A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [171]
12.4 Although General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to isolate and squeeze the South was never formally adopted, this effectively became the strategy of the war.
12.5 The North and South copied the European system of parole and exchange of prisoners. Prisoners gave their word—their parole—not to take up arms until they were formally exchanged for an enemy prisoner of equal rank. If the wait for exchange was going to take more than a few days, parolees could go home or to a parole camp and wait until they received notice that the paperwork had been completed.
12.6 Among the Confederate prisoners was the accident-prone Garibaldi veteran Lieutenant Henry Ronald MacIver, who had received a bullet in the wrist. An Irish Federal surgeon bandaged his arm with more skill than he could have hoped for, and afterward MacIver was transferred to Alexandria. He was, wrote his biographer, “somewhat dismayed to find himself face to face with his old jailer … he saw that the man recognised him as his former prisoner the instant they met.”81
THIRTEEN
Is Blood Thicker Than Water?
The possibility of intervention—Lee invades the North—Antietam, the bloodiest day—Dawson experiences Northern hospitality—The splendors and shortages of Richmond—Meeting the Confederate generals
“The suspense was hideous and unendurable,” Henry Adams recalled, as he waited for news from America.1 On September 9, 1862, came a telegram from Reuter’s agency announcing a victory for Union general John Pope at Bull Run. “This has been a Red Letter Day,” Moran wrote euphorically. “If this be true it is the beginning of the end.”2
Four days later, Moran learned they had been misled; Pope had been defeated, and the Confederate army was just twenty miles from Washington. “My heart sunk within me,” he wrote. “The rebels here are elated beyond measure. The Northern people are looked upon as cravens, and the Union is regarded as hopelessly gone.” He was alone at the legation; the Adamses were away and Charles Wilson had taken a leave of absence “for his health.” With no one to act as a moderating influence on his behavior, Moran happily insulted a British Army officer who called at the legation to volunteer for the Federal army; “they think we are unable to attend to our affairs, and that they can settle them,” he remarked testily.3
The Adams family said goodbye to their hosts and returned to London as soon as they heard the news. Mrs. Adams told Moran that it would have been “torture” to remain, since there were Confederate sympathizers among the house party. Henry suffered pangs of guilt that so many were risking their lives while he was fighting the battle of the drawing rooms. “After a sleepless night,” Henry subsequently wrote of his younger self, “walking up and down his room without reflecting that his father was beneath him, he announced at breakfast his intention to go home into the army.”4
Lord Russell had been wavering over whether Britain should intercede, until he received the reports about the Second Battle of Bull Run.5 Charles Francis Adams had come away from their meeting on September 4 thinking it was business as usual, since Russell had assured him “I [could be] quite at ease in regard to any idea of joint action of the European powers in our affairs. I laughed and said I was in hopes that they all had quite too much to occupy their minds … to think of troubling themselves with matters on the other side of the Atlantic.”6 But a day later, the Confederate commissioner in Brussels, Ambrose Dudley Mann, reported that he had just received a letter from his informant in London, “an influential Englishman,