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That same day, the twenty-sixth, President Jefferson Davis told Southerners to relinquish their hope for British intervention. He was speaking to the legislature in his home state of Mississippi at the end of a morale-boosting tour through the western parts of the Confederacy. Davis did not need to rouse his listeners’ indignation—many already had firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the devastation wrought by Union armies. Nor did he need to warn them against complacency: beyond Virginia, the South was shrinking as more and more territory came under Federal control. What the lean and shabbily dressed listeners required from their president was reassurance that the North might smash their homes but not their moral purpose. Davis damned Northerners as the blighted offspring of Cromwell’s fanatical Roundheads. It was in their blood to oppress others, he declared. Their ancestors “persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” The liberty-loving South could never live in harmony with such monsters of intolerance. But having given his audience its dose of tonic, Davis proceeded to administer a series of bitter pills. The last, and most shocking to the once-mighty kings of cotton, was the fact of the South’s utter isolation. “In the course of this war our eyes have often been turned abroad,” admitted Davis:

We have expected sometimes recognition, and sometimes intervention, at the hands of foreign nations; and we had a right to expect it … but this I say: “Put not your trust in princes,” and rest not your hopes on foreign nations. This war is ours; we must fight it out ourselves. And I feel some pride in knowing that, so far, we have done it without the good will of anybody.63

The Marquis of Hartington was moved by Davis’s speech. He and his traveling companion, Colonel Leslie, had arrived in Richmond on December 23, five days after leaving Baltimore in the dead of night. Hartington had wanted to ask the U.S. government’s permission to cross into the South, but the legation had warned him against the idea. “They said they thought it was very doubtful,” he explained to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “and if we were refused there would be more difficulty in going out on our own hook.” He promised they would not resist if they were captured during the attempt.64 Fortunately, with the assistance of the ubiquitous Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, they had been able to travel from one safe house to the next without encountering any Federal patrols.

The difference between the countryside of Maryland and that of Virginia was striking. “The country looks terribly desolated,” wrote Hartington. “The fences are all pulled down for firewood, a good many houses burnt, and everything looking very bare.” The contrast between Baltimore and Richmond was even greater. The Southern capital had doubled in size in less than two years, but it was worse off in every aspect. Hartington was surprised by the shoddy appearance of all classes. “They have had no new clothes since the war began,” he wrote, “and are not likely to get any till it is over.” Yet “these people say they are ready to go on for any length of time, and I believe many of them think the longer the better, because it will widen the breach between them and the Yankees, against whom their hatred is more intense than you can possibly conceive.”65

Hartington had arrived in America in August with no strong feelings about the war. After a couple of weeks in New York, he felt “inclined to be more a Unionist than I was.” The moderation of New Yorkers impressed him, since “I believe, if they could lick them, and the South would come back to-morrow, they would be willing to forget everything that had happened, and go on as usual.” But as he saw more of the North he became less certain about the point of the war: “I understand nothing about it, and I can’t find anybody except Seward who even pretends that he does.… They mix up in the most perplexing manner the slavery question, which they say makes theirs the