A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (115 page)

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Since the death of Livingstone’s wife, Mary, in 1862, relations between father and son had become strained to the breaking point. Dr. Livingstone had not seen his son—or any of his other children—for several years, though he continued to send them long, disapproving letters from East Africa. Robert was a restless, lonely boy—“dour, determined, impulsive,” was how one contemporary described him. Far from acceding to his father’s wish for him to train as a doctor, Robert wanted to join the army or navy. At one point, he absconded from school and became lost for a short time in the underworld of Limehouse in London, where sailors’ hostels operated side by side with opium dens and brothels.

THIRTY-ONE
The Crisis Comes

Not enough men—Lincoln upholds the message of Gettysburg—Lord Lyons insists—Colonel Grenfell’s new mission—Failure of the Copperheads

T
he South was nearly bankrupt. In mid-July, President Davis persuaded George A. Trenholm to take over from Christopher Memminger as secretary of the treasury—even though the businessman told him frankly that it was too late to improve the Confederacy’s finances. Its rampant inflation and crippling shortages were evidence of an economy that was no longer functioning. The South’s military position also looked critical, especially in the West, and on July 17, 1864, Davis removed General Joe Johnston from command of the Army of Tennessee. The cabinet unanimously backed the decision. General William T. Sherman had invaded Georgia on May 7 with a force of a hundred thousand men, and for the past three months Richmond had been expecting to hear of a great battle between the two armies. But Johnston had insisted on pursuing a strategy of attrition, arguing that he could wear Sherman down through defensive maneuvering and then attack once the numerically superior Federals were too weak to resist.

The problem for Johnston was that whenever he settled his men into a seemingly impregnable position, Sherman simply marched around him and continued toward Atlanta. Johnston succeeded in having one battle of his choosing, at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, less than thirty miles from Atlanta, but Sherman easily absorbed the three thousand casualties and moved forward. Johnston abandoned the mountain, but before he could establish a new defensive line the Federals had crossed the last natural barrier before Atlanta—the Chattahoochee River—on July 8. Now there were no more mountains or rivers to stand in the way of Sherman’s advance. Losing Atlanta would not only be politically disastrous; Davis knew that its capture would “open the way for the Federal Army to the Gulf on the one hand, and to Charleston on the other.” The South would be split in two: “It would give them control of our network of railways and thus paralyze our efforts.”
¹
Davis replaced Johnston with one of his subordinate commanders, thirty-three-year-old General John Bell Hood, who had been lobbying for weeks to be allowed to wage a more aggressive campaign.

Atlanta was not the only city under threat. Mobile’s defenses were crumbling, and the survival of Charleston—where the Federal bombardment was under way—rested on Fort Sumter’s continuing to keep the enemy out of the harbor. Captain Henry Feilden was fighting his own battles with the Ordnance Department for more guns. (There was still no word of his promotion, despite General Jones’s having added his own letter of recommendation to General Beauregard’s.) He did not wish to sound defeatist, but if Mobile were to fall, Feilden told General Gorgas, “Farragut’s fleet would be set at liberty for operations to the eastern coast, and there can be little doubt that Charleston would be the first place assailed … in our present position, I feel deeply apprehensive as to the result of a grand naval attack.”
²

Feilden was unable to press his point further; in August he was sent on a special mission to Florida. “Throughout this State but especially on the Coast there are large numbers of deserters and desperadoes who have fled from our armies and hid themselves in these almost inaccessible wilds,” he explained to Julia. “The General now wishes to apply the policy of reconciliation, and I shall go down amongst them as an ambassador. I think with good care we may have some success, but they will be a hard crowd to deal with.”
³
Feilden kept Julia amused with wry descriptions of his journey along the country roads of the Deep South. He made a brief stop in Savannah, Georgia, where he stayed at a plantation remarkably untouched by the war. His bedroom, he told Julia, was decorated with French china: “You will think me very foolish perhaps noticing all these things, but I am so fond of pretty house arrangements.” While he was there, he dined with an aging officer who remembered selling cotton to his grandfather, old Sir William Feilden.
⁴

The South could not afford Feilden to return empty-handed. It had run through its reserves of able-bodied men, and there were now so few officers left that one of the Confederate brigadier generals killed at Deep Bottom was only twenty-four years old. The War Department clerk John Jones had heard that General Bragg was recommending “publication be made here, in the United States, and in Europe, encouraging enlistments of foreigners in our army.”
⁵
Bragg had probably been inspired by the unexpected arrival in Richmond of four Polish army officers in early August who claimed that thousands of Polish exiles would fight for the South in return for grants of land after the war. The manpower shortage was so acute that Davis was willing to believe them; he authorized the South’s financial agent in Britain, Colin McRae, to spend £50,000 to charter transport ships for the Poles allegedly waiting to enlist.
⁶
Benjamin also agreed to Henry MacIver’s request for passage on a blockade runner so he could return to Scotland and raise volunteers for the Confederacy. (The arrangement brought to a close the Scottish officer’s disappointing career in the Confederate army, which had ended with him sidelined to provost marshal duties and beset with health problems brought on by syphilis.)
⁷

The Confederate Navy Department was lacking not men, but ships. At the beginning of August, the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, detached the
Tallahassee
from the fleet defending Wilmington and sent it on a commerce raid up and down the East Coast. The vessel was a former blockade runner purchased by Mallory from an English blockade-running firm and converted into a raider. The
Tallahassee
destroyed twenty-six vessels during its nineteen-day voyage—Northern papers reacted as though the entire Eastern Seaboard was under attack—but the brief sensation was won at a terrible cost to Southern supplies. Lee had argued strongly against the plan, and his fears were proved right. The
Tallahassee
consumed the last of Wilmington’s supply of smokeless coal, forcing blockade runners to burn the more conspicuous black variety, which led to the capture of seven ships. The Federal navy took advantage of the
Tallahassee
’s absence to double the size of the blockading fleet around Wilmington. Fresh sailors were sent to the U.S. Navy ships, including Henry Morton Stanley, whose previous history as both a Confederate and a Federal deserter was unknown to the authorities.
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The
Tallahassee
was an embarrassment to Lord Lyons as well as the U.S. Navy Department. The Northern press, Lyons informed Russell, constantly referred to the vessel as the “Anglo-Rebel pirate.” He suspected that the stalemate in Virginia and Georgia had created more than the usual need to find scapegoats, and advised the foreign secretary to refrain from making any sort of public statement about American affairs. “I should say the quieter England and France were just at this moment the better.” The subject was too volatile, especially since the “Peace Party” was becoming bolder in its demands for an armistice. Lincoln’s popularity had fallen precipitously since the slaughter in Virginia and the fiasco of the crater explosion at Petersburg. The latest news from Atlanta was also disappointing: Sherman had defeated Hood in three separate engagements, and yet the city remained in Confederate hands. Newspapers throughout the North harped on the administration’s failures: “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the beginning of General Grant’s campaign?” asked the Democratic
New York World.
“Who is responsible for the terrible and unavailing loss of life … after the opening of a campaign that promised to be triumphant?”
⁹
Lyons feared that “Mr. Lincoln’s chance of the Presidency for a second term seems vanishing.”
¹⁰

—

Jefferson Davis had been praying for this moment: the Northern public and press were growing weary of the war. His original belief that Southern independence would be achieved through British recognition had been proved wrong, and his hopes that Lee would deliver independence through his victories had been dashed, but he still had faith that the South would prevail if it could break the Northern will to fight. He now realized that Britain’s neutral stance was not a curse but a boon to the Confederacy, since Canada was the perfect staging post for waging psychological warfare against the North. The special commissioners in Canada, Jacob Thompson and Clement C. Clay, could move about with relative ease, and even if they failed to inflict serious damage on Northern targets, their activities might provoke Washington into declaring war against Britain. Davis was sure that recognition of the South would be among the first steps, if not the very first, that Britain would take against the North.

Ill.53
Punch’s view that Britain (Palmerston) will soon have to recognize the Confederacy (Jefferson Davis).

Thompson and Clay had quickly realized that they would never work well together, but they had created enough separation between their projects to minimize potential friction. Clay preferred to work with James Holcombe, a former law professor at the University of Virginia who had been in Canada for the past five months on a separate mission for the Confederate State Department.
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11
Clay was hoping to romance disaffected Northern politicians into believing that an armistice was in the interest of both sides. It seemed to him that the peace advocates were willing to believe almost anything. “We have not dispelled the fond delusion of most of those with whom we have conversed, that some kind of common government might—at some time hereafter—be established,” he wrote archly to Benjamin.
¹²
One of these intermediaries convinced the editor of the
New York Tribune,
Horace Greeley, that Clay and Holcombe had been given the authority to negotiate peace terms with the North.
¹³
Greeley used the power of his newspaper to confront Lincoln over his reluctance to consider the Confederates’ terms: “I entreat you to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents,” he urged melodramatically. “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace.”
¹⁴
The public, Greeley insisted, would vote for a Democratic president in November if Lincoln seemed to care more about war than peace.

Lincoln knew enough about the Confederate commissioners in Canada to be certain that political embarrassment rather than peace was their goal, but he also knew that he could not afford to be portrayed as deaf to potential overtures from the South. Yet there were no terms that the South could offer—other than the abolition of slavery and restoration of the Union—that he would accept. In contrast to many Northerners, and even some conservative Republicans, Lincoln’s belief in the principles articulated at Gettysburg—liberty and democracy—was unshakable, and he would not trade them for peace, or for his reelection in November.

Lincoln skillfully wrong-footed Greeley by inviting him to be the North’s representative in these apparently genuine discussions for peace. Greeley had no choice but to accept, and on July 18, with Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay accompanying him as a witness, he met with Clay and Holcombe on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Hay was carrying a letter from Lincoln to the commissioners, addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” It offered them safe conduct to Washington to discuss the war under the following terms: “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery”; no other condition would be acceptable. The discussion unfolded much as Lincoln had expected, with Clay admitting that he had no authority to negotiate a peace and Greeley and Hay returning empty-handed. But the Confederates had pried out of Lincoln a statement about slavery and its fundamental place in the war that could only make him more unpopular with the great mass of voters in the West, who still thought they were fighting for the Union rather than abolition.