9. Norman C. Delaney, John McIntosh Kell of the Raider Alabama (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1973), p. 153.
10. Charles Francis Adams made the first claim for redress against the Alabama, “for the national and private injuries sustained by the proceedings of this vessel,” on November 20, 1862. Russell replied on December 19, categorically stating that “Britain cannot be held responsible … for these irregular proceedings of British subjects,” and to claim otherwise would be as reasonable as the British government suing the American “for the injuries done to the property of British subjects by the Alabama … on the ground that the United States claim authority … over the Confederate States, by whom that vessel was commissioned.” PRFA, 1 (1864), p. 35, Russell to Charles Francis Adams, December 22, 1862.
11. PRO FO282/7 (2), Consul Archibald to Lord Lyons, April 9, 1863.
12. PRO HO45/7261/216, Colonial Office to Home Office, February 10, 1864. Final estimates for Irish-American recruitment throughout the war hover around 140,000 in the Federal army, and between 20,000 and 40,000 in the Confederate. Of the sixteen stowaways on the Kearsarge, five were tried in April 1864 for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act. They pleaded guilty to the charge and were released on their own cognizance. By then, Adams thought the government was pursuing the case in order to appear even-handed in its battle to shut down Confederate operations.
13. Charles P. Cullop, “An Unequal Duel: Union Recruiting in Ireland, 1863–1864,” Civil War History, 13 (1967), p. 108.
14. James D. Bulloch, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), vol. 1, p. 444.
15. Duke University, Special Collections Library, Rose O’Neal Greenhow Papers, Greenhow to Alexander Boteler, December 10, 1863.
16. The captured blockade runner is incorrectly identified as the Ceres in William C. Davis (ed.), Secret History of Confederate Diplomacy Abroad (Lawrence, Kan., 2005), p. xxii.
17. Ann Blackman, Wild Rose: Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Civil War Spy (New York, 2005), p. 275.
18. Ibid.
19. Lynda L. Crist, Kenneth H. Williams, and Peggy L. Dillard (eds.), The Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 10 (Baton Rouge, La., 1999), p. 143.
20. Bayly Ellen Marks and Mark Naton Schatz (eds.), Between North and South: A Maryland Journalist Views the Civil War; The Narrative of William Wilkins Glenn, 1861–1869 (Cranbury, N.J., 1976), p. 123, February 1864.
21. North Carolina State Archives, Private Collections, PC1226, Rose O’Neal Greenhow Papers, London Diary, p. 48.
22. The Private Journal of Georgiana Gholson Walker, ed. Dwight Franklin Henderson, Confederate Centennial Studies, 25 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1963), p. 74, March 8, 1864.
23. North Carolina State Archives, Greenhow diary, p. 53.
24. Bulloch, The Secret Service of The Confederate States of America, p. 296.
25. Ibid.
26. Stanley Lebergott, “Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling, 1861–1865,” Journal of Economic History, 41 (Dec. 1981), p. 876.
27. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 981–85, Hotze to Benjamin, December 26, 1863.
28. R.J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), p. 190.
29. Index, January 14, 1863.
30. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 1007–9, Mason to Benjamin, January 25, 1864. For example, Lady Wharncliffe wrote on January 30, 1864: “To think that having started [the war in 1861 with our friends] here drawn with indignation at the conduct of the Confederates, and that now one should be wishing for their success, slave owners as they are! … However I am convinced that somehow the knell of slavery is rung.” Durham University, Grey MSS, GRE/G17/21/18–19, Georgiana Elizabeth, Lady Wharncliffe, to Miss Elizabeth Copley.
31. Benjamin to Spence, January 11, 1864, quoted in John Bigelow, “The Confederate Diplomatists and Their Shirt of Nessus,” Century Magazine, 20 (1891), p. 122.
32. MPUS, Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1 (1864), p. 44.
33. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 1263, February 11, 1863.
34. Wilbur Devereux Jones, The Confederate Rams at Birkenhead, Confederate Centennial Studies, 19 (Wilmington, N.C., 2000), p. 107.
35. W. G. Wiebe, Mary S. Miller, and Anne P. Robson, Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1860–1864 (Toronto, 2009), p. 314.
36. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 2, pp. 118–19, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, January 16, 1864.
37. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1264, February 16, 1864, and February 17, 1864.
38. Ibid., p. 1266, February 20, 1864.
39. Ibid., p. 1269, March 1, 1864.
40. Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 28.
41. Wallace and Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 1274, March 12, 1863.
42. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 874–81, Hotze to Benjamin, August 27, 1863.
43. The book was far superior to the novelist George Alfred Lawrence’s self-pitying account of his capture and imprisonment, called Border and Bastille. It was also much more effective as a piece of pro-Confederate propaganda than a work such as The South as It Is, by the Rev. T. D. Ozanne, who had spent twenty-one years in the South and could not understand why it should be made to suffer all because of “one social evil.”
44. Hugh Dubrulle, “Fear of Americanization and the Emergence of an Anglo-Saxon Confederacy,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 33/4 (Winter 2001), pp. 583–613, at p. 594.
45. Brian Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,” Civil War History, 23 (March 1977), p. 158.
46. Ibid.
47. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, pp. 1046–47, Slidell to Benjamin, March 5, 1864.
48. Jenkins, “Frank Lawley and the Confederacy,” p. 158.
49. Quoted in Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness (New York, 1996), p. 75.
50. North Carolina State Archives, Greenhow diary, p. 65.
Chapter 28: A Great Slaughter
1. A head count in the South at the end of 1863 revealed that only 277,000 soldiers remained after three years. President Davis did not dare allow such alarming information to reach the public. The North, on the other hand, had 611,000 men in arms.
2. John Bierman, Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire (New York, 1988), p. 234.
3. Thomas Edgar Pemberton, Sir Charles Wyndham: A Biography (London, 1904), p. 27; “Britons in the Civil War: Sir Charles Wyndham,” Crossfire, 37 (Nov. 1990).
4. OR, ser. 1, vol. 34/1, p. 219, Report of Admiral Porter, June 13, 1864. “I trust some future historian will treat this matter as it deserves to be treated,” he declared, “because it is a subject in which the whole country should feel an interest.”
5. Although Dahlgren’s massacre plan could have been a forgery, the South believed that the papers were authentic.
6. Duane Schultz, The Dahlgren Affair (New York, 1998), p. 157. Two weeks before Colonel Dahlgren made his doomed ride toward Richmond, the Confederate Congress had secretly approved a bill on February 15 to transfer $5 million to a Secret Service fund. The bill also authorized the use of covert warfare against the North. The government had finally accepted that Lee could not win the war by himself.
7. Ibid., p. 181.
8. Mabel Clare Weaks, “Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell,” Filson Club History Quarterly, 34 (1960), p. 11.
9. Stephen Z. Starr, Colonel Grenfell’s Wars (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), p. 125.
10. Frank Moore (ed.), Rebellion Record, ser. 1, 53 vols., vol. 8 (New York, 1883), p. 515, Burton N. Harrison to Lord Lyons, April 6, 1864.
11. Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada (Hanover, Mass., 1970), p. 36.
12. John Jones passed a pleasant two days in February 1863, working out possible permutations of a three-way partition between the states; Joh
n B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (Urbane, Ill., 1958), p. 165.
13. James Morton Callahan, The Diplomatic History of the Confederacy (Baltimore, 1901), p. 225.
14. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President, 3 vols. (New York, 1959), vol. 3, p. 35.
15. “There is no doubt he has got the best military head of any man in this Confederacy, and if he only gets a chance he will make his mark on the enemy this Spring and Summer,” Feilden had written enthusiastically. South Carolina Historical Society, Feilden-Smythe MSS (3), Feilden to Julia McCord, April 20, 1864.
16. Ibid., (10), Feilden to Julia McCord, April 20, 1864.
17. Ibid., (6), Feilden to Julia McCord, April 30, 1864.
18. E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston (Columbia, S.C., 1982), p. 283.
19. PRO FO5/896, f. 23, Lyons to Russell, November 3, 1863; the reference for the quotation in the footnote is PRO FO 5/896, f. 33, Lyons to Russell, November 3, 1863.
20. PRO FO 5/948/274, f. 63, Lyons to Russell, April 19, 1864; James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes (eds.), The American Civil War Through British Eyes, vol. 3 (Kent, Ohio, 2005), p. 178.
21. New York Times, February 2, 1864.
22. West Sussex RO, Lyons MSS, box 301, Lyons to sister, December 26, 1863; PRO 30/22/37, f. 63, Lyons to Russell, December 24, 1863.
23. PRO 30/22/38, ff. 46–49, Lyons to Russell, May 17, 1864.
24. British Library of Political and Economic Science, LSE, Farr MSS, ADD 2, unknown writer to Captain Hatch, February 19, 1864.
25. Duke University, Malet family MSS, Malet to mother, January 4, 1863.
26. Edmund Hammond, the permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, had a low opinion of young men who wanted to have a personal life outside the Foreign Office: “The labour required of the Foreign Office Clerks is great, the attendance long, and the hours late and uncertain.…” Reports from Commissioners, 20 vols., vol. 5 (London, 1856), p. 67, Hammond to Horace Mann, June 25, 1855.
27. PRO FO5/949, f. 5, d. 289, Lyons to Russell, May 3, 1864.
28. PRO FO282/10, f. 294, Archibald to Lyons, January 30, 1863.
29. Bright-Sumner Letters, 1861–1872, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 46 (1912), pp. 93–165, at p. 125, Bright to Sumner, December 15, 1863. Thomas Smelt, the father of young Stephen, wrote to Lincoln on March 6, imploring him to release his son, who had been drugged and drafted into the army. The humble clerk struggled to express himself: “I also appeal to you as a Father and man of honour that you take all these circumstances into your consideration, and for the sake of his family, you be graciously pleased to grant this my prayer,” he begged. By the time Mr. Smelt’s letter had passed from Lincoln’s desk to the adjutant general’s office, and from there into the hands of the War Department clerks, Stephen had been wounded and captured by the Confederates. Stephen Smelt was a prisoner of war in Andersonville, the prison with the highest death toll in the South, and he was beyond the reach of his father or the indifferent Northern authorities. NARA RG 94/SKM 06, Thomas Smelt to Lincoln, March 6, 1864.
30. PRO FO 5/898, f. 66, Lyons to Russell, December 7, 1863.
31. The Foreign Office could not, officially, applaud a solution that forced British subjects to pledge their allegiance to a foreign country, but there was relief in London that a hideous injustice against conscripted Britons in the Southern armies had been resolved.
32. Warwickshire RO, CR114A/533/23 (1), Seymour MSS, General Wistar to General Dix, April 15, 1864.
33. A. S. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents, p. 67.
34. James Pendlebury MSS, private collection, p. 1.
35. James Pendlebury MSS, p. 2.
36. PRO FO5/1287, d.189, Francis Lousada to Lord Lyons, March 11, 1864, and passim.
37. Fitzgerald Ross, Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Champaign, Ill., 1997), p. 219.
38. Frances Elizabeth Owen Monck, My Canadian Leaves: Diary of a Visit to Canada, 1865–6 (London, 1891), p. 127.
39. Journal of John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley (Cambridge, 1997), p. 75.
40. R.A.J. Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright (New York, 1931), p. 271.
41. Edward Lyulph Stanley, Fourth Baron Stanley of Alderley, letters from America, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Cambridge, Stanley to Lady Stanley, April 17, 1864.
42. Ibid., April 27, 1864.
43. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 128, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, May 1, 1864.
44. OR, ser. 1, vol. 32/3, p. 246, Grant to Sherman, April 3, 1864.
45. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents, p. 77, Horrocks to parents, May 8, 1864.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 78.
48. James Pendlebury MSS, pp. 4–5.
49. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, 3 vols. (New York, 1986), vol. 3, p. 170.
50. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 197, Dawson to mother, June 1, 1864.
51. Jeffry D. Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier (New York, 1993), p. 385.
52. New-York Historical Society, Narrative of Ebenezer Wells (c. 1881), May 5, 1864.
53. Dawson, Reminiscences, p. 197, Dawson to mother, June 1, 1864, and p. 115.
54. Grant was annoyed by the halfhearted performance from his tired army, but, wrote a British military historian in the 1930s, “it is sometimes difficult to decide where driving force deteriorates into mere pigheadedness and refusal to face unpalatable facts.” Alfred H. Burne, Lee, Grant, and Sherman (repr. Lawrence, Kan., 2000), p. 24.
55. New-York Historical Society, Narrative of Ebenezer Wells, May 10, 1864.
56. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1906), p. 110.
57. Lewis (ed.), My Dear Parents, p. 85, Horrocks to father, May 31, 1864.
58. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters, vol. 2, p. 131, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, May 29, 1864.
Chapter 29: “Defiance to Her Enemies”
1. Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, John Ward Diary, pp. 178–79.
2. The Times, May 27, 1864. Les Misérables had been published in New York to great acclaim in 1862.
3. Francis W. Dawson, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861–1865, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 130.
4. Merseyside Maritime Museum, Fraser, Trenholm MSS, B/FT, box 81, p. 298, Prioleau to Henry Wise, May 17, 1864.
5. Samuel Bernard Thompson, Confederate Purchasing Operations Abroad (Gloucester, Mass., 1973), p. 40.
6. James M. Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston, 1917), p. 180.
7. Ibid., p. 182.
8. Ibid.
9. Warren F. Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1983), p. 194. The blockade-running business had remained an exclusive club of a small number of shipping firms. The most accurate calculation to date lists only 111 British-owned ships between 1861 and 1865.
10. Library of Congress, Mason Papers, Lindsay to Mason, May 10, 1864.
11. Ibid., Tremlett to Mason, June 2, 1864.
12. Ibid., Maury Papers, Tremlett to Maury, June 1, 1864.
13. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 3, p. 1144, Mason to Benjamin, June 9, 1864.
14. The name Cold Harbor came from the local tavern, which offered beds for the night but not hot meals.
15. Frederick W. Seward (ed.), Seward at Washington (New York, 1891), p. 223.
16. Ernest Samuels (ed.), Henry Adams: Selected Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 68, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 10, 1864.
17. Norman C. Delaney, John McIntosh Kell of the Raider Alabama (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1973), p. 157.
18. Raphael Semmes, Service Afloat: A Personal Memoir of My Cruises and Services (1868; re
pr. Baltimore, 1987), p. 750.
19. John Morris Ellicott, The Life of John Ancrum Winslow (New York, 1905), p. 179.
20. Frederick Milnes Edge, An Englishman’s View of the Battle Between the Alabama and the Kearsarge (New York, 1864), pp. 27–28, D. H. Llewellyn to Travers, June 14, 1864.
21. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel (eds.), Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (Secaucus, N.J., 1985), vol. 4, p. 607.
22. Ellicott, The Life of John Ancrum Winslow, p. 193.
23. Charles Grayson Summersell, CSS Alabama (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985), p. 77.
24. Ibid., p. 78.
25. Edge, An Englishman’s View of the Battle Between the Alabama and the Kearsarge, p. 28.
26. A week after Llewellyn’s death, the doctors and students at his alma mater, Charing Cross Medical School, voted to open a subscription fund in memory of his sacrifice. The public subscription was especially popular with doctors in the Indian Army. Enough money was raised to found the Llewellyn Scholarship Prize, and two memorials, one at Charing Cross Hospital and the other at his parish church, Easton, in Wiltshire. The marble plaque at Charing Cross paid tribute to Llewellyn’s bravery and sacrifice under fire: IN MEMORY OF DAVID HERBERT LLEWELLYN, FORMERLY A STUDENT OF THIS HOSPITAL AND AFTERWARDS SURGEON TO THE CONFEDERATE STATES WAR STEAMER ALABAMA. AFTER HER ACTION WITH THE FEDERAL STEAMER “KEARSARGE” OFF CHERBOURG, THOUGH ENTREATED BY THE WOUNDED TO JOIN THEM IN THEIR BOAT, HE REFUSED TO PERIL THEIR SAFETY BY SO DOING, AND WENT DOWN WITH THE SINKING VESSEL, ON 19TH JUNE 1864 IN THE 26TH YEAR OF HIS AGE. THIS TABLET HAS BEEN ERECTED AND A SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDED IN HIS NAME BY HIS FELLOW STUDENTS, AND OTHERS IN ENGLAND AND INDIA TO COMMEMORATE HIS SELF-SACRIFICING COURAGE AND DEVOTION.
27. NARA, M.T-185, roll 8, vol. 8, U.S. Consuls in Bristol, Consul Eastman to Seward, June 23, 1864.
28. Somerset RO, Somerset MSS, d/RA/A/2a/40/10, Palmerston to Somerset, June 21, 1864.
29. W. C. Ford (ed.), A Cycle of Adams Letters: 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920), vol. 2, p. 158, Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., June 24, 1864.
30. See Beth Archer Brombert, Édouard Manet (Chicago, 1997), pp. 159–60, for the reasons why, contrary to popular belief, Manet did not witness the battle. The quotation in the footnote on this page is from W. S. Hoole, Confederate Foreign Agent: The European Diary of Edward C. Anderson (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1976), July 17, 1864.
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 110