A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (78 page)

Washington society turned out en masse, including President Lincoln, to watch the self-styled “youngest star in the world,” John Wilkes Booth, play Hamlet at Grover’s Theatre. Dr. Charles Culverwell observed Booth’s debut in the capital. Having heard that the lesser parts were open to audition, Culverwell took a leave of absence and auditioned under the name Charles Wyndham. To his great surprise, he won the part of Osric. On the handbills for the play, Culverwell was described as “Charles Wyndham: first appearance of a gifted young actor.” After the opening night on April 14, 1863, no one mentioned Osric, but Booth received praise from every quarter. Many years later, Culverwell still retained vivid memories of his brief encounter with Booth:

During my introductory rehearsal I wandered about the stage and finally chose an advantageous position at a little table where I could command a good view of all the proceedings. John Wilkes noticed me there and smiled.… The courtesy and kindness shown to me by John Wilkes made way for friendship between us, and we frequently were together after the play. He was a most charming fellow, off the stage as well as on, a man of flashing wit and magnetic manner. He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I have ever listened. As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic. He could hold a group spellbound by the hour at the force and fire and beauty of him … as an actor, the natural endowment of John Wilkes Booth was of the highest. His original gift was greater than that of his wonderful brother, Edwin.… He was the idol of women. They would rave of him, his voice, his hair, and his eyes. Small wonder, for he was fascinating.… Poor, sad, mad, bad, John Wilkes Booth.
¹¹

Lord Lyons was never given the opportunity to watch Booth play Hamlet; a careless clerk in the Foreign Office had forwarded the legation’s correspondence to the printers of the parliamentary “Blue Book” without first removing the censored passages. Its arrival in mid-April caused such controversy that Lyons suffered the same hideous embarrassment that had ruined Charles Francis Adams’s Christmas. “The goodwill to me personally, which miraculously survived so long, seems at last to have sunk altogether,” wrote Lyons. The political damage was also considerable. The Blue Book had offended or alienated both supporters and enemies alike: “Unluckily the book contains just the passages in my dispatches which are most irritating to each of the parties, and which it is most inconvenient to them to have published.”
¹²
Lyons was especially worried about how the Blue Book would affect his relationship with Seward. He had heard that the secretary was annoyed and feared that it made him appear weak in his dealings with the diplomatic corps.

Lyons also braced himself for a difficult time over the
Peterhoff
affair, with Seward making public threats and statements about what the United States would and would not stand for, similar to his recent grandstanding about letters of marque. But Seward surprised him; rather than allowing the controversy to take on a life of its own, he courageously defied the objections of the abinet and returned the
Peterhoff
’s captured mailbag to Lyons. He even prevailed upon his rival Gideon Welles to transfer Admiral Wilkes to the Pacific Ocean, where there were fewer opportunities to cause trouble. The U.S. navy secretary grudgingly gave the order, but in secret Welles fantasized about the dire retribution awaiting Britain—“years of desolation, of dissolution, of suffering and blood.”
¹³
Welles’s supporters started a whispering campaign against Lyons. “Among other devices,” wrote Lyons, “is that of representing me as having made the most violent and arrogant demands about the
Peterhoff.
” This led to an unpleasant encounter with Charles Sumner at a dinner party. The senator dragged Lyons into a corner and proceeded to rail at him for overstepping his prerogative. Lyons was dumbfounded at first, then swore he had never made anything resembling a demand. He finally offered to show Sumner copies of his correspondence with Seward.
¹⁴

Lyons wondered whether he was wasting his efforts to bolster good relations between the two countries. “One hardly knows whether to wish the North success or failure in the field,” he had written to Russell during the
Peterhoff
affair.
¹⁵
Yet the Confederacy was equally bitter against England, Lyons learned from the diplomatic bags that occasionally made it out of the South.
^19.2
“It ought to have been known here from the first, but was not, that England could be no friend to the Confederacy or its cause,” declared the
Richmond Enquirer,
for example. “We have been long in finding out the truth and, before we would admit it, have endured some humiliations and insolent airs on the part of that Power, which surprised us very much, but ought not to have done so. At last the thing has become too clear.”
¹⁷

Southern rage against Britain placed Francis Lawley in a difficult position. He had completed his tour of the Confederacy and returned to Richmond at the end of March, but his report for
The Times
was taking longer than usual to compose. Anything less than unqualified praise, Lawley had discovered, was not tolerated by his hosts. He confided his exasperation to William Gregory. “I cannot impress upon you the difficulty which I find in the discharge of my present office, in avoiding topics which will be calculated to ruffle the amour propre … of the most susceptible people and government on earth.”
¹⁸

Lawley still believed in the purity of the Southern planter class as the epitome of all that was noble and intelligent in the human race. But in his opinion, the rest of the Southern population was going to the dogs: “Richmond and in a less degree, Charleston and Mobile, strike me as immense gambling booths.” He would know—many of his friends and acquaintances, including Judah Benjamin, made up the chief clientele of Richmond’s illicit “hells.” Profiteering, corruption, and hoarding were rampant. Lawley felt a visceral disappointment whenever he observed Southerners behaving like ordinary human beings in time of war, and he tried as much as possible to shut his eyes to the messy aspects of the South. He required moral clarity from the Confederates, especially now that the North was growing stronger and more aggressive. Part of him was confident that “Fighting Joe” Hooker stood no chance against Lee. But he had seen enough of the Federal army to have doubts, even if he preferred not to express them out loud. “My sole and only hope is in the demoralization of the Yankees but I have little faith in it,” he wrote to Gregory. “The truth is that the Yankee fights much better than he has been represented as fighting.”
¹⁹

On April 2, 1863, a few days after Lawley had unburdened himself to Gregory, there were bread riots in Richmond. The Confederate capital was a microcosm of the many hardships being endured across the South; hunger and disease were spreading. Smallpox had invaded the poorer neighborhoods as more refugees arrived, begging for space even if it meant sleeping outside on a porch or in a garden shed. Everything was scarce. Women who before the war bought only the finest scented soaps from France were using soap made from kitchen grease mixed with lye. Ordinary articles such as pins and buttons were so hard to come by that John Jones, the diarist in the Confederate War Department, walked to work every day with his eyes fixed on the ground hoping to find some carelessly dropped treasure in the gutter.

Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was also suffering; the men had been on half rations for so long that many were showing the first signs of scurvy. There were still plenty of foodstuffs in southern Virginia and North Carolina, particularly in the fertile tidewater regions near the coast, but over the past year, transportation had become almost impossible. The Federal occupation of Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern—all of them strategically important towns along the southeastern seaboard—was choking the Confederate supply line. On the morning of the bread riots in Richmond, General Longstreet—Francis Dawson’s new commander—received permission to attack Suffolk. The Union garrison there was weakly held, and Longstreet believed he could take it with twenty thousand men. The Confederate general had hoped to launch a surprise attack, but an intercepted message alerted the Federals to his plan.

Washington promptly dispatched thousands of troops to strengthen the garrison, forcing Longstreet to alter his battle plan from an attack to a siege. The no longer plump Englishman George Herbert of the 9th New York Volunteers (“Hawkins’s Zouaves”) was among the Union reinforcements. The regiment was thunderstruck by its mobilization. The men had only six weeks left before the terms of their enlistment expired. They had expected to remain in camp at Newport News, Virginia, where the most strenuous activity of the day was a game of baseball against the 51st New York. The men “are all anxiously looking forward to our final march up Broadway,” Herbert told his mother. Few of them intended to reenlist: Herbert was already planning his future in England. “I guess I shall have somewhere about $400 when I am mustered out and the more gold falls the richer I shall be,” he mused on March 31.
²⁰

Eleven days later, on April 11, Herbert and his comrades disembarked at Portsmouth Naval Yard. The regiment stood listlessly under pelting rain as inquiries revealed that Suffolk was already under siege by Longstreet’s forces. The trains had been canceled and there were no available wagons. The soldiers were forced to march twenty-seven miles over railroad ties, loaded down with all their equipment. It was dark by the time they reached the Suffolk camp. No one had bothered to prepare for the regiment’s arrival, so the men went from tent to tent seeking a place to sleep. The lieutenant colonel, Edgar Kimball, found an old friend from the Mexican War and spent a few hours warming himself with his tent companion’s whiskey.

A little after 2:00
A.M.,
Kimball remembered his orders to report to General George Getty’s headquarters. On the way, however, he came across General Michael Corcoran, the boisterous commander of the Irish Brigade. In one version of what happened next, Kimball went to the aid of a sentry who was shouting at several men on horseback. Corcoran, on the other hand, claimed that Kimball suddenly emerged from the darkness and grabbed his bridle, demanding that the countersign be given. But according to all versions of the incident, Corcoran refused to give it, saying, “I am General Corcoran and staff.” This was not enough for Kimball, who began brandishing his sword, whereupon Corcoran shot him at point-blank range. Journalists at the camp rushed to telegraph the news of his death.

Kimball’s insistence on the proper countersign was initially commended as a wise precaution when the guerrilla John Mosby was about: “Under the circumstances, with a Rebel force in close proximity, an enemy might have said the same thing,” wrote a New York correspondent. When the Zouaves learned of their colonel’s death, many of them picked up their weapons and started for Corcoran’s camp. Fearing a riot, General Getty had the bugle sounded for assembly, which the men instinctively obeyed. He sat on his horse in front of the regiment and made a conciliatory speech, promising that there would be an investigation into Kimball’s shooting. The soldiers calmed down as they listened. At first they were rather pleased to hear that the general was sending them away from the camp at once. A few hours later, when they had reached Fort Nansemond, the men realized that the general had ordered them to the “extreme front.” The Zouaves spent the next twenty-two days under continuous fire from Confederate rifle pits, “so fully occupied with the enemy in front,” wrote the regiment’s historian, “that if his satanic majesty had wished to brew mischief he could have found no heart or hands in the regiment to do it for him.” None of the regiment was allowed to attend Kimball’s funeral in New York on April 20.
²¹

As more Union troops were sent to reinforce Suffolk, Longstreet realized that his small army would soon be radically outnumbered. He saw no reason to continue the siege, since enough bacon and grain to feed Lee’s army for two months had been collected during the so-called Tidewater Campaign. Longstreet was preparing to withdraw his men when a telegram arrived on May 3, 1863, ordering his immediate return to the Army of Northern Virginia: “Fighting Joe” Hooker was on the move. Longstreet tried to move as quickly as he could without jeopardizing the safety of the long wagon trains filled with supplies.

George Henry Herbert’s term of enlistment ended on the same day as Longstreet’s retreat. The Zoaves threatened to mutiny if they were kept at Suffolk a minute longer, sufficiently alarming the authorities into providing troop transports to take the Zouaves straight to New York.

Longstreet doubted that he would reach Lee in time to help him stop General Hooker’s advance. Suffolk was more than 150 miles from Fredericksburg and “Fighting Joe” had been counting on this when he devised his battle plan. The two armies had passed the winter facing each other across the banks of the Rappahannock River. Hooker tried to give the impression that he was contemplating another frontal assault on Fredericksburg in order to hide the fact that he was looking for places to ford the river upstream. Richmond was still his objective, and the Confederate army was still blocking the way; but Hooker’s strategy—one of the boldest on the Union side for the entire war—involved a sophisticated deception. He intended to force the Confederates out of their entrenched position at Fredericksburg by attacking them simultaneously from several different directions. To achieve this, he needed to disguise the whereabouts of his army until it was too late for Lee to do anything other than react defensively.