12. Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974, 1980), vol. 2, p. 290.
13. Somerset RO, Somerset MSS, d/RA/A/2a/39/11, Palmerston to Somerset, September 13, 1863. Palmerston continued: “If we get these ships they will tend to give us moral as well as maritime strength.” On October 2, Palmerston was ruminating on the theme of war with the United States: “We shall be pretty well off, I see, by next summer, with an addition for 1865; and there seems no good reason to expect a rupture with France within that period though it would be hazardous to say as much of our relations with the United States.”
14. Detective Officer William Cozens filed the following report: “On Sunday the 13th instant, 95 men of the crew of the Florida arrived here by Railway from Cardiff the greater portion of them are natives of Ireland and some from various parts of Great Britain, the rest are composed of Germans, Dutchmen and a few Americans.” PRO HO45/7261/122.
15. BDOFA, Part 1, ser. C, vol. 6, p. 184, Adams to Russell, September 16, 1863.
16. D. P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York, 1974), p. 326, PRFA, 1 (1864), p. 384, Russell to Adams, September 25, 1863.
17. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston 1920), vol. 2, p. 82, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., September 16, 1863.
18. Diary of Gideon Welles, vol. 1, p. 435, September 17, 1863.
19. PRO 30/22/37, ff. 227–30, Lyons to Russell, November 6, 1863.
20. PRO 30/22/37, ff. 213–16, Lyons to Russell, October 23, 1863.
21. For a fuller discussion of Sumner’s motives and the reaction to his speech, see David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York, 1970), pp. 126–37.
22. Beverly Wilson Palmer (ed.), The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (Boston, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 197–98, Sumner to Bright, October 6, 1863.
23. Quoted in Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 1220, October 8, 1863.
24. Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness (New York, 1994), p. 69.
25. MHS, Adams MSS, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, October 24, 1863.
26. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1212, September 22, 1863.
27. Benjamin did not have a clear idea, when he sent the dispatch on August 4, of what Mason’s departure would achieve, beyond pinning his hopes on the French to break clear of their alliance with Britain. Charles Hubbard, The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy (Knoxville, Tenn., 1998), p. 149.
28. North Carolina State Archives, Private Collections, PC 1226 Rose O’Neal Greenhow Papers, London Diary, p. 35.
29. Blackman, Wild Rose, p. 271.
30. PRO 30/22/26, Argyll to Russell, October 17, 1863.
31. Philip Guedalla (ed.), Gladstone and Palmerston, Being the Correspondence of Lord Palmerston with Mr. Gladstone, 1851–1865 (London, 1928), pp. 264–66, Palmerston to Gladstone, October 9, 1863; Gladstone to Palmerston, October 8, 1863.
32. BDOFA, part 1, ser. C, vol. 6, doc. 348, Captain Inglefield to Lord Paget, November 1, 1863; Inglefield to Vice-Admiral Grey, October 25, 1863.
33. James M. Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston, 1917), p. 164.
34. University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., Rush Rhees Library, A.W39 Thurlow Weed MSS, Currie to Weed, September 15, 1863.
35. Some of James Horrocks’s letters were deposited in the Lancashire Record Office in Preston; the rest are in the Blackburn Museum. In 1982, the curator of the Blackburn Museum, A. S. Lewis, collated the two collections and published them under the title My Dear Parents. The combination of Lewis’s scholarship and Horrocks’s engaging style makes the book one of the most important eyewitness accounts of Civil War life by an English volunteer. Horrocks’s father owned a cotton mill and had suffered hard during the cotton famine. Horrocks was forced to abandon his studies at the Wesleyan teachers’ training college in London and return home to Bolton. The pregnancy of Martha Jane Hammer had added another financial burden. She successfully sued him for financial support. He ran away to America rather than submit to the court, leaving his family with the embarrassment of the unpaid support.
36. A. S. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents (New York, 1982), p. 23, Horrocks to parents, September 5, 1863.
37. Ibid.
38. Daniel B. Lucas, Memoir of John Yates Beall (Montreal, 1865), p. 265.
39. W. W. Baker, “Memoirs of Service” (property of Mr. Jack Beall), p. 21.
40. Jeffry D. Wert, Mosby’s Rangers (New York, 1990), p. 98.
41. Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln (New York, 2006), p. 313.
42. Frank E. Vandiver (ed.), The Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1947), p. 55.
43. Sam Watkins, Company Aytch (New York, 1999), p. 74.
Chapter 25: River of Death
1. Robert L. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road (Middlesboro, Ky., 1966), pp. 268–69.
2. Ibid., pp. 263–65.
3. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, doc. 52, p. 435, De Courcy to Brigadier General Potter, September 7, 1863.
4. William Marvel, Burnside (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), p. 278. For example, De Courcy wrote to Brigadier General Potter on September 7, 1863: “My sick are filling the houses in my rear, and I have no surgeons or medicines to leave with them. Dr. Wilson can inform you that I foretold this and some of the other disasters which must take place on this line of operations unless commissary, quartermaster’s, and medical departments work in a different fashion from what they are now doing.” OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, doc. 52, p. 435.
5. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road, p. 271.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Frank E. Vandiver (ed.), The Civil War Diary of Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1947), p. 62, September 17, 1863.
9. NARA, M552, roll 26, Compiled Military Service Record, De Courcy to Colonel Richmond, September 18, 1863.
10. http://www.mkwe.com/ohio/pages/linn-03.htm, 16th Ohio Volunteers, Diary and Letters of Thomas Buchannan Linn, September 21, 1863.
11. NARA, RG9, Loring to Burnside, September 18, 1863.
12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30/3, doc. 52, p. 943, General Field Orders No. 15.
13. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President, 3 vols. (New York, 1959), vol. 2, p. 475.
14. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 100.
15. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary (New York, 1906), p. 241.
16. Brian Holden Reid, The American Civil War, p. 132.
17. Sam Watkins, Company Aytch (New York, 1999), p. 88.
18. Ibid., p. 89.
19. Illustrated London News, December 26, 1863.
20. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 102.
21. Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, ed. Gary Gallagher (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), p. 301. Vizetelly’s brother claimed that he offered to deliver a message for Longstreet during the battle, since all the other couriers had been picked off by Federal sharpshooters. “Upon his return to the General’s headquarters, Longstreet commissioned him an ‘honorary captain’ in the Confederate States Army.” William Stanley Hoole, p. 104. It is possible that Vizetelly delivered messages, but not during a battle that he missed.
22. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 102.
23. Emory University, Gregory MSS, Lawley to Gregory, September 16, 1863.
24. Julia Miele Rodas, “More Than a Civil (War) Friendship: Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 60/1 (1998), pp. 39–60, at p. 48, Morris to Lawley, September 24, 1863.
25. Emory University, Gregory MSS, box 24, Lawley to Gregory, September 16, 1863.
26. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (New York, 2005), p. 556.
27. Michael Burlin
game and John R. Turner Ettlinger (eds.), Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), p. 84, September 11, 1863.
28. Frederic William Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (New York, 1906), p. 119.
29. It should be noted that Seward already suspected that the ships had been detained. Leslie Stephen dismissed Seward as a lightweight after he confused John Stuart Mill with Richard Monckton Milnes. Yet Seward was not so different than the MP who remarked to an American visitor that Lee would presumably follow up his Gettysburg victory by taking Washington and New Orleans, since “New Orleans is about 100 miles from Washington, I think?” J. G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols.; vol. 3: Midstream (New York, 1953), p. 317.
30. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, p. 122.
31. An Englishman in the American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry Yates Thompson, 1863, ed. Sir Christopher Chancellor (New York, 1971), p. 86.
32. Ibid., p. 98.
33. Randall, Lincoln the President, p. 370.
34. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1993), p. 335.
35. Philip Van Doren Stern, When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War (New York, 1965), p. 234.
36. “I never was in such a town or place in all my life,” Milne wrote admiringly. He believed that below the surface of hostility was a deep bond between the two countries that it was his duty to nurture. Somerset RO, Somerset MSS, D/RA/A/2a/34/32, Milne to Somerset, October 18, 1863.
37. Ibid.
38. New York Albion, October 17, 1863.
39. PRO 30/22/37, ff. 203–7, Lyons to Russell, October 16, 1863.
40. PRO 30/22/37, ff. 219–26, Lyons to Russell, October 26, 1863.
41. PRO 30/22/37, ff. 203–7, Lyons to Russell, October 16, 1863.
42. PRO FO5/895, ff. 69–71, d. 758, Lyons to Russell, October 23, 1863.
43. Eugene H. Berwanger, The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1994), p. 119.
44. William Watson, The Civil War Adventures of a Blockade Runner (College Station, Tex., 2001), pp. 50, 56.
45. PRO FO5/909, ff. 361–62, Lynn to Magruder, October 3, 1863.
46. Watson, The Civil War Adventures of a Blockade Runner, pp. 50, 58.
47. PRO FO5/896, f. 40, Lyons to Russell, November 6, 1863. “My Lord, I have much to say regarding the barbarous manner in which British subjects are treated in the Southern Confederacy,” wrote Mr. McIntyre from Alabama on October 3, 1863. His friend James Maloney applied for a British passport in 1861 and started for home. The provost marshal arrested him anyway and sent him to General Bragg’s army, sneering at “his dammed English protection.” “I do not know whether your Lordship is acquainted with these facts or not. But if you are … it is very strange that something cannot be done to secure for British Subjects that protection which they seek.” In January 1864, the legation had to return the Southern consuls’ pay receipts to London, explaining that Lord Lyons “has no means of sending these letters to their destination, nor does he know whether the Consular officers to whom they are addressed are still at their posts.” The source for the quotation in the footnote on this page is PRO FO5/948, f. 57, Lyons to Russell, April 19, 1864.
48. Berwanger, The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War, p. 104.
Chapter 26: Can the Nation Endure?
1. PRO FO5/908, ff. 115–17, no. 30, Cridland to Russell, November 14, 1863.
2. Fitzgerald Ross, Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Champaign, Ill., 1997), p. 140.
3. The Times, December 1, 1863.
4. Ross, Cities and Camps, p. 143.
5. John G. Nicolay and John Hay (eds.), Complete Works of Lincoln, vol. 9 (New York, 1907), p. 26, Lincoln to Grant, July 13, 1863.
6. “The Journal of Robert Neve,” private collection, p. 140.
7. Ibid., p. 143.
8. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 105.
9. Jeffrey Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier (New York, 1993), p. 341.
10. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 109.
11. The Times, December 15, 1863.
12. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (London, 2001), p. 273.
13. Decatur Daily News, March 20, 1879.
14. David Donald provides the following footnote in his edition of Salmon P. Chase’s diary: “Henry Charles De Ahna wrote the President his version of these events on January 31, 1864: ‘As Your Excellency probably recollects, it was brought to the knowledge of the Government several months ago, that through a singular mistake in a name, I found myself approached by an agent of the Rebel government and an offer of $50,000 was made to me, if I would undertake to enter into a negotiation with Col. Percy Wyndham and by offering him in the name of the Rebel Government the sum of 100,000 Dollars, would succeed in persuading the said Percy Wyndham to allow himself to be taken prisoner with his whole Cavalry Brigade.’ De Ahna told his story to V. Hogan, ‘who was then well known as Secretary Chase’s Detective,’ and he also had an interview with Chase himself, but he claimed that Chase failed properly to investigate the matter.” Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, ed. David Donald (New York, 1954), p. 316.
15. PRO FO 115/400, f. 247, Lyons to John Livingston, November 3, 1863.
16. Nicolay and Hay (eds.), Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 9, p. 204, Lincoln to Meade, November 9, 1863; Lincoln to Burnside, November 8, 1863.
17. Ibid., p. 154, Lincoln to Rosecrans, October 4, 1863.
18. Sarah Forbes Hughes (ed.), Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, 2 vols. (New York, 1990), vol. 2, p. 74, Forbes to Lincoln, September 8, 1863.
19. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 2, p. 573; Ronald White, Jr., Lincoln (New York, 2009), p. 604.
20. David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), p. 465.
21. The Times, December 4, 1863.
22. Michael Burlingame and R. Turner Ettlinger (eds.), Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), pp. 112–13, November 18–19, 1863.
23. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 576.
24. Nicolay and Hay (eds.), Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 9, pp. 209–10.
25. An Englishman in the American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry Yates Thompson, 1863, ed. Sir Christopher Chancellor (New York, 1971), pp. 141–42.
26. Sam Watkins, Company Aytch (New York, 1999), p. 91.
27. An Englishman in the American Civil War, p. 152.
28. “The Journal of Robert Neve,” p. 158.
29. An Englishman in the American Civil War, p. 153.
30. Cleburne realized that he had a volunteer of exceptional quality the moment Byrne presented himself at his headquarters. Cleburne requested a commission for him on November 8, writing: “This young gentleman is eminently deserving. He left England to volunteer his services in our cause. He has been on my staff. I have found him a brave and gallant officer, highly intelligent, and devoted to our cause. I am the more anxious he should be appointed, because he sacrificed the opportunity of being commissioned in the British Service. He passed the examination required to entitle him to be placed on the list of possible appointees, before he left England, which he did upon a limited leave of absence. His leave has now expired, and, as he understands, he had forfeited his chance of being subjected in that service.” Irving A. Buck, Cleburne and His Command (Wilmington, N.Y., 1995), p. 27.
31. “The Journal of Robert Neve,” p. 161.
32. Watkins, Company Aytch, p. 95.
33. An Englishman in the American Civil War, pp. 166–67.
34. Ibid., p. 18.
35. George Templeton Strong, Diary of
the Civil War, 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1962), p. 375, November 27, 1863.
36. R. W. McFarland, The Surrender of Cumberland Gap (Columbus, Ohio, 1898), p. 29.
37. For a complete description of the 16th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and De Courcy’s career as its colonel, along with scanned documents, muster rolls, and much more, see http://www.mkwe.com/home.htm.
38. Ten years later, De Courcy’s cousin died. Thus, Kind Hearts and Coronets style, though De Courcy was the fourth child of a second son, he became the 31st Baron Kingsale, Ireland’s premier barony.
39. Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln (New York, 2006), p. 321.
40. British Library of Political and Economic Science, LSE, GB 0097, Farr MSS, vol. 10, Henry Ezechiel to Mr. Murray, January 6, 1864.
41. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, p. 306, November 12, 1863.
PART III: IF ONLY WE ARE SPARED
Chapter 27: Buckling Under Pressure
1. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 106, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., November 27, 1863.
2. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 514, Stephen Mallory to Bulloch, October 22, 1863.
3. Fitzgerald Ross, Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Champaign, Ill., 1997), p. 172.
4. Stephen Z. Starr, Colonel Grenfell’s Wars (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), pp. 106–7, Ross, Cities and Camps, pp. 172–73.
5. C. Vann Woodward (ed.), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 337, January 12, 1864.
6. Illustrated London News, April 2, 1863, p. 313.
7. Raphael Semmes, My Adventures Afloat: A Personal Memoir of My Cruises and Services (1868; repr. Baltimore, 1987), p. 629.
8. They were Baron Maximilian von Meulnier of Bremen and Julius Schroeder of Hanover.
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 109