A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [222]
Henry returned to his room after dinner. The general sought him out again and offered his bed to share:
I thanked him very much for the courtesy, but said goodnight, and slept in a tent, sharing the blankets of one of his aides-de-camp. In the morning at breakfast I noticed the General said Grace before the meal with the same fervour as I had remarked before. An hour or two afterwards it was time for me to return to the Station. This time I had a horse, and I turned up the General’s Head-quarters to bid adieu to him. His little room was vacant so I stepped in and stood before the fire: I noticed my great coat stretched before the fire on a chair. Shortly after the General entered the room. I was saying goodbye, and as I finished he said, “Captain, I have been trying to dry your great coat, but am afraid I have not succeeded very well.” That little act shows the man, does it not! To think that in the midst of his duties, with the cares and responsibilities of a vast army on his shoulders, with the pickets of a hostile army almost within sight of his quarters, he found time to think of and to carry out these little acts of thoughtfulness!
Feilden had never encountered such personal courtesy from a British general. He returned to Richmond desperately hoping that the War Department had accepted his application. He would have accepted anything, and was thrilled to receive the offer of a captaincy and the position of assistant adjutant general in Charleston. In only a few weeks he had become as ardent a Confederate as any native-born Southerner. For the first time in years, Feilden felt at home: “I am tired of going to sea myself, I am sick of seeing new places,” he wrote, “never did I feel happier than at the present moment.” He was an efficient adjutant and quickly made friends among his fellow officers; General Beauregard pronounced himself satisfied with the latest addition to his staff.
Charleston society was delighted with the handsome and personable English captain. “The people are the kindest I ever met,” Feilden wrote in wonder, unaware that he was making up for the loss of Consul Bunch, whose recent departure from the city had left a void that he filled perfectly. (Though the “cotton is king” attitude of the South had never ceased to irritate the consul, he had been heartbroken to receive the Foreign Office’s order to return to England.)26 Feilden’s lodgings were in one of the boardinghouses used by English blockade runners. This gave him unfettered access to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Until then, he told his aunt, he had been eating the diet of ordinary Southerners: “coffee made out of rye, or else water, crackers and old bacon or tough meat. The people of the South are suffering very much for want of good food.”27
Neither the threat of attack nor the scarcity of luxuries had diminished Charleston’s social calendar. Francis Lawley attended a ball before setting off on his travels through the western part of the Confederacy, and he was impressed by the Southerners’ determination to keep up appearances; the shimmering silks and starched collars defied the truth of the two-year-old blockade. It was as though the closer the city came to danger, the more its inhabitants clung to their old habits. “I am finishing off this scrawl as the gentleman who is taking this to England leaves tomorrow,” Feilden wrote on March 4, 1863. “We are living here very comfortably and enjoying ourselves, although every day we expect to be attacked by the Yankee Armada.”28
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17.1 Vallandigham reveled in being called a “Copperhead,” a term used by the Republicans to imply that the Peace Democrats were like snakes, ready to strike