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

by Amanda Foreman

  —

  An uneven line of soiled white flags had signaled the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4. As the medical inspector of the XIII Army Corps, Dr. Charles Mayo was among the first wave of Federal officers sent to inspect the situation inside the town.23.1 Seven thousand mortar shells had been lobbed into Vicksburg during the forty-three-day siege. In some streets, every single house had been hit; shattered glass and wooden shards lay strewn everywhere. “The blackened ruins that had once been houses” made Mayo wonder how Londoners would fare in similar circumstances. “We knew quite well that the besieged would be unable to take charge of their own. As it was we found their sick in a most miserable plight,” he wrote. “The state of their hospitals was such that a regard for our own safety compelled us to place them in the hands of our own medical officers for instant purification and speedy abolition. They had come to the end of their resources. About 15,000 men fit for duty was all that remained of Pemberton’s army: his sick numbered 6,000 or 7,000.”8

  The fighting continued, however, and although Pemberton had finally given up Vicksburg, General Johnston had no intention of surrendering the regiments under his control. He decided to make a stand at Jackson, whose citizens were still struggling to resurrect the city after its occupation in May. Frank Vizetelly reluctantly decided that it was time for him to leave the Mississippi Delta before the Federals seized control of the last railroads going east. He made it out just in time: on July 7, 46,000 U.S. troops, led by General Sherman himself, crossed the Big Black River and were only twenty miles from Jackson. But the journey quickly became a nightmare once the parched and dusty soldiers discovered that the retreating Confederates had fouled all the wells. Sherman was forced to send his mule teams back to the Big Black River to collect drinking water for his thirsty army. At Jackson, he encountered another problem: the Confederates were too well entrenched to be dislodged by anything except a sustained artillery barrage—the kind that required much more ammunition than the Federals had brought. It took less than an hour for the Union batteries to fire all their available shells. Sherman hastily sent his ordnance officers to round up all the army’s reserves. In the meantime, the guns remained silent.

  Ill.42 Rebels marching out of Vicksburg and stacking arms.

  Helpless until the ammunition arrived, the Union soldiers fortified their positions with heavy bales of cotton brought in from the surrounding countryside by heavily guarded wagon trains. Undaunted by the capture of the previous wagon train, Ebenezer Wells set off with his, despite having an escort that was only half strength. “I was about six miles out, riding along in front of my teams,” he wrote, when “I was startled by a shot passing close to me.” It seemed to be coming from a nearby cornfield. One of the guards became frightened and jumped into a wagon. As he landed, his gun went off, firing a bullet into Wells’s best friend. Torn between saving the wounded officer and protecting the supply train, Wells shouted for the wagons to keep moving without him and carried his friend to the edge of the road. “I knelt beside him while he told me his last message home,” he recorded. The officer begged him to send his watch and Bible home to his family. “Then, asking me to take his hand but not to move it for the pain, he told me to go as I was in danger.” Wells reluctantly galloped off after his wagons. Traveling down the same road on the return journey, he was horrified to see a large red stain where his friend had lain. “By great favour the general allowed me to have a funeral,” wrote Wells. The ammunition had arrived and the guns were firing when the burial took place, the priest’s words drowned out by the roar of the artillery.9

  The next day, July 17, 1863, a lone black civilian was spotted walking away from the city carrying a white flag.10 Johnston had led his army out during the night, leaving Jackson silent and empty but for a few hundred frightened citizens. The Federals marched in and captured some Confederate stragglers, among them an Englishman named Captain Frederick Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment. Two years later, after he had escaped to England, Captain Hampson still shuddered at his treatment:

  Ill.43 The surrender of Vicksburg—view of the city from the riverbank showing part of the river batteries.

  When captured by the enemy I was stripped of my clothes, even my shoes then robbed of my money, watch and rings. [I] was then marched a distance of 45 miles to Vicksburg barefoot, and on the route was grossly insulted by the privates and some officers of the Federal Army: I experienced fearful suffering from hunger, exposure and thirst, not being allowed to leave the ranks, and when we bivouacked [we had] no tents or covering to protect us from the weather; it raining almost all the time.… I remained in their hands until about the middle of August, when I succeeded with two more brother officers in effecting my escape from Vicksburg, thence to New Orleans, and from there made the best of my way (via New York by water) to England.11

  Ebenezer Wells had fallen victim to “Mississippi fever” and was too ill to celebrate the Federal capture of Jackson, becoming another of the delirious, groaning soldiers whom Dr. Mayo tried to keep alive long enough to be transported to the North. Mayo had more than five hundred patients in his field hospital, ninety of them under his personal care. He was no longer living in a tent, but on a steamboat next to the hospital ships. Lord Lyons’s reply to his letter reached him there. Though disappointed by the minister’s refusal to pass his resignation on, Mayo was gracious in his response, apologizing for placing him in an uncomfortable position: “Of course I had no right to expect any other reply than that which I have just received,” he replied to Lyons in late July. “Two months of sickness in a climate like this, incurred through a blunder made by a Washington office-assistant do not tend to improve a man’s temper, nor to reconcile him to his position. I intend to leave this district with or without orders, at the first opportunity.”12

  —

  “The fall of Vicksburg has made me ill all the week,” James Spence wrote to Mason.13 The Times downplayed the news at first, but on July 23, Charles Francis Adams noted that the paper “condescends to admit this morning that Vicksburg is taken.” Three days later, The Times was also forced to concede the Federal capture of the Mississippi River—Port Hudson had surrendered to General Nathaniel Banks on July 9 after a forty-eight-day siege.

  As soon as Henry Hotze recovered from the shock of the news—no one had expected Vicksburg to surrender, let alone General Lee to falter—he began rallying his supporters in the press. It was imperative that they halt the now precipitous slide of Confederate bonds. “You will not be surprised that I am giving to my operations an extension which only the urgencies of the crisis could warrant,” he informed Judah Benjamin. Hotze had pulled off the extraordinary feat of persuading a religious publishing house to include in every publication, religious and nonreligious, for the next two months, a Southern pamphlet entitled “Address to the Christians Throughout the World.” Signed by the ninety-six clergymen of Richmond, the “Address” urged fellow Christians to protest against Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.14 Hotze estimated that it would be read by 2 million people.15 This and the obvious shock felt by the British public were his only comfort.

  There was outrage in the legation at the lack of enthusiasm in England over the Northern successes. The Economist described Lee’s defeat as a tragedy because it meant a prolonging of the war.16 “The salons of this great metropolis are in tears,” Adams wrote cynically in his diary. “Tears of anger mixed with grief.” He was still smarting over the ignominious end to Mrs. Adams’s weekly parties; not even Benjamin Moran bothered to attend the final one.23.2 The assistant secretary had ceased to attend out of protest, having been cast into a jealous agony ever since George Sheffield, one of Lord Lyons’s unpaid attachés, visited the legation and innocently revealed that Lyons invited the junior diplomats to every dinner. Moran blamed Henry Adams for stealing his rightful place. Ironically, Henry had recently written to Seward’s son, Frederick, pleading for an increase in salary in recognition of Moran’s services: “He is an invaluable man,�
�� he wrote, “a tremendous worker, and worth any ten ordinary officers to Government, but here he has borne nine tenths of the labour of the Legation for seven years, and gets for it a miserable pittance of $1500 a year; about enough to support a respectable cab-driver in this city.”17

  Unaware of Henry’s intercession on his behalf, Moran behaved toward him with appalling rudeness and spite. It pained him to watch Henry slowly navigate his way into English society and start to enjoy a real life outside the legation. The younger Adams had become a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, which did not have permanent premises like Brooks’s or Boodles, but whose members were all notable figures on the literary or political stage. Henry was mystified why Lord Frederick Cavendish had championed his admission: “Whether he feels his conscience touched by the vagaries of his brother Hartington; or whether he desires to show a general and delicate sympathy with our position,” he wrote to Charles Francis Jr., “I don’t know and can’t guess.” But more important even than joining a club or being proposed by a peer, Henry had finally made a genuine friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell, known as Carlo, the son of James Gaskell, a Yorkshire MP and supporter of the North. They became lifelong friends.18

  —

  The season was drawing to a close. “The streets are full of Pickford’s vans carting furniture from the houses, and Belgravia and May Fair are the scene of dirt and littered straw,” Henry wrote to his brother. He knew he would miss the excitement. Despite everything, he liked going about in London society, “and some day in America,” he wrote, “I may astonish myself by defending these people for whom I entertain at present only a profound and lively contempt.”19

  Their father was looking forward to the summer recess: though the year had begun disastrously, none of it now seemed to matter. “The great causes of our apprehension have died away,” he wrote. “The cotton famine and Lancashire distress have not proved such serious troubles as we had feared.”20 Newspapers no longer carried alarming reports of protest meetings and “disturbances” in the mill towns. The Earl of Derby’s Central Committee was efficiently distributing almost £500,000 worth of charity, and the Poor Law Board was overseeing a £2 million public works program in Lancashire, paying the unemployed cotton workers to build sewers, pave roads, and create public parks and recreation grounds.21 Some mills were using cotton from India, even though it was of inferior quality to Southern cotton, which had almost doubled imports from 536,000 bales in 1861 to over a million in 1863. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities for workers who were willing to move away from the cotton districts. The British linen and woolen industries were enjoying a renaissance, for example, the profits from blockade running were swilling around Liverpool, and the armaments industry was having its best year ever.22 The latest figures showed that even with the dragging effects of the Morrill Tariff, the value of British trade was rising and would top £444 million for 1863. All of these developments were an encouraging counterbalance to the troubles of the cotton industry.

  —

  The legation was settling into its usual summer routine when Benjamin Moran noticed something strange. He wrote on July 27: “The steamer this week brought no Despatches whatever. This never occurred before in my time.”23

  The abrupt silence had been caused by the complete breakdown of civic order in New York. For five days, between July 13 and 17, the city lay at the mercy of fifty thousand rioters who exacted gruesome revenge on the two classes of persons they considered most responsible for the war: Negroes and those who defended them. There had been signs of working-class resentment ever since the Draft Act became law on March 3, 1863. In theory, it provided Washington with more than 3 million potential new soldiers; in practice, it netted about 100,000 reluctant conscripts and 70,000 substitutes. The draft applied to all able-bodied white males between the ages of twenty and forty-five, but the exemptions for particular family circumstances, such as only sons with widowed mothers to support, as well as the provision that allowed a man to purchase a substitute for $300, mostly benefited the middle class and native-born Americans.24 For immigrant laborers earning an average of 85 cents a day, the sum of $300 was a cruel joke. Nowhere was the resentment greater than among the 200,000 Irish immigrants of New York, many of whom felt that they had been enticed into emigrating so that they could provide “food for [gun]powder.” The editor of the Freeman’s Journal, a popular Irish newspaper in New York, demanded to know why the Irish were expected “to go and carry on a war for the nigger.”25

  Although aliens were specifically excluded from the draft, the State Department had recently tightened the rules and increased the burden of proof required from resident foreigners. Consul Archibald was struggling to keep pace with the demand for his help. There had been a sharp increase since the spring in the number of “crimpings”—kidnappings and illegal conscriptions of British subjects. The latest complaint to reach the consulate involved three Caribbean sailors who had disappeared from the Mary Harris only to reappear as unwilling seamen on board USS Tulip. Archibald wondered whether the recent strike by Irish dockworkers had something to do with the Tulip case; the shipyard owners had brought in contrabands—freed slaves—to replace the workers. The combination of the looming draft and black strikebreakers was an especially inflammable mix. The working-class Irish community was outraged that the draft applied only to whites and feared that cheaper—and better educated—black workers were out to steal their jobs.

  On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the authorities chose a half-developed block of Manhattan—Forty-seventh Street and Third Avenue—to hold the first of two lotteries for the draft. Colonel Robert Nugent of the Irish 69th New York Volunteers had been asked to oversee the lottery in the hope that this would calm Irish objections. But no other preparations had been made in case the event turned violent; there were only eight hundred policemen on duty for the entire city, and almost every New York regiment was at Gettysburg with General Meade.26 The drawing of names passed without incident, however. There were a few more fires than usual over the weekend, and the crowds watching them seemed to be on the large side, but the authorities had no hint of what was about to happen on Monday.

  When the famous Great Eastern—the largest passenger ship in the world—docked at New York on Sunday night, the disembarking passengers felt an air of menace from the onlookers. The financial agents John Murray Forbes and William H. Aspinwall were among them; in Forbes’s trunk were $6 million worth of bonds. He was standing on the quayside, fearful that he was about to be mugged, when an Irish cab driver recognized him from a goodwill visit Forbes had once paid to his regiment and offered to take him anywhere he wanted. “We rattled safely over the rough, dark streets, and I was soon glad to deposit my charge among the heaps in the old Brevoort House [Hotel],” wrote Forbes.27 A few hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle’s train pulled into New York from Pennsylvania. He had said farewell to his friends on July 9, when the Confederate army was still resting at Hagerstown in Maryland, and turned back toward the North. Fremantle’s steamship, the China, was scheduled to depart for England on Wednesday, July 15, and until then he had arranged to stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. Even though the city was searing hot, Fremantle walked the length of Broadway on Monday. “On returning to the Fifth Avenue,” he wrote, “I found all the shopkeepers beginning to close their stores, and I perceived by degrees that there was great alarm about the resistance to the draft which was going on this morning.” Inside the hotel he found a scene of pandemonium, with terrified guests begging the equally frightened concierges for protection. A mob had torched several blocks nearby and was holding back the fire brigade. Fremantle decided it would be better to wander around anonymously rather than be trapped in the hotel: “I walked about in the neighbourhood, and saw a company of soldiers [from the invalid corps] on the march, who were being jeered at and hooted by small boys, and I saw a negro pursued by the crowd take refuge with the military; he was followed by loud cries of ‘Down with the bloody nigger! Kill
all niggers!’ ”28

  The British consul was able to rescue Ann Anderson, a Barbadian ship’s cook, who was being chased down West Street by a mob. Fortunately, she had time to hammer on the doors of the consulate at No. 10 and be pulled to safety. Twenty blocks north of Fremantle’s hotel, at Forty-third and Fifth, stood the Colored Orphan Asylum, home to 237 Negro children aged twelve and under. Three thousand rioters gathered at the front, forcing the asylum superintendent hurriedly to evacuate the small occupants through the back. One little girl was left behind. She was found cowering under her bed by the rioters and beaten to death.29

  Farther downtown, another mob, heavily armed and ten thousand strong, appeared in front of the police headquarters on Mulberry Street and were confronted by two hundred club-wielding policemen. After twenty minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, the mob turned tail.30 The violence was sporadic but clearly the result of direction. Small working parties cut down the telegraph poles along Third Avenue, isolating each of the twenty-six police precincts from central command. Others stopped railroad cars and pulled up the tracks. Rioters broke into the Armory at Twenty-first Street and Second Avenue, helping themselves to the rifles and carbines within. A separate mob headed over to Newspaper Row, across from City Hall Park, where the Tribune and The New York Times had their offices. The Times editor, Henry Raymond, kept the crowd at bay with three borrowed Gatling guns, but the Tribune building had only a small band of policemen guarding its entrance.31 Rioters burst through the doors to find that the staff had used bales of newspaper to barricade the stairs. Unable to push their way through, the mob set fire to the counters and went off in search of other prey.