A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [178]
From the hotel they went to a music hall. They entered as the performers were leading the audience in a rendition of “The Union and McClellan forever.” Undaunted, the captain escorted Dawson down the aisle to the front row, calmly ignoring the growls and murmurs from the crowd. “By this time,” he noticed, “my companion was decidedly exhilarated.” Dawson had no choice but to wait and see what suicidal escapade the captain would think up next. About half an hour later, the officer jumped from his seat and shouted at the top of his voice that he would beat any man who laid on a finger on his friend. His action unleashed the crowd. Just before Dawson lost consciousness, he heard shots being fired. When he recovered, he learned that the commandant had come looking for them. The captain had emerged barely alive. It transpired that he had a notorious drinking problem.
Dawson was almost relieved when he reached the relative safety of Fort Delaware. The grim fort turned prison was situated in the middle of the Delaware River on a swamp-infested island known locally as Pea Patch. The only other inhabitants beside the inmates and guards were malaria-carrying mosquitoes and rats. As an officer, Dawson was housed inside the fort rather than in one of the wooden barracks outside. “The Time dragged heavily,” he wrote. Ninety unwashed men were crammed into a thirty-foot room and never allowed out except for meals, which were short and sparse. After three weeks he was paroled and shipped back to Richmond.
He arrived in the city on October 6. “I can hardly realize now,” he wrote, “that the time, counted by days and weeks, was really so short. And yet, it must have been so.” There was an air of anxiety in Richmond that he had not felt before. All leave had been canceled, and uniformed men were thronging the streets. The hotels were full and there was nowhere for him to stay. The wounded from Antietam filled every spare bed and couch in the city. More than ten thousand soldiers were being treated in Richmond’s hospitals. Having heard that there was a shortage of nurses, Mary Sophia Hill temporarily left Sam and went to help at Chimborazo, which had grown so quickly since its establishment in 1861 that in a few more months it would be the largest military hospital in the world.
Dawson could not rejoin Longstreet’s army until his exchange was official, which would not be until the end of November, but he was able to wangle a military pass from Colonel Gorgas, who recognized that the foreign volunteer could simply resign if he became fed up. Dawson left the city to visit the Pegrams. Though he did not like to admit it, he was in love—in love with the South, with its people, its culture, and at this particular moment, with Miss Pegram. “You will think me partial, but it is not so,” Dawson insisted in a letter to his mother. Yet he could not help dwelling on certain attributes of Captain Pegram’s niece: “Loving brown eyes, perfect hands and a rich mass of glorious auburn hair.”42 The delightful Miss Pegram had nursed him during his convalescence in the summer, and was pleased to do so again.
Dawson’s departure from Richmond at the beginning of October coincided with the arrival of Francis Lawley and Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley. They had met in Baltimore shortly before the Battle of Antietam when they were trying to slip into the Confederacy, the former to report for The Times, the latter, who was stationed in Canada, to satisfy his curiosity about volunteer armies. The twenty-nine-year-old Wolseley had been among the first wave of soldiers sent out by the British government during the Trent affair. After the possibility of war had subsided, Wolseley continued to be fascinated