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By Root 6993 0

only 26 senators and 135 representatives—passed a draft law conscripting all able-bodied men between eighteen and thirty-five. When Mercier met with his old friend Judah Benjamin, who had been transferred by Davis from the War Department to the State Department in March, he was told that the South would fight to her last breath. Northerners were “a people for whom we feel unmitigated contempt as well as abhorrence,” Benjamin declared with uncharacteristic heat.11 Sitting in the new Confederate secretary of state’s spacious but austere office in the former U.S. Customs House, Mercier realized that Benjamin was hoping that the French could be enticed into breaking the blockade in return for cotton and the promise of a free trade agreement. But Mercier knew it was not France that needed persuading.

When Mercier returned to Washington on April 24, Lyons went to see him immediately, worried that his impetuous colleague had made promises to the Confederates that would undo their joint policy of neutrality. Mercier was more excited than usual. He spoke eloquently of the Southern spirit and the reasons why France and Britain should cease dallying and recognize the Confederacy’s independence. The South was preparing to recoup its losses, he insisted. Even now, the Confederates were on the verge of completing a second ironclad that would render New Orleans invincible to naval attack. Moreover, they were prepared to lose Richmond, Tennessee, “New Orleans and all their seaports, and indeed the whole of the coast.”12 But even as Mercier was talking, a fleet of U.S. gunboats was bearing down on New Orleans, having subdued the supposedly impregnable forts that defended her.

The city officially surrendered on April 26. The train on which Francis Dawson and his friend Captain Pegram were traveling was within twenty miles of New Orleans when it pulled onto a side track. To their astonishment, train after train came rumbling past in the other direction, each one packed with evacuating Confederate soldiers. “There was no choice for us but to go back to Virginia,” Dawson wrote. The much-vaunted ironclad that should have been Pegram’s next command was out of their reach. “The journey back was worse than the journey down, as the delays were multiplied,” Dawson remembered. Despite Mercier’s optimism, this last defeat was sending waves of panic through the South. “New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy,” came the anguished cry of the diarist Mary Chesnut.13 Rumors that General McClellan was almost at Richmond sent people rushing out of the city. Clerks packed up the government archives and prepared them for removal; President Davis put his wife and children on the train for Raleigh, North Carolina.14

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For six days, until the arrival of Union general Benjamin Butler and his 15,000 troops, New Orleans was a city on the verge of anarchy. Fires burned unchecked; looters roamed at will; all commerce, including the delivery of foodstuffs, abruptly stopped. Rioters stormed the mint, and one, William Mumford, succeeded in tearing down the U.S. flag that had been installed on Union admiral David Glasgow Farragut’s orders. It was then dragged through the streets of the city. In retaliation, Farragut warned that he was sending his men ashore and would bombard the city unless the U.S. flag was flown from City Hall. The desperate mayor turned to the foreign consuls to save New Orleans from immolation. He begged them to send the 4,500-strong European Brigade, which was made up of foreign neutrals who were not liable for the draft, but who had volunteered for civil defense duty.15 The arrival of the French warship Milan allayed the consuls’ trepidation about sending a group of middle-aged “merchants, bankers, underwriters, judges, real-estate owners and capitalists” into riot duty. The Brigade proved to be a poor substitute; as darkness descended each night, recalled an observer, the city glowed by the light of the arsonist’s torch, and the faint but urgent ringing of fire bells wafted out across the water.16

On May 1, twenty-five hundred Northern