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St. Maur set off for Washington after the Seven Days’ Battles and arrived under a flag of truce at McClellan’s camp on July 15. He had planned to stay for some time, but his admission to having observed the campaign from the “other side” provoked a reaction from the Union officers “which was really childish,” he protested to his father. Unwisely, he fell into arguments with them about the reasons for the war and other sensitive subjects. Lord Edward’s opinions had undergone a complete transformation, just as the Southern propagandist W. W. Glenn had hoped. “I did not start with any feeling one way or the other,” he insisted, “but I defy any candid man to go south, without being convinced that this war must end in separation.” If the split did not happen soon, he expected it to become a long and “very cruel war.” He had heard from Southern officers that there had been instances of Louisiania regiments killing their Northern prisoners. “This,” decided Lord Edward, “is Butler’s doing.”

* * *

11.1 Northerners had pointed out to Vizetelly the staggering disparities between the two sides. The last economic figures before the war showed that the Southern states had 18,026 “industrial establishments,” the North, 110,274.31

11.2 The Prince de Joinville excused McClellan’s performance, claiming that the general had been constantly hamstrung and interfered with by Washington.

11.3 France’s invasion of Mexico made the presence of Joinville and the Orleans exiles politically embarrassing, and they departed from America at the end of June. But Joinville continued to defend McClellan from abroad, publishing a long pamphlet, entitled “The Army of the Potomac,” which appeared the following October.

11.4 Among the Union wounded was a cousin of William Gladstone’s, twenty-one-year-old Herbert Gladstone, who had joined the 36th New York British Volunteers the previous year. He survived an agonizing journey back to the capital with a bullet lodged in his left leg, after which his family in England lost track of him.

TWELVE

The South Is Rising

Beast Butler—Palmerston is offended—Hotze and Spence join forces—Lindsay goes too far—The Alabama escapes—Déjà vu at Bull Run

“Beast Butler,” as the South dubbed General Ben Butler, was enjoying what the Scotsman William Watson called a “perfect reign of terror” over New Orleans. Watson received his discharge at Camp Tupelo and set off by train and steamboat to New Orleans. During his journey south, he witnessed unsettling scenes: Federal soldiers marching onto a plantation and putting down a slave revolt at gunpoint; Confederate “guerrillas” using women and children as human shields. When he reached New Orleans, Watson went straight to the consul, George Coppell, to ask for a certificate of British nationality. “He informed me that the certificate would be of no use or protection, if I violated neutrality. I then looked about for a day or two to see the state of things under Butler’s rule.”1

Watson found a city ruled by whim—the whim of a Union soldier, a Butler-appointed bureaucrat or judge, or an anonymous informer. “Butler continued to hunt for treason, and all material that could contribute to it he confiscated. He found it existed extensively in the vaults of banks,” wrote Watson, “in merchants’ safes, in rich men’s houses, among their stores of plate and other valuables.”2 A judicial ransom system was in effect. Men of means would be arrested on some unknown charge and their wives prevailed upon to secure their release by handing over thousands of dollars to a “fixer” who happened to know the right judge.

Watson had been in the city for only a few days when he experienced Butler’s justice for himself. It began with a thoughtless comment he made in a café. A short while later, Watson was accosted on the street by three men and forcibly marched to the customs house. He was questioned by detectives who “seized my pocket-book, as they had seen in it treasonable documents in the shape of bank-notes.” He asked to see a lawyer and to have his arrest made known to the British