A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [124]
Herbert was delighted to hear that a journalist from the Illustrated London News was with them, and he asked his mother to look out for his reports. A total of 264 Union solders and 143 Confederates had been killed in the attack; later, he would consider such casualty numbers remarkably small, but for now he thought he had survived a great battle. Vizetelly admitted to being impressed. “I will not attempt to prophesy a triumph for the Federalists,” he told readers at home, “but, seeing the improved condition in the morale of the Union forces, and feeling somewhat competent to give an opinion, I am inclined to believe that these first successes are not to be their last. I have watched the Northern army almost from its first appearance in the field. I have seen it a stripling … I now see it arrived at man’s estate.”28
News of Burnside’s success on Roanoke Island reached Washington while the city was still under the rosy glow of Mary Lincoln’s triumphant White House ball held on February 5. The capital celebrated even harder when it learned that a great victory had been won in Tennessee. General Ulysses S. Grant had captured Fort Henry on the sixth and Fort Donelson on the fifteenth, giving him control of Tennessee’s two main rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee. An important water highway had been opened for the North, which ran from the north of Kentucky all the way down to Mississippi and Alabama.
Lord Lyons wished in his heart he could escape while there was relative calm. “I don’t expect to be ever free here from troubles,” he wrote.29 There would always be another incident. “I have no doubt that for me personally this would be the moment to give up this place. I can never keep things in as good a state as they are,” he confided to his sister two days after the ball. “However, I cannot propose this to the Government, especially after the GCB—and of course feel bound to stay as long as they wish to keep me.”30 Lyons was referring to the Order of the Bath, which Lord Russell had arranged to have bestowed upon him for his handling of the Trent crisis. When he had learned of the honor, Lyons had written to Russell with his characteristic humility that he had done nothing “brilliant or striking;” “the only merit which I can attribute to myself is that of having laboured sedulously, though quietly and unobtrusively … to carry out honestly your orders and wishes.”31 He also commended his staff for their exemplary behavior during the crisis—although he would not have been able to say the same for them now. Since the resolution of the affair, the attachés and secretaries had been living up to their nickname of “the Bold Buccaneers.” Two of the more literary members of the group had decided to put on a play, and persuaded Lyons to allow them to perform it at the British legation.
Ill.16 The 9th New York Volunteers (Hawkins’s Zouaves) and the 21st Massachusetts in a bayonet charge on the Confederate fieldworks on Roanoke Island, by Frank Vizetelly.
The attachés’ youth and high spirits insulated them from the subdued atmosphere that pervaded Washington after the sudden death of Lincoln’s middle son, Willie, on February 20. The precocious eleven-year-old, who had reigned as the undisputed favorite of the family, was suspected to have died of typhoid fever. Mary Lincoln withdrew into her own private agony of grief, leaving her devastated husband with the burden of caring for their other boy still at home, seven-year-old Tad, who was battling the same illness that had killed his brother. The Spectator’s correspondent Edward Dicey was