A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (96 page)

During July, Rosecrans had pushed his Confederate adversary, Braxton Bragg, into the eastern corner of Tennessee. Bragg still held Chattanooga, with its all-important rail depots, but the irascible general was leading a demoralized army that had already been defeated twice in battle. Bragg’s bullying manner made him despised by his officers and loathed by the men. “I had seen men shot, and whipped, and shaved, and branded,” wrote Sam Watkins, a private in the 1st Tennessee Regiment. He thought he was used to Bragg’s ways, but at Chattanooga worse was to come. He watched the hanging of two “Yankee spies.” “I saw a guard approach,” he wrote, “and saw two little boys in their midst.… I saw that they were handcuffed. ‘Are they spies?’ I was appalled; I was horrified; nay, more, I was sick at heart … the youngest one began to beg and cry and plead most piteously.… The props were knocked out and the two boys were dangling in the air. I turned off sick at heart.”
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Maffitt could not resist lingering in the Channel in the hope of snatching a last-minute prize, and he was rewarded for his daring with the
Anglo-Saxon,
a U.S. ship carrying coal to New York. He removed the passengers, appropriated the coal, and burned the ship. The Royal Navy was affronted by Maffitt’s cheek at carrying out a raid so close to British waters and sent a frigate to patrol the area. But by then Maffitt had docked at Brest.

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The Duke of Argyll told Sumner that he would not show his letters to Lord Russell because the foreign minister would dismiss them as gibberish. The duchess also tried to reason with him. “I like you to be quite frank with me, but wish you did not hope for what is impossible,” she wrote earnestly. “We must be neutral, as a Government.… I sent some of the newspaper extracts you sent me to Lord Russell. He replied: ‘We must be neutral.… We do not “fit out ships by the dozen,” and Mr. S. must know the allegation to be untrue. One—two—three ships may have evaded our laws, just as the Americans evaded the American laws during the Canadian Contest.… You will have seen that the Government did their best in the
Alexandra
case. As to the ironplated ships, there seems to be great difficulty in getting at the truth.’ ”
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Nine years later, in 1872, while taking a break between wars, an old friend from the Vicksburg campaign went down to Oxford to pay Dr. Mayo a visit. The friend was General Sherman.

TWENTY-FIVE
River of Death

Colonel De Courcy wins and loses—Longstreet arrives at Chickamauga—The Confederate generals’ revolt—Two English travelers—Contrasting goodwill tours—“They are all down on us”

T
he timing of Longstreet’s arrival in Chattanooga depended on eastern Tennessee’s remaining under Southern control. If the railroads or the road through the Cumberland Gap stayed open, Longstreet would be able to reach General Bragg in a matter of days. If these were closed, the only other possible train route went south through the Carolinas, west through Georgia, and finally north to Chattanooga, taking at least a week, if not two. However, Federal forces led by General Burnside captured Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 2, 1863, cutting the Virginia–Tennessee rail link. This left the Cumberland Gap, which had been guarded by a garrison force of 2,500 Confederates since starvation drove out Colonel De Courcy in 1862. The new Confederate commander at the Gap, Brigadier General John Frazer, was struggling. Only two regiments were in a fit state for duty; the other two had been so depleted by illness and desertions that they were in a state of near mutiny. Frazer had been receiving conflicting orders about whether to evacuate or defend the fort. In the end, he decided to fight.
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Burnside did not want to be caught up in an arduous struggle for a single pass when he had an ideal candidate for the task in Colonel De Courcy, whose familiarity with the area was unmatched. Burnside assigned to him an independent brigade of 1,700 men, with orders to attack the Confederates from the northern side of the Gap. For De Courcy, the command signaled that his rehabilitation was complete, his reputation no longer tainted by the accusations of cowardice at Chickasaw Bluffs.

De Courcy’s happiness was shortlived. He discovered after the expedition had begun that he was leading a brigade that consisted of the flotsam and rejects of Burnside’s army; one regiment was just three months old, another a mere two weeks. Worse still, the ordnance supplies had failed to arrive on time. His artillery regiment had lost most of its guns; his two cavalry regiments had no revolvers; and the infantry regiments were down to thirty bullets per man. Their bread ration was enough to last them for four days, perhaps seven if cut in half. De Courcy ordered a slow march, hoping that the rations and munitions would catch up with them along the way. None came. By September 7, De Courcy had grown so outraged by the lackadaisical incompetence of Federal headquarters in Kentucky that he was bombarding them with hourly messages demanding to know, in the strongest language possible, when he could expect the arrival of his supplies. His brigade had now crossed the Cumberland Ford, and the Gap was less than half a day’s march away.
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When he learned that no wagons had been dispatched because the commissary officer in Kentucky had been on a drunken spree for several days, the best and worst aspects of De Courcy’s character came to the fore. “What is to be done?” he wrote to a member of Burnside’s staff on September 7. “My men will begin to get sick before many hours for want of bread. Little corn here, and I have only ammunition enough to bluster with and persuade the enemy to evacuate or capitulate if he be so inclined but I cannot make a serious attack.”
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De Courcy’s first instinct was to telegraph his resignation. But as he thought about his predicament, he realized that the Confederates had no means of knowing the state of his forces. This gave him the idea of deceiving the Confederates into thinking his brigade was four times its actual size—by having his men march in a continuous loop within earshot of the fort. Thus heartened, he made the fatal mistake of falling in love with his cleverness, and when help arrived in the form of a cavalry brigade under General James M. Shackelford, De Courcy became fearful that he would interfere. He should have dispatched a messenger to explain his intentions. Instead, he sent a letter asking Shackelford to stay out of the Gap because “I fear you have not been made acquainted … that I am fully acquainted with all the roads and locations on both sides of the gap, and further that I have been in the military profession almost continuously since my sixteenth year.” Shackelford ignored De Courcy and sent a message to General Frazer ordering him to surrender, which he refused to do.

Between his furious telegrams to Kentucky and his tactless behavior with Shackelford, De Courcy was leaving a trail of ill will.
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On September 8, De Courcy sent a polite communication to General Frazer. The situation was hopeless, he said. The fort was surrounded, and any attempt to fight their way out would only result in “a cruel loss of life.” All this time, the same Federal regiments had been marching around and around, making it seem as though the Confederates were facing several thousand men. De Courcy naturally hedged when Frazer replied asking to know the number of Federal troops opposing him. For twenty-four hours the Confederate general held firm, but after a day of absolute stillness—De Courcy would not even allow the men to load their rifles in case one of the new recruits accidentally pulled the trigger and started a firefight—Frazer’s nerve started to buckle. De Courcy thoughtfully sent back the Confederate go-between with a gift of two gallons of good whiskey. He followed up with a note: “It is now 12:30
P.M.,
and I shall not open fire until 2
P.M.,
unless before that time you shall have struck all your flags and hoisted in their stead white flags in token of surrender.”
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During these tense negotiations, General Burnside had marched up from Knoxville, Tennessee, with an additional infantry brigade. He, too, sent a demand for surrender to General Frazer. By now the Confederate had received three orders in three days from three separate forces. As far as he knew, tens of thousands of Federal troops were poised to blow his position to pieces. Frazer drank De Courcy’s whiskey and considered his options. In the meantime, an irritated Burnside tried to assert his authority over the situation. He was incensed to learn that De Courcy had ignored Shackelford’s command. Ignorant of the colonel’s plan and the reasons behind it, Burnside regarded his action as veering close to insubordination.

At three o’clock on September 9, Frazer ordered his staff to run up the white flag. De Courcy’s troops fell into line and marched into the fortified camp, singing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The Confederates were unaware that their Federal captors were carrying unloaded rifles. The soldiers looked at the small force with astonishment; one shouted, “Where are the rest of the men?”
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De Courcy went to find Frazer, who was sitting in his tent, the last of the whiskey in one hand, his snuffbox in the other. In the meantime, a quarter of the Confederates quietly slipped away from the gap, taking their guns and knapsacks with them. De Courcy was not interested in the loss of four hundred or so prisoners. He had captured the pass without firing a single bullet. He savored the moment. “The whiskey worked,” he remarked, according to one of his aides.
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When Richmond learned of the surrender, Josiah Gorgas recorded in his diary that the Cumberland Gap had been given away by “a drunken Brigadier, named Frazer.”
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Burnside trotted up the road an hour later, expecting to see the Confederates in formation and Frazer standing at the front, ready to hand over his flag. The sight of De Courcy walking around as though he owned the place made Burnside snap. Enraged, he ordered two officers to escort the colonel back to his camp. The following day, De Courcy was taken to Kentucky under armed guard. The charge was insubordination, but the rumor swirling through the ranks was that he had colluded with General Frazer to let the prisoners escape. No charges were actually brought against him, but once again he was in limbo and his character under suspicion. On September 18, 1863, De Courcy wrote to the assistant adjutant general on Burnside’s staff pleading for a court of inquiry so he could clear his name. An investigation “has now become absolutely necessary to save my character—as an officer and a gentleman.”
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Down in Louisiana, the 16th Ohio Volunteers received a vague report that De Courcy was no longer on detached duty with Burnside. They still missed him. “Hear that Col. De Courcy is ordered back to his regiment,” wrote the regiment’s drummer in his diary on September 21, 1863. “Hope it is true.”
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In Kentucky, Burnside’s harsh treatment of De Courcy won the colonel a large degree of sympathy. “It is stating the case very mildly to say that the officers of De Courcy’s brigade were highly indignant at this summary way of dealing with the leader—a leader whose sterling qualities they had seen occasion to admire,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Robert McFarland of the 86th Ohio Infantry. The officers wrote a protest on De Courcy’s behalf and sent it to President Lincoln. Even Burnside’s own staff felt that the summary arrest without charge was an overreaction to the incident. One of the assistant adjutant generals, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Loring, added his voice to the clamor: “I feel for him that he would suffer under very grave imputations if the circumstances of the case be not made publicly known.”
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But the protests only annoyed Burnside all the more. He refused to grant De Courcy’s request for a court of inquiry. Instead, on September 29, Burnside distributed a public letter that lambasted De Courcy for his arrogant behavior.
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The detour forced on Longstreet by the capture of the Cumberland Gap meant changing trains at least ten times to reach Chattanooga. “Never before were such crazy cars—passenger, mail, coal, box, platform, all and every sort, wobbling on the jumping scrap-iron—used for hauling soldiers,” recalled one of his aides.
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The men were not bothered by their unorthodox conveyances, however, and even enjoyed themselves. “When we reached South Carolina we received attentions which had long ceased to be common in Virginia,” wrote Francis Dawson. “A number of ladies were waiting for us on the platform, armed with bouquets of flowers and with well filled baskets of cake, fruit, and more substantial fare. There was an abundance, too, of lemonade for the dusty soldiers.”
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But to Mary Chesnut, who caught a glimpse of the rumbling cavalcade, the sight was macabre. Miles of flatcars cars passed by, with “soldiers rolled in their blankets lying in rows with their heads all covered, fast asleep. In their grey blankets, packed in regular order, they looked like swathed mummies.” The sight made her sad: “All these fine fellows were going to kill or be killed. Why?”
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