A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (102 page)

The Confederates began to march away from Knoxville on December 4. Fearing that General Sherman was on his way to help Burnside, Longstreet decided it would be safer to retreat farther east rather than head south toward Georgia. “The men suffered frightfully,” wrote Dawson. “It is no exaggeration to say that on such marches as they were obliged to make in that bitter weather they left the bloody tracks of their feet on the sharp stones of the roads.” Longstreet, stricken with remorse and self-doubt, wished to be relieved of command. His request was denied, but President Davis did accept General Bragg’s resignation. The general blamed the defeat on the cowardice of his troops and the personal animosity of his commanders without ever examining his own part in either cause. President Davis had no other alternative than to recall his stubborn opponent General Joe Johnston and order him to take command of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee.

In the Federal army, General Burnside, too, asked to be relieved. He was satisfied that his reputation as a commander had been redeemed by the capture of the Cumberland Gap and the defense of Knoxville. No longer would he be known solely for the disaster at Fredericksburg and the humiliating “Mud March” of January 1863. The real victor of the Cumberland Gap, Colonel De Courcy, was also determined to leave the army. The War Department, not interested in deciding the contest between a departing general and his disgruntled colonel, had never responded to De Courcy’s complaints. He was saved from becoming bitter by the loyal support and admiration of the soldiers who had been with him on the campaign. “It was the unanimous opinion of the officers in De Courcy’s brigade that this trouble actually grew out of jealousy caused by the brilliant result of De Courcy’s tactics,” Lieutenant Colonel McFarland of the 86th Ohio Infantry later claimed. “It will be borne in mind that 2500 men, well protected by rifle-pits, forts, and cannon, had surrendered to 800, who were without effective support of any kind.”
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The injustice meted out to De Courcy so grieved his old regiment that on December 19 the officers and men of the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry presented him with a commemorative sword, sash, and belt. Captain Hamilton Richeson declared:

Officers there are who command the confidence of those under them, but who cannot win their respect. Others have the respect of the men but not their confidence. You, sir, not only possess the confidence, but also the respect of the soldiers of your regiment.… Indeed, through all the vicissitudes, dangers, privations and vexations of a soldier’s life, while you were with the regiment you made so perfect, your conduct was admirable.
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De Courcy had always hoped that he would win their respect, though devotion had seemed out of the question because of his famously disciplinarian style. The 16th’s parting gift demonstrated that he had achieved far more than he had believed possible. “If I did well it was because they did better,” he replied. “Under fire they were ever firm, cool and self-reliant.” De Courcy’s Civil War experiences had been harsh and frequently heartbreaking, but were by no means in vain. The soldiers he had tried so hard to mold into idealized versions of British troops remained proudly and defiantly true to their American roots; rather, it was De Courcy himself who was transformed into an officer and leader worthy of his men.
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—

General Meade had suffered the misfortune of embarking on his new campaign against Lee the day after eastern newspapers reported Grant’s boast that his army was “driving a big nail in the coffin of the rebellion.” Meade had learned that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was little more than half the size of the 80,000-strong Army of the Potomac, was encamped in two separate locations some thirty miles apart. His plan was to creep across the Rapidan River, strike at one Confederate corps with all his might, and then quickly go after the other. But gross incompetence by one of his generals, who became lost, and miserable weather, which slowed down the others, wrecked Meade’s beautiful design. By the time all the Federals were across the river and in place, Lee had his full army ready and properly entrenched. The area, known as Mine Run, was only eight miles from Chancellorsville. It was a thickly wooded area divided by a stream that ran into the Rapidan River. When Meade surveyed his army’s position on November 30, he knew in his heart that he had failed. Though Lee had fewer than fifty thousand men at his disposal, they were expertly placed behind impregnable defenses. A soldier from Massachusetts looked across at the Confederate works and “felt death in my very bones.”
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Meade made the courageous decision to call off the attack, though he knew he would be dubbed a coward by the Northern public, and quietly pulled his army back over the Rapidan. During the retreat a sudden freeze almost paralyzed the Army of the Potomac. The 7th Maine Infantry, young Frederick Farr’s regiment, suffered its worst night of the war as it crossed the Rapidan on December 1. “We halted after marching for a short time, and the night being intensely cold we made fires,” wrote a friend of Frederick’s. “This was the last that has been seen or heard of him. It is supposed that wearied out by the exceptional hardships he had undergone, he fell asleep by one of the fires and did not awake till the rebel cavalry came up to him and took him prisoner, as the Rebs followed close at our heels.”
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No one had received word from Frederick, but it was assumed that he was in one of the prisons near Richmond.

The Army of the Potomac retired to its winter camps, which were spread out between the two “Raps,” the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers. The Army of Northern Virginia followed suit on the other side of the Rapidan, and out west, the opposing armies under Grant and Johnston did the same. There would be no more fighting until the spring. Although the Federal offensive in Virginia had not materialized, it was Lee rather than Meade who was on the defensive, and the same pattern was being repeated all over the South. Charleston held, despite the continued bombardment of its forts, but the question was for how much longer. Wilmington was still open, but Mobile and Galveston, though nominally under Confederate control, were receiving only a trickle of blockade runners. John Jones, the War Department clerk in Richmond, had heard that the capture rate was one in four blockade runners; “we can afford that,” he wrote.
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But Jones had also heard in the War Department that soldiers were threatening to desert in order to feed their families and protect their farms. Grant’s victory at Chattanooga had given the Union a base from which to attack not only the heart of the South, but also its munitions and gunpowder factories in Georgia.

Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga—the three Confederate victories in 1863—had not taken the South one step closer to independence, whereas Gettysburg had restored the morale of the Northern public, and Vicksburg had showed that victory was possible. “The signs look better,” Lincoln wrote after the Mississippi River was reopened to travel and commerce. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Much of Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia north of Fredericksburg were under Union control; the Gulf and Atlantic coasts were also closed off from the Confederacy; and Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana were inaccessible to Richmond. But these advantages seemed less certain when the core of the Confederacy—Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama—remained intact; two formidable Confederate armies and the great Robert E. Lee were at Davis’s disposal; and the fighting spirit of the South remained unbroken.

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Unwilling to volunteer for the regular Confederate army, Burley briefly tried his hand at journalism before turning to the stage. He joined the New Richmond Theatre, run by the British theater manager Richard d’Orsay Ogden. Burley’s first role was a small part in the aptly named
The Guerrillas,
a Confederate melodrama set during Stonewall Jackson’s military campaign in 1862.

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This was also Robert Neve’s final day of the war. Already sick with dysentery, he was sent to the hospital after the battle and was never again well enough to fight. He mustered out of the army in September 1864 and returned to England. His health permanently damaged by the war, he died in his mid-thirties in 1879, and his wife, Charlotte, successfully applied to Washington for a widow’s pension.

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In early 1864, De Courcy submitted his resignation. He received an ordinary discharge on February 19, which, after protests, was amended to an honorable discharge on March 3. He was forty-four years old. More than half his life had been spent in the service of one army or another, and he could not imagine beginning a new life in business or farming. De Courcy chose to go home to England. His future prospects were slim. But there was still one career open to him: he could marry well. On May 10, 1864, De Courcy married Elia, Comtesse du Bosque de Beaumont, a French widow of independent means.
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PART III

I
F
O
NLY
W
E
A
RE
S
PARED

TWENTY-SEVEN
Buckling Under Pressure

Time for a vacation—The
Alabama—
The Irish—Confederate woes in Europe—The Liberal government clings to power

“T
hey are wearing out, down there,” Henry Adams wrote to his brother Charles Francis Jr. after
The Times
published Francis Lawley’s reports from Tennessee. “He says it took him forty hours to go by rail the hundred and thirty miles from Atlanta to Chattanooga, in the filthiest, meanest cars he ever saw.”
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The effects of the Federal blockade were far worse than Henry knew. The Confederate government cupboards were practically bare: in recent months the purchasing orders for its agent James Bulloch in Liverpool had broadened from military supplies to include such ordinary items as “one dozen erasers,” “two dozen memorandum books of different sizes, and 12 dozen best lead pencils.”
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Francis Lawley was feeling worn out himself. After three years of reporting from the field, he had decided to take a leave of absence in the New Year. He stayed in the Confederate capital over Christmas while his friends Frank Vizetelly and Fitzgerald Ross went to the headquarters of Confederate general Jeb Stuart near Orange Court House in Virginia. The celebrations were not as jolly as those of the previous Christmas, though Stuart chivalrously lent them his own tent, and Ross was delighted to meet Stuart’s new assistant inspector general of the cavalry corps, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell. After their visit, Ross wrote that the English cavalry officer had “told us some capital stories of his various adventures.… The Colonel … has only lately been transferred to this army, and looks back with regret to the stirring and fighting time when he was with [General John Hunt] Morgan in the West … [they] adored their ‘fighting old Colonel,’ and would have followed him anywhere.”
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Grenfell had failed to achieve the same popularity among Stuart’s men. When the Englishman had resurfaced in Richmond after his mysterious disappearance from Bragg’s army, his value as an expert cavalryman convinced the Confederate authorities not to prosecute him for his original crime of helping a slave to escape, or for having jumped bail ahead of his trial. But Grenfell’s placement on Stuart’s staff in September caused fierce resentment among the tight-knit group. By the time Ross met Grenfell, the colonel had become so fed up with his treatment that he was on the verge of joining forces again with General Morgan. The Kentucky raider’s recent escape from a Federal prison in Ohio had raised his reputation in the South still higher, and hundreds of volunteers were answering his invitation to form a new guerrilla outfit.
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After Christmas, Ross and Vizetelly returned to Richmond to say goodbye to Lawley. Though his spirits were waning, those of Richmond society were not; amateur theatricals were the craze that winter. Vizetelly had been the mainstay of every production—painting scenery, rehearsing songs, adapting parts, and sometimes even acting. On January 12, 1864, he performed in a comedy before a select audience that included President Davis and General Stuart. Vizetelly’s part “was to dandle and stifle the cries of a screaming baby,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, while three soldiers behind a curtain simulated the child’s cries. “When Mr. Vizetelly had exhausted all known methods of quieting an infant (in vain), his despair was comic. He threw the baby on a chair and sat on it,” prompting great roars of laughter.
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