A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (3 page)

45.
A colored regiment (Library of Congress)

46.
“Contraband of war” (Library of Congress)

47.
A slave auction house in Atlanta, Georgia (Library of Congress)

48.
The Rohrbach Bridge, Antietam (U.S. National Archives)

49.
The dead after Antietam (Library of Congress)

50.
Lincoln and McClellan after Antietam (Library of Congress)

51.
General Ambrose Burnside (Library of Congress)

52.
Fredericksburg (Library of Congress)

53.
Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg (U.S. National Archives)

54.
Admiral Raphael Semmes aboard CSS
Alabama
(U.S. Naval Historical Center)

55.
Commander Matthew Maury (Library of Congress)

56.
Lieutenant James Morgan (James Morris Morgan,
Recollections of a Rebel Reefer,
Houghton Mifflin, 1917)

57.
Colonel John F. De Courcy (descendants of Maj. Milton Mills, 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry)

58.
Colonel Sir Percy Wyndham (Library of Congress)

59.
Dr. Charles Culverwell (from the private collection of Sir George Newnes)

60.
Battle of Gettysburg (Library of Congress)

61.
Little Round Top, Gettysburg (Library of Congress)

62.
Diplomatic expedition to Trenton Falls (U.S. National Archives)

63.
Rose Greenhow and her daughter (Library of Congress)

64.
Belle Boyd (Library of Congress)

65.
General Braxton Bragg (Library of Congress)

66.
Civilians hunting for souvenirs after Chattanooga (Dubose Collection)

67.
Jacob Thompson (Library of Congress)

68.
Clement C. Clay (Library of Congress)

69.
Confederate plotters at Niagara Falls (William A. Tidwell,
Come Retribution,
Barnes & Noble / University Press of Mississippi, 1988)

70.
Mounted cannon (U.S. National Archives)

71.
Field artillery (Library of Congress)

72.
A Federal observation balloon (Library of Congress)

73.
General Ulysses S. Grant and his staff (Library of Congress)

74.
The aftermath of Cold Harbor (Library of Congress)

75.
CSS
Alabama
(U.S. National Archives)

76.
CSS
Stonewall
(Library of Congress)

77.
USS
Kearsarge
(U.S. National Archives)

78.
Fort Sedgwick (Library of Congress)

79.
The trenches at Petersburg (U.S. National Archives)

80.
Charleston at the end of the war (U.S. National Archives)

81.
Richmond after its fall (U.S. National Archives)

82.
The victory parade of the Union Army, May 24, 1865 (Library of Congress)

83.
The Capitol on May 24, 1865 (Library of Congress)

84.
The Lincoln Memorial, Edinburgh (copyright © The Scotsman Publications Ltd. Licensor:
www.scram.ac.uk
)

85.
The British Stonewall Jackson Memorial, Richmond (Library of Congress)

List of Maps

Click on the map numbers below to navigate to each map. You can then click the map number beneath the image to navigate back to this section.

 
map.1
The United States of America and the Confederate States of America

 
map.2
Virginia and the Washington area

 
map.3
Mississippi River to Virginia

 
map.4
The Carolinas

 
map.5
Washington

 
map.6
London

 
map.7
First Bull Run or Manassas, July 21, 1861

 
map.8
Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, April 6–7, 1862

 
map.9
The Seven Days, June 25–July 1, 1862

map.10
Second Bull Run or Manassas, August 28–30, 1862

map.11
Antietam or Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862

map.12
Richmond

map.13
Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862

map.14
Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863

map.15
Vicksburg campaign, May 18, 1862–July 4, 1863

map.16
Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863

map.17
Chickamauga, September 20, 1863

map.18
Chattanooga, November 24–25, 1863

map.19
The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5–12, 1864

map.20
British North America and the United States

map.21
Petersburg and Appomattox, March 25–April 9, 1865

Preface

S
ome years ago, while researching the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, I learned that her great-nephew, later the eighth Duke of Devonshire, had spent Christmas Day 1862 making eggnog for the Confederate cavalry officers of General Robert E. Lee’s army. “I hope Freddy [his younger brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish] won’t groan much over my rebel sympathies, but I can’t help them,” he wrote to his father three days later. “The people here are so much more earnest about the [war] than the North seems to be.”

I was aware that the American Civil War had sharply polarized public opinion in Britain (my original doctoral thesis had examined attitudes toward race and color in pre-Victorian England), but it was still a shock to discover that the heir to the greatest Liberal peerage in England thought the slaveholding South had the moral advantage over the antislavery North. Understanding how the Confederacy had managed to achieve this ascendancy, not only with the duke but also with people who might generally be considered as belonging to the “progressive” classes in Britain—journalists, writers, university students, actors, social reformers, even the clergy—became one of the driving obsessions behind this book.

My original intention was to write a history of the British volunteers who fought in the Civil War. I had assumed that by examining their reasons for joining the Union or Confederate armies, I would gain an insight into the forces that had shaped public opinion. But once I began, the book refused to stay within its intended confines, especially as it became clear that these volunteers were part of an Anglo-American world that was far greater and more complex than I had ever imagined. It gradually became a biography of a relationship, or, more accurately, of the many relationships that together formed the British-American experience during the Civil War.

The war began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The ensuing four-year struggle would lead to the freedom of 4 million slaves and cost the lives of more than 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians. President Abraham Lincoln responded to the attack on Fort Sumter by calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers and declaring a blockade of Southern ports. Across the Atlantic, however, Lord Palmerston’s Liberal government was chiefly concerned with ensuring that Britain did not become embroiled in the conflict. There was too much at stake: the livelihoods of nearly a million workers depended on Southern cotton, while British investors held $444 million worth of U.S. stocks and securities. On May 13, reflecting a rare moment of unanimity between Parliament, the press, and the public, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation of neutrality, which recognized that a state of war existed between the Union and the Confederacy and forbade British subjects to take part. But this well-meaning act had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended. Each side accused Britain of favoring the other: the North threatened to invade Canada in retaliation, the South used every legal loophole to build its warships in British dockyards, and Britons ignored the injunction against interfering and volunteered by the thousands in the Union and Confederate armies. Twice in four years Britain and the North were on the brink of war: the first time, in December 1861, British troops were halfway to Canada by the time the two governments backed down.

Biography is a subset of history, yet it stands independently, too. The most obvious difference is that biographers delve deeply into individual lives and the influences that shaped them, whereas for historians it is the sum of individual experiences that is important. In
A World on Fire
I have tried to combine both approaches. I decided from the beginning to treat each of the significant figures in the story, and many of the lesser ones, as though he or she was the principal subject of the book, so that I could understand the antecedents of their motives and decisions during the Civil War. This not only added several years to the project but also created the problem of how to construct a single narrative out of competing points of view within a time frame that encompassed multiple simultaneous events. The challenge seemed insurmountable, until one day I remembered having seen Trevor Nunn’s 1980
Nicholas Nickleby,
an extraordinary “theater-in-the-round” production that brought together a vast panoply of characters through a combination of three-dimensional staging, shifting scenes, and running narratives that created an all-enveloping experience for the audience. This memory became my guide and inspiration, and I set about writing a history-in-the-round in the hope of immersing the reader inside the British-American world of the Civil War. I was fortunate that many areas of this world had already been researched by Brian Jenkins, Howard Jones, R.J.M. Blackett, Charles Hubbard, D. P. Crook, Frank Merli, Warren F. Spencer, Norman Ferris, and others. My debt to their pioneering work cannot be overstated; any omissions or errors in the book are mine alone.

I am deeply grateful to Eve and Michael Williams-Jones, Hugh Dubrulle, Jonathan Foreman, Brian Jenkins, James McPherson, Christopher Mason, Michael Musick, Fredric Smoler, and Richard Snow for their help and criticisms of early versions of
A World on Fire.
The book took twelve years to complete, and I owe heartfelt thanks to Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfont, and Jeffrey Posternak of the Wylie Agency for their loyalty during all that time. True to the spirit of the book,
A World on Fire
was simultaneously edited by Susanna Porter at Random House in New York and Stuart Proffitt at Allen Lane in London; it has been a profoundly rewarding and intellectually satisfying process to work with them both. Over the years I have benefited enormously from the help and guidance provided by librarians and archivists all over the world, and they are thanked by name in the acknowledgments section. My family have been a tremendous support to me, but there is one person who, above all, made this book possible, and that is my husband: the center of
my
world.