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

by Amanda Foreman

  The Marquis of Hartington and his friend Colonel Leslie were exploring Charleston when they learned of Wynne’s imprisonment. The Charlestonians “are much better off here than at Richmond for most things,” Hartington observed to his father. “Though most people have removed their property and slaves … in case of an attack by the enemy.” But being “better off” was not the same as being comfortable. Hartington was more candid about the situation to his mistress, Skittles: “I have lost all my luggage, & I can’t get any things here; at least very few things; & I have had to get along on one suit of clothes for a fortnight & shall for some time longer.… We have had some hunting as they call it, but it is not much like Leicestershire.”22 Apart from the ruined areas from the fire in 1861, the city was clean and orderly. The hotels were not crammed with shabby refugees like those in Richmond. But there was no escaping the fact that Charleston was under siege. The cost of living had risen eightfold since April 1861. Consul Bunch reported that salt was seventy times more expensive, there was no coal at any price, and the only cloth available for purchase was sailors’ blue serge.

  Hartington had been inclined to sail out of Charleston in a blockade runner since “there is scarcely any risk at all of being taken in one of them, especially in running out, and it would not do us much harm if we should be caught as they could only take us to some other port and then let us go.”23 Now he feared the ignominy of his position if he were to be thrown into the Old Capitol like Wynne. With the help of their new friends, Hartington and Leslie devised an overland route that relied on safe houses all the way to Washington. On February 9, Edward Malet was woken by sinister noises coming from his garden. He went outside to investigate and found Hartington and Colonel Leslie prowling in the back. They were terrified of being caught by the police; Captain Wynne had escaped from the Old Capitol prison earlier that day, causing a hue and cry in the capital.17.5

  Malet took Hartington and Leslie in for the night. “The best advice we could give them,” he wrote, “was to be off as fast as possible and stop nowhere till they were in New York.” Hartington and Leslie arrived in New York a week after their rescue by Malet, having traversed almost three hundred miles without a single incident. Hartington made up for it now by creating a wonderfully embarrassing one: he attended a ball given by the Rothschilds’ banker August Belmont, and either accidentally or purposefully sported a Confederate badge on his lapel. However, when a Union lieutenant on sick leave angrily confronted him, Hartington apologized and removed it, not wishing to be thought of as anti-Northern even though his sympathies now lay with the South.17.6

  —

  The more the blockading squadron tried to tighten its grip, the more Charlestonians enjoyed watching the blockade runners evade them and triumphantly steam into the harbor. The ships brought not only precious supplies but also news and, from time to time, British volunteers for the army. One of the first to arrive in January was Captain Stephen Winthrop, from Warwickshire and formerly of the 22nd Regiment of Foot, who braved the winter mud to seek out Robert E. Lee in Camp Fredericksburg. The general welcomed Winthrop with great courtesy, though he neither needed nor wanted another volunteer on his staff. After a short deliberation over what to do with the Englishman, Lee sent him to General Longstreet with his regards.

  Winthrop was shortly followed by two more volunteers: Henry Wemyss Feilden of the Black Watch and Bradford Smith Hoskins, formerly of the 44th Regiment of Foot and the Garibaldi Guard. The latter ended up with Jeb Stuart, who sent him to replenish John Mosby’s staff; Feilden was assigned to the defense of Charleston. Feilden’s background was similar to Colonel Currie’s; both men were public-school-educated career officers with a strong sense of personal honor and public duty. After leaving Cheltenham College in 1857, Feilden had joined the Black Watch, properly known as the 42nd Royal Highlanders. He spent his nineteenth birthday in India preparing to recapture Cawnpore, the scene of one of the worst massacres of British civilians during the Indian Mutiny. His twenty-first was celebrated in China while floundering in the deep swamp that surrounded the Taku forts; it was here that U.S. commodore Josiah Tatnall disobeyed the order to be a mere observer and sent aid to the British forces.

  Feilden’s grandfather Sir William was a mill owner from Blackburn, Lancashire, who had made a fortune in the cotton business. But Henry was the second of seven children, and one of four sons; there was never any doubt that he would have to earn his living. He sold his army commission in 1860 and returned to England in the hope of going into business. Four years of hard fighting had matured Feilden in unexpected ways; in addition to possessing considerable courage and self-confidence, he felt a strong sense of compassion for the weak and vulnerable. Many years later, Rudyard Kipling, one of Feilden’s closest friends, said of him, “I don’t believe the Colonel ever gave a man a shove downwards in all his life.”24

  The family connection with Southern cotton made Feilden all the more susceptible to Confederate propaganda. He believed the canard that the South would abolish slavery once independence had been achieved. Shorn of its moral perils, the South looked immensely attractive, especially through the sympathetic reports of Vizetelly and Lawley.25 Feilden resolved to run the blockade with a cargo of supplies, sell them at a profit, and then join the Confederate army. But once he arrived at Bermuda, Feilden discovered that Francis Lawley’s claim that Charleston was an open port was a gross exaggeration. It took three attempts and two different captains before he reached the Confederacy at the end of January.

  Feilden eventually arrived at Richmond on February 15, 1863. “The city is one great camp,” he wrote to his aunt.

  Indeed the whole country is, everyone is a soldier, and everyone is trying for military distinction. The demand for appointment as officers is enormous, so many thousand have extraordinary claims on the Executive that it is impossible to do one half of them justice. I saw at once that my chance of getting a military appointment was very small, and indeed I could not expect it otherwise. I paid a visit to the Secretary of War, presented my letter to him and other influential men, was told that if possible something would be given to me, and I received from all of them that kindness and courtesy so distinctive in the Southern gentlemen. A good number of Englishmen have, prior to this, come out to this country, and I believe with very rare exceptions they have been obliged to serve as volunteers in the Army or on some General’s staff until they have proved themselves fit for something.

  A Confederate sympathizer in Nassau had asked Feilden to deliver a box of goods to Stonewall Jackson in camp at Hamilton’s Crossing near Fredericksburg. Eager to meet the general, Feilden set off on the fifty-mile journey as soon as there was a lull in the rain and snow. But “the day I went to camp the rain came down with redoubled fury, as if it was proud of showing the earth’s dirty face, and dissipating the white mantle of snow,” he wrote.

  I stumbled through mud, I waded through creeks, I passed through pinewoods. Wet through I got into camp about 2 o’clock and made my way to a small house—the General’s Head Quarters. I wrote my name, gave it to an orderly and was immediately told to walk in. The General rose and greeted me warmly—he is so simple and unaffected in his ways and habits. I cannot illustrate this better than by telling exactly what he did—he took off my wet overcoat with his own hands, made up the fire, brought wood for me to put my feet on to keep them warm whilst my boots were drying, and then began asking me a great many questions on many subjects. We had a very pleasant conversation till dinnertime when we went out and joined the members of his staff. At dinner the General said Grace in a fervent, quiet manner that struck me much; there is a something about his face that you cannot help reverencing. He is a tall man, well and powerfully built but thin, with a brown beard and hair; his mouth is very determined-looking, the lips thin and compressed firmly together; his eyes are blue dark, with a keen and searching expression in them; his age is 38 and he looks about 40. I expected to see an old, untidy-looking man, and was surprised and pleased
with his looks.

  Henry returned to his room after dinner. The general sought him out again and offered his bed to share:

  I thanked him very much for the courtesy, but said goodnight, and slept in a tent, sharing the blankets of one of his aides-de-camp. In the morning at breakfast I noticed the General said Grace before the meal with the same fervour as I had remarked before. An hour or two afterwards it was time for me to return to the Station. This time I had a horse, and I turned up the General’s Head-quarters to bid adieu to him. His little room was vacant so I stepped in and stood before the fire: I noticed my great coat stretched before the fire on a chair. Shortly after the General entered the room. I was saying goodbye, and as I finished he said, “Captain, I have been trying to dry your great coat, but am afraid I have not succeeded very well.” That little act shows the man, does it not! To think that in the midst of his duties, with the cares and responsibilities of a vast army on his shoulders, with the pickets of a hostile army almost within sight of his quarters, he found time to think of and to carry out these little acts of thoughtfulness!

  Feilden had never encountered such personal courtesy from a British general. He returned to Richmond desperately hoping that the War Department had accepted his application. He would have accepted anything, and was thrilled to receive the offer of a captaincy and the position of assistant adjutant general in Charleston. In only a few weeks he had become as ardent a Confederate as any native-born Southerner. For the first time in years, Feilden felt at home: “I am tired of going to sea myself, I am sick of seeing new places,” he wrote, “never did I feel happier than at the present moment.” He was an efficient adjutant and quickly made friends among his fellow officers; General Beauregard pronounced himself satisfied with the latest addition to his staff.

  Charleston society was delighted with the handsome and personable English captain. “The people are the kindest I ever met,” Feilden wrote in wonder, unaware that he was making up for the loss of Consul Bunch, whose recent departure from the city had left a void that he filled perfectly. (Though the “cotton is king” attitude of the South had never ceased to irritate the consul, he had been heartbroken to receive the Foreign Office’s order to return to England.)26 Feilden’s lodgings were in one of the boardinghouses used by English blockade runners. This gave him unfettered access to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Until then, he told his aunt, he had been eating the diet of ordinary Southerners: “coffee made out of rye, or else water, crackers and old bacon or tough meat. The people of the South are suffering very much for want of good food.”27

  Neither the threat of attack nor the scarcity of luxuries had diminished Charleston’s social calendar. Francis Lawley attended a ball before setting off on his travels through the western part of the Confederacy, and he was impressed by the Southerners’ determination to keep up appearances; the shimmering silks and starched collars defied the truth of the two-year-old blockade. It was as though the closer the city came to danger, the more its inhabitants clung to their old habits. “I am finishing off this scrawl as the gentleman who is taking this to England leaves tomorrow,” Feilden wrote on March 4, 1863. “We are living here very comfortably and enjoying ourselves, although every day we expect to be attacked by the Yankee Armada.”28

  * * *

  17.1 Vallandigham reveled in being called a “Copperhead,” a term used by the Republicans to imply that the Peace Democrats were like snakes, ready to strike on behalf of the South without warning—and by the Democrats themselves to symbolize their commitment to freedom and states’ rights, since copper pennies bore the word “liberty.”

  17.2 Dr. Mayo was shocked when he visited Congress. “In both houses,” he wrote, “the occupation of members seemed to consist of calling each other traitors.” He was a witness to some of the least edifying scenes in Senate history. On January 27, 1863, Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware made his infamous harangue from the Senate floor. He was, recorded the doctor, “in a state of hopeless drunkenness, and insisted on making a speech, and when rebuked by the chairman and threatened with removal by the sergeant-at-arms, drew and cocked his revolver, and threatened to shoot any body who interfered with him.” The standoff continued for some time, until Saulsbury was persuaded to leave.

  17.3 It was General Butler who invented the term “contraband.” He was the commandant of Fortress Monroe in 1861 when three runaway slaves arrived asking for sanctuary. When their former Southern masters requested their return, Butler refused, arguing that slaves were “contraband of war,” since the South was using them as “tools” to sustain the war effort. The term stuck.

  17.4 These included former employees from the Irish estate of William Gregory, the leading Confederate sympathizer in Parliament. Gregory’s gamekeeper, Michael Conolly, had followed his family to America and volunteered for the North. His action cost him his arm at Fredericksburg. Several of Conolly’s cousins were also wounded, but his two brothers had come out of the battle unscathed. “As for my part,” Conolly wrote to Gregory from his hospital bed, “I will not be able to join the company again.”

  17.5 Wynne had escaped by “breaking out a panel in his door.” He was one of only four escapees in the prison’s history. Wynne always insisted that he acted on his own, and the legation’s records are silent on the matter.

  17.6 Hartington’s faux pas took on a life of its own. The lapel badge story was repeated ad nauseam as incontrovertible proof of the English aristocracy’s hatred of the United States. The American poet and literary critic James Russell Lowell included the incident in his diatribe against European arrogance in his essay “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners” (1869), changing the story slightly in order to have Lincoln meet Hartington after the ball and deliberately insult him for having shown disrespect toward the North.

  EIGHTEEN

  Faltering Steps of a Counterrevolution

  Attack on Charleston—British public opinion begins to change—The illustrious Maury, Pathfinder of the Seas—Espionage—Lord Russell is thwarted by John Bright—Wilkes again

  The “Yankee Armada” set sail for Charleston at the beginning of April 1863. Frank Vizetelly was still in the city and could hardly wait for the clash to take place. His reports for the Illustrated London News became increasingly one-sided as he watched the city prepare for the attack. “I have every faith in the result of the coming encounter,” he wrote, “for never at any time have the Confederates been more determined to do or die than they express themselves now.”1 More important than the Confederates’ determination, however, was the lack of preparedness of the U.S. invasion force. Dr. Mayo inspected the fleet of seven monitors18.1 and two ironclads before it left the Washington Navy Yard “and sincerely pitied those who had to go to sea in it.” The decks of the monitors were barely a foot above water. He thought the slightest turbulence would probably swamp the vessels and send them to the bottom of the sea.2 Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont was similarly pessimistic about his fleet, but the public clamor to capture and punish Charleston for starting the war was gathering force. Lincoln interpreted Du Pont’s reluctance as McClellan-like timidity. “Doom hangs over wicked Charleston,” boomed the New York Herald Tribune on the eve of the fleet’s departure. “If there is any city deserving of holocaustic infamy, it is Charleston.”3

  Ill.33 Confederates deploying torpedoes by moonlight in the harbor channel, Charleston, May 1863, by Frank Vizetelly.

  Du Pont’s fleet sailed into the harbor on April 7. At 3:00 P.M. urgent peals rang across the city, alerting the inhabitants to take cover. Confident in Beauregard’s defenses, many chose to watch from rooftops and balconies rather than hide in their houses. Frank Vizetelly ran from the Charles Hotel down to the Battery Promenade, where he jostled with the spectators for an unobstructed view of Fort Sumter. “I sketched the scene,” he wrote for the Illustrated London News, “and finished the drawing in the evening, while the garrison of Fort Sumter were repairing the damages.” Admiral Du Pont’s gloomy prediction that his
fleet would be overwhelmed was soon fulfilled. The fight lasted a mere two and a half hours. But in that time his fleet was crippled and his best ironclad steamer, the Keokuk, was sunk.

  “I don’t think the Yankees can capture Charleston, do what they will,” Henry Feilden wrote after the battle. “In six weeks more the unhealthy season will come on, and the scoundrels will die on this coast like rotten sheep.” It was his firm belief that the South would win its independence by Christmas. In the meantime, he planned to convert his entire savings into Confederate currency while it was still cheap to buy. Vizetelly was similarly ebullient about the South’s prospects of victory. “The fight may be renewed at any moment if the Federals have the stomach for the attempt,” he informed his readers back home, “but I think they have suffered too much.”4

  The U.S. secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, was furious with Du Pont for failing to put on a better show. Embarrassed by yet another naval defeat, he wondered whether it was even worth making a further attempt: “Nothing has been done, and it is the recommendation of all, from the Admiral down, that no effort be made to do anything,” Welles wrote gloomily in his diary. “I am by no means confident that we are acting wisely in expending so much strength and effort on Charleston, a place of no strategic importance. But it is lamentable to witness the … want of zeal among so many of the best officers of the service.”5