A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [156]
The Confederates did not require Miss Hopley’s services when their own native-born women were perfectly willing to carry out dangerous operations. Rose Greenhow, the Washington hostess who had exposed herself to Northern wrath by passing military secrets to the South, had arrived in Richmond after months of house arrest and then incarceration in a Federal prison. President Davis made a point of calling at her hotel and was shocked to see the ravages wrought by her ordeal. She had the air of someone “shaken by mental torture,” he wrote sadly to his wife.66 Moreover, she was homeless and penniless. Judah Benjamin promptly sent her $2,500 as a mark of the Confederacy’s gratitude.
Lord Edward’s arrival had coincided with the beginning of General Lee’s counteroffensive against McClellan. Bored with his leaky tugboat, Francis Dawson resigned from the Confederate navy to join an artillery battery commanded by Willie Pegram, a nephew of Captain Pegram’s. On June 26, Pegram’s battery was ordered to cross the Chickahominy River, northeast of Richmond. According to Lee’s plan, the troops under General A. P. Hill (to which the battery belonged) were to form one element of a four-part attack against McClellan’s somewhat incoherently placed divisions. If all went well for Lee, the Federal invaders would be attacked on every side and could disintegrate.
But one vital piece was missing: Stonewall Jackson and his men had not yet arrived from the Shenandoah Valley. After anxiously waiting until three in the afternoon, General Hill ordered his men to begin their assault without him. “The guns were instantly loaded, and the firing began,” Dawson recalled. “A solid shot bowled past me, killed one of our men, tore a leg and arm from another, and threw three horses into a bloody, struggling heap. This was my chance, and I stepped to the gun and worked away as though existence depended on my labours.”67 He worked feverishly until a blow knocked him off his feet. “That Britisher has gone up at last,” he heard. Dawson examined his leg and saw that a shell fragment had ripped away six inches of flesh. But strangely, he felt nothing. “I went back to my post, and there remained until the battery was withdrawn after sunset.” Of the seventy-five men in Pegram’s battery, only twenty-eight were still standing.
Dawson managed to hobble for several miles to a field hospital. While trying to obtain some morphine for a friend, he saw surgeons, their bare arms smeared with blood, cutting and sawing into rows of limbs. Below one table lay “arms, feet, and legs, thrown promiscuously in a heap, like the refuse of a slaughter house.” Dawson decided not to stay and obtained a ride on an ambulance going to Richmond. His adventures with Willie Pegram had been brief, but he was gratified to read about himself in the Richmond Dispatch a few days later as the “young Englishman” who had “received a wound while acting most gallantly.”68 He was a hero, as tens of pretty young lady nurses told him every day.
Dawson soon began to regret his fame. When one of his friends in the Confederate navy, James Morgan, came to visit him, Dawson begged for his help. “The day was hot,” Morgan recalled,
and I found my friend lying on a cot near the open front door, so weak that he could not speak above a whisper, and after greeting him and speaking some words of cheer I saw that he was anxious to tell me something. I leaned over him to hear what he had to say, and the poor fellow whispered in my ear “Jimmie, for God’s sake, make them move my cot to the back of the building.” I assured him that he had been placed in the choicest spot in the hospital, where he could get any little air