A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (105 page)

Shortly after the altercation with Moran, Henry and Charles Francis Jr. left for Paris, “a city for pleasure,” wrote Charles Francis Jr.
⁴⁰
The brothers took every advantage of their freedom. Charles recorded that they spent their last night drinking a beautiful Burgundy “and started for London smiling and happy with wine.” He was sober, though a little jaded, for his presentation at court on March 12. During the carriage ride, Charles further annoyed Moran by grumbling about the occasion. “This cant is abominable,” wrote Moran afterward. “If he didn’t know what he was going for, why in the name of decency did he go?”
⁴¹
Henry was still smarting from the argument and stayed at home.

—

Henry Hotze was pleased when he heard that the Reverend John Sella Martin and Andrew Jackson, both former slaves, had ended their lecture tours and were going home to America. Their presence had threatened to overshadow his successful infiltration of the down-market press. With sufficient funds, the South could be parlayed into a national cause, Hotze often told Benjamin:

The North has two papers, one 3-penny and one penny paper, which it subsidizes lavishly. We also have two, a 3-penny one and a penny one, and in respectability, standing, and influence no one would venture to institute even a comparison between the respective champions. We have moreover the advantage over the subsidized writers of the North that our cause is pleaded with the force of personal conviction and with the zeal of personal friendship and political sympathy.… In the neutral press, both daily and weekly, we have also important connections, equally honorable, while the North, beyond its own organs, has nothing. All this, I unhesitatingly declare, is due to the
Index.
⁴²

Hotze was also looking for ways to dilute the impact of Henry Yates Thompson’s recent articles. Since his return from the battlefields of eastern Tennessee, Thompson had been writing for the
Daily News
and touring the country giving talks about his experiences in the North, somewhat to his family’s embarrassment. Leslie Stephen was another irritant, since he was unafraid to take on the South’s supporters at Cambridge and force them to defend their views on slavery. Neither man was an eccentric or a fanatic, and their opinions on the war could not easily be dismissed. Hotze hoped that Colonel Fremantle’s
Three Months in the Southern States,
which had been published just before Christmas, would become so popular that dissenting voices would be ignored.
⁴³
Still, even Fremantle’s book contained passages that upset Hotze. At James Mason’s request, Fremantle had removed passages that made the South seem foreign in English eyes, but he refused to take out his impressions of Southern slavery.
⁴⁴

Lawley’s arrival in England in February briefly revived Hotze’s hope of a propaganda coup. The journalist had been traveling for nearly three weeks, and the enforced rest had restored him to health. William Howard Russell saw him twice in the same week and noted that he was “in splendid fettle, grey but as clear and handsome as paint.” His eloquent reports of the Confederacy’s sufferings had won him a following of swooning females, but Russell was not deceived. Lawley, he wrote, was as “hard as nails.”
⁴⁵
However, Lawley could not afford to bring public attention to himself lest he alert his creditors. The best he could do for Hotze and the Confederates during the short time he dared spend in England was to speak privately to his former colleagues in Westminster. None of these meetings produced anything of substance, although his interview with Disraeli on February 19 had seemed promising at the time.
⁴⁶

At the beginning of March, Lawley passed through Paris on his way to Italy. Slidell reported to Benjamin that Lawley “had a long and very interesting interview with the Emperor. The Conversation turned entirely upon American affairs and was most satisfactory … the Emperor is prepared to take any action in our favor in concert with England, but adheres to his determination not to move without her cooperation.”
⁴⁷
The Times
barely touched on American affairs while its special correspondent was away, and when it did, Hotze found the articles quite unsatisfactory. His impatience was shared by the managers of
The Times.
Mowbray Morris reluctantly granted Lawley an extra month’s vacation in return for his promise to be in Virginia before the start of the spring campaigns.
⁴⁸

On March 25, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., set sail back to the United States. The brothers had been surprised by how much they enjoyed each other’s company. Henry even accompanied him to Liverpool and waited on the tugboat as Charles Francis Jr.’s steamer pulled out of sight. “Henry nodded to me good-bye from the tug,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “and I, with a bitter taste … in my mouth, was off for home.”
⁴⁹
His departure for America was followed a few days later by that of Rose Greenhow for France. Little Rose sobbed when her mother appeared at the convent. Her distress made Rose dread the inevitable parting. “I know I ought not to be miserable,” Rose wrote in her diary as she reflected on the decisions that had brought them to Europe, “and yet I am, and tears which I try to keep back flow down my cheek and blind me.”
⁵⁰
On April 2 she celebrated little Rose’s eleventh birthday with the one gift that her daughter craved above all: her undivided attention.

^27.1
That same night, in the Kell household, far away in McIntosh County, Georgia, six-year-old Jonny Kell cried as his mother buried his little sister, Dot, near the house. Jonny’s younger brother, three-year-old Munroe, was too shocked to speak. Jonny frightened his mother by saying he wished to join “little Sissy” in heaven. Four days after her daughter’s death, Mrs. Kell was relieved to hear that Munroe had regained his words. “Jonny, you may have my marbles,” he said, “I don’t want them any more.” That evening he showed the classic signs of diphtheria. He was dead by the morning. “Oh God have mercy on my desolate broken heart,” wrote Lieutenant Kell’s despairing wife. “He has been gone so long, so long! Three long sad years.”
⁹

^27.2
Captain John Ancrum Winslow had been searching for James Morgan’s ship, the
Georgia,
when storm damage forced USS
Kearsarge
to put into Queenstown, Ireland, on November 3 for emergency repairs. While it was there, a local newspaper printed a story that the U.S. ship had come expressly to enlist volunteers. The following day the
Kearsarge
was surrounded by rowboats filled with men clamoring to be chosen. The
Kearsarge
set sail on November 5 with sixteen extra men. Winslow’s explanation of the incident failed to say how the sixteen climbed aboard unnoticed and managed to find such perfect hiding places on an unfamiliar ship.

^27.3
The eighty-year-old premier had been cited as the guilty party in the divorce proceedings of Timothy O’Kane against his wife, Margaret, prompting the society joke: “She was Kane, but was he Able?” Benjamin Disraeli grumpily predicted that the case—though spurious—would do wonders for Palmerston’s popularity and no doubt give him a sweeping victory at the next election.

TWENTY-EIGHT
A Great Slaughter

Grant takes command—A disastrous campaign—Lord Lyons labors on—The new volunteers—Return to the Wilderness—An unstoppable force

G
eneral Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Washington on March 8, 1864, to accept his promotion to lieutenant general. In giving him command of all the Union armies in the field, Lincoln promised that he would not interfere as long as the strategy remained one of relentless attack. They both knew that the South could not possibly compete with the North for manpower or resources.
¹
The Capitol’s gleaming new dome—finished on December 2, 1863—was a powerful advertisement for the healthy state of the U.S. Treasury, especially compared to the hyperinflation and financial chaos that were crippling the South.
^28.1

Yet the year had not begun well for the North: the Confederate cavalry under General Nathan Bedford Forrest had hampered Sherman’s attempts to wreck Mississippi’s rail system; a Union incursion into Florida was beaten back in late February; and in Charleston, the Federal navy encountered a new and potentially devastating weapon of war: the submarine. The experimental CSS
H. L. Hunley
—named after its inventor—sank the gunboat USS
Housatonic
during an evening attack on February 17. (All but five of the Federal crew survived, but the
Hunley
mysteriously sank during its return journey to Fort Moultrie, drowning the six sailors inside. The tragedy dissuaded the Confederates from building any more submarines.)

Grant had prepared a strategic plan for the next phase of the war: to subdue the western half of the Confederacy first before moving east to crush Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. But he discovered on his arrival in Washington that Lincoln’s promise not to meddle in military actions contained qualifications. Lincoln, along with General Henry Halleck (who had been relegated to the newly created administrative post of chief of staff), wanted a major push up the Red River into Texas.

The fertile cotton plantations along the Red River were too enticing for the administration to ignore. Lincoln also liked the idea of keeping troops in Texas just in case the Confederates attempted to join forces with the French in Mexico. The fall of Mexico City in June 1863 had effectively ended the Franco-Mexican War, although the victorious French army was still fighting the defeated Juarist regime in parts of the country. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, had been cajoled by Louis-Napoleon into accepting the imperial crown of Mexico and was due to arrive in the country sometime in April.
^28.2
Even though Grant did not think either reason was sufficiently compelling to deprive him of the forces he needed for an attack against Mobile, Alabama—which he considered a vital stepping-off point for capturing the rest of the state—Lincoln and Halleck went ahead with their plan anyway.

On March 12, General Nathaniel Banks’s troops began slogging from Franklin, Louisiana, toward Shreveport, the Confederate capital of Louisiana since the capture of Alexandria in 1863. The campaign was a joint army-navy expedition, with Admiral David Dixon Porter leading a flotilla up the Red River to converge with Banks at Shreveport. Some of the infantry regiments were only two months old. The 17th Infantry Corps d’Afrique, for example, was made up of freed slaves from Nashville, Tennessee. Its officers were white volunteers from across the North, among them Dr. Charles Culverwell from New York.
^28.3
The generous signing bonus of $227 had persuaded him to apply for the post; part of it paid for his photograph in a new uniform purchased specially for the expedition. Many years later, he made light of his participation in the Red River campaign, joking that he had expected to show off his crisp new jacket to the inhabitants of captured Confederate towns, only to find that the opportunity never came.

Few excursions in the war encountered so many mishaps or ended so ignominiously as Banks’s Louisiana campaign. The start had been exceptionally smooth; he reached Alexandria on March 26 and immediately began to organize elections for the new pro-Union state legislature. But after that, nothing went right. This plan to revive economic ties between Southern plantation owners and the North was undone by Admiral Porter’s officers, who seized all the cotton for themselves before the official cotton brokers, who accompanied Banks, had a chance to transact any legitimate business. Even the Red River turned against him; instead of rising to its usual winter levels, it began to shrink at a rapid rate. Porter just managed to haul his vessels over the rapids above Alexandria before the fast-emerging rocks made the journey impossible. The U.S. fleet ground to a halt near Grand Ecore, a small trading town perched atop a ninety-foot bluff, more than seventy miles from Shreveport. Banks was able to push his army a little farther upriver, but the single-track route he had chosen turned the journey into a slow-moving haul through foul slurry.

The Confederate general Richard “Dick” Taylor ended Banks’s advance at the Battle of Mansfield on April 7, some forty miles south of Shreveport. Taylor had only 8,000 men against 12,000 Federals, but he was one of the ablest generals in the South and had already demonstrated his aggressive fighting skills while serving under Stonewall Jackson in 1862. In this campaign, Taylor also benefited from having several excellent subordinates, including the French aristocrat Prince Camille de Polignac (affectionately dubbed “Prince Polecat” by his Texan troops), who had volunteered for the South in 1861. The Confederates cost the Federals 2,000 men at Mansfield; the loss shattered Banks’s confidence in the mission, and he ordered a general retreat, much to the chagrin of his own troops. His men never forgave him for making them look like cowards, and whenever he passed by marching columns he was greeted with rude songs and catcalls. Prevented from fighting the real enemy, Federal soldiers instead punished the surrounding communities, leaving a swath of burning homesteads all the way back to Alexandria. Porter’s fleet was now stranded above the rapids, forcing Banks to stay put with his glowering army until the Red River rose or someone found a way to carry the ships over the rocks.