A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (86 page)

“I hear everyone complaining dreadfully of General Johnston’s inactivity in Mississippi, and all now despair of saving Vicksburg,” Fremantle wrote in his diary. He had spent his first day in Richmond visiting with as many government officials as would receive him.
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He eventually managed to gain access to the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin—“a stout dapper little man” in Fremantle’s opinion—whose anteroom was crowded with supplicants waiting for an audience. Benjamin gravely pressed upon him England’s moral responsibility in allowing the bloodshed to continue—one word about recognition and the war would end, he claimed. When Fremantle brought up the specter of Britain’s losing Canada if she grappled with the North, Benjamin laughed at the possibility: “They know perfectly well you could deprive them of California … with much greater ease.” This was a novel idea that Fremantle was too polite to pursue.
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After their interview, Benjamin escorted Fremantle to Davis’s house. The president served him tea, the first that Fremantle had seen during his travels, while they discussed the risks to England if she supported the Confederacy. Although Davis avoided talking about the current fighting, he alluded bitterly to the suffering wrought by Union armies. His own family had been made homeless after Federal soldiers torched his brother’s plantation in Mississippi, having forced the tearful occupants out onto the lawn to watch the destruction. He defended the behavior of Confederate soldiers and denied that they shot men who surrendered. (The fate of Negro regiments at Charleston and also Port Hudson in 1864 would put the lie to this claim.) This gave Fremantle the opportunity to question him about Colonel Grenfell’s legal trouble with the state authorities. “He was very sorry when I told him,” wrote Fremantle, as “he had heard much of his gallantry and good services.”
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But Davis was not unduly troubled by Grenfell’s departure; there seemed to be no shortage of foreign volunteers.
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“When I took my leave about 9 o’clock, the President asked me to call upon him again,” wrote Fremantle. He felt sorry for him; Davis looked much older than his fifty-five years. He face was lined and emaciated, his eyes were evidently hurting him, yet “nothing can exceed the charm of his manner, which is simple, easy, and most fascinating.”
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This was an uncharacteristic description of a man who was generally considered to be haughty and cold, and too enamored of his military record during the Mexican-American War to listen to the advice of his generals. On the night of June 19 there was an explosion of thunder and lightning over Richmond. The clattering of rain followed by a rush of cool air made a pleasant end to Fremantle’s last hours in the city. He was packing in preparation for a dawn departure by train to Culpeper, where he hoped to obtain a horse and ride to Lee’s headquarters at Berryville.

The drought also broke at Middleburg, near the northern Virginia border, finally ridding the countryside of its pervasive smell of rotting horses.
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Water flowed through the camp of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, flooding the tents, many of which stood empty. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was alone in his, struggling to make sense of the past forty-eight hours. Only four days ago he had been studying William Howard Russell’s published diary for accuracy and bias, wondering if the authorities had forgotten the regiment’s existence. After the Battle of Brandy Station, General Pleasonton had ordered the cavalry to pursue the Confederate army into the Blue Ridge Mountains and bring him definitive intelligence of its direction. Jeb Stuart had placed his troopers in front of the three mountain gaps to hold the Union cavalry off. Both he and his men were trying to blot out their recent near humiliation; Pleasonton’s cavalry were no less determined to prove that they were the Confederates’ equals or better. The 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had always previously ended up on the sidelines or been held in reserve, but this time they were assigned to Kilpatrick’s brigade and sent to break the Confederate hold at Aldie, the northernmost gap in the Blue Ridge. They roared into the village on the morning of the seventeenth, easily driving off the rebel pickets, but when they turned back for another sweep, they were hit by a countercharge of Confederate reinforcements. Charles Francis Jr.’s squadron became trapped at the foot of a hill. “My poor men were just slaughtered and all we could do was to stand still and be shot down,” he wrote in anguish to his brother Henry. “In twenty minutes and without fault on our part I lost thirty-two as good men and horses as can be found in the cavalry corps. They seemed to pick out my best and truest men, my pets and favourites. How and why I escaped I can’t say, for my men fell all around me.”
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He was racked by guilt and grief over his losses. The army’s leaders were butchers, he wrote bitterly to Henry; the “drunk-murdering-arson dynasty” of Hooker and the rest had to be expelled before they did Lee’s work for him.

Ill.41
General Longstreet’s corps crossing the Blue Ridge from the Shenandoah to the Rappahannock, by Frank Vizetelly.

Jeb Stuart succeeded in driving the Federals away from the passes, but he could not prevent General Pleasonton from obtaining the information sought by Hooker. By June 22 the Federals knew for certain that Pennsylvania and not Washington was Lee’s objective. Stuart was unsure what Lee wished him to do in the face of so many threats—should he guard the gaps, follow the Confederate army up the Shenandoah Valley, or create a diversion and try to maintain the deception that the capital was in danger? Lee sent him two notes, on June 22 and 23, which the cavalry commander interpreted to mean that he could use his own judgment, provided he rejoined the main body of the army in good time. Stuart decided to go riding and raiding in between the Federal army and Washington.
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Fremantle at last arrived at Lee’s headquarters at 9:00
A.M.
on June 22. He recognized the general immediately but refrained from going up to him; the expression on Lee’s face discouraged frivolous interruption. Instead, Fremantle asked a member of the staff where he might find Francis Lawley. After introducing him to Lee’s aides, Lawley invited Fremantle to join them for breakfast. There was another guest at the table, a Prussian captain named Justus Scheibert, who was an official observer from the Royal Prussian Engineers. The conversation centered mostly on Jeb Stuart and his successful repulse of Pleasonton’s cavalry at the mountain passes. For the moment, at least, Stuart’s reputation was on a reprieve. But he had lost one of his most popular volunteers—the Prussian soldier Heros von Borcke, who had been severely wounded at Aldie.

Lawley understood Fremantle’s desire to meet Lee, but persuaded him to wait until the atmosphere was less frenetic. He suggested they leave the camp and deposit themselves ten miles farther north, at Winchester, where there would be decent lodgings and a blacksmith for Fremantle’s suffering horse. They spent the next couple of days together, exploring the battle-scarred countryside and staying out of the Confederates’ way. The houses looked bleak and dilapidated, with those still inhabited being used as hospitals for the wounded. The travelers visited the mud hole that had once been Commissioner Mason’s elegant plantation. “Literally not one stone remains standing upon another,” wrote Fremantle, surprised at the vitriol behind the Federal attack.

On June 24, leaving Lawley to write his
Times
dispatch, Fremantle went foraging for their horses without success. He eventually found virgin grass four miles outside town, but all the hay and corn had been seized long ago. He was experiencing on a small scale one of Lee’s greatest anxieties: how to feed his army. As usual, Lawley hid the situation from his readers. He conceded that the Southern army was “still ragged and unkempt” but declared that all had good shoes and that the animals were “for the most part sleek and fat.” Lawley was unable to finish his report that day or the next. He became so ill, probably with dysentery, that they had to stay behind in Winchester even though the Confederate army had resumed its northward progress. On June 25, Lawley forced himself to mount his horse and they rode all day in the rain, trying to catch up with Lee. They managed to pass some divisions of Longstreet’s corps, but the generals had already crossed the Potomac.

“It was a dreary day! The rain was falling in torrents,” recalled Francis Dawson. “General Lee, General Longstreet and General Pickett were riding together, followed by their staffs. When we reached the Maryland shore we found several patriotic ladies with small feet and big umbrellas waiting to receive the Confederates who were coming a second time to deliver downtrodden Maryland.” One of the four women held an enormous wreath that had been intended to adorn the neck of Lee’s horse, Traveler, but its size frightened the animal and it was handed to one of the general’s aides to carry. More ladies greeted them at Hagerstown, just south of the Pennsylvania state line. This time one of them asked for a lock of Lee’s hair, which he refused, offering one of General George Pickett’s instead. “General Pickett did not enjoy the joke,” wrote Dawson, “for he was known everywhere by his corkscrew ringlets, which were not particularly becoming when the rain made them lank in such weather as we then had.”
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Lawley and Fremantle rode into Hagerstown late at night on Friday, June 26. They had almost caught up with the army, but Lawley was so weak that he slumped alarmingly on his horse. Fremantle’s had gone lame; “by the assistance of his tail, I managed to struggle through the deep mud and wet,” he wrote, until after seventeen very long miles they bribed a Dutchman with gold to let them stay the night. “I dared not take off my solitary pair of boots, because I knew I should never get them on again,” recorded Fremantle. Twenty-four hours earlier, in England, the
Times
’ managing editor, Mowbray Morris, was writing optimistically to Lawley to keep going just a little bit longer. The only real hardship was the blockade, he asserted; once that was raised, “your position will be comparatively easy and your work pleasant.”
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The following day Lawley was too ill to be moved. Deciding that his friend required medical attention, Fremantle took Lawley’s horse, which seemed marginally less likely to collapse, and set off in search of Longstreet. He found him after only an hour. Longstreet immediately sent an ambulance to fetch Lawley, and invited Fremantle to join his mess during the campaign. He informed the surprised Englishman that they had already crossed into Pennsylvania, Maryland being only ten miles wide at that point. They were heading toward Chambersburg, a small town twenty miles from Hagerstown.

After a couple of days’ observation, Fremantle realized that he was witnessing a rare event in military history: an invasion unaccompanied by mass rape and murder. Northern blacks were being robbed, assaulted, and in some cases forced at gunpoint into slavery. But since these crimes happened along the fringes of the army, Fremantle saw only minor infractions such as fence breaking or Northern whites being forced to accept worthless Confederate dollars for their goods. Fremantle thought they were remarkably ungrateful for the army’s restrained behavior “and really appear to be unaware that their own troops have been for two years treating Southern towns with ten times more harshness.”
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Francis Dawson felt proud to be riding in Longstreet’s corps. “The army behaved superbly in Pennsylvania,” he declared. “The orders against straggling and looting were strict.” He saw Lee dismount in front of a field of broken rails and tidy them up himself: “It was the best rebuke that he could have given to the offenders.” When the army entered Chambersburg, Dawson was surprised to see young men lolling on street corners. Suddenly Lee’s invading army of sixty thousand seemed small and vulnerable; there were no such “spare” men in Virginia. Dawson visited the prison where he had been held after the Battle of Antietam. There were Yankee prisoners in the yard, and for a brief moment he wanted to pelt them with stones, as had been done to him.

To maintain order, Lee had decreed that only generals and their staff were allowed into Chambersburg without a special pass. But this official reassurance was not enough to calm the townspeople: all the shops and hotels were closed and shuttered. The commissary officers could not find anyone willing to sell provisions, though they threatened to seize them by force if necessary. Lawley was recuperating at the Franklin Hotel, which was kept locked to casual passersby. Fremantle had to hammer on the doors, shouting that he was an English traveler, until they were cautiously opened.