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of heart in June. Henry Morton Stanley, formerly of the Confederate Dixie Grays, joined the Union army on June 7. Stanley had been sent to Camp Douglas, outside Chicago, along with hundreds of other Confederate prisoners.34 About twenty-six thousand men were sent there during the war; at least six thousand never came out. The inmates called it “80 acres of hell.” “The appearance of the prisoners startled me,” Stanley recalled. Every man was filthy, emaciated, and crawling with vermin.35 To reach the latrines Stanley was forced to step over half-naked men lying in great puddles of feces, either too weak or too delirious to move. “Exhumed corpses could not have presented anything more hideous than dozens of these dead-and-alive men,” he wrote. “Every morning, the wagons came to the hospital and dead-house, to take away the bodies; and I saw the corpses rolled in their blankets, taken to the vehicles, and piled one upon another.”36

Ill.21 Destruction of the Confederate “cottonclads” off Memphis, by Frank Vizetelly.

More than three hundred of the eight thousand prisoners in the camp claimed to be British subjects, and a group of them demanded to see the British consul, John Wilkins. He turned to Lord Lyons for advice. Surely, Wilkins asked, they should try to secure the release of those who had been forcibly conscripted into Confederate service. Lyons encouraged him to “exert all his influence unofficially in their favour,” but he deemed it hopeless to use official channels, since it would be impossible to prove whether a man had enlisted willingly.37 Consul Wilkins argued and pleaded to see the British prisoners, but the authorities would not allow him inside the camp.38

Stanley solved his predicament by switching sides and enlisting for three years in Battery L of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. The “increase in sickness, the horrors of the prison, the oily atmosphere, the ignominious cartage of the dead, the useless flight of time, the fear of being incarcerated for years … so affected my spirits that I felt a few more days of these scenes would drive me mad.” He had never cared about politics anyway: “There were no blackies in Wales.”39 In mid-June the battery was shipped to Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, where Stanley was hospitalized for dysentery on the twenty-second. Soon afterward, he went for a stroll around the hospital grounds and did not return. He went home to Wales, eager to get as far away from the war as possible.

Stanley was lucky not to have been assigned to Battery K, which was sent to Tennessee to help Union general George W. Morgan seize the Cumberland Gap from Confederate control. The Gap was a mountain pass through the Appalachians, where Virginia rubbed borders with neighboring Kentucky and Tennessee. The rugged Cumberland Mountains suddenly parted there, as though a spade had dug a thousand-foot-deep slice through the rock, allowing the aptly named Wilderness Road to wind its way down to the rich basin known as the Bluegrass region. General Morgan realized that the Confederate stronghold could not be taken by a direct attack. The only option was to split up his brigades and have them clamber up and over the Cumberland Mountains along mule tracks so they could launch a surprise assault on the Confederates from the other side.

Colonel Fitzroy De Courcy was ordered to lead his brigade through a steep gorge flanked by sheer rock on one side and the Cumberland River on the other. It had been eight months since he had been given command of the 16th Ohio Volunteers. His men were pleased to have one of the best drillmasters in the Union as their colonel. But the ways of the British Army were not those of a volunteer regiment, and the Ohioans considered him unduly harsh and exacting. He was no more popular with them than he had been with Fanny Seward. De Courcy was at his best when commanding larger forces in which individuals were less likely to be the victims of his scathing comments. But General Morgan had realized that a soldier of De Courcy’s experience was invaluable and had promoted him