A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (138 page)

You cannot hardly understand and I cannot explain how our private lives have all become interwoven with the life of the nation’s. No one who has not lived through it can understand the bond between those who have.… Neither is it possible without this intense and prolonged experience to estimate the keen personal suffering that has entered into every household and saddened every life.… The great secret of our dead leader’s popularity was the wonderful instinct with which he felt and acted … he did not lead, he expressed the American heartbreak … it has been to me a revelation to feel such influence and to see
such
leadership. I never was thoroughly republican before … but I am so, thoroughly, now.
⁵⁴

^38.1
A former British Army officer in the Confederate army, Henry O’Brien, lay among the wounded, left for dead by his comrades. He had not expected the war to come to this: “I came to this country last winter,” he explained a few weeks later from prison, his life having been saved by a Federal surgeon. “[I ran] the blockade at Wilmington, NC through a love of adventure and a desire of seeing something of active service on this continent.”
⁸

^38.2
Her first performance, on October 15, 1858, had coincided with Lincoln’s final U.S. Senate campaign debate against Stephen A. Douglas. Although Douglas went on to represent Illinois in the Senate, Lincoln’s extraordinary eloquence and clarity regarding the future of slavery had catapulted him to national prominence.

^38.3
Consul Archibald broke Foreign Office protocol for the first time in his life to attend a memorial service organized by the British community in New York. He defended his action to Sir Frederick Bruce, arguing that to stay away would have offended not only his own sensibilities but also the entire city’s.

^38.4
A paroled Confederate general, Cadmus Wilcox, who bumped into Thomas Conolly in New York on April 22, wrote: “[I] met Conley [
sic
] the first night. He gave an amusing account of his leaving Richmond in the night and his difficulties in reaching the Baltimore-Ohio railroad. He urged me to go to Ireland with him and, supposing I wanted money, offered me his purse freely.”

^38.5
Leslie Stephen prepared a devastating critique of
The Times
’ reporting on the war, which he published later that year under the title “The Times and the American Civil War.” The thirty-three-page pamphlet carefully dissected each report and essay for its bias and misrepresentation of facts.

^38.6
The bulk of the money disappeared and has never been found.

^38.7
The Scotsman William Watson was in Havana trying to salvage some of his profits from his blockade runner the
Rob Roy
when the
Stonewall
sputtered into the harbor. “As for the large fleet of blockade-running steamers thrown idle at Havana, it would be difficult to say what became of them all,” wrote Watson. He was disappointed to discover that exorbitant taxes and charges had reduced his share to a sum comparable to the average yearly wage of a ship’s master.
⁴⁶

^38.8
In contrast to “plain and quiet Lord Lyons,” Bruce was “white-haired, white-whiskered, round-cheeked, with rich dark eyes, hearty, [and] convivial,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future Supreme Court justice. Bruce was a clever choice as minister; his successful partnership with Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister in China, had already made him popular with the administration. Moreover, Bruce liked Americans, having served on a previous diplomatic mission to Washington in 1842; he felt comfortable among them, preferring the raw energy of the New World to the stuffy hauteur of the Old. Holmes was amazed to discover that Bruce was “pretty freely outspoken for our side as if he were one of us.”
⁴⁹

Epilogue

Going home, staying on—A transatlantic cable—The
Alabama
claims—Sumner’s demands—Impasse—Last chance at Geneva—Conclusion

O
n May 23, 1865, more than 150,000 soldiers began marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in a grand review of the Union armies. The parade lasted for two days, and even then the spectators lining the route saw but a fraction of the victorious Northern forces. General Ulysses S. Grant—who would succeed Andrew Johnson as president in 1868—was now the commander in chief of the largest army in the world, with 1,034,064 soldiers at his disposal.
¹

Yet a mere eighteen months later, Grant’s forces would consist of just 54,302 men in the regular U.S. Army, and 11,000 (most of whom were U.S. Colored troops) in the volunteer army.
²
The navy was also shrinking, selling its warships as quickly as the market allowed, until by 1870 only 52 of the original 641 vessels remained.
³
The rapid pace of demobilization reflected the country’s desperate yearning for peace. In the aftermath of the war, a different kind of volunteer stepped forward, one motivated by a sense of debt to the nation’s fallen, whose mission was not to kill but to collect statistics, identify remains, and reinter in military cemeteries thousands of rotting and neglected corpses.
⁴
The renowned Civil War nurse Clara Barton founded the Office of Correspondence to help families in their search for soldiers who were missing and presumed dead.
⁵
A total of 360,222 Federal soldiers were known to have died during the four years of the war, and another 271,175 had been injured or maimed. To Colonel L.D.H. Currie, the British commander of the 133rd New York Metropolitan Guard, this terrible human toll meant the loss of all but one of the regiment’s founding officers. To the former British prisoner Private James Pendlebury of the 69th New York Irish Regiment, it meant returning to his regiment after ten months in captivity to find that he recognized less than half the faces.

The demobilized forces benefited from a steady economy and abundant land. The continuous influx of immigrants during the war—more than 800,000 by most accounts—had not crowded out the labor pool, and many of the British volunteers, including Colonel Currie, saw America as offering greater opportunities than the old country.
⁶
The errant father Private James Horrocks would not have returned to England even if he could have. He stayed in the U.S. Army until November 1865, by which time he had earned both the officer’s commission he coveted and a considerable sum of money. “I have paid all my debts,” he wrote to his family on the twenty-seventh, “bought … an excellent suit of citizen’s clothes and everything I stood in need of and have still above $400 left.” Horrocks joined the million-plus veterans who sought to make new lives for themselves after their wartime experiences. But his hopes of making a fortune were never quite realized: he married a woman from California, settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and passed into middle age as an accountant in a credit agency. Despite having no legitimate children of his own, Horrocks refused to acknowledge the illegitimate son in England whose birth had driven him from his home and into the ranks of the Federal army.
⁷

Other British volunteers became true Anglo-Americans in the manner of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who moved easily between the two countries until she fell out with her sister Emily over the management of the New York infirmary and went to live permanently in England in 1869. The most colorful example of this new breed was Henry Morton Stanley, the serial deserter. He jumped ship from USS
Minnesota
in February 1865 and spent the next two years pursuing various ventures in America, including gold prospecting in Colorado, while simultaneously trying to launch a career in journalism. His ability to spin a tale eventually brought him to the notice of James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the
New York Herald,
who hired him as a foreign correspondent. In 1871, Stanley set off on his famous expedition through present-day Tanzania to find the missing missionary Dr. David Livingstone, father of Robert, the British volunteer who had died in a Confederate prison camp shortly before the war’s end. After spending almost two decades in Africa, Stanley returned to England in 1890, where he subsequently became an MP and was knighted in 1897.

The Britons who chose to go home took with them not just memories (and in some cases wounds) but also new attitudes based on American ideals. James Pendlebury received $875 from the army, which he spent in just two weeks and had to work his passage across the Atlantic. But his experiences had changed him for the better. “What did I learn from all this?” he asked in his memoirs. “I have learned that I never need want for bread as long as I have health and strength.… Nothing that is honest demeans a man and if he does not like his work; well, let him mend himself as soon as he can. This is what I learned in America.… Today, through going to America I am an independent gentleman.” Pendlebury became a successful businessman and tried hard to stay off drink. In 1877 he took his family to the Isle of Man, where, according to his obituary, he purchased a mansion and became “a prominent figure at many public meetings … [unafraid] to express his opinions in the most vigorous language.”
⁸

The America that Pendlebury was describing did not extend to the South. Eighty-eight percent of America’s wealth now resided in the North; in the Cotton States there was neither the industrial base nor the manpower to fuel economic growth. One in four white Southern males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five—some 258,000—had been killed in the war, and at least 260,000 had suffered debilitating injuries.
⁹
Nine thousand miles of railroad track had been destroyed, three-quarters of the South’s merchant shipping was gone, and almost all the banks had been emptied of specie. Without slavery, the entire commercial infrastructure of the South collapsed. For the first year after the war, bartering was commonplace in many villages and communities. The labor-intensive cotton plantations were worth only a third of their prewar value, and even the parts of the South that had been untouched by actual fighting were soon brought to poverty and ruin. Frances Butler, Fanny Kemble’s youngest daughter, had never shared her mother’s pro-Northern sympathies, and in 1865 she returned with her father to the family’s rice plantation in Georgia. For the first couple of years she lived in utter squalor:

So I cook, and my maid does the housework, and as it has rained hard for three days and the kitchen roof is half off, I cook in the dining-room or parlour. Fortunately, my provisions are so limited that I have not much to cook; for five days my food has consisted of hard pilot biscuits, grits cooked in different ways, oysters, and twice, as a great treat, ham and eggs. I brought a box of preserves from the North with me, but half of them upset, and the rest were spoilt. One window is entirely without a sash, so I have to keep the shutters closed all the time, and over the other I have pasted three pieces of paper where panes should be.… I think if it rains much more there will not be a dry spot left in the house.
¹⁰

The exploitative aspects of Reconstruction—the punitive taxes, questionable expropriations, and legal chicanery that often ran unchecked—also hindered the South’s recovery. Captain Henry Feilden, the English volunteer on General Beauregard’s staff in Charleston, lost the title to his house, forcing him to live apart from his new wife, Julia. He went to Orangeburg, some seventy miles from Charleston, where he tried to set up a wagon hauling business, while Julia remained in Greenville with her aunt.
¹¹
They endured the arrangement for a year before accepting defeat and moving to England. Feilden was reinstated in the British Army and served as paymaster in the 18th Royal Hussars. In later life, he combined his military service with a second career as a naturalist and eminent polar explorer. The marriage was a happy one, though childless, and a timely bequest in 1901 brought them a beautiful seventeenth-century house in the village of Burwash, Sussex. There, Rudyard Kipling and Feilden became neighbors and close friends. After Feilden’s death in 1921, Kipling wrote, “He was the gentlest, gallantest English gentleman who ever walked.”
^epl.1
12

Francis Dawson, General Fitz Lee’s English ordnance officer, was also driven to manual labor. As soon as he had recovered from his shoulder wound he worked as a field hand on a plantation near Richmond. The job sustained him until businesses began to reopen and his education made him a desirable employee. In 1866 he joined the staff of the Richmond
Examiner
for a short time before becoming the assistant editor of the
Charleston Mercury
. Unlike Feilden, however, Dawson not only made the South his home, but he played a significant part in its revival as the editor of the
Charleston News and Courier.
His second wife (the first having died young) was the writer Sarah Morgan, an older sister of his longtime friend Lieutenant James Morgan—who rounded out his own picaresque career by becoming the U.S. consul general to Australia
.
Dawson was playing an increasingly prominent role in Democratic politics when he was killed on March 12, 1889, during an argument with his neighbor. Southern culture had always been more aggressive than Northern, but the weakening of social and official authority after the Civil War led to even greater levels of violence. Dawson’s contribution to the pacification of the South had been a long campaign against dueling, an effort that a courtroom jury repaid by acquitting his murderer.