A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (123 page)

Grant was sufficiently encouraged by his troops’ handling of the Confederate attack to order a follow-up assault on October 13, but this time the Federals were driven back by the defenders. “We have had a pretty brisk little fight today,” Dawson wrote to his mother that evening. “Grant has been feeling our lines on this [North] side of the River; he made but two attacks on our ranks and each time was easily repulsed.” The setback to the Federals had an immediate effect on the Confederates’ spirits. Dawson was almost giddy: “There are croakers [pessimists] everywhere … but you must not allow any of them to persuade you that we are, as the Yankees say, ‘in our last ditch.’ ” Moreover, his commander had returned: “I am happy to say that General Longstreet reported for duty today, his right arm and hand is still paralyzed from his wound but he could not be kept back any longer … he is a tower of strength to our cause, and he returns at a good time.”
³⁷

Dawson’s optimism was a testament to his ignorance of the true state of the Confederate defenses. He had laughed at the sight of black regiments during the recent fighting in and around Darbytown Road, considering their deployment proof of the North’s weakness. But more experienced Confederate officers acknowledged their heroism and were asking why the South did not employ their slaves to solve the manpower shortage.
^33.6
General Lee was considering the idea, although he did not say so in public.

Edward Stanley was fascinated by the North’s ambivalence to Negro regiments. Even some members of the Adams family were shocked by Charles Francis Jr.’s transfer to a black regiment. “His uncle, Mr. Sidney Brooks, was I hear very disgusted that his favourite nephew would do this,” wrote Stanley. “I am glad he has done this as the more people of position take these commands, the more it tends to raise the Negro.” Stanley thought the experience would be good for Adams himself, who “was not quite free from the American prejudice against and repugnance to Negroes.” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had not regretted his decision the previous September to transfer to the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), but he shared General Sherman’s doubts that black troops would ever be the equal of white. The “Nigs” were angelic, he told Henry Adams after the regiment had sustained nineteen casualties and three dead in fighting at Petersburg on June 15. But “the rugged discipline which improves whites is too much for them. It is easy to crush them into slaves, but very difficult by kindness and patience to approach them to our own standard.”
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Stanley had finished his tour of the North more pessimistic about the future of the freedman than when he started. Day-to-day relations between blacks and whites had the feel of an awkward jig to him. He had visited a school in Boston where a “quadroon” pupil was made to sit by herself, as though separated from the other girls by a cordon sanitaire.
^33.7
The sight convinced him that the racial integration of the U.S. Army was vital to reforming American society. He knew this would not happen overnight, but he had been encouraged by the number of white soldiers willing to join colored regiments, especially among the foreign volunteers who wanted to become officers.

Private James Horrocks was among the whites applying to transfer to a colored regiment. “What do you think about it?” he asked his parents, as he weighed the army’s unequal treatment of colored regiments against the possible improvement of his prospects:

Chances of being shot greater; accommodations and comforts generally smaller, but pay much larger than what I have now. No horse to ride but a uniform to wear. And above all—an
Officer
’s real shoulder straps and the right of being addressed and treated as a gentleman, with the advantage of better society, and if I like it, this is a position I can hold for life, being United States troops, while Volunteers will undoubtedly be disbanded when the war is over.
^33.8
40

Horrocks’s confidence that peace could not be far away received a boost on October 19 at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley. The Confederates under Jubal Early surprised the Federals in a dawn attack, routing two of Sheridan’s corps and destroying their camps. But in the afternoon, Sheridan led a crushing counterattack, capturing hundreds of prisoners and most of Early’s artillery. It was the Confederate general’s third and final battle against Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Every battle had been a Federal victory, and Early could not afford to risk another encounter. “We have only pistols, sabers and old fashioned rifles,” wrote a Confederate cavalryman. “Above all, we have not enough food to keep the horses up.”
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Sheridan had achieved his purpose; the verdant Shenandoah Valley was now a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads.

Sheridan’s success in Virginia made some newspapers uneasy. “The laying waste of the Shenandoah Valley will undoubtedly call out acts in retaliation equally terrible,” predicted the
Detroit Free Press
as reports began to filter through to the North of a Southern movement to exact revenge.
⁴²
On October 15 the
Richmond Whig
urged Davis

to burn one of the chief cities of the enemy, say Boston, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati. If we are asked how such a thing can be done, we answer, nothing would be easier. A million of dollars would lay the proudest city of the enemy in ashes. The men to execute the work are already there. There would be no difficulty in finding there, here, or in Canada, suitable persons to take charge of the enterprise and arrange its details.… New York is worth twenty Richmonds. They have a dozen towns to our one; and in their towns is centered nearly all their wealth. It would not be immoral and barbarous. It is not immoral nor barbarous to defend yourself by any means or with any weapon the enemy may employ for your destruction.
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The Confederacy’s mood of despair and outrage would soon be reflected in its new cipher key, which would be altered from “Complete Victory” to the more ominous-sounding “Come Retribution.”

^33.1
The fourth Viscount Monck exceeded all expectations when he took up the governorship. He had only accepted the post because his Irish estates were so encumbered with debt that it was either Canada or bankruptcy. He had never displayed the least talent for politics or administration before; yet Palmerston had seen something in Monck that he liked, and his perspicacity was rewarded. Monck was a diligent, discreet, and scrupulously honest public servant who led the way to the British North American provinces’ becoming the Canadian Confederation in 1867.

^33.2
The vessel was the
Night Hawk,
which had confused the pilot on board the
Condor.
Thomas Taylor was the “supercargo,” the officer in charge of a ship’s cargo. Though only twenty-four, Taylor had the highest success rate of any English blockade runner. But his luck had run out the night before the
Condor
’s arrival. The
Night Hawk
was chased onto a sandbar and boarded by Federal sailors, who “acted more like maniacs than sane men, firing their revolvers and cutting right and left with their cutlasses,” recalled Taylor. After beating up the crew, they set fire to the ship and left, not caring whether the blockade runners burned or drowned. Taylor had wanted to fight the flames, but his men dragged him onto a rowboat, “though the boiling surf seemed more dangerous to my mind than remaining on the burning ship.”
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^33.3
Feilden promised the family he had stayed with in Florida that he would send them a reward if they ever found the ring. Two years after the end of the war, he received a small package with the ring inside. He kept his promise and sent all the money he could afford.

^33.4
During a battle on September 24, 1864, at Front Royal, an English volunteer substitute, Private Philip Baybutt (1844–1907), seized the regimental flag of the 6th Virginia Cavalry. The prize enabled him to receive the only Medal of Honor awarded to a British subject during the Civil War.

^33.5
Sheridan ordered his troops to hang prisoners of Mosby’s Rangers rather than treat them as prisoners of war, and six were executed on September 22, 1864. Mosby retaliated and executed five Union prisoners, chosen at random, on November 6. A week later he wrote to Sheridan suggesting that they call a truce on the executions.

^33.6
The colored troops in the Darbytown Road engagements received fourteen of the sixteen Medals of Honor awarded to black soldiers during the Civil War.

^33.7
Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, a French journalist and liberal politician, was in New York on a similar cultural voyage as Stanley. He observed: “Between Broadway and the Hudson River there exists a filthy, rundown neighborhood inhabited by Irish immigrants and colored people exclusively. It is impossible to imagine anything more depressingly poor.… From time to time one sees with amazement a trolley car ride by which carries a sign: ‘Colored People Admitted.’ What in the world can be the meaning of this? Are there separate laws here for Negroes? No, but public prejudice persecutes them more powerfully, more tyrannically even than law.”
³⁹

^33.8
For example, the English volunteer Thomas Beach, who had adopted a new identity as a Frenchman named Henri Le Caron, was able to leap from being a private in the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry to a lieutenant in the 15th U.S. Colored Infantry.

THIRTY-FOUR
“War Is Cruelty”

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

I
nstead 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.”)
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