A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (70 page)

If that were not enough to shake the U.S. Navy’s morale, a week later the blockading fleet at Mobile Bay in Alabama failed to stop the midnight escape of the infamous CSS
Florida,
the ship originally known as the
Oreto.
After her hurried exit from Liverpool in March 1862, the vessel had suffered one setback after another. The British authorities in Nassau detained her for nearly four months, although the courts there finally determined that she was not in defiance of the Foreign Enlistment Act. But once free, Captain Maffitt lost half his crew to yellow fever, including his own stepson. Even when the
Florida
eventually sailed into Mobile in September, she continued to be dogged by misfortune. It took three months to complete the repairs to her damaged hull. Finally, on January 17, 1863, nine months after leaving Liverpool, the
Florida
began its long-delayed career as a Confederate commerce raider. Two days later, Captain Maffitt captured his first prize, a cargo ship bound for New York.

The Confederate gains at sea were taking place at a sensitive time for Anglo-U.S. relations. For the past two months, a group of twelve New York businessmen calling themselves the New York International Relief Committee had been soliciting donations for Lancashire’s suffering cotton workers.
³⁷
On January 9, the
George Griswold
set sail carrying a large cargo of provisions that included 13,000 barrels of flour and 500 bushels of corn, all paid for by the committee. The ship was bedecked with symbols of Anglo-American friendship, including the flags and pennants of the two nations. As the
Griswold
was towed out of New York Harbor, she received salutes from the British vessels that had gathered to see her off. Four more ships soon followed the
Griswold;
the irony that they could be captured and destroyed by the
Alabama
was not lost on the Northern press, nor on Seward.
^16.5
38

The secretary of state used the public’s resentment over the
Alabama
and the
Florida
to his advantage. Over the New Year, he had met with Senator James Grimes, chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, and persuaded him to propose an armed response against Britain. There was nothing anti-British in Seward’s motives. His only concern was how to shore up his weak position among Republicans; with any luck, Sumner would oppose Grimes’s measures and look like an apologist for England, costing him popularity in the press. After the Galveston attack by CSS
Alabama
, Grimes announced that he was reviving the bill to allow President Lincoln to issue letters of marque. Arming civilian privateers was necessary, he argued, because the Confederates were building their own fleet in England. Lincoln should have the power “to let slip the dogs of war” against them.
³⁹

As Seward had hoped, Charles Sumner could not resist attacking such a poorly conceived idea. “This revival of Letters of Marque is [Seward’s] work. I have protested to the President against their issue, but I fear that I shall not entirely succeed,” he complained to John Bright. “There is not a Senator—not one—who is [Seward’s] friend politically, the larger part are positively, and some even bitterly against him.… In the House of Reps., he has no friends; nor among his colleagues of the cabinet.” Lord Lyons was crestfallen once he realized that Seward had resorted to the same anti-British line that had made the first year of the war so acrimonious and difficult. “It looks like a return to the old bluster,” he wrote sadly. “Whether he does it to recover his position with the Radical party and with the people at large … or … he really thinks he can frighten England and France with his privateers, I can not say. He is more cordial than ever with me personally, and I do my best to prevent his getting into hot water either with France or with me.”
⁴⁰

Sumner was speaking the truth, however, when he warned Bright that the Confederate navy program had to be stopped. “The feeling towards England runs high and I hear it constantly said that war is inevitable unless those ships now building are kept from preying on our commerce.”
⁴¹
Northern newspapers were blaming the
Alabama
and the
Florida
for the precipitous decline of U.S. shipping (rather than the lack of Northern investment in the merchant marine).
⁴²
“England will be hated for it, till the last American now on the stage goes to his grave,” threatened the
New York Times.
⁴³

^16.1
Confederate president Jefferson Davis also had emotional ties to Vicksburg. His family home, Brierfield plantation, was only twenty miles south of the town along a part of the river known as Davis Bend. He described Vicksburg as the “nail-head that held the South’s two halves together.”

^16.2
The phrase referred to the Great Siege of Gibraltar during the American War of Independence. Though vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the besieged British forces on the Rock had defied a combined Spanish and French invasion fleet for three years and seven months, one of the longest sieges in history.

^16.3
Grant apparently believed that “Jewish peddlers” were to blame for the army’s supply problems.

^16.4
During the Crimean War, the 19th Regiment of Foot was sent to the evocatively named Calamity Bay, where it took part in the bungled fight against the Russians for the Alma Heights. Currie was brought down by a bullet that tore a large hole through his left foot. He was rescued from the field, conscious, and therefore able to prevent the regimental surgeon from amputating his foot. For several months Currie lay festering in the notorious Scutari hospital until he was rescued by his brother, who brought him home on a stretcher. Currie made it his mission to walk again. Through sheer force of will he dragged himself on crutches to his medal ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 19, 1855. His ashen countenance so alarmed Queen Victoria that she asked to be kept informed of his recovery.

^16.5
Lord Lyons naturally took heart from the
Griswold,
perhaps far too much. The ship was proof, he told Russell, that Americans liked to complain about Britain, but behind the posturing “there lies a deeper and more enduring feeling of good will and kindly affection, which will be a lasting bond of feeling between the two kindred nations.”

SEVENTEEN
“The Tinsel Has Worn Off”

Democrats versus Republicans—Burnside in the Virginia mud—Arrival of General Hooker—Mosby’s Raid—A crisis of conscience—Volunteering for the South—An encounter with Stonewall Jackson

L
incoln’s troubles made the Democrats bolder in their denunciation of Republican “fanaticism” for persisting with the war. “You have not conquered the South,” thundered Clement Vallandigham in the House on January 14, 1863. “You never will.”
¹
The Ohio congressman and leader of the Peace Democrats had been unseated by the Republicans in the congressional elections, and this was his farewell speech. Though far from being an Anglophile, Vallandigham was deliberately echoing the Earl of Chatham’s warning to the House of Commons during the American War of Independence: “My Lords, you cannot conquer America!” Although Vallandigham had been defeated in the violent and expensive contest, he was confident that his opposition to the war—and to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—would win him the governorship of Ohio in ten months’ time. “Sir,” he concluded, “there is fifty-fold less of anti-slavery sentiment to-day in the West than there was two years ago; and if this war be continued, there will be still less a year hence.”
^17.1

Vallandigham’s “make peace now” speech was received by a public still trying to comprehend the staggering death toll from Fredericksburg, Chickasaw Bluffs, and Murfreesboro. Discontent with the war, wrote Lyons on February 10, “is undoubtedly increasing, and if we have no success before the Spring … it will be impossible to keep up the numbers of the Army.”
^17.2
One hundred and thirty regiments were about to reach the end of their term of enlistment, George Herbert’s among them. “I am waiting as impatiently as you can for 4th of May,” he wrote to his mother. Like most of his comrades, he had no intention of reenlisting: “The tinsel has worn off the thing,” he admitted.
²
Congress, aware that it faced a potentially crippling manpower shortage, was preparing a bill for a national draft.

The recent spate of defeats was not the only reason for the lack of enthusiasm for volunteering. The War Department’s mishandling of wounded soldiers had become a national scandal. Dr. Mayo never saw the gross abuses of the system, since he was caring for officers who were well enough to recuperate in private establishments, but another English doctor, twenty-five-year-old Charles Culverwell, was a reluctant witness to the neglect suffered by soldiers who were sent to the convalescent hospitals.
³
Ironically, Culverwell had never wanted to be a doctor. He was addicted to the theater, but his father had pleaded and “reasoned with me, until at last he suggested a compromise. ‘Get your diplomas; get a means of livelihood at your fingers’ ends, and then you may do whatever you like.’ ”
⁴
Culverwell dutifully qualified, married in 1860, became a father himself, and set out to support his family as a doctor by day while acting at night under the stage name Charles Wyndham. The public was unconvinced by either role. “No patient darkened my door,” he wrote, and the theater company went bankrupt in August 1862. There are conflicting accounts as to why he enlisted as a surgeon in the Federal army.
⁵
But regardless of whether he went freely or was pushed by his family, Culverwell later claimed that he relished the prospect of adventure: “I was bound for America, the land of freedom where equality was adored, favoritism abhorred.… I was convinced that on my arrival there I had only to hold up my little finger and every State in the Union would rush at me with a commission.” He arrived in America in October 1862 with just $45. The rest of the family’s savings was left with his wife, Emma, who remained in London, pregnant with their second child. They had agreed she would come out as soon as he was financially secure.

The plan went awry from the beginning. Culverwell had arrived without letters of introduction; they were offered to him, including one to General Nathaniel Banks, but he had turned them down, believing they would not be needed in the egalitarian New World. Not knowing what else to do, Culverwell parked himself in the public sitting room at Willard’s Hotel and placed his illustrated book on surgery on his knees. He sat there reading for two days, hoping that someone would ask him if he was a doctor. At the end of the second day he noticed an elderly gentleman being approached by autograph seekers. He recognized the face but could not recall the name; however, this was enough to give him courage. His heart beating with excitement, Culverwell went up to him and asked for help. The stranger politely declined. Not knowing what else to do, Culverwell returned to the public room the following day. This time, the elderly gentleman sought his eye and asked him:

“How was it you were so foolish to come to America without letters? They are absolutely indispensable here.” I explained to him that I was stupid enough to believe America different from other countries, and the mere fact of introductions being used in Europe stamped them as superfluous here. I told him that a letter to General Banks which had been offered to me, I had even refused to wait for, as it had come from Paris. “I know General Banks,” he replied; “I’ll give you a letter to him if you like, but I shall be bound to say I know nothing about you.” “So long as I am able to get to him,” I said, “I should ask for nothing more.”
⁶

Culverwell discovered that the kind stranger was none other than the impresario P. T. Barnum. His letter opened the way to an appointment as acting assistant surgeon, a position that allowed the holder to resign and rejoin at will. But Barnum’s influence evidently had its limits: Dr. Culverwell was sent to one of the “contraband camps” near Alexandria, the most unpopular posting in the medical corps. He lasted two weeks in the pestilential and stinking shantytown that contained the South’s runaway slaves.
^17.3
His request for a transfer resulted in the army’s second most unpopular assignment: duty at Camp Convalescent, Fort Ellsworth, known locally as “Camp Misery,” where wounded soldiers too sick to be discharged instead died of neglect. “We don’t get any vegetables at all,” wrote an inmate of Camp Convalescent. “We are in tents, five in each tent, no beds.… We don’t get our cooking done … it is one of the meanest places I have come across.… They need not talk of the misery of the rebels, let them come down here and it will open their eyes.”
⁷
Culverwell lasted for two months there before he could stand it no longer and again asked to be transferred. This time the authorities were merciful, and on January 20, 1863, he was sent to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, one of the largest military hospitals outside Washington.