long-range shells. Longstreet’s artillery chief, Edward P. Alexander, begged him to call the charge before the Federal guns started up again.
Dawson watched as 14,000 Confederate soldiers assembled in the woods. One division, led by the ringleted George Pickett, was almost exclusively Virginian. Prayers were read to the brigades, almost as though the men were receiving the last rites. “This is a desperate thing to attempt,” Dawson heard one of the brigadier generals remark. “Just then,” Dawson continued, “a hare which had been lying in the bushes, sprang up and leaped rapidly to the rear. A gaunt Virginian, with an earnestness that struck a sympathetic chord in many a breast, yelled out: ‘Run old heah; if I were an old heah I would run too.’ ”25
The Federals could not see the Confederates massing in the woods across from them. “From our position the eye ranged over a wide expanse of uneven country, fields broken by woods, showing nowhere any signs of an army movement, much less of conflict,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote in his memoirs. Even at the height of the battle, Gettysburg seemed pleasingly pastoral: “a quiet, midsummer, and champagne country. Neither our lines nor those of the enemy were visible to us; and the sounds of battle were hushed.” When the Confederate artillery fire began, Charles Francis Jr. and the survivors of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had been lying on the grass, near their horses, while they waited for orders. The thick heat and soft buzzing of insects acted as a kind of soporific. “Lulled by the incessant roar of the cannon,” he recorded, “while the fate of the army and the nation trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict, I dropped quietly asleep. It was not heroic; but it was … war.”26
Forty-seven Confederate regiments spaced over the distance of a mile began advancing across the 1,400-yard field that lay in front of Cemetery Ridge. Francis Lawley—too ill to climb the tree himself—shouted up to Justus Scheibert to describe the charge to him. The Prussian started a running commentary full of technical descriptions, prompting Lawley to bellow at him in frustration to use layman’s terms, but Scheibert was at a loss for further words, having never witnessed such butchery. The closer the Confederates stumbled toward the concave Federal line, the easier targets they presented. Fremantle entered the wood where Pickett’s division had gathered only a few minutes before. Federal shells were bringing down huge tree limbs, and yet the wood was full of gray-clad soldiers, “in numbers as great as the crowd in Oxford Street in the middle of the day.” Then he saw that every single one was wounded.27
The woodland scene confused Fremantle. When he found Longstreet, who was sitting on a rail at the edge of the wood, he made an exceptionally thoughtless comment. “Thinking I was just in time to see the attack,” he wrote contritely, “I remarked to the General that ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for any thing.’ ” Longstreet gave a hollow laugh. “The Devil you wouldn’t! I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed; look there!”28 Longstreet asked wearily for a drink, and Fremantle offered him a sip of rum from his flask. Scattered in heaps and fragments below were nearly seven thousand Confederate soldiers. George Pickett had lost two-thirds of his division, including all thirteen colonels. “I suppose that I was the first man to whom Pickett spoke when he reached the line,” wrote Francis Dawson. “With tears in his eyes, he said to me: ‘Why did you not halt my men here? Great God, where, oh! where is my division?’ I told him that he saw around him what there was left of it.”29
Fremantle was surprised by Longstreet’s calm demeanor. A Federal charge at this moment would have smashed the Confederate army into pieces. When one general protested that he could not gather his men, Longstreet sarcastically told him not to worry, the enemy would do it for him. Lee came riding up the hill to help rally the soldiers. “His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not show signs of the slightest disappointment,” wrote Fremantle. His only concern was to ready a line of defense. Lee asked Colonel Edward Alexander whether they had enough ammunition to repel a Federal attack. The artillerist gave a bleak answer. Lee bravely acknowledged his part in the failed charge. “It was all my fault this time,” Lee told the dazed fugitives from Pickett’s charge; “form your ranks again when you get back to cover.”30 At 7:30 P.M., when he was certain that there would be no more fighting that day, Fremantle returned to camp to describe the recent events to Lawley.
On the following day, July 4, the battlefield was soaked by a long, steady downpour. “Many dear friends had yielded up their young lives during the hours which had elapsed,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “but, though twenty thousand fellow creatures were wounded or dead around us, though the flood-gates of heaven seemed open and the torrents fell upon the quick and the dead, yet the elements seemed electrified with a certain magnetic influence of victory, and, as the great army sank down over-wearied in its tracks, it felt that the crisis and danger was passed—that Gettysburg was immortal.”31
Lee now had just one aim—to retreat with the remnants of his army before Meade attacked. In all, 70,000 Confederates had fought at Gettysburg; only 48,000 were leaving. The Federal army had one field hospital for every 12,000 soldiers; the Confederates simply gathered as many of the injured as they could and loaded them onto wagons. Thousands were left behind, and countless men died from their wounds or starved to death waiting for someone to rescue them. Two weeks after the battle, a civilian stumbled upon one of the abandoned camps. A party was sent to collect the survivors. A shocked witness wrote:
One boy without beard was stretched out dead, quite naked, a piece of blanket thrown over his emaciated form, a rag over his face, and his small, thin hands laid over his breast. Of the dead none knew their names, and it breaks my heart to think of the mothers waiting and watching for the sons laid in the lonely grave on that fearful battlefield. All of those men in the woods were nearly naked, and when ladies approached they tried to cover themselves with the filthy rags they had cast aside. The wounds themselves, unwashed and untouched, were full of worms. God only knows what they suffered.32
Lincoln would never forgive Meade for not driving after Lee. But the Union commander had lost a quarter of his army; 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or captured. His generals supported his decision to wait until they were sure of Lee’s movements. A temporary halt while the injured were removed and the supply trains arrived did not seem like an intolerable delay. The Federal cavalry caught up with the Confederates two days later. “As we approached Hagerstown, we heard some fighting ahead, between our cavalry and a cavalry force of the enemy. I rode ahead to see if any artillery was needed,” wrote Colonel Alexander.
During the day I had an accession to my staff. Capt. Stephen Winthrop … on the march from Gettysburg [had] negotiated with Gen. Sorrel, Longstreet’s adjutant, to be transferred to me. Sorrel asked me if I would consent—which I did very willingly, and he joined me about noon on the 6th. He was well built, stout & very muscular, good grey-blue eyes, a full, oval face, with a British mouth and nose, good natured, jolly, & brave. He was an excellent and admirable representation of his country.… That very afternoon he got a chance to show the stuff he was made of.33
Winthrop was returning with a fresh horse from Alexander’s reserve when he rode into one of Jeb Stuart’s regiments as it prepared to attack a Federal battery. He introduced himself and asked to carry their colors. The Confederates were too surprised to decline his request. He positioned himself at the front of the charge and leaped forward. “Winthrop’s horse was killed by a canister quite close to the guns, but the charge was repulsed. He got another horse, and went in a second charge,” recalled Ale
“The March back to the Potomac was dreary and miserable indeed,” wrote Dawson. “The rain fell in torrents. The clothing of the men was worn and tattered, and too many of them were without shoes. It was a heart-breaking business, and gloom settled down upon the army.” A trail eighteen miles long slowly ground through the mud toward Hagerstown in Maryland. During the journey, Longstreet talked to Fremantle and Lawley about the reasons for the Confederate defeat, placing the failure on numbers rather than tactics.34 “He said the mistake they had made was in not concentrating the army more, and making the attack yesterday with 30,000 men instead of 15,000,” reported Fremantle. “The advance had been in three lines, and the troops of Hill’s corps who gave way were young soldiers, who had never been under fire before.” Longstreet would retract this opinion after the war, however, writing in his own memoirs that forty thousand men “could not have carried the position at Gettysburg.”35
Lawley, Fremantle, Ross, and Scheibert arrived at Hagerstown on the seventh and took rooms together at the Washington Hotel.36 Lawley had a hard task ahead of him and was left alone by the others so he could write in peace. He could not disguise the grief in his heart: “For the first time during my residence in Secessia,” he began, “it is my province to record, as having happened under my own eyes, a failure of the Confederate arms.”37
* * *
22.1 Despite not having met a single Southerner who was prepared to free his slaves under any conditions, Fremantle wrote after his visit to Charleston: “I think that if the Confederate States were left alone, the system would be much modified and amended.”
22.2 Only the week before, on June 9, a letter from Lieutenant Sydney Herbert Davies had appeared on his desk. Davies had resigned from his regiment in Canada in order to carry secret dispatches to the South. “I have now the honour to apply for a major’s commission in the CSA,” he wrote. “I am in possession of a first class certificate as an instructor of musketry and am not ignorant of warfare.” He was rewarded with a commission of first lieutenant.5
22.3 Gettysburg, like Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, had its own lexicon of horrors where thousands died contesting a patch of ground: the Wheat Field, Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard.
TWENTY-THREE
Pressure Rising
Fiasco at the House of Commons—Vicksburg surrenders—An economy without cotton—Rioting in New York—A summer jaunt—Rose Greenhow’s diplomatic mission
The House of Commons was full on Tuesday evening, June 30, 1863, when Henry Adams entered the Strangers Gallery, pretending not to notice the Southerners seated around him. According to the latest news from America, Lee’s army had marched without hindrance all the way to Pennsylvania. But the news appeared to be having a dampening effect on support for Roebuck’s motion—several MPs had questioned the need for a debate on recognition when the Confederacy was on the verge of winning independence without English help. It was yet one more dilemma weighing on Roebuck’s mind when he entered the Commons. Earlier that day, in the House of Lords, Russell had denied for a second time that the French emperor had written to him about recognizing the South.
James Spence had always felt uncomfortable with Roebuck as the South’s main spokesman in the Commons, but even he never imagined the extent to which the MP would self-immolate that evening. Roebuck’s speech began unpromisingly with an overflow of bile before descending into such balderdash that he alienated his listeners. There were cries of “No!” when Roebuck insisted that Negroes were worse off in the North than in the South, where “black children and white children are brought up together. I say it without fear of contradiction from any one whose contradiction is worthy of notice.… There is a kindly feeling in the minds of the Southern planters toward those whom England fixed there in a condition of servitude.” But the real damage came toward the end when he referred to his interview with Louis-Napoleon. Roebuck explained afterward that Russell’s denial had given him no choice but to bring up the matter because his own honor was at stake. But rather than simply saying in a few words that France was eager to cooperate on a policy of recognition, Roebuck gave a blow-by-blow description of their interview, including Louis-Napoleon’s complaints about double-dealing by the Foreign Office.
At that moment he was doomed, the Confederate lobby discredited. Roebuck had broken a cardinal rule: he, a backbencher, had wedged himself into the middle of Anglo-French relations. The Tories abandoned Roebuck to his fate—even MPs known to sympathize with the South expressed their disapproval of the motion, and the undersecretaries from the Home and Foreign offices were scathing in their criticism of his interference. Gladstone’s telling-off was merciful by comparison, though the cabinet was furious with Roebuck for dredging up the question of recognition. But there was more to come.
John Bright had watched his prey stagger and bleed from a thousand little cuts before he moved in for the kill. He recalled with biting sarcasm that “only about two years ago” Roebuck had stated categorically, “I have no faith in the Emperor of the French,” and yet he was appearing before the House as the emissary of “the great French ruler.” As to the confusion between Roebuck and the Foreign Office over what the emperor had actually communicated:
I will say this in justice to the French Emperor, that there has never come from him, not from any one of his ministers, nor is there anything to be found in what they have written, that is tinctured in the smallest degree with that bitter hostility which the hon. and learned Gentleman [Roebuck] has constantly exhibited to the United States of America and their people.1
Observing Roebuck’s humiliation, Henry Adams wrote that Bright “caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier.” Bright’s crushing of the MP was so complete that Henry “felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done.” A Southerner described it as “the most deliberate and tremendous pounding I have ever witnessed.”2 The House adjourned for the night, leaving Roebuck’s motion prostrate on the floor.
There was consternation in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay as to how Anglo-French policy could have degenerated so swiftly into public farce. The French foreign minister, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, dispatched a telegram to Ambassador Gros in London asking for an explanation of the British government’s denial.3 At the Foreign Office, Lord Russell asked Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador to France, whether he had knowledge of a proposal from the emperor. Russell vaguely recalled Baron Gros’s aside about the emperor’s support for Southern recognition, but it had never occurred to him to treat it as an official communiqué to the government. Just as troubling to the cabinet was the claim in Roebuck’s speech that Louis-Napoleon had complained of his peace overtures being ridiculed by the British. The Foreign Office clerks were ordered to comb through every diplomatic dispatch of the past twelve months to see if there was any truth to the allegation.
When Mason reported the debacle to Slidell, his chief concern was whether they would be able to procure written evidence to prove Roebuck’s claim. James Spence and William Gregory, on the other hand, wanted only to be rid of the controversy; they pleaded with Roebuck to withdraw his motion. “The members are 10 to 1 in favour of the South,” wrote Spence to Commissioner Mason, but the minute the emperor of France was dragged into the debate, the issue became a matter of national pride and “on this point the vote might be 5 to 1 against Southern interests.”4 Roebuck, as Spence had feared, would not be swayed, nor would he listen to Palmerston, who wrote to him on July 9 saying he was welcome to make his motions in support of the South, but he was treadi
On Friday, July 10, Roebuck tried to resume his motion, only to find himself blocked by his friends. William Schaw Lindsay urged him to wait until after the arrival of the Scotia in three days’ time—bringing definitive news of Lee’s victory—which would cast the debate in an entirely different light. The Confederates added their own entreaties, terrified that Roebuck was on course to destroy the South’s political chances in the Commons permanently. All Henry Hotze desired now was a “decent retreat” before the House had the opportunity to vote down Roebuck’s motion.6
The Times helped the Confederates by printing an editorial on Monday, July 13, urging Roebuck to withdraw his motion. Finally Roebuck listened to the pleas from the chorus around him. That same evening he announced to the House his decision to withdraw his motion. Benjamin Moran was in the gallery, watching as the Southern lobby squirmed during Roebuck’s speech. William Lindsay spoke immediately after, telling the members that whatever else they thought of his friend, he was not a liar; the emperor truly had told them of his desire to recognize the South. The speech was “a long rambling half mad jumble,” wrote Moran, “which the House alternately laughed and jeered at. Then Palmerston rose, and while patting the two dupes on the head, expressed the hope that the unusual proceedings … would never be repeated.”7 The Confederates were never happier to see a motion die.
Charles Francis Adams attended a reception at Lord Derby’s later that night, his recent depression almost lifted by the Confederate fiasco in the Commons. The Tories pressed him for news, forcing him to admit that, like them, he was waiting for the Atlantic steamer to arrive. But when the Scotia did come, on Thursday, July 17, the reports about the battle at Gettysburg were unclear. Adams could not tell whether Lee had suffered a defeat or merely been checked for a day or so. The Times hedged but leaned toward a momentary delay. Two days later, however, Henry Adams came down to breakfast and found his father reading the victory telegram from the State Department. “I wanted to hug the army of the Potomac,” Henry wrote of his joy at that moment. “I wanted to get the whole of the army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I wanted to fight some small man and lick him.” The telegram announced not only Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg but also the fall of Vicksburg.