A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  The Union soldiers had fled Shiloh by the time Stanley’s regiment arrived. The Confederates were stopped in their tracks by the sight of such abundance. Here was a neat little village of tents, many with a smoking stove in front, and all surrounded by mounds of new equipment. Everything was superior to their own camp, even the bedding. The sudden resumption of cannon fire recalled them to their senses, and the soldiers moved off. A short while later—whether it was five minutes or five hours Stanley did not know—he heard a piteous cry behind him. “Oh stop, please stop a bit.” He glanced back. It was the boy with the violets. He was standing awkwardly on one leg, staring at the remains of his foot.3 Henry Stanley continued to run until something hit his belt buckle with such force that he flipped over and landed on the ground headfirst. When he came to, his regiment had disappeared and all was silent.

  As he stumbled through the forest, he almost fell again, tripping over a body lying faceup. The eyes of the dead soldier seemed to stare back at him. With a shock, Stanley recognized him as the “stout English Sergeant of a neighbouring company.… This plump, ruddy-faced man had been conspicuous for his complexion, jovial features and good humour.” The more he ran, the more bodies he encountered. The dead, he recalled, “lay thick as the sleepers in a London park on a Bank Holiday.” The rest of the day became a series of wordless images. By the time he found his company again only fifty men remained.

  Johnston and Beauregard’s Waterloo strategy fell apart in an area known as the Hornet’s Nest, where a sunken road acted like a defensive trench for the Federal troops, enabling them to hold steady for six hours against dozens of Confederate assaults. General Johnston was killed leading the final charge. A bullet tore through an artery in his leg, causing him to bleed to death in minutes. The Union soldiers holding the nest surrendered at 5:30 P.M., but by then Grant had formed a new defensive line along the river. He had been driven back two miles, but his army was still intact. “We’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” remarked Sherman to Grant after the fighting stopped. “Yes,” he said, with a short, sharp puff of the cigar; “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”4

  Grant always used simple language when he spoke. The forty-year-old general was a quiet, plain figure whose forcefulness and intelligence were cloaked behind an unassuming manner. Associates struggled to describe him: “He is rather under middle height, of a spare, strong build; light-brown hair, and short, light brown beard,” wrote an aide to General Meade. “His face has three expressions: deep thought, extreme determination; and great simplicity and calmness.” Unlike McClellan, Grant had never aspired to become an American Napoleon; he had not even intended to become a professional soldier. “A military life had no charms for me,” Grant wrote of his time at West Point, “and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.” But Grant remained in the army for eleven years, fighting in the Mexican War of 1846–48 and spending the next six years on mindless garrison duty, developing and failing to conquer a drink habit. Although happily married to his wife, Julia, and a devoted father to their four children, Grant floundered in civilian life. One year he was reduced to pawning his watch to buy Christmas presents for the family. When the war broke out, Grant was working as a clerk in his father’s tannery in Galena, Illinois—a humble climb down for the former captain. Within six months of volunteering, however, Grant had risen from colonel to brigadier general and, in addition to his old nickname in the army of “Sam”—for his initials U. S. (Uncle Sam)—had acquired the new national nickname of “Unconditional Surrender Grant” because of the terms he had offered to the defeated Confederates at Fort Donelson.5

  Sherman’s short conversation with Grant on the night of the sixth was actually one of the first between them. Sherman had suffered a nervous breakdown during the autumn of 1861 and had only recently returned to duty. Sherman was the opposite of Grant in mannerisms: his tall, wiry frame was always moving, he gesticulated as he spoke, and he often worked himself up into an excitement during conversation. But in many ways the pattern of his life was similar to Grant’s: Sherman had also struggled in civilian life; he, too, loved his wife and adored his children; and he had also fought his own private battles of the mind. The latter forged an unbreakable bond between them. Sherman later remarked: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk. And now we stand by each other always.” In turn, Grant said of him: “Sherman is impetuous, faulty but he sees his faults as well as any man.” Both were realists, neither was an abolitionist, and each approached the task of warfare in the same relentless and dogged spirit. Sherman had briefly wondered if they should retreat on the sixth, until speaking to Grant reaffirmed his resolve.

  During the night, General Buell and his reinforcements sailed down the river to Pittsburg Landing. By contrast, flooded roads and a damaged rail system meant that Van Dorn’s battle-ravaged army was still sitting 250 miles away in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was good news for William Watson and the 3rd Louisiana Regiment, who were spared the fight, but it was a disaster for Beauregard. The weather turned, and a harsh downpour pelted the living and the dead. Flashes of lightning revealed the presence of wild pigs, attracted by the smell of fresh meat. Neither side had expected such a high number of casualties, and many of the ten thousand wounded were left out on the field all night, their screams so terrible that a Confederate soldier wrote, “This night of horrors will haunt me to my grave.”6

  For many of the reinforcements, including an Englishman named Robert Neve of the 5th Kentucky Volunteers, this was their baptism of war. “Boys,” said Neve’s commander in the morning, just before sending the Union regiment off into the woods, “we shall beat them today, for their general is killed. He was shot yesterday in leading a charge.” The news had no real meaning for Neve except that his side was apparently doing better than the rebels. Yesterday the Confederates had attacked; today it was their job to return the favor. Neve’s regiment surged through the woods like hunters flushing out their prey. Occasionally, a stray shell interrupted their momentum. With every foothold gained, Neve’s confidence rose; fighting was not so bad after all.

  The exhausted Confederates made a game effort to repel the invaders. Henry Morton Stanley’s company marched forward in skirmishing order. The young soldier stood in a daze until his captain barked, “Now, Mr. Stanley, if you please,” which mortified him. He rushed blindly forward, straight into a pocket of Federal soldiers from Ohio. Two of them wanted to shoot him immediately, but an officer saved his life. As he was marched off to the Union camp, they chatted about “our respective causes, and, though I could not admit it,” he wrote later, “there was much reason in what they said.” The slavery question “could have been settled in another and quieter way, but they cared all their lives were worth for their country.”7

  General Beauregard ordered his army to retreat to Corinth, more than twenty miles away. In the confusion after the battle, along with the abandoned wagons and artillery guns that had become stuck in the mud, hundreds of wounded men were also left behind. Beauregard’s reputation for tactical genius was also a casualty, although Grant’s received a knock, too, for the way he was taken unawares on the first day. The total number of casualties was staggering: more than 23,000 men, or 25 percent of the forces engaged.

  Shiloh was not the only blow to the Confederacy. That same day, the famously abrasive and arrogant Union commander General John Pope captured another strategic point: Island No. 10 on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Journalist Edward Dicey had traveled west to Cairo, a commercial depot on the Mississippi River just above the Mason-Dixon Line. He watched as great hospital steamboats disgorged their wounded from Shiloh and Island No. 10. “All day and all night long you heard the ringing of their bells and the whistling of the steam.” Piles of coffins waited on the jetty “with the dead men’s names inscribed upon them, left standing in front of the railway offices.”8

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  In Virginia, General
McClellan had already landed two-thirds of his army at Fortress Monroe, which guarded the entrance to Hampton Roads, and was marching up the peninsula toward Richmond when the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, sent a small fleet to attack the remainder of the ship transports. On April 11, the Merrimac, accompanied by six vessels, steamed toward the Federal fleet and its Monitor. Francis Dawson had been assigned to the Beaufort, which, despite its grand-sounding name, was only a small tugboat with one gun. “The general idea was that the Monitor would be overwhelmed by the combined attack,” wrote Dawson. But the Monitor refused to leave the cover of Fortress Monroe, disappointing HMS Rinaldo and the two French warships that had moved in to observe the fight. One of the Confederate gunboats did manage to capture three transports, which elicited an indiscreet cheer from the Rinaldo, but otherwise little was achieved in the expedition. When Dawson returned to the base, he was relieved to learn that he was being transferred. Captain Pegram had been given command of an ironclad in New Orleans, and Dawson was to join him.9

  The French minister, M. Mercier, visited Richmond a few days later, on April 16, expecting to hear talk of surrender.10 Instead, that after-noon, the Confederate Congress—which had only 26 senators and 135 representatives—passed a draft law conscripting all able-bodied men between eighteen and thirty-five. When Mercier met with his old friend Judah Benjamin, who had been transferred by Davis from the War Department to the State Department in March, he was told that the South would fight to her last breath. Northerners were “a people for whom we feel unmitigated contempt as well as abhorrence,” Benjamin declared with uncharacteristic heat.11 Sitting in the new Confederate secretary of state’s spacious but austere office in the former U.S. Customs House, Mercier realized that Benjamin was hoping that the French could be enticed into breaking the blockade in return for cotton and the promise of a free trade agreement. But Mercier knew it was not France that needed persuading.

  When Mercier returned to Washington on April 24, Lyons went to see him immediately, worried that his impetuous colleague had made promises to the Confederates that would undo their joint policy of neutrality. Mercier was more excited than usual. He spoke eloquently of the Southern spirit and the reasons why France and Britain should cease dallying and recognize the Confederacy’s independence. The South was preparing to recoup its losses, he insisted. Even now, the Confederates were on the verge of completing a second ironclad that would render New Orleans invincible to naval attack. Moreover, they were prepared to lose Richmond, Tennessee, “New Orleans and all their seaports, and indeed the whole of the coast.”12 But even as Mercier was talking, a fleet of U.S. gunboats was bearing down on New Orleans, having subdued the supposedly impregnable forts that defended her.

  The city officially surrendered on April 26. The train on which Francis Dawson and his friend Captain Pegram were traveling was within twenty miles of New Orleans when it pulled onto a side track. To their astonishment, train after train came rumbling past in the other direction, each one packed with evacuating Confederate soldiers. “There was no choice for us but to go back to Virginia,” Dawson wrote. The much-vaunted ironclad that should have been Pegram’s next command was out of their reach. “The journey back was worse than the journey down, as the delays were multiplied,” Dawson remembered. Despite Mercier’s optimism, this last defeat was sending waves of panic through the South. “New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy,” came the anguished cry of the diarist Mary Chesnut.13 Rumors that General McClellan was almost at Richmond sent people rushing out of the city. Clerks packed up the government archives and prepared them for removal; President Davis put his wife and children on the train for Raleigh, North Carolina.14

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  For six days, until the arrival of Union general Benjamin Butler and his 15,000 troops, New Orleans was a city on the verge of anarchy. Fires burned unchecked; looters roamed at will; all commerce, including the delivery of foodstuffs, abruptly stopped. Rioters stormed the mint, and one, William Mumford, succeeded in tearing down the U.S. flag that had been installed on Union admiral David Glasgow Farragut’s orders. It was then dragged through the streets of the city. In retaliation, Farragut warned that he was sending his men ashore and would bombard the city unless the U.S. flag was flown from City Hall. The desperate mayor turned to the foreign consuls to save New Orleans from immolation. He begged them to send the 4,500-strong European Brigade, which was made up of foreign neutrals who were not liable for the draft, but who had volunteered for civil defense duty.15 The arrival of the French warship Milan allayed the consuls’ trepidation about sending a group of middle-aged “merchants, bankers, underwriters, judges, real-estate owners and capitalists” into riot duty. The Brigade proved to be a poor substitute; as darkness descended each night, recalled an observer, the city glowed by the light of the arsonist’s torch, and the faint but urgent ringing of fire bells wafted out across the water.16

  On May 1, twenty-five hundred Northern soldiers marched through rubble and trash-strewn streets to take up positions in the chief public buildings. The residents of the magnificent St. Charles Hotel in the French Quarter were turned out to make way for General Butler and his retinue, while the customs house became his headquarters. Butler let it be known that henceforth every citizen would live and abide by his rules alone. “The hand that cuts your bread can cut your throat,” he announced.17 Butler was one of the first politicians to be made a general in the volunteer army. It was his success in raising regiments—and his support for the war as a Democrat—rather than any previous military experience that won him the rank. He had joined the Massachusetts militia as a twenty-one-year-old, and had risen to become a brigadier general without ever hearing a shot in battle. A successful lawyer by profession, Ben Butler could fight hard and dirty when circumstances demanded. Force of will and astute backroom tactics had won him the military command of the New Orleans operation—a remarkable feat considering that his two previous commands had been marred by breathtaking incompetence.

  Among Butler’s first acts was the capture and execution of William Mumford, who was strung up from the same flagpole that had flown the desecrated U.S. flag. He also issued a raft of edicts: Any house used by sharpshooters would be destroyed.18 Shopkeepers who refused to sell to Union officers would have their goods confiscated. Overt displays of partisanship would be judged without mercy—a woman who laughed loudly at a passing Union funeral cortege was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.19 Almost anyone who wished to do business in the city was first required to take an oath of allegiance.

  Nor was Butler troubled in the least by diplomatic niceties. When the foreign consuls protested against their citizens’ having to take loyalty oaths, he invited them to leave the city. He declared all foreign funds in their safekeeping to be Confederate contraband and therefore liable to seizure. Union soldiers forced their way into the Dutch consulate and bullied the hapless consul into opening his vault. When Butler attempted the same with the French consulate, however, Count Mejan reminded him that a French warship was moored on the river. Butler also punished members of the British Guard (a company in the European Brigade) who had sent their uniforms and weapons to friends in the Confederate army. Two were imprisoned and another thirty-seven were forced to leave the city.20

  Lord Lyons thought it was “very imprudent” for the British Guard to engage in such partisan behavior, but he was sufficiently alarmed by Consul Mure’s reports to order the Rinaldo to proceed to the city. New Orleans had always been a byword for lawlessness and truculence, and the absence of menfolk did little to cow its abandoned wives and daughters. These female Southerners wore Confederate colors, sang songs, hissed, spat, turned their backs, and on one famous occasion dumped the contents of a chamber pot on Union soldiers. In retaliation, on May 15, Butler issued General Order No. 28, which held that “hereafter, when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable
to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Washington dismissed the document as a crude piece of Southern propaganda, until newspapers from New Orleans confirmed it.21

  Butler’s “Woman Order” galvanized the South more effectively than any speech or partial victory might have achieved.22 The Confederate armies in the west had become demoralized after the recent spate of defeats. The loss of Island No. 10 had increased federal control of the Mississippi River to within attacking distance of Memphis, the Confederacy’s fifth-largest city and the river gateway into Mississippi. Many of the regiments in General Beauregard’s army had come to the end of their twelve-month terms and wanted to return home. One of his corps commanders, Braxton Bragg, who was promoted to general after Shiloh, refused to let them go, and to make his point, deserters were shot without trial. William Watson’s 3rd Louisiana were among the twelve-month regiments. The men were furious with Bragg until the “Woman Order” became known. “The feeling of indignation which was roused by Butler’s acts overcame in a great measure the disaffection that had been fast spreading through the army,” wrote Watson. “Many were roused to a spirit of revenge … not that they hated Davis and his Bragg the less, but that they hated Lincoln and his Butler the more.”23

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