A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (111 page)

The
Alabama
’s crew received a heroes’ welcome on their arrival at Southampton. “One thing is very noticeable, that the destruction of the
Alabama
is much lamented by a majority of this people,” Consul Zebina Eastman remarked crossly to Seward. “The London
Standard
says, ‘Every
TRUE
Englishman will regret to learn that the gallant Alabama has gone to her last resting place.’ ”
²⁷

The cabinet’s view regarding the
Alabama
’s demise was more practical. Lord Russell hoped that Adams would cease making claims for compensation, though he doubted the Northerners would be bought off that easily. Palmerston, as usual, asked what lessons could be learned for the navy: “The Fate of the
Alabama
certainly shews that the days of unprotected wooden ships are fast fading away, and it makes one rather uneasy about the fore and aft unprotected parts of the [iron-hulled, armor-plated warship HMS]
Warrior,
” he warned the Duke of Somerset.
²⁸

Henry Adams was disgusted with the way the papers were “trying to make a sea-lion of this arrant humbug.”
²⁹
On June 24 an advertisement appeared in the
Telegraph
asking for contributions from army and navy officers to a fund to replace the sword lost by Semmes when the
Alabama
went down. The press interest was so great on both sides of the Channel, and the reports so detailed and numerous, that Édouard Manet was able to paint a depiction of the battle that persuaded people he had witnessed it himself.
^29.4
30
Captain Semmes and Lieutenant Kell recuperated at the Reverend Francis Tremlett’s vicarage while the papers debated the significance of the
Alabama
’s role in the war. In two years the cruiser had captured or destroyed a total of sixty-five U.S. ships, causing more than $5 million worth of losses to the Northern merchant marine trade. Had Britain behaved with propriety, was she blameless over the existence of the
Alabama,
asked several newspapers. The Duke of Argyll pressed the cabinet for an answer. “It will be found important to be able to say that we did our best to protest against the legitimacy of such proceedings,” he had warned shortly before the duel. Otherwise, “in the first war in which we are engaged, ‘Alabamas’ will certainly be fitted out against us from neutral ports.”
³¹

—

When news of the
Kearsarge
’s victory reached Washington, Gideon Welles ordered the Navy Department to fly its largest Union flag. In Baltimore harbor, U.S. troopships sailing past HMS
Phaeton
hooted and chanted the
Alabama
’s name.
³²
Glad to have something other than casualty lists and homecoming parades to report,
The New York Times
discussed the sinking of the
Alabama
for several weeks.
^29.5

The best that could be said for Grant in June was that he remained undaunted despite having lost 55,000 men since May. But the sheer fact he was still marching forward was vitally important for Northern morale in light of the humiliating end to General Banks’s Red River campaign. Lincoln’s ability to shield his friend did not extend to outright disaster, and Banks’s replacement to lead the XIX Corps, Major General Edward Canby, was appointed even before the defeated Federals arrived back in New Orleans.

Banks retained his title of commander of the Department of the Gulf, but his role was purely administrative. General Canby began a complete reorganization of his army. Among the changes was the formation of a “marine brigade” under Colonel L.D.H. Currie, whose task was to guard the Mississippi River from guerrilla attacks.
³⁴
Dr. Charles Culverwell, however, chose to return to his family. May was the start of the sickly season, when swarms of mosquitoes rose like shimmering clouds out of the swamps. But the only assignment that would take him back to New York was escort duty for eleven soldiers who had become insane during the Red River campaign. Only seven survived the journey. Culverwell could cope no longer. Shortly afterward he resigned from the army and returned to England, never again to repeat the experiment of military life or indeed of being a doctor.
^29.6

The return of General Banks to New Orleans coincided with Edward Lyulph Stanley’s arrival in the city. The Englishman was told that Banks had been laboring hard to improve the condition of freed slaves, having established nine military schools to teach literacy to the black recruits and ninety-five regular schools for black children.
³⁶
But Stanley quickly realized that the white population were putting up a fierce resistance to Banks’s reforms. “The whites here have been accustomed to maltreat the negroes without any notice being taken of it,” he observed to his family on May 17.
³⁷
He went to a supposedly well-run plantation—the same one visited by William Howard Russell in 1861 and the Marquis of Hartington in 1862—and thought it exposed the myth of “the contented slave.” He was appalled by the dirty state of their hovels, by their despair, and by their fear of him as a white man. “I am quite satisfied that [the plantation] is being very badly managed in the interest of the negro,” he declared.
³⁸

Stanley doubted how much more Banks could achieve without the wholehearted support of his staff. One New Orleans resident admitted to Stanley that she preferred the certainty of Butler’s misrule to the arbitrary and capricious administration that now governed the lives of ordinary citizens. Banks had little control over his subordinates, she complained; rather than step in to curb abuses, “he was so undecided and would keep putting you off, and giving you no satisfactory answer.”
³⁹

Mary Sophia Hill, the former British schoolteacher who had become a Confederate nurse after her twin brother, Sam, enlisted in the army, was one of the victims of General Banks’s poor administration. She had left the South after the Battle of Gettysburg to visit relatives in Britain. But on her return to New Orleans in the spring of 1864, she had found herself under increasing scrutiny from Federal officials. “Imagine how my English blood boiled with indignation at being treated like a criminal,” she complained to her brother on May 20. “I will never forget it [
sic
] to the Yankees—never; not that it would be possible for me to hold them in greater contempt than I do at present.”
⁴⁰

Mary had attracted attention because she always seemed to have a letter or parcel to deliver to someone in the city. She received two visits from a stranger named Ellen Williams, who offered to convey any letters to the South since she was departing for Galveston. Ellen also tried to give her a note from Confederate general Dick Taylor addressed to a Mrs. Hill, which Mary refused to take: “I told her I was not Mrs. Hill and the letter was not for me.” But Mary injudiciously gave her three letters, including one for Sam. A few days later, on May 26, Mary came home to find a Captain Frost from the provost office waiting in the parlor. He bundled her into a cab and drove her to the women’s prison on Julia Street.

The jailer, Mr. Laurence, took a hearty dislike to the new prisoner and her repeated declarations of British nationality. He boarded up Mary’s window, removed the sheets from her bed, and prevented her from having contact with her sister or brother. “I often wonder since [how] I kept my senses,” she wrote later, “for many have lost their reason for less cruelty.” The main charge against her, she eventually learned, was passing information to the enemy. “I wrote to Mr. Coppell, acting Consul, who wrote me word he would attend to my case: it was not necessary to see me. I differed with him. It was his duty to see me and hear what I had to say, he knowing me to be a British subject.”
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41
After three weeks of solitary confinement, Mary was allowed a visit from her sister and brother-in-law, who were so appalled by her condition that they forced the authorities to allow her to be seen by a doctor. “Had it not been for him, I would have died,” she wrote.
⁴²
She was held in prison without being officially charged or given a date for her trial, while she grew weaker and more desperate by the day.

—

Mary Sophia Hill was not the only nuisance to the Federal authorities. Belle Boyd, the Confederate spy and heroine of the Battle of Front Royal in 1862, was also in custody. Her ability to pry information out of impressionable Federal soldiers was legendary. It was only with the greatest reluctance that Stanton had sanctioned Belle’s release from prison the previous December after she contracted typhoid.

Belle had recuperated in Mobile, Alabama, under the care of Mary Semmes, the wife of Captain Semmes, who “treated me with as much attention as though I had been her own daughter.” Mary’s tales of the
Alabama
inspired Belle to try a new kind of adventure, and she wrote to Judah P. Benjamin offering to carry Confederate dispatches to England. Benjamin was delighted and provided her with $500 in gold, a letter of introduction to Henry Hotze, and passage on a blockade runner out of Wilmington. As dawn broke on her twentieth birthday, May 9, 1864, the
Greyhound
carried Belle and two other passengers past the blockade out into the open sea. She did not get far; USS
Connecticut
captured the
Greyhound
at 1:40
P.M.
on the following day.

The U.S. naval officer in charge of taking the
Greyhound
to Boston, Lieutenant Samuel Hardinge, was a handsome young fellow without a girl back home. He did not know, at first, that the widowed “Mrs. Lewis” was the infamous Belle Boyd—and by the time he discovered her true identity he was so besotted that she was able to persuade him that the captain of the
Greyhound
ought to be released. Hardinge took Belle shopping for clothes when the
Greyhound
stopped briefly in New York, and finished by proposing marriage to her when the vessel docked at Boston. “So generous and noble was he in every thing,” Belle wrote later, “that I could not but acknowledge that my heart was his. I firmly believe that God intended us to meet and love.”
⁴³

This had not, however, been the intention of the Navy Department. Gideon Welles ordered Lieutenant Hardinge’s arrest. “My dear Miss Belle, It is all up with me,” Hardinge wrote dejectedly on June 8. “The Admiralty says that it looks bad for us; so I have adopted a very good motto, viz: ‘Face the music!’ ”
⁴⁴
Welles and the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, were incensed that Belle had managed to make both their departments look foolish and were determined it should never happen again. The provost marshal in Boston received a telegram ordering her immediate removal to Canada, and “if I was again caught in the United States, or by the United States authorities, I should be shot,” she wrote. Two days later she was on the train to Montreal, missing Hardinge but excited at the “delightful prospect of breathing free Canadian air.”
⁴⁵

Stanton had been in the midst of deciding what to do with Miss Boyd when one of his clerks informed him that an Englishman, a former volunteer in the Confederate army, was asking for an audience. The military governor of New York, General John Dix, had hesitated to accept Colonel Grenfell’s tale about his disenchantment with the South and had sent him to Washington to apply directly to the War Department for permission to travel through the North as a tourist. Annoyed at the presumption on his time, Stanton nevertheless agreed to see Grenfell out of curiosity. Two days later, on June 13, Grenfell was shown into Stanton’s office.
⁴⁶

Stanton received Grenfell with a stenographer present, which ought to have been a warning that this was not the time to play games. Heedless of the danger, Grenfell behaved like a second-string actor at his grand moment. He not only offered the incredulous secretary “inside” information about Lee’s army, but he also professed himself ready to join the U.S. Army. Stanton declined the offer. But he did extract a promise from Grenfell to make no further contact with or provide any help to the Confederacy. The colonel left Stanton’s office believing that his performance had been masterful. He had received permission to travel anywhere in the North without having to register his presence with the local provost marshals. It had not occurred to Grenfell that the authorities could keep watch on him by other means. Believing his mission accomplished, Grenfell returned to New York where his new friend, Fitzgerald Ross, was waiting to begin their tour of northern New York and Canada, unaware of the sinister reason for the journey.

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The Confederates had used every possible trick, including jury tampering, to influence the outcome of the court cases. On May 17, 1864, for example, Charles Prioleau directed one of their agents to make sure there was a favorable decision in an upcoming court case: “The enclosed list contains the names of the Juries to try the case on the 6 June. It is important to know the sympathies of as many of them as possible … find out whether any of them or how many are, by opinion or interest, enemies to the cause of the defendants or the contrary.… Any expenses incurred we will of course discharge—you have carte blanche in this respect.”
⁴