A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (51 page)

The regiment was en route to the Army of the Potomac when a special messenger arrived with instructions to turn around and head for the Shenandoah Valley as quickly as possible, where it was to join a force under General McDowell, of Bull Run fame. Jefferson Davis’s military chief of staff, Robert E. Lee, had ordered Stonewall Jackson to create a diversion in the Shenandoah Valley so that Lincoln would not dare to send all the soldiers at his disposal to McClellan. The valley was like a gently undulating corridor with high, wooded mountain ranges on either side. The Shenandoah Valley Turnpike stretched 125 miles from the Potomac River all the way down to the bottom of the valley, making it an ideal conduit for an invading force.

Stonewall Jackson, a dour Presbyterian who rarely spoke, even to explain his orders, had originally been sent to defend the valley’s abundant orchards and lush pastures. His performance in Virginia during the winter had been lackluster, but since the beginning of McClellan’s peninsula campaign, he had beaten every force sent to stop him. He disabled one Federal army, under Frémont, on May 8. Next he turned on Union general Nathaniel P. Banks on the twenty-third at Front Royal. This was Sam Hill’s, and the 6th Louisiana’s, first experience of fighting. Their commander, Dick Taylor, recorded in his memoirs that at midday on May 23, they were marching along a road heading north, when

there rushed out of the wood to meet us a young, rather well-looking woman, afterward widely known as Belle Boyd. Breathless with speed and agitation, some time elapsed before she found her voice. Then, with much volubility, she said we were near Front Royal, beyond the wood; that the town was filled with federals, whose camp was on the west side of the river, where they had guns in position to cover the wagon bridge, but none bearing on the railway bridge below the former.… All this she told with the precision of a staff officer making a report.
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It has been disputed whether Belle Boyd’s courageous dash through active battle lines did indeed provide Jackson with new intelligence, but it was certainly news to Taylor, who ordered his troops to storm the town. The Federals surrendered after five hours of fighting. Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, a childhood friend of Belle Boyd’s, bumped into her “standing on the pavement in front of a hotel, talking with some few federal officers (prisoners) and some of her acquaintances in our army.… As I stooped from my saddle she pinned a rose to my uniform, bidding me remember that it was blood-red and that it was her ‘colors.’ ”
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Two days after the Confederates’ success at Front Royal, Sam Hill’s brigade tore through Winchester, liberating it from Federal occupation. Mary Sophia Hill heard that Sam had been killed, “so off I started for Staunton,” she wrote, “nearly crazy.” She eventually found Sam in a makeshift hospital. He was dirty and in shock, but his wounds were not life-threatening. She became determined to have him transferred out of his regiment.
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On June 1, Sir Percy and his rerouted Cavaliers arrived at Strasburg, to the west of Front Royal, just as Stonewall Jackson’s troops were evacuating the area. Turner Ashby, a recently promoted Confederate brigadier general, was picking off Union soldiers who had had the ill luck to advance too far forward. Sir Percy was fed up with hearing about the “Black Knight of the Confederacy,” as Ashby was called, and had declared to a journalist covering Federal movements that he was going to “bag” the rebel. Shortly after breakfast on June 6, Sir Percy learned that one of Stonewall Jackson’s wagon trains was stuck in the mud on the road to Port Republic, guarded by just a handful of Ashby’s men. His orders did not include mounting offensives, but he could not resist the prize. Just before two o’clock, he ordered his cavalry into formation and started off at a gallop in the direction of the stranded wagons. But Ashby and his entire cavalry were actually grazing their horses not far away. As Sir Percy galloped toward the woods straddling the road, he was stopped by a fierce countercharge from Ashby. The regiment’s colors, sixty-four Cavaliers, and Sir Percy himself were captured. Sir Percy was furious with the behavior of his troops, whom he felt had barely put up a fight.
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“He would have stopped right there in the road and engaged in fisticuffs if he could have found a partner,” wrote a Confederate soldier.
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Sir Percy was still seething with rage when he arrived as a prisoner at the Confederate base, where an old comrade from the Garibaldi campaign, Roberdeau Wheat, immediately recognized his voice. According to Dick Taylor, Wheat shouted, “Percy, old boy!” “Why, Bob!” the other rejoined. Wheat good-naturedly chided him for fighting on the “wrong” side, and then stepped aside so that the colonel could be brought before Stonewall Jackson.
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That evening, while the two men were chatting in Jackson’s office, news came that Turner Ashby had been shot through the heart during a later skirmish. A member of Jackson’s staff quickly led Sir Percy away so that the general could be alone.
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By sunset on June 9, the bulk of the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley were in full retreat. A newspaper in Richmond declared: “Strange as it may appear, news from the armies within five miles of [this city] is of secondary importance. Invariably the crowds which daily flock around the bulletin boards ask first ‘What news of Jackson?’ ”
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With only 17,000 troops at his disposal, Jackson had succeeded against a combined Union force three times his strength, attacking it piecemeal, making full use of the valley’s terrain. Yet the events taking place around Richmond were just as significant; on May 31, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston had launched an attack against McClellan’s army. Known as the Battle of Fair Oaks, or Seven Pines, the campaign failed in all its objectives, but it did produce one stroke of luck for the Confederacy: the obstinate and ineffectual General Joe Johnston was struck by a bullet. President Davis replaced him with General Robert E. Lee, who had never before commanded troops in battle. He will “be timid and irresolute in action,” sneered General McClellan when informed of Lee’s appointment.
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Spring flooding postponed further movement by either army; and the lull had all Washington on tenterhooks. The five miles between McClellan and the city of Richmond seemed a mere hop and a skip to victory. Seward boasted to Charles Sumner that the war would be over in ninety days or less. Lord Lyons could not help wondering whether he was about to miss its most exciting moment. He had at last received permission to take a holiday and was leaving on June 18. Life in Washington was no “bed of roses,” he had often told his sister. But it was not until May that he had finally summoned up the nerve to ask Lord Russell for a leave of absence.
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Lyons had grown despondent waiting for an answer; “my chance of getting home seems less and less as I reflect upon it,” he wrote to his sister.
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By the beginning of June, he had persuaded himself that his case was hopeless. Then, on the sixth, came Lord Russell’s letter granting him three months’ leave.
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Lord Lyons’s final week in Washington started out well with only the usual routine work.
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This satisfactory state of affairs was ruined, however, by the arrival of Lord Edward St. Maur, a younger son of the Duke of Somerset, First Lord of the Admiralty. It was Lord Edward’s older brother, Lord St. Maur, who had briefly fought as a Red Shirt under Garibaldi. Lord Lyons thought that Lord Edward was risking his career in the Foreign Service for a cheap thrill and warned him that the presence of a British cabinet minister’s son could lead to all kinds of unexpected trouble. But even he had not anticipated Lord Edward’s falling into the hands of Consul Bernal in Baltimore and his secessionist cronies. The Southern journalist W. W. Glenn remembered his first meeting with Lord Edward St. Maur very well. “He was quite young,” he wrote, “and had a great dread of having his name in the newspapers … on account of his father’s position in the English Cabinet.… He was quite Northern [supporting] too.” Glenn had plans for the youth, however.

I determined to devote myself to giving intelligent Englishmen every facility for acquainting themselves thoroughly with the true condition of Southern affairs and the spirit of the Southern people … it might prove useful to make so intelligent a convert: Lord Lyons of course attempted to dissuade him from carrying out his project, and went as far as to tell Lord Edward that if he was caught and thrown into prison, he need expect no aid from him as Minister. Lord Lyons from the beginning did everything he could to prevent the slightest offense being given to the Federal Government.… He made later several remonstrances to me through his attachés.
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Dread at what might happen to Lord Edward overshadowed Lyons’s otherwise joyful departure on June 18. In Washington, President Lincoln shook his hand and asked him to convey “his good intentions towards the people of Great Britain.” When Lyons reached New York, Seward stopped by his hotel to say goodbye. He promised that if anything did arise between the two countries while Lyons was away, he would place the matter on hold until his return.
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Lyons was touched by these displays, although he had no illusion that the goodwill toward him was anything other than temporary and capricious. If he, rather than Mercier, had visited Richmond to explore the views of the Confederate government, the result would have been expulsion from the country and an apology demanded from Britain. The contrast between the public’s attitude toward Britain and France also disturbed him. The French attempt to topple the Mexican government in the spring, Lyons noticed, had been accepted with an angry shrug, even though it mocked American claims to be the sole power in the region.
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They “are more civil to France than to England,” he asserted to Lord Russell, “partly because they never will have, do what she will, the same bitterness against her as they have against England.”
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Lord Edward knew that crossing the lines into Southern territory might be risky, but “there is no imprudence in what I am doing—I have asked good advice,” he assured his parents on June 19. “I do not intend to get into any chance of difficulties.”
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Nor did he; Glenn’s contacts proved their worth, and Lord Edward was safely deposited in Richmond on June 26. He did not think it odd that with the Confederacy fighting for its life, President Davis would make time to see him. Lord Edward was perhaps too young and naïve to realize what the presence of an English cabinet minister’s son would mean to Southerners. All Lord Edward had to do was say his name and government officials, staff officers, and influential citizens opened their doors to him. “There is a remarkably friendly feeling towards England … the only sign of ill-feeling that exists is on the subject of recognition,” he not surprisingly concluded. “I saw and talked to everybody, I was very kindly treated indeed.”
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He was so well treated that other British subjects—many of whom were desperately trying to find any means of leaving the South—became quite jealous. The Confederates deliberately shielded him from the hardships and persecution often suffered by ordinary Britons. A young Scottish journalist named Gabriel Cueto, for example, had been held without charge since May.
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Lord Edward never heard about him, and Cueto’s case did not receive a mention in England either, although he would spend nine months in a Confederate prison essentially for speaking his mind.
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An English governess named Catherine Hopley, who was stranded in Richmond, thought it was outrageous that “Lord Seymour [
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] should be able to obtain a passport from the Confederate government without any trouble,” while the rest of them were left to rot in the city. “I went the first thing in the morning, to see Mr. Cridland,” she wrote, “at what the ‘blockaded British subjects’ used to call ‘anything but the Consolation Office.’ ” She also visited the Confederate secretary of war, George Randolph, and Stephen Mallory of the Confederate navy, and offered herself as a courier to Europe. But both men scarcely looked up from their papers. Their curt dismissal was especially wounding since “I was sympathising so deeply with them all, and wishing I could take messages and letters to England for them, and feeling worthy of being trusted even with the gravest secrets.”
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The Confederates did not require Miss Hopley’s services when their own native-born women were perfectly willing to carry out dangerous operations. Rose Greenhow, the Washington hostess who had exposed herself to Northern wrath by passing military secrets to the South, had arrived in Richmond after months of house arrest and then incarceration in a Federal prison. President Davis made a point of calling at her hotel and was shocked to see the ravages wrought by her ordeal. She had the air of someone “shaken by mental torture,” he wrote sadly to his wife.
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Moreover, she was homeless and penniless. Judah Benjamin promptly sent her $2,500 as a mark of the Confederacy’s gratitude.