A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [179]
During the summer, The Times had offered Lawley the now vacant post of special correspondent. The middling poet and bon vivant Charles Mackay had replaced J. C. Bancroft Davis in New York and was supplying the paper with business and political analysis.13.2 But Delane needed the eyewitness reports previously supplied by Russell. Lawley knew nothing about military matters, but in two other important respects he had changed a great deal since February. He was a hardier traveler, and he had decided that the South had a right to independence. No single event was responsible for Lawley’s apostasy, but the Anglophobia displayed before and during the Trent affair, not to mention the untrammeled hounding of his friend William Howard Russell, had helped to convince him that a strong Confederacy was essential if the North’s aggressive tendencies were to be restrained.45
Map.12 Richmond
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Just surviving the tortuous journey past Federal pickets and scouting parties into Confederate territory was an education for Lawley. W. W. Glenn’s contacts were finding it harder to slip back and forth. Lawley had never before shared a room, let alone a bed, with several dirty strangers. In his autobiography, Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, as he was to become, recalled with amusement being woken up in the middle of the night by Lawley, who was standing in the corner of the farmer’s shed where they were sleeping, frantically waving his stick at the rats scurrying over his feet. Less comical was their train ride from Fredericksburg to Richmond. The travelers had to squeeze in beside hundreds of amputees who were being conveyed to hospitals in the city. The men lay stretched across the seats and were bumped and jolted continuously. “That train,” wrote Wolseley, “opened Frank Lawley’s eyes to the horrible side of war, made all the more in this instance because no chloroform or medical supplies of any sort were available.”46
When Lawley and Wolseley reached Richmond, they were lucky to secure an attic room in the Exchange Hotel. Frank Vizetelly, they learned, had snagged the last remaining bed at the Spotswood, the Willard’s of Richmond. He was glad of their company and went with them to the war secretary’s office to obtain a travel pass. The sight of the captured flags of the enemy lying in heaps on the floor shocked Wolseley, but he held his tongue while they received their papers and letters of introduction. The following day, October 9, the little party set off to find General Lee’s headquarters.
Wolseley came away with fragmentary but vivid impressions of the city. Richmond had hardly changed since Charles Dickens had described it in 1842 as “delightfully situated on eight hills, overhanging the James River.” It was still a city of churches rather than saloons, and despite the arrival of five railway lines over the past thirty years, the pace of life remained slow and decorous. The residents prized the city’s reputation as the premier cultural center of the South. Richmond boasted five daily newspapers, a literary journal, several theaters, and an academy of fine arts. The city did share one characteristic with Washington: its hotels were similarly uncomfortable and dirty. But otherwise the capitals were a study in contrasts. Washington was a city built to order, lacking in history or tradition; Richmond was formed shortly after the first settlers arrived in Jamestown, and its history was indistinguishable from many of the most famous events of the Revolutionary era. Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty