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Unlike the domeless Capitol building in Washington, Richmond’s neoclassical capitol was not only finished but also widely admired and imitated. Designed by Thomas Jefferson, it stood proudly on the highest hill of the city, within a twelve-acre park called Capitol Square, dominating the skyline like the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Here, in a cluster of classical buildings, lay the seat of the Confederate government. The Confederate presidential residence was situated four blocks away, in an Italianate mansion that had been donated to the government by the owner.

Richmond was built on a rising slope, and its streets were regular and easy to navigate. The industrial district—the flour mills, tobacco and wheat processing plants, and ironworks—was down by the river. Shops and businesses of the better class were below Capitol Square, along Main Street, and the residential neighborhoods were on the crests of the hills. The city’s busiest slave auction house, owned by Robert Lumpkin, was only three blocks from the capitol. Wolseley avoided it when he went exploring, though it was almost the only establishment in town with goods to sell. The bookshops were empty of books, and the general stores were denuded of everyday items like shoe polish and pins.

Ill.23 View of Richmond from the west, by Frank Vizetelly, who sketched his own image on the left, under the tree.

Before they left, Lawley gave his Times dispatch to the French consul, who was less of a stickler than Consul Moore when it came to preserving the sanctity of the diplomatic bag. Like Wolseley, Lawley had noticed the effects of the blockade, but he airily dismissed them in his article as merely depriving Southerners of a few unnecessary luxuries. Nor did it matter, he declared, that Confederate soldiers often had to march without shoes, hats, or coats: “These men, many of them bearing some of England’s most honoured names, and descended from England’s best families, are in the field, and have been so for 19 months, fighting against [Northern] mercenaries!” (The article prompted the paper’s managing editor, Mowbray Morris, to remind Lawley that they required his newsgathering skills, rather than his opinions, since they had plenty of the latter at home.)47 Had he read the dispatch, Consul Moore would have been infuriated by Lawley’s insouciance. The beleaguered diplomat was, at this moment, writing pathetic letters to the Foreign Office saying he was wretchedly understaffed, overwhelmed, and unable to buy even such commodities as coal for the office: “I leave it to your Lordship to judge if we are not entitled to extra aid.”48

Lawley had never had to suffer a moment’s hardship that was not the direct result of his own profligacy. Perhaps this was why he came to idolize the Confederate army. The young plantation aristocrats who so readily sacrificed everything for the sake of an ideal put his own idle existence to shame. Many of them, like the ambulance driver who conveyed Lawley and his friends away from Richmond, were utterly unsuited for soldiering. The driver, the son of a wealthy farmer, had accepted the relatively menial occupation because his battle wounds were too severe to allow him to continue to fight. Yet he had no idea how to look after himself, even to the extent of becoming drenched because he had never had to fetch his own blanket before.49

Observing the Southerner’s inability to shift for himself, Wolseley decided that the difference between a professional army and a collection of armed volunteers was, for want of a better term, the existence of esprit de corps. Without it, as he and other English observers noticed, nothing worked as it should.50 There appeared to be little internal cooperation or forward thinking. Regiments would march along muddy roads, making them worse, without stopping to lay new tracks so that the next regiment would not become bogged down. Wolseley admitted to feeling “sorely puzzled” about the South. Slaves were referred to as “servants,”