A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (126 page)

The Army of Northern Virginia was stretched like an elastic band along mile after mile of trenches and fortifications. Lee had already moved his headquarters to be closer to Petersburg, where Grant had made the greatest gains in territory. Dawson’s prophecy was accurate almost to the day. The Federals settled into their winter dugouts during the second week of November. Private James Horrocks and the 5th Battery, New Jersey actually built little wooden cabins, complete with windows and brick chimneys.

Thank goodness I have a nice, warm log shanty to live in [he wrote to his parents]. Already the winter of Virginia begins to commence. This season is characterized chiefly by perpetual rain, and penetrating cold that pierces through one’s clothing and makes one shiver. Mud of a sticky character takes one up to the knees and it is no rare occurrence to get up to the middle in it.… The state of the ground renders the movement of Artillery almost impossible.
⁴⁶

General Longstreet occasionally ordered a round of artillery fire to keep the Federals on their toes, but his batteries were no less mudbound than those of his opponents. The relative quiet enabled him to reorganize his staff. There were several promotions and requests for transfers, including one by Francis Dawson. Longstreet had never shown the least interest in the Englishman, but he was suddenly indignant when Dawson was appointed chief ordnance officer on General Fitzhugh Lee’s staff. “General Fitz Lee heard of me through some of our mutual English friends and made application for me,” Dawson explained to his mother. Dawson was delighted to be able to say goodbye to his uncongenial messmates. “Although I have suffered but little,” he wrote to his mother on November 24, “it is useless to deny that there is considerable jealousy displayed towards an Englishman.”
⁴⁷

Dawson felt welcomed by his new mess officers from the beginning. “A better set of fellows on Fitz Lee’s staff it would have been difficult to find,” he wrote. “There was no bickering, no jealousy, no antagonism.” The camaraderie he had craved—“we lived together as though we were near relatives”—made up for the hardship of his new post. Dawson had to work twice as hard with a smaller staff and no logistical support: “I found that it was no joke to organize the Ordnance Department of a couple of Divisions of Confederate Cavalry, but I adapted myself to circumstances.”
⁴⁸

Lee had sent his nephew to reinforce Jubal Early’s shattered army in the Shenandoah Valley, where there was clearly going to be no winter lull. General Sheridan’s reputation so terrified civilians that the women of Harrisonburg had petitioned the government for the right to organize themselves into a regiment for local defense.
⁴⁹
Their bravery inspired Dawson to chide his mother for complaining about his father’s debts: “Tell him for me to keep a stout breast,” he wrote. “Only think of the misery and desolation of this fair land and all will seem light by comparison.”
⁵⁰

—

In Georgia, General Sherman had initiated his own version of scorched-earth tactics. The Federal Army of the Tennessee had occupied Atlanta since September 2; finally, on November 15, Sherman gave the order to evacuate. His next destination was the city of Savannah, 285 miles to the east. He did not expect much resistance from Lee, who could not afford to detach a single regiment from the siege around Petersburg; nor was he frightened of General Hood and his little Army of Tennessee, which was lurking somewhere in the countryside. Before he left Atlanta he set the city on fire and expelled its remaining residents, telling the mayor, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
⁵¹
Five thousand houses were burned to the ground in a single night. “Behind us lay Atlanta,” Sherman recalled in his memoirs as the army began to march, “smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.”

Sherman’s plan for Georgia was effective and simple. He divided his army into two wings and cut a devastating trough more than fifty miles wide through the state. Foragers, known as “bummers,” had broad orders to do as they pleased short of mass rape and murder. Fearful that the Federals might first head south toward Andersonville, which was only 120 miles from Atlanta, Confederate prison commandant Wirz sent hundreds of Union prisoners on forced marches to various locations around the state. He could not feed them all anyway; James Pendlebury received a pint of corn for a four-day march. “A poor fellow asked if he could lie beside me and in the morning he was dead,” he wrote. “During that march I don’t think beasts could have been more savage.”

The economic catastrophe caused by Sherman’s march sent immediate ripples across the South. At Salisbury prison, North Carolina, where Robert Livingstone had been sent in October, ten thousand prisoners were living outdoors in a large pen. “Some dug holes in the ground to shelter themselves from the cold winds at night,” wrote Archibald McCowan, a Scotsman who arrived at the same time as Livingstone. As the rations grew smaller and smaller, the prisoners feared that the Confederates would starve them to death before the war ended. Walking past the prison well on November 24, McCowan noticed a small group of prisoners lounging around, each carrying a club made from a tree branch. “One of these men was very conspicuous on account of his uniform; the red breeches and Turkish cap of a Zouave regiment.” Suddenly, the group attacked the prison sentries. “Each of the other conspirators knocked down his man and with the arms thus obtained they rushed to the large gate which generally stood open to allow teams to pass in and out,” wrote McCowan.
⁵²
The other prisoners joined in. Two of the guards were killed before the sentries on the other side of the pen realized what was happening. In a few minutes, every prisoner was running toward the gates. McCowan had intended to join the mêlée, but a friend grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down. “Stay where you are you damn fool,” he said. The commandant climbed to the roof and turned the prison’s howitzer onto the crowd below. McCowan waited until all was silent before raising his head. He saw a number of bodies sprawled on the ground. “I learned later that 15 prisoners were killed and about 60 wounded, not one of whom knew anything about the matter.” Robert Livingstone had tried to run away with the others and been shot down. He lived for ten days before dying of his wounds on December 4, when his body was dumped in a trough alongside the other casualties of the failed rebellion.

^34.1
A completely separate operation led by a Kentucky doctor, Luke P. Blackburn, had been inspired by the yellow fever epidemics in Bermuda. Dr. Blackburn was an expert on the disease and twice in 1864 offered his services to the Bermudan authorities, once in the spring and once in the autumn. Believing, mistakenly, that yellow fever could be transmitted via the clothes of deceased victims, Blackburn nursed the dying patients and then stored their belongings in large trunks. He had these transported to Halifax, where another agent shipped them to Washington to be auctioned off to unsuspecting civilians. Blackburn’s ignorance that yellow fever is spread via mosquito bites rather than human contact spared the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Blackburn’s plot was exposed after the war, but he escaped punishment and became governor of Kentucky in 1879.

^34.2
Formerly the home of Lady Byron, Hanger Hill was advertised by its current owners as a healthy retreat from London with the convenience of being only six miles from the city’s center. Henry Adams liked Hanger Hill’s aristocratic pretensions, but the unrelieved proximity to his family was a trial. Mary was weak and querulous, and “Loo will bore herself to death,” he told his brother Charles Francis Jr.

^34.3
Maury was working on improvements to his mines and what he termed “torpedoes,” which were immobile electrical mines intended to detonate upon contact. Unfortunately, he failed to take into account the impracticality of using new technology that could not be easily replicated or repaired. Stephen Mallory could not afford to waste his dwindling resources on such rarified warfare. But the British Army had plenty of resources, and General Sir John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers supplied Maury with acid, batteries, insulated wire, and all other necessary ingredients for mine manufacturing without asking too many questions about how much was actually required for experimental use.

^34.4
Spence had already assumed the task of unraveling Rose Greenhow’s estate on behalf of her daughters and balked at taking on any more work. “She had faults, but who has not,” Spence had written to Wharncliffe after learning of her death. His reference to her “faults” was a delicate allusion to the distrust she inspired in Francis Lawley and others as a shameless manipulator of men. Varina Davis, President Davis’s wife, could only feel so much pity for Rose, “her poor wasted beautiful face all divested of its meretricious ornaments and her scheming head hanging helplessly upon those who but an hour before she felt so able and willing to deceive.”

^34.5
Percy Gregg, a writer whom Hotze had always suspected of being slightly unhinged, had started the trouble by refusing to allow Witt to edit his copy. Witt had retaliated by dropping his stories altogether—with good reason: they were the ravings of a violent racist. “Of the passages altered or omitted there is scarcely one that I would have let stand,” Hotze admonished Gregg on his return from Germany. “There are some I could mention to you which I should consider almost fatal to the paper.” Hotze had never intended for the
Index
to be a pulpit for slavery. He was trying to massage, not bludgeon, public opinion. “It is a matter of real disappointment to me that one of my chief calculations, resting upon you, threatens to fail.”
²¹

^34.6
Hundreds of Federal prisoners took part in the sham vote. According to an early chronicler of Kansas state history, “When Sherman started on his march to Savannah the rebel authorities believed that a detachment of the Federal army would be sent to release the prisoners at Andersonville. Accordingly, in October 1864, [several Kansan prisoners] were taken to Milledgeville, Georgia, and from there to Savannah. While at Milledgeville, the Union prisoners went through the form of casting their votes at the general election. The soldiers in the field were given the privilege of voting for President.… The rebels were very much interested in the outcome, and advised those who wanted the war to come to a speedy close to vote for McClellan. However, the result of this balloting was about two to one in favor of Lincoln.”
³⁴

^34.7
By the middle of 1864 the South had become so desperate for men that Davis agreed to a simple exchange—soldier for soldier—without regard to race. Prison exchanges resumed in November, albeit slowly.

THIRTY-FIVE
“The British Mark on Every
Battle-field”

The plot against New York—A parting of friends—Congress retaliates—A Christmas gift—Wilmington falls—One last attempt

D
espite the failure of his agents on Lake Erie and in Chicago, the Confederate leader of clandestine operations in Canada, Jacob Thompson, remained confident in his designs for a campaign of terror. He had particular faith in John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley, and believed that their new scheme—to purchase a steamer and convert it into a warship—had a far greater chance of succeeding than the ill-fated attempt to seize the
Philo Parsons.
Burley had been working at a foundry in Guelph, Ontario, overseeing the construction of the cannon and torpedoes that were to be fitted onto the converted steamship. “Everything is going on finely and I anticipate having the things finished early, perhaps this week,” he had reported in October.
¹
Beall was waiting to captain the vessel as soon as it was delivered to Canada’s Port Colborne, at the southern end of the Welland Canal on Lake Erie, some thirty miles west of Buffalo.

Beall’s plan called for the steamer, renamed CSS
Georgian,
to receive its battering ram and cannon at Colborne. The ram was designed to sink USS
Michigan,
and the cannon was to be used against the undefended cities along Lake Erie from Buffalo to Detroit. But when the
Georgian
sailed onto Lake Erie on November 1, it seemed as though every household within a two-hundred-mile radius of Colborne knew of her arrival. “The whole lake shore was a scene of wild excitement,” Thompson wrote to Judah P. Benjamin. “At Buffalo two tugs had cannon placed on board.… Bells were rung at Detroit.… The bane and curse of carrying out anything in this country is the surveillance under which we act.”
²
To make matters worse, the
Georgian
’s propeller broke and a replacement had to be brought from Toronto. But the conspirators believed they were safe after the authorities searched the vessel and, since the weaponry had not yet been delivered, found nothing suspicious.