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

by Amanda Foreman

  Ill.60 Richmond, Virginia, after capture by the Federals, by Thomas Kennard.

  Shells screaming, passed us, some bursting a few feet off us, volley of bullets coming in every direction [wrote Welly]. Every now and then, I heard bullets go with a thud into some unfortunate soldier, who would give a scream and all was over. I had a very narrow escape by a Parrot [sic] shell passing within 2 inches of my head and bursting within a foot of me, by coming in contact with a tree, a piece of it killing a man about a hundred yards off. It certainly was very exciting. People may talk about hunting, but a good battle is a 100 times more exciting.7

  The surrounded Confederates tried to fight their way through, many resorting to fists and teeth if they had no weapons.38.1 But after five hours the two divisions surrendered, making prisoners of nine Confederate generals (including Custis, Lee’s eldest son) and almost eight thousand soldiers. The gray countryside turned black with the smoke rising from burning wagons. Lawley looked about him and saw “exhausted men, worn-out mules and horses, lying down side by side—gaunt famine glaring hopelessly from sunken lack-lustre eyes—dead mules, dead horses, dead men everywhere—death, many times welcomed as God’s blessing in disguise.”9

  Lee dragged the remains of his army across the Appomattox River and reached Farmville on April 7. The precious rations were waiting for him, but also the news that the way ahead to Appomattox Station, twenty-five miles west of Farmville—where the rest of his supplies had been sent—was blocked by Sheridan. Straggling had diminished Lee’s army to fewer than 13,000 men, yet when he received a note from Grant on the evening of the seventh asking for surrender to avoid “any further effusion of blood,” he tried to use the correspondence to buy time while his officers looked for an escape route to Danville. That night, General Fitz Lee sent Welly to deliver a note to his uncle, Robert E. Lee, who was, wrote the British officer, “quite calm, although the Army is in such a state.”10 The next day was even worse for the Confederates. “No food, and marching all day. It is a fearful sight to see the state of our Army, hundreds upon hundreds lying in the road, not able to move from hunger and fatigue,” wrote Welly. “The enemy surround us on all sides.” Lee’s army was so depleted that one brigade had only eight men.11

  During the night of April 8, Lee’s senior commanders, Longstreet, Gordon, and Fitz Lee, gathered in a copse near Appomattox Court House to discuss the possible courses left open to them. Fitz Lee did not wish to be a part of any surrender, and informed his uncle that he would take the remainder of his corps and flee southward. But the others were prepared to surrender with Lee if their final attempt to escape failed. Though there were only 10,000 soldiers present for duty against a pursuing force of 116,000, the generals agreed there should be one last attempt to break through Grant’s encirclement: “At 6 A.M., our line of battle is formed,” wrote Welly. “The whole line move forward under heavy shelling from the enemy, our men seem mad with rage, they charge the enemy who are ten times their number, and drive them before them, killing all that come in their way, taking no prisoners, but for all that it is no good, the enemy’s reserve come up and our men have to retreat, but they do it only inch by inch.”12

  At 8:30 A.M. Lee was informed that Gordon’s attack had failed and the troops were falling back toward Longstreet’s position, which was itself under fire from Federal forces. “Then,” said Lee, “there is nothing left for me to do but to go to General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”13 He had prepared for this moment, having dressed before the battle in his best uniform, with red sash, ceremonial sword, and gold scabbard (the last given to him by a group of English female admirers).14 Welly was still exchanging fire with Federal soldiers when Fitz Lee received Lee’s dispatch that he was surrendering the army that day.

  When the Union and Confederate generals gathered at 1:00 P.M. in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s brick house a short distance from Appomattox Court House, Grant was struck by the extreme contrast between Lee’s immaculate clothes and his own “rough travelling suit” (which was only a private’s uniform adorned with the stars and epaulets of a lieutenant general). Lee had just two officers with him; Grant was accompanied by Generals Sheridan, Ord, and Porter and most of his staff, but the witnesses stood back respectfully as the two men chatted for a while, as though the occasion was no more than two veterans meeting for the first time since the Mexican-American War. “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of so much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say,” wrote Grant in his memoirs, “but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed.”15 Finally Lee could take the suspense no longer and brought the subject around to the surrender.

  At four in the afternoon, Lee and his aides stepped out onto the sunlit porch of the McLean house, the document of surrender signed. Grant had offered generous terms: the Confederates were to lay down their weapons in perpetuity, but in return the officers could keep their horses and sidearms, and all could return to their homes unmolested. Grant had also offered to send rations to the famished Confederates. Lee mounted his horse, Traveller, and rode toward his own lines. “As the great Confederate captain rode back from his interview with General Grant,” wrote Francis Lawley,

  the news of the surrender acquired shape and consistency, and could no longer be denied. The effect on the worn and battered troops—some of whom had fought since April 1861 … passes mortal description. Whole lines of battle rushed up to their beloved old chief, and, choking with emotion, broke ranks and struggled with each other to wring him once more by the hand. Men who had fought throughout the war, and knew what the agony and humiliation of the moment must be to him, strove with a refinement of unselfishness and tenderness which he alone could fully appreciate, to lighten his burden and mitigate his pain. With tears pouring down both cheeks, General Lee at length commanded voice enough to say: “Men, we have fought through the war together. I have done the best that I could for you.”16

  Lawley did not stay to watch the defeated Confederates stack arms and surrender their regimental flags on April 12. He was in New York, finishing his report on Richmond’s evacuation, when the ceremony took place. His refusal to witness the final moments of the Army of Northern Virginia meant that he deprived himself of an experience that would surely have helped to heal rather than increase his sorrows. There was none of the crowing or ritual humiliation that he had feared; indeed, as the first line of Confederates stepped forward to deliver their weapons—members of Stonewall Jackson’s old brigade—the Federal guard stood at attention and presented arms, inspiring the Confederates to do the same—“honor answering honor,” in the words of the attending Union general Joshua Chamberlain.17

  Word of Lee’s surrender spread quickly throughout the South. “We were brought into the 4 mile camp at Vicksburg and I was lying there when news came of General Grant’s great victory,” wrote James Pendlebury of the 69th New York Irish Regiment. He had survived three months of relentless marching from one makeshift prison to another until his rescue by Federal troops. Sick and weak as he was, Pendlebury dragged his emaciated frame to the Vicksburg courthouse and rang the bell, which was answered by a volley of cannon fire off the surrounding hills. But in Richmond, the one-hundred-gun salute was ignored by the long shuffling lines of residents queuing at U.S. Sanitary Commission depots for their rations. Francis Dawson had regained consciousness, although he was incapacitated by the bullet wound to his shoulder. “What would you think of me were I to return to England, poorer than when I left her shores?” he wrote to his mother. He felt not just the defeat of the Confederacy but a sense of personal failure: “My life has been a useless one, productive only of grief to others whom I love the best and remorse to myself.” He had always promised his mother that his absence from London would not leave her in want; however, his “worldly possessions” now consisted of “a postage stamp and what was left of a five dollar greenback that a friend in Baltimore had sent me
.”18

  Farther south, at Danville, Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and an escort of sixty midshipmen from the Confederate naval academy boarded their trains again, this time for Greensboro, North Carolina, where the armies of Beauregard and Johnston were said to remain intact. “People in the army wonder at my good spirits,” Feilden wrote to Julia from his makeshift camp at Hillsborough, North Carolina, “for all that I cannot shut my eyes to our condition, though perhaps after all it is more philosophic to try and not think, but to float down with the current.”19 But, like Dawson, Feilden was prepared for a prolonged resistance to Federal rule. “To tell the truth,” he wrote, “I would sooner be killed in this war than leave the country in its present distress of my own accord.” Davis shared his sentiments, and when he reached Greensboro, the Confederate president became indignant with Beauregard and Johnston for telling him there was no alternative to asking Sherman for his terms of surrender. Davis insisted that the war was by no means over, not when there remained two undefeated Confederate armies—Johnston’s in North Carolina and General Edmund Kirby-Smith’s west of the Mississippi.20 Driven by Davis’s determination to fight on—and a fear that they would all be hanged for treason if caught by the Federals—the remaining members of the Confederate cabinet began making preparations to leave Greensboro on April 14. They were being hunted by Federal forces, but one determined seeker had already found them, though he was a friend: Frank Vizetelly, who had been trying to catch up with Davis since the fall of Richmond, was the only journalist to reach him.

  —

  Abraham Lincoln had been in Washington for five days on April 14 when he convened the cabinet to discuss the terms for readmitting the Southern states to the Union. The only member not at the meeting was William Seward, who was bedridden after suffering a carriage accident on April 5 that had left him with a dislocated shoulder and a broken jaw. His wife and daughter, Frances and Fanny, were nursing him. “His face is so marred and swollen and discolored that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity,” Frances wrote to her sister, nor was he able to communicate except by grunting.21 Bereft of his closest ally, Lincoln found it much more difficult to persuade the cabinet of the wisdom of showing clemency toward the South. He even advised the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, to allow the Confederate plotters in Canada to escape to Europe. Stanton wanted Jacob Thompson arrested and tried in the United States. “Best to let him run,” countered Lincoln.22

  The president felt there was something momentous about this day—Good Friday. He was not sure what to expect, he told the cabinet, perhaps news of Johnston’s surrender or the capture of Jefferson Davis, but the night before he had dreamed his recurring dream—the one that always seemed to precede good news—in which he was sailing “with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”23 When he joined Mary Lincoln for a carriage ride a couple of hours later, Lincoln was even more emphatic about his feelings: “I consider this day, the war has come to a close,” he told her. “We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”24

  That evening the Lincolns went to Ford’s Theatre to watch Laura Keane in her one-thousandth performance of Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin.38.2 All of Washington knew that Lincoln was going to be there, and many people had bought tickets just so they could catch a glimpse of him. The information helped John Wilkes Booth to make up his mind; his previous attempts to kidnap the president had all been thwarted by faulty intelligence or human failure. Months of frustration had exacerbated his already volatile nature, and tonight he was determined “to live in history.”25 He expected three deaths to occur simultaneously: Lincoln’s by his hand, Vice President Andrew Johnson’s by the hand of George Atzerodt, and Seward’s by the hand of Lewis Powell; and he had prepared a statement in advance for the National Intelligencer justifying the murders. The three men started out together, but George Atzerodt could not bring himself to perform the task and retreated to a hotel bar. At 10:00 P.M. Powell called at Seward’s house, claiming to have brought medicine from the doctor. A servant took him to the third floor, where Fanny and a male nurse were tending to Seward. But Frederick, Seward’s younger son, became suspicious and refused to let Powell enter the patient’s room. Throwing off his pretense, Powell attempted to shoot Frederick, and when the gun failed to go off, he used it to beat him unconscious. Easily dispensing with the nurse who opened the door to investigate the noise, Powell ignored Fanny and went straight for Seward, who struggled to defend himself as Powell hacked at his head and neck with his bowie knife. Fanny’s screams alerted Seward’s older son, Augustus, who rushed into the room and tried to grab the knife. Powell slashed at him wildly; breaking free of Augustus’s grip, he hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house, stabbing a State Department messenger who happened to call at the wrong time.

  A few minutes later, just after the curtain had risen for the third act of Our American Cousin, Booth talked his way into the presidential box and fired a single shot into the back of Lincoln’s head. Before anyone could stop him, Booth leaped over the balustrade and onto the stage, the petrified actors watching helplessly as he hobbled out the back. Lincoln was carried to a house across the street where he lingered, unconscious, for nine hours, his decline observed by the cabinet and several doctors. Mary Lincoln became so hysterical that she was removed from the room several times, and she was absent when Lincoln took his final breath at twenty-two minutes past seven in the morning.

  Seward lived, though his throat had been slashed several times and his right cheek nearly sliced off as he tried to fight his attacker. Frederick was in a coma, his skull broken in two places, and Augustus had suffered two stab wounds to the head and one to his hand. The secretary of state drifted in and out of consciousness for several days, unaware that Lincoln was dead or that Andrew Johnson had been sworn in as the seventeenth president of the United States. Although propped up on pillows so he could watch Lincoln’s funeral procession on April 19, Seward admitted later that the black funeral plumes passing beneath his window had caught his eye but failed to register with him as anything significant or untoward.26

  On April 21, Lincoln’s funeral train pulled away from Washington station at 7:00 A.M. and began its seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Springfield, Illinois.38.3 That day, in Virginia, the raider John Singleton Mosby disbanded his Partisan Rangers, although Mosby himself refused to give his parole. His two British volunteers confounded the Federals by asking for safe passage to Canada. The following day, General Fitz Lee wrote his final dispatch to Robert E. Lee, commending each of his staff officers “and Captain Llewellyn Saunderson, who, having just arrived from his native country, Ireland, joined me previously to the fall of Petersburg, and remained with me to the last.”38.4 27 Lincoln’s train had reached Albany, the state capital of New York, when Joe Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman on April 26. The one important difference to the terms that Grant had offered Lee was Sherman’s agreement to provide transport for the Southern troops from distant states. Henry Feilden had only a hundred miles to travel in order to reach Julia in Greenville, South Carolina, so he set off on his own horse.

  I have not heard anything about you for so long that I have been quite miserable. You are aware I suppose that the war has ended in this part of the country, and that we have given in on this side of the Mississippi. Considering the position we were in, General Johnston made excellent terms with Sherman for the army—that is to say—that we are not to be molested by the Yankee Government, and our personal property is respected. No one else in the country has any guarantee for either life or property, except from the magnanimity of our enemies, which does not amount to much. The feeling of indignation in the North against our late leaders is described by the Yankee officers as intense. General Schofield (a very old friend of General Hardee’s) who now commands North Carolina advised him to leave the country at once. My own opinion is that our prominent men will be treated with great se
verity, if not executed.… The death of Lincoln was looked upon by our army as a great misfortune for the South. If he were alive we should have had no difficulty in getting terms.28

  The flight of John Wilkes Booth, the man behind the South’s “great misfortune,” also came to an end on April 26. (Lewis Powell, the attempted murderer of Seward, had been caught ten days earlier.) Booth and another accomplice were found in a barn a few miles south of Port Royal, Virginia, by a detachment of twenty-six Federal soldiers. When Booth refused to surrender, they set fire to the barn in the hope of flushing him out, but one of the soldiers, Boston Corbett, shot him in the neck while he remained inside. Corbett’s desire for glory deprived the mourning nation of the chance to obtain justice for its slain president.

  Lincoln’s funeral train finally reached its destination at Springfield, Illinois, on May 3, 1865. After a twelve-day journey through more than 440 cities and towns, the bodies of Lincoln and his son Willie, who had died in 1862, would now be laid to rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery.

  —

  England was already “staggering,” according to Benjamin Moran, over the news of Lee’s surrender when the telegram announcing the assassination of President Lincoln arrived on April 26. John Bright felt “stunned and ill” when he heard the news. He was in mourning for his best friend, Richard Cobden, who had died on April 2, three weeks too soon to celebrate “this great triumph of the Republic,” and his brother-in-law Samuel Lucas, the owner and editor of the Morning Star, who had died on the sixteenth. “I feel at times as if I could suffer no more and grieve no more,” wrote Bright in his diary. “The slave interest has not been able to destroy the nation, but it succeeded in killing the President.”29 “I was horror struck,” recorded Moran, “and at once went up with Mr. Alward [the new assistant secretary] to announce the intelligence to Mr. Adams. He turned as pale as death.” Within a few hours the legation was overrun with visitors. Adams had expected to see Bright and Forster, and possibly Lord Houghton (formerly Richard Monckton Milnes), but certainly not the Duke of Argyll or Lord Russell, who showed “as much sympathy as he was capable of.”30 Lord Lyons also made a special trip to London to pay his respects and obtain news about Seward.