A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (25 page)

Even without the threat of ostracism or harassment, there were other, more prosaic forces bearing down on the British community. The blockade was not only hurting the city financially, it was also an impediment to those who wished to leave the South. Many unemployed Britons were trapped in New Orleans; “nothing remains for them but to enlist,” admitted Russell.
¹³
Two Anglo-Irish siblings from England, Mary Sophia Hill and her twin brother, Sam, were among the early victims of the blockade. The merchant families who sent their daughters to Mary’s seminary in the Garden District were suddenly unable to pay the fees. Six weeks after the blockade began there was not a single pupil left in the school.

Mary and Sam were an eccentric pair. She was tight-lipped, fussy, and prone to shrillness; he was quiet, absent-minded, and passive. Despite having trained as a civil engineer under Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sam had never been able to withstand the rigors of an occupation, and over the years his dependence on her had become absolute. The siblings had arrived in New Orleans in 1850 so Sam could take up yet another new position. His inevitable failure gave Mary the idea that they should start a school together. She would teach English, French, and music; Sam, if he were able, could teach mathematics.

“In my eyes,” wrote Mary, “the only blot I ever saw in the sunny South was slavery; but as a stranger, an alien, I had no right to meddle.”
¹⁴
But her sympathy for the South did not extend to Sam volunteering: “I was, and still am, and ever will be, a British subject,” she wrote in her diary.
¹⁵
Nevertheless, her brother had joined the Irish Brigade after a furious argument over the failure of the seminary. Mary woke up one morning in early June to discover he had packed his bags and disappeared. She had seen the placards calling for Irishmen to join the 6th Louisiana Volunteers, as the Irish Brigade was officially designated, but never once did she think that her introverted and clumsy brother might heed the call. Nor dared she imagine how the Irish Catholic volunteers would treat a Protestant whose loyalty was not to Ireland but to the Crown:

I tried all I could to get him free [Mary recalled]; went to Mr. Muir [
sic
], who was then Consul, to see what he could do, but with no good result. It nearly broke my heart to see my only brother and only near male relative leave me and leave the flag we were born under for a stranger, and perhaps get killed for his folly; so I concluded I would follow him to Virginia to care for him where I knew he would sadly want a woman’s care, and that I would, whenever needed, care for the wounded, the sick and the distressed. Miss Nightingale God bless her taught us, women of the British flag, this lesson of humanity.
¹⁶

Sam’s regiment was in need of a nurse, and Colonel Isaac Seymour was willing to overlook the fact that Mary was unmarried, since he doubted that the forty-two-year-old spinster would interest the men. “So,” she recorded, “having no particular ties; being as the law has it, a
femme sole,
I made up my mind to this humane calling.” Two weeks later Mary jotted in her diary: “My brother quite miserable at the step he has taken. I am so glad I made up my mind to look after him.”
¹⁷

—

Mary Sophia Hill would have found it much more difficult to become a nurse in the North. There was no shortage of women wanting to help. British-born Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United States, was deluged with nursing applicants after the Federal surrender of Fort Sumter.
^5.3
She was cross that the same society ladies who had previously claimed to be scandalized by the infirmary were now begging to be admitted for training.
¹⁸
But she soon realized there would never be a better opportunity to attract support for her medical college. With the aid of Henry Bellows, the charismatic pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church, she invited “the women of New York” to attend a mass meeting at the Cooper Institute. They expected large numbers, but not the four thousand who crammed into the hall.

The result of this historic event was the creation of the Women’s Central Association of Relief. Elizabeth envisioned it as a kind of civilian central command that would direct the various relief efforts on the home front, from the training of nurses to the distribution of woolen socks. The WCAR would work side by side with the army, ensuring that the needs of soldiers were met as quickly as possible. The Reverend Henry Bellows and a delegation of male doctors went to Washington to seek government approval for the plan. But during the thirteen-hour train journey they conceived a different idea: a national organization modeled on the British Sanitary Commission, which had been formed in response to Florence Nightingale’s exposure of army hospital conditions during the Crimean War. Bellows suggested they call it the United States Sanitary Aid Commission.
¹⁹

The Army Medical Bureau resented any interference or infringement on its domain and tried to block the commission from receiving official sanction. President Lincoln shared the bureau’s doubts over the wisdom of allowing philanthropists and women to interfere with the work of professionals.
²⁰
Yet on June 18 he reluctantly signed the United States Sanitary Commission into existence, remarking as he did so that it would probably be a “fifth wheel to the coach.” The commission was awarded an office in the treasury building along with a table and some chairs. Still fighting a rearguard action, the army medical chiefs succeeded in limiting its operations to the new volunteer regiments. The sixteen thousand regulars that made up the standing army would be kept safe from the civilians.

Elizabeth Blackwell’s name did not appear in any literature put out by the Sanitary Commission. Although she had been the initial force behind the volunteer movement, neither she nor the infirmary were invited to participate. “We shall do much good but you will probably not see our names,” Elizabeth wrote to her best friend, Barbara Bodichon, on June 6:

We would have accepted a place on the health commission which our association is endeavoring to establish in Washington and which the government will probably appoint—but the Doctors would not permit us to come forward. In the hospital committee, which you will see referred to in the report, they declined to allow OUR little hospital to be represented—and they refused to have anything to do with the nurse education plan if the “Miss Blackwells were going to engineer the matter.” Of course as it is essential to open these hospitals to nurses, we kept in the background, had there been any power to support us, we would have found our true place, but there was none.
²¹

Elizabeth and her sister Emily accepted their exclusion gracefully. Elizabeth became chair of the WCAR’s nurse registration committee, and together the two sisters began to interview and select those who showed the most promise. Each candidate received a month’s training at the infirmary, followed by a further month’s practical experience at Bellevue or New York Hospital.

Dr. Blackwell had no doubt that her nurses would prove themselves in the field, as long as the well-meaning but catastrophically inept Dorothea Dix was prevented from ruining the enterprise. The fifty-nine-year-old veteran campaigner for the mentally ill had arrived at Washington in early May to offer herself as superintendent of army nurses. A lack of candidates had given her the position by default. Miss Dix was a “meddler general” without peer, complained Elizabeth. “For it really amounts to that, she being without system, or any practical knowledge of the business.”
²²
She soon confirmed Elizabeth’s fears: erratic, disorganized, and quarrelsome, she was a positive hindrance to the scheme. Most applicants were turned away on ludicrous grounds, such as being too pretty or too recently widowed, but Elizabeth’s trained nurses she dared not refuse.
²³

“If the Doctors would only do the part they have chosen and educate that material, we should have a capital band of nurses,” Elizabeth wrote to Barbara Bodichon in June.
²⁴
She also hoped they would accept the field hospital designs sent over by Florence Nightingale, but feared that the same chauvinism and anti-British prejudice that had led to her exclusion from the Sanitary Commission might also extend to anything originating with Miss Nightingale.
²⁵
There was nothing to be gained from being associated with England since the neutrality proclamation. “To be scolded now whenever I enter a friend’s house with ‘well what do you say to England’s behaviour … ’ is a great irritation to me,” complained Elizabeth. “I have been deeply chagrined by the tone our papers have been taking towards England.”
²⁶

—

The Anglophobia encouraged by Seward was growing in strength. The
New York Herald
was the worst offender. Its Scottish editor, James Gordon Bennett, had no qualms about printing incendiary articles if they whetted public appetite for more. The
Herald
had toned down its antiwar rhetoric after a mob tried to burn down the paper’s headquarters, but attacking England remained a popular alternative. New York had transformed from the ambivalent, even apathetic, city described by William Howard Russell in
The Times
into a noisy carnival of war. The shops along Broadway had become recruiting offices; posters and handbills advertising new regiments covered the city.

“The outbreak of the Civil War has given me a great addition of new and extraordinary duties, in the incessant applications for protection, and advice, etc,” wrote the British consul in New York, Edward Archibald.
²⁸
He was rising to the challenge with valiant enthusiasm. A career diplomat for almost thirty years, Archibald was a devoted family man who spent his Sunday afternoons visiting sick and needy Britons. Since taking up his post in 1857, he had diligently collected statistics, written reports, resolved commercial disputes, found lost relatives, sent home destitute Britons, and performed all the myriad duties, both practical and pastoral, that were a consul’s lot in a busy city like New York. Until Archibald shocked his superiors by denouncing the rebellion in an official dispatch, the Foreign Office had considered him their most reliable consul in the United States.
²⁹

Forced volunteering was not solely a Southern phenomenon, and the greatest call on Archibald’s time was the plight of Britons who had been imprisoned or punished for their refusal to join a regiment.
³⁰
His task was made more difficult by those who had joined willingly but had changed their minds and were looking for an excuse to escape.
³¹
Despite Archibald’s efforts to publicize the Foreign Enlistment Act, Britons were volunteering in droves.
^5.4
The slightest hint of a conflict between the North and Britain had also encouraged thousands of Irish immigrants to join the war effort.

The language employed by Irish recruiters was so explicit that Archibald warned the Foreign Office to prepare for a new threat. Posters urged their fellow Irishmen to train in America in order to fight the British oppressors back home. At least three regiments in New York were filled with Irish recruits, the majority of whom were avowed Fenians. Michael Corcoran, the colonel of the infamous 69th Infantry Regiment—the unit that had refused to parade in honor of the Prince of Wales—was also the commander of the Fenian movement’s military wing.
³²
Another well-known Irish revolutionary in the 69th was Thomas Meagher, whose stature among the New York Irish community was almost godlike since his escape from a penal colony in Tasmania, where he had been banished for sedition.
³³
(Meagher’s friend and fellow escapee, John Mitchell, had thrown his lot with the South.)

A large number of British immigrants volunteered out of idealism, but there were just as many, like twenty-five-year-old George Henry Herbert, who joined to stave off destitution after the company that had recruited him from England went bankrupt. He had been unemployed since Christmas and was down to his last pair of socks. They were holding up well—“There is only one hole in the heel of one of them,” he had written cheerfully to his mother—but he could no longer continue without work. Such was the clamor for new recruits that even a man as short and overweight as Herbert could join a popular regiment like the 9th New York Volunteers, better known as Hawkins’s Zouaves.
^5.5
Unlike the majority of the new volunteers, who enlisted for ninety days, Herbert signed up for two years and in return was awarded the rank of first sergeant. He was grateful for any sort of position but harbored secret hopes of becoming an officer: “I study as much as I can,” he wrote to his mother, “and do not despair of getting a commission sometime or other.”
³⁴
Herbert’s hope of promotion would depend on his popularity with the men, since the volunteer regiments were allowed to elect their own officers.