A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (114 page)

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The president has “called for 500,000 more recruits,” Lyons reported to London on July 22. “It will depend very much on the events of the present campaign whether he gets them.”
²⁶
Thurlow Weed believed this new draft to be an act of political suicide.
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The army knew little of Grant’s intentions, and its spirits sank as the soldiers broiled and sweated in their camps, waiting for orders. “Here we are just where we have been so long and no one knows anything,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., complained to his brother. “I am tired of the Carnival of Death.”
²⁸

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.”
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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

At 4:45
A.M.
on July 30, the fuse was lit and four tons of gunpowder exploded underneath two unsuspecting South Carolina regiments. Two hundred and fifty men were buried instantly; several hundred others were blown to fragments. The hole formed by the explosion was more than 150 feet long, 97 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. “Into this crater,” wrote Confederate general Edward Parker Alexander, “the leading [Federal] division literally swarmed, until it was packed about as full as it could hold.”
³²
The Federal soldiers were trapped as the Confederate regiments on either side of the crater formed a new defensive line and trained their guns into the crater. Alexander’s English staff officer, Stephen Winthrop, and three others ran to one of the artillery pieces that was still working and started firing. The Federal soldiers were slaughtered like animals in a pen. Almost four thousand were lost in the debacle, including most of the black troops who were sent in after the white regiments. “The effort was a stupendous failure,” wrote Grant.
³³

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

Among the three thousand casualties on August 14 was Robert Moffat Livingstone, the eighteen-year-old son of Dr. David Livingstone, the celebrated missionary and explorer. The boy had been missing for more than a year. Livingstone had ordered Robert to sail from England and join him in Kilmane, Portuguese East Africa, in early 1863, but the wayward youth had changed his mind and journeyed only as far as Natal, South Africa, where he absconded with the ship’s money box.
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43
Robert worked his passage to America and joined the 3rd New Hampshire Infantry in January 1864, enlisting under the name of Rupert Vincent. His regiment had suffered several losses at Deep Bottom, including their colonel, Josiah Plimpton; but it was actually heatstroke that felled Robert, a common problem that week. He was taken to a field hospital, where he became lost in the system for more than a month, leading his commanding officers to assume he had deserted. At least his family now knew where he was; Robert finally wrote to his favorite sister, confessing that army life was not at all how he had envisioned.
⁴⁴
“Robert has gone all to the bad,” lamented Dr. Livingstone when he heard the news. Despite his grief, Livingstone did not give up on him entirely, resolving that if Robert behaved himself, he would try to help him obtain an officer’s commission.
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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.
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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.”
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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?”
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^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.”
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^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.