A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
Yet neither army flinched. At dawn on the sixth the fighting resumed with the same ferocity. Under General Hancock’s direction, Pendlebury’s corps suddenly found its cohesion and began to overpower the Confederates. Lee was near the Orange Plank Road when he saw hundreds of troops running toward him. Realizing that the line had broken, he spurred his horse forward in a desperate attempt to rally the men himself. At that moment, the first of Longstreet’s regiments—a brigade of Texans—came storming up, having marched through the night from the Old Fredericksburg Road. The sight of Lee caused them to shout in dismay, “Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!”49 The Texans rushed ahead of him; but of the eight hundred who went forward, only three hundred returned unhurt.
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
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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
Dawson arrived as Longstreet was being carefully laid in an ambulance. The general had been hit by a single bullet, which passed through his neck and out his right shoulder. He was bleeding heavily but conscious. Dawson joined the silent group riding in the ambulance. They met Lee on the way to the hospital. “I shall not soon forget the sadness in his face,” wrote Dawson, “and the almost despairing movement of his hands, when he was told that Longstreet had fallen.” Longstreet’s appearance convinced Lee that the Wilderness had claimed his other most reliable commander. Visibly shaken, he rode away to assume control of Longstreet’s attack. But Lee could only guess what Longstreet had planned to do, and not all of it made sense to him. It was four o’clock when he gave the order to attack, several hours after Longstreet had intended his final assault to begin. During the delay, the Federals had regrouped and were prepared for the onslaught. The firing ceased at nightfall with neither side conceding their ground.
The following day, May 7, saw skirmishes but no real fighting. The two armies needed time to replenish their ammunition, fill places left by the dead and wounded, and eat and sleep after two days of continuous fighting. In the past forty-eight hours, 11,000 Confederate and 17,500 Federal soldiers had been killed or wounded in the Wilderness. Troops in the Army of the Potomac watched with a baleful eye as the supply wagons were hitched to horses and led toward the rear. They took it as a sign that Grant had ordered a retreat, just like Hooker after Chancellorsville and Burnside after Fredericksburg. The casualties from the battle were certainly enough to make most commanders unwilling to risk another clash with Lee; but Grant was different from his predecessors. The wagons were moving because Grant was continuing the advance to Richmond. He informed General Meade that the entire army must be on the march by midnight. Once the long lines began moving, Grant took his place at the front so that the men would know he was leading them toward, rather than away from, battle.
Lee was prepared for the news. He knew he was facing a far tougher opponent than his previous adversaries. He assumed Grant was heading for the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House—the road south from there being the swiftest route to Richmond—and raced to get there ahead of him. Over the next couple of days, the two armies converged on Spotsylvania, skirmishing all the way.54 Lee managed to stay in front, but barely: using bayonets and tin cups, his army hastily dug itself in along the intersection at the court house in a thin line that extended for about three miles. The Confederates braced for Grant’s attack on the tenth. During the afternoon, Union regiments clambered through the woods and out into the open in an attempt to punch a hole in Lee’s defenses. The Confederate line bulged in the middle, where the ground was higher than the rest of the undulating landscape. Here, at a point dubbed “the Mule Shoe” because of its U shape, a Federal attack succeeded in capturing twelve hundred prisoners, temporarily threatening the integrity of Lee’s line. A simultaneous attack on the Confederate position around Spotsylvania Court House was led in part by the 79th New York Volunteers. Though Ebenezer Wells was furious at being in the front lines when his release was less than three days away, he feared being called a coward even more than he feared dying.55 But here the Confederates held their position, and the attack ended at darkness with once again nothing achieved. The Highlanders were kept at the front lines until the final minute of their enlistment, when the regiment was ordered to march to Fredericksburg with two hundred prisoners in tow.
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, w
The Army of the Potomac had suffered twice as many casualties as the Army of Northern Virginia since May 5. A rough estimate showed that on May 13, 83,000 Federals remained of the 119,000 who had crossed the Rapidan River on the fourth. But Lee had not only lost a quarter of his army: a third of his commanders were also gone, and more responsibilities were devolving onto his shoulders. Grant, on the other hand, though he did not want for commanders, had far too many who were a positive help to the enemy. Nothing useful had come out of General Sigel’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, and General Butler had become trapped behind his trenches eight miles south of Richmond. He had fought so feebly that even James Horrocks could see that the Army of the James was poorly led. “There is no confidence felt in the beast at all,” he informed his father.57
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
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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-NINE
“Defiance to Her Enemies”
Garibaldi’s visit—James Mason falls for the trick—Battle in the English Channel—A tale of corruption in New Orleans—The beautiful Belle—A fatal arrogance
The English were shocked by the descriptions of the fighting in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. “There has been a great deal of news from America this week,” wrote the Lancashire cotton worker John Ward on May 29, 1864, “giving an account of some of the most terrific battles with the most terrible carnage and slaughter for eight days that has ever been known in the world, and with little result.”1 Most newspapers described the duel between Grant and Lee as a festival of slaughter. In The Times, Charles Mackay compared Grant to Javert from Hugo’s Les Misérables: “But still he holds his way undaunted, seeing nothing, caring nothing, but Richmond.”2 The “unprecedented death toll” in May was a popular subject with newspaper editors and cartoonists. “It is mortifying that we get no telegrams direct from officials at Washington,” complained Benjamin Moran. “If
Yet the Confederate agent James Bulloch was also feeling stymied at every turn. He was desperate to make use of the propaganda skills of Henry Hotze or Francis Lawley; but Hotze was in France trying to revive the newspaper contacts abandoned by Edwin De Leon, and Lawley was in Italy, unable to return to London after his interview with the emperor for fear of alerting his creditors. Frank Vizetelly was in England, but since his arrival in mid-April he had divided his formidable energy between his favorite literary haunts, the Cheshire Cheese public house in Fleet Street and the Savage Club in Drury Lane. He had not thought about the Confederacy except to let Francis Dawson’s family know that “he is very much liked, and is a very good officer, and, I have no doubt, will make his way.”3
The court’s decision against the Confederate warship Alexandra had been overturned on appeal, but Bulloch knew it was too late to resurrect his dream of a British-built Confederate navy.29.1 In France, the Marine Department had ordered the two unfinished vessels in Nantes to be detained. “Every pledge has been violated, and we have encountered nothing but deception and duplicity and are now their victims,” Bulloch wrote indignantly of the French.5 He understood better than Slidell that the Confederacy was simply a pawn in the emperor’s grand designs for Mexico. Only three raiders remained afloat: the Georgia, currently undergoing refurbishment in Cherbourg; the Alabama, whose last known whereabouts put her near Cape Town; and the Florida, which was thought to be near Bermuda. Bulloch hoped to keep them all at sea, if only to deter investors from using U.S. shipping firms. He would rather have sold Matthew Maury’s unseaworthy Rappahannock, still at Calais, and used the money to repair the Georgia, but he was overruled by the senior Confederate naval commander in Europe, Commodore Samuel Barron, who decided to do the opposite, strip the Georgia of her fittings and use them on the Rappahannock.