A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (63 page)

As November drew to a close, the public’s interest in the intervention question waned. In spite of himself, Russell was being credited with having behaved with propriety. Even some British Confederate sympathizers agreed with the government’s decision to remain neutral.
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Only the ever optimistic James Mason still believed that “events are maturing which must lead to some change in the attitude of England.”
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Two years after the conclusion of the war, in 1867, Gladstone admitted in a letter to the American author and abolitionist Charles Edwards Lester: “I had imbibed, conscientiously if erroneously, an opinion that 20 or 24 millions of the North would be happier, and would be stronger … without the South than with it, and also that the negroes would be much nearer to emancipation under a Southern Government than under the old system of the Union, that had not at that date [August 1862] been abandoned.… As far as regards the special or separate interest of England in the matter, I … had always contended that it was best for our interest that the Union should be kept entire.”
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PART II

F
IRE
A
LL
A
ROUND
T
HEM

FIFTEEN
Bloodbath at Fredericksburg

Lincoln suffers at the polls—the Battle of Fredericksburg—The Senators attempt a coup—The Marquis of Hartington’s conversion—Victory or annihilation

L
ord Lyons returned to Washington on November 12, 1862, having spent a few days in New York speaking to Democratic and Republican leaders. He was relieved to find that they were far more willing to share their personal views than the politicians in the capital, who were wary of appearing too familiar with him. The “Peace Democrats” had performed well in the November elections, picking up the governorships of New York and New Jersey as well as taking control of several state legislatures. Their declared aim of peace and compromise over slavery chimed perfectly with the large number of Northern voters who had felt blindsided by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. McClellan’s failure to chase after Lee following the Battle of Antietam in September had also contributed to a growing doubt in the North over whether the war was worth the enormous sacrifice in human lives. There had been nine major battles during the past eleven months, resulting in more than 150,000 casualties between the two sides, and yet there was no indication of any end in sight.

Across the Atlantic, the results of the midterm elections seemed much worse to Charles Francis Adams than they really were—the Republicans still controlled Congress by a large majority—and his bitterness toward Lincoln threatened to overwhelm his peace of mind. Benjamin Moran was shocked by Adams’s indiscreet tirades against the administration (though he secretly enjoyed them, too) and recorded each outburst with relish. “Mr. Adams had a long talk with me about Lincoln,” he wrote in his diary on November 19.

He thinks the recent political defeats a natural result of his management.… Mr. Adams regards Lincoln as a vulgar man, unfitted both by education and nature for the post of President, and one whose administration will not be much praised in the future.
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Ordinarily, Adams would never have confided in a gossipy malcontent like Moran. But despite having made a large circle of acquaintances during the past eighteen months, he felt as friendless as the day he arrived in London. The U.S. minister in Spain, Carl Schurz, pitied his social isolation. Adams “performed his social duties with punctilious care,” Schurz wrote after a brief visit to England, but was not “a shining figure on festive occasions [and] lacked the gifts of personal magnetism or sympathetic charm that would draw men to him.”
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His wife, Abigail, felt upstaged by the social success of the American expatriate Mrs. Russell Sturgis, whose soirées were a feature of the season.

The frustration and sense of alienation at the American legation were not all that dissimilar to the loneliness experienced by Lord Lyons and his staff in Washington. Lyons’s new first attaché, twenty-five-year-old Edward Malet, had been warned by his friend William Kennedy, who had been seconded to the legation in September, to prepare himself for ghastly weather and few distractions.
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“However,” Kennedy added, “there is lots of work to do and so one has no time to walk about or grumble, especially as we dine every night with [the minister].”
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Since Malet had been serving as an unpaid attaché at the British legation in Petropolis, Brazil, where Emperor Pedro II kept his summer residence, he could hardly wait to experience the so-called discomforts of Washington. A salary of £300, and his promotion to “the most important mission next to the Embassies,” were, Malet wrote happily to his parents, more than enough compensation.

Lord Lyons’s dislike of change, particularly with regard to his own staff, made him prickly toward Malet at first, even though the young attaché’s background echoed his own. Malet’s father, Sir Alexander, was currently serving his tenth year as minister to the German Federation, placing upon his son the same burdens of expectation and family tradition that had overshadowed Lyons’s early career.
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This unacknowledged connection between them may have been another reason why Lyons was so much harder on Malet than on the others. Malet often had his draft letters returned for rewriting, accompanied by such acerbic comments as “Brevity is the soul of wit, but I object to absolute nonsense—L.”
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Malet found that Kennedy had not been exaggerating about the long hours. “I have only visited one American house,” he wrote to his mother after a month in the capital. The glorious days of the “Buccaneers” were already over. Rarely stopping for lunch, the attachés’ first break from their desks came at 7:00
P.M.,
when they dashed to Willard’s to gulp down as many cocktails as they could before returning to the legation at eight for dinner with Lyons. In addition to the daily bundles of diplomatic correspondence that required copying and filing, the attachés were also handling hundreds of cases on behalf of British subjects who were seeking redress or protection from various authorities; and in the past year a large number of cases had arisen that concerned missing, conscripted, injured, or dead British volunteers. Most weeknights Malet was obliged to return to the chancery after dinner and continue working until past midnight. But his situation was different from Henry Adams’s in one important respect: the presence of ten bachelors gave the legation in Washington a rather hearty feel, not unlike an undergraduate college or an officers’ mess. There was none of the poisonous claustrophobia that infected the legation in London. Nor did Malet have to live with his parents; he was able to rent a spacious house with Kennedy just down the street from the legation, at 227 H Street North. It came with a garden and entertaining rooms large enough to inspire him to try his hand at decorating. He was quite pleased with the results: one room was pink with gold buds, the other white “with lots of small gold stars.”
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All that was lacking were the people to fill them. Malet passed his precious spare time wandering up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, watching “the queerest figures I ever saw in my life—and nearly always troops of prisoners being taken from one place of confinement to another.”
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—

The latest prisoners to arrive in Washington were Confederates captured during a skirmish on November 2, 1862, at Snickers Gap, one of the three main passes in the Blue Ridge Mountains that linked the eastern part of Virginia with the Shenandoah Valley. General McClellan’s new plan involved advancing along the base of the Blue Ridge, methodically taking each gap, until he reached the Manassas Gap railroad. Once there he intended to decide whether to attack a portion of Lee’s army that was known to be only twenty-five miles away, or to avoid a fight and march east to the town of Fredericksburg, which lay along the bank of the Rappahannock River, sixty miles due north of Richmond. In his telegram to Lincoln that afternoon, McClellan made his usual plea for more men and cavalry, though “I will do the best I can with what I have got,” he added.
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Lincoln was no longer interested in McClellan’s best. He had already made up his mind to dismiss the general after the midterm elections and appoint a successor who was less preoccupied with maneuvering and more interested in attacking. On the night of November 7, McClellan was writing a letter to his wife when two visitors knocked at his door. Snow covered their clothes and their faces were raw from the cold; McClellan realized that this was not a courtesy call. The older of the two, General Catharinus P. Buckingham, had come by special train from Washington to deliver the order from Lincoln removing McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac and replacing him with General Ambrose Burnside. “I read the papers with a smile,” wrote McClellan, and “turned to Burnside [who was standing next to Buckingham] and said, ‘Well Burnside, I turn the command over to you.’ ”
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McClellan told his wife, “They have made a great mistake,” and in his heart Burnside suspected it, too. Although his victory at Roanoke the previous spring had raised his reputation with Lincoln, Burnside’s limitations as a military leader had been revealed by his muddled thinking during the Battle of Antietam. Many soldiers broke ranks and tried to touch McClellan’s boots as he rode out of the camp and into retirement on November 9. He had failed to lead them to victory, but his commitment to their welfare had touched their lives in ways that only the soldiers themselves could appreciate.

Sir Percy Wyndham was disgusted by what he considered to be incompetent army management by the War Department. He had been assigned against his wishes to General Franz Sigel’s
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Army Corps in early September and was given temporary command of the cavalry brigade, which was on guard duty in northern Virginia.
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Bored by his new command, Sir Percy asked General Samuel P. Heintzelman of the
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Army Corps for his help in obtaining a transfer. He was especially annoyed that connections seemed to count far more than merit: “The names of a great many Colonels in the service have been recommended to the President for Promotion,” he wrote, but “I, not being acquainted with any political parties of person of influence, naturally have no chance of being recommended in like manner. I would consider it a lasting favour if you would use your influence in obtaining me a position, and if possible in your own command.” Heintzelman was experiencing his own difficulties with the high command and had no influence to spare; so bitter were the rivalries in Sigel’s corps that a jealous officer sabotaged Sir Percy Wyndham’s request by accusing him of disloyalty. “I hear it from a field officer of cavalry that Wyndham said to him in the presence of a private of his Regiment that he would soon as leave to fight for the Confederates as for the Union, and that he would if our Government did not give him what he wanted,” claimed the embittered informer.
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Even the jovial English lieutenant of the 9th New York Volunteers, George Henry Herbert, was becoming disillusioned, despite his recent promotion to ordnance officer for the division. “The system is radically wrong,” he complained. “With the exception of a few regiments, officers and men treat one another as equals, no punishments are inflicted. The private under you today may, if a friend of his gets into office, be a Colonel in another regiment tomorrow.”
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Herbert’s experience was confirmed by an English military observer who was fascinated by the different styles of leadership of the two armies. In the South, though many officers were just as unqualified as their Northern counterparts, the plantation system fostered a strong sense of social hierarchy. “The Regimental Officers are mostly men of Known families in the districts from whence the regiment is raised,” he wrote, “and the ‘mean whites’ look up to and obey the sons of the Great Planters.” In the North, it was not uncommon for the soldiers to disregard “their Captains and their Lieutenants, whom they regard as equals.”
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