A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (85 page)

When Lee and his army reached Culpeper Court House on June 9, Stuart put on another review, this time without the flower girls. But the feeling among the observers was that the cavalry general had become far too interested in showmanship. Lee commented acidly to Stuart about a Northern commander who had also bedecked himself with flowers—just before a defeat. Francis Lawley wrote damningly that Stuart was “much too fond of frolics and dancing and being flattered.”
²⁵
As soon as the performance ended, the men dispersed in readiness for the long march in the morning. Lee planned to take the army across the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley and head due north; Stuart was meant to be diverting attention rather than attracting it, so that Lee would have time to put sufficient distance between himself and his pursuers.

At 4:30 in the morning on June 9, the first divisions of Union general Alfred Pleasonton’s 11,000-strong cavalry corps splashed across the Rappahannock on a mission to “to disperse and destroy the rebel force” at Culpeper. Stuart’s antics had led the Federal cavalry straight to him; fortunately for the Confederates, Hooker’s information was several days old and he was unaware that the entire Army of Northern Virginia was nearby or that it was about to begin the journey northward. Woken by the sound of firing, Stuart scrambled out of his tent on Fleetwood Hill, which overlooked Brandy Station, and shouted to his officers to block the river fords. He was too late; half the Federal cavalry was already across the river.

Sir Percy Wyndham, restored to brigade command and in high spirits, led the second half of the corps, which forded the Rappahannock in midmorning. He was trotting toward Brandy Station when an artillery gun on top of Fleetwood Hill began firing shells at their feet. There was only the one gun at Stuart’s headquarters, but Wyndham could not know that. He shouted for the brigade to halt and take up a defensive position. A Federal artillery gun was pointed in the offending direction and fired back. Half an hour later, the 1st New Jersey Cavaliers made the first of six charges against Stuart’s position on Fleetwood Hill. Wyndham had trained his men to use their sabers, which at the time they had scoffed at as fancy Old Worldism, but now that they were fighting up close with the horses wheeling and rearing, the saber proved by far the most effective weapon. Their Confederate opponents were outraged and bewildered; one of them shouted, “Draw your pistols and fight like gentlemen!”
²⁶

The thunderous galloping of thousands of horses caused a swirling brown cloud to envelop the hill as cavalry units charged and countercharged one another for almost seven hours. At various times during the day, each side briefly gained control of the crest. The Confederates captured Wyndham’s artillery and two of his best officers were killed, yet the 1st New Jersey Cavaliers fought on until they were surrounded and their only path of retreat was through the enemy. Wyndham remained in command, despite a bullet having sliced through his calf, until all his men were off the hill and safely back across the Rappahannock.

Wyndham exhorted the regiment to take pride in its performance. Though they had not ended with possession of the hill, his troops had behaved nobly, he wrote the following day, “standing unmoved under the enemy’s artillery fire, and when ordered to charge, dashing forward with a spirit and determination.”
²⁷
The Battle of Brandy Station fulfilled Wyndham’s dream of leading his own cavalry charge. The disappointments and frustrations of the past year were eclipsed by the brilliant performance of his troops under fire. The exhausted soldiers relished his delight. Wyndham “paid the regiment the highest compliments for its steady and dashing charges,” wrote one of his officers to the governor of New Jersey on June 10. “He goes to Washington today [to the hospital]. We hope he will soon return, as he cannot be spared from his command.”
²⁸

The Battle of Brandy Station was a turning point for the Federal cavalry. Though its 866 casualties were nearly twice as many as the Confederates’, the Union cavalry had come of age. Even Charles Francis Adams, Jr., whose squadron played only a small part in the fighting, gained confidence from the fight. But for Pleasonton’s mistiming of the two river crossings, he told Henry, they would have “whipped Stuart out of his boots.”
²⁹
Charles Francis Jr. was right. If Pleasonton had coordinated the corps better so that the two divisions had attacked simultaneously rather than six hours apart, Stuart would have been smashed to pieces. Reflecting on the battle many years later, one of Stuart’s officers commented that Brandy Station “made the Federal cavalry.”
³⁰
Similarly, the battle ruined Jeb Stuart’s aura of invincibility; the fact that he had ultimately held his ground did not excuse his carelessness in allowing the surprise attack or lessen the shame of his having to call on infantry reinforcements for help.

—

Lee could not afford to let the near debacle at Brandy Station slow the momentum of his army. The departure for Maryland proceeded as planned. The Second Corps under Ewell headed toward the lower Shenandoah Valley, with Longstreet following close behind. On June 13 the Third Corps quietly slipped away from Fredericksburg, leaving their Federal opponents to discover that the weeklong sparring had simply been a feint rather than the preparation for a large battle. General Hooker realized he had been tricked, but his latest intelligence told him only that the Confederate army was somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley. The best he could do was to keep the Army of the Potomac moving north while protecting Washington against surprise attacks.

The skirmishing at Fredericksburg had been a gentle introduction to warfare for Company F of the 7th Maine Infantry, a unit of new recruits that arrived in Virginia on May 23, 1863. Walking fresh into a battle-hardened regiment was not usually a pleasant experience for recruits. But the newest and youngest member of Company F had no difficulty in endearing himself to his comrades. Nineteen-year-old Frederick Farr was a runaway from England who had enlisted under the alias Frederick Clark. His father was the celebrated epidemiologist William Farr, who pinpointed the cause of the great cholera epidemic of 1848. The last that Farr Sr. had heard from his son was in January, when Frederick wrote to say he was studying hard for his civil service exams. Three weeks later, on February 26, Frederick had secretly boarded the
Anglo-Saxon
for Portland, Maine.

Back at home, Dr. Farr called at the American legation to swear an affidavit that Frederick was underage and had enlisted without his parents’ permission. He also fired off letters to his Northern friends in the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Statistics Office begging for their help. Joseph Kennedy of the Census Bureau petitioned Seward, Lyons, and even General Hooker on Farr’s behalf. Kennedy tried to have Frederick transferred to General Pleasonton’s staff, where his own son was an aide, and he engaged a local lawyer in Maine to visit the boy. The lawyer returned with unexpected news: the youth had only ever wanted to be a soldier and had refused his help. “He is very popular with his superior officers and is as disinclined to leave the service at present as they are indisposed to part with him.” All the lawyer could do for now was ask the regiment’s colonel and the governor of Maine (both of whom were personal friends) to take an interest in Frederick’s welfare.
³¹

On June 8, Joseph Kennedy cornered Lord Lyons at a ball given by the Brazilian minister. Kennedy continued pressing Farr’s case until Lyons explained that even in the best circumstances—when the law had been clearly transgressed—his appeals to Seward often failed to win a release.
³²
That day, Lyons had been shown one of the saddest letters yet received by the legation. A Miss Hodges in Baltimore had written about her fiancé, Bradford Smith Hoskins, who had been killed on May 30, during a skirmish between Federal cavalry and Mosby’s Rangers. Hoskins had been in America for less than six months, and with Mosby for only six weeks. Federal troopers had carried the mortally wounded officer into a nearby farmhouse belonging to the Green family, who took pity on the Englishman dying so far from home and buried him in their family plot in the cemetery across the way. Unfortunately, the Federals’ magnanimous gesture was undermined by the theft of his personal effects. Miss Hodges begged Lord Lyons to track down the missing articles and have them returned to Hoskins’s father in England. The minister dutifully began the laborious task of finding the thief.
^21.5
34

Lyons was longing for a respite from the daily grind of appeals and rejections. He half hoped that the rumors of an imminent attack by the Confederates were true. “There is some chance of communication between Washington and the North being interrupted, as it was at the beginning of the war,” Lyons wrote to his sister on June 16. “The interruption of my correspondence for a few days would be a most enjoyable relief to me.”
³⁵
But he suspected there was no real danger, except to Lee. Lyons thought the general had made “a perilous move” by launching another invasion, even though the mere suggestion of his coming had created panic in Washington. Sir Percy Wyndham was ordered out of his bed and told to round up all available horsemen for the city’s defense.

^21.1
It was the second tragedy to strike the Lewis family. Lewis’s daughter had died in childbirth some weeks before, leaving the infant son to be brought up by her grieving husband, William Vernon Harcourt. The double loss (Lewis had been like a father to Harcourt) led to Harcourt’s temporary withdrawal from public life. He stopped writing his pro-Northern essays, which had appeared in
The Times
under the pen name “Historicus,” and remained a widower until 1876, when he married Elizabeth Motley, the daughter of the American historian John Lothrop Motley.

^21.2
John had disappeared while leading a reconnaissance mission at Vicksburg. A friend on the Federal side made inquiries but could find no record of his capture. An investigation after the war found evidence that he had run into a Federal scouting party, which shot him and dumped his body.

^21.3
The wealthy Beresford Hope and his brother-in-law Lord Robert Cecil, the future Marquis of Salisbury and prime minister, were both haunted by the fear that American-style democracy might one day infect British politics. But whenever Beresford Hope adopted a cause, he embraced it with fanatical intensity. He romanticized the South to an absurd degree, publishing three pamphlets in support of its independence. “I honestly and entirely believe,” he wrote, “that the cause which will tend to the confirmation of all the evils of slavery, is that of the North, and that the cause which is most likely to prove a benefit to the slave, and in the end relieve him of his shackles, is that of the South.” A. Beresford Hope,
The Remnants of the American Disruption,
p. 44 (London, 1862). The statue of Stonewall Jackson was not finished until 1874, but Beresford Hope had remained committed to the project and paid the shipping costs. The unveiling ceremony took place in Richmond, Virginia, the following year in front of fifty thousand people, including many survivors of Jackson’s cavalry.
⁹

^21.4
Forbes and Aspinwall were two wealthy businessmen and philanthropists who had arrived in the spring bearing $10 million in government bonds. Seward had sent them to England on a secret mission to purchase any ships that could be used by the Confederates for their navy. Only a handful of people were meant to know the details, but Forbes and Aspinwall had been in England for less than a week when
The Times
received a tip-off. Thwarted by their exposure, they gave a considerable portion of their money to Consuls Dudley and Morse for their espionage operations—with more immediate and probably far more effective results.

^21.5
Several months went by as the case moved slowly down the chain of command until it reached the colonel of the 5th New York Cavalry. He discovered that it was one of his troopers who had taken the bag. The article was proffered up, with Hoskins’s belongings still inside, and passed back up the chain to Washington. It was a melancholy triumph for Lyons, but he was glad to inform the Reverend Hoskins in Kent that his son’s belongings were on their way home.
³³

TWENTY-TWO
Crossroads at Gettysburg

The anguish of Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—Colonel Fremantle meets Robert E. Lee—The view from the oak tree—The Federals hold—Lawley’s painful duty

T
he train carrying the English colonel Arthur Fremantle pulled into Richmond on the morning of June 17, 1863, while more than a hundred miles away the Army of Northern Virginia was crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley. Francis Lawley had already left Richmond, hoping to reach Lee before the army disappeared entirely. Lawley was weighed down by a sense of foreboding, even though his reports maintained their jaunty tone. His boast that “Vicksburg will never fall” was simply propaganda, he had admitted to the Marquess of Hartington in a confidential letter of June 14. It looked increasingly doubtful that the besieged town could withstand Grant for much longer. “If it falls the Confederacy may hold out and will strive to hold out for years,” he wrote. “But bisected & perforated everywhere by its enemies its fortunes will be at zero. No successes which Lee can gain in Virginia will be set off against the fall of Vicksburg.” Mindful of Hartington’s new position as undersecretary for war, Lawley appealed to his military instincts, urging him to lobby for Southern recognition so that Britain would have an ally if the North turned its million-strong army toward Canada.
¹