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Lawley still believed in the purity of the Southern planter class as the epitome of all that was noble and intelligent in the human race. But in his opinion, the rest of the Southern population was going to the dogs: “Richmond and in a less degree, Charleston and Mobile, strike me as immense gambling booths.” He would know—many of his friends and acquaintances, including Judah Benjamin, made up the chief clientele of Richmond’s illicit “hells.” Profiteering, corruption, and hoarding were rampant. Lawley felt a visceral disappointment whenever he observed Southerners behaving like ordinary human beings in time of war, and he tried as much as possible to shut his eyes to the messy aspects of the South. He required moral clarity from the Confederates, especially now that the North was growing stronger and more aggressive. Part of him was confident that “Fighting Joe” Hooker stood no chance against Lee. But he had seen enough of the Federal army to have doubts, even if he preferred not to express them out loud. “My sole and only hope is in the demoralization of the Yankees but I have little faith in it,” he wrote to Gregory. “The truth is that the Yankee fights much better than he has been represented as fighting.”19

On April 2, 1863, a few days after Lawley had unburdened himself to Gregory, there were bread riots in Richmond. The Confederate capital was a microcosm of the many hardships being endured across the South; hunger and disease were spreading. Smallpox had invaded the poorer neighborhoods as more refugees arrived, begging for space even if it meant sleeping outside on a porch or in a garden shed. Everything was scarce. Women who before the war bought only the finest scented soaps from France were using soap made from kitchen grease mixed with lye. Ordinary articles such as pins and buttons were so hard to come by that John Jones, the diarist in the Confederate War Department, walked to work every day with his eyes fixed on the ground hoping to find some carelessly dropped treasure in the gutter.

Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was also suffering; the men had been on half rations for so long that many were showing the first signs of scurvy. There were still plenty of foodstuffs in southern Virginia and North Carolina, particularly in the fertile tidewater regions near the coast, but over the past year, transportation had become almost impossible. The Federal occupation of Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern—all of them strategically important towns along the southeastern seaboard—was choking the Confederate supply line. On the morning of the bread riots in Richmond, General Longstreet—Francis Dawson’s new commander—received permission to attack Suffolk. The Union garrison there was weakly held, and Longstreet believed he could take it with twenty thousand men. The Confederate general had hoped to launch a surprise attack, but an intercepted message alerted the Federals to his plan.

Washington promptly dispatched thousands of troops to strengthen the garrison, forcing Longstreet to alter his battle plan from an attack to a siege. The no longer plump Englishman George Herbert of the 9th New York Volunteers (“Hawkins’s Zouaves”) was among the Union reinforcements. The regiment was thunderstruck by its mobilization. The men had only six weeks left before the terms of their enlistment expired. They had expected to remain in camp at Newport News, Virginia, where the most strenuous activity of the day was a game of baseball against the 51st New York. The men “are all anxiously looking forward to our final march up Broadway,” Herbert told his mother. Few of them intended to reenlist: Herbert was already planning his future in England. “I guess I shall have somewhere about $400 when I am mustered out and the more gold falls the richer I shall be,” he mused on March 31.20

Eleven days later, on April 11, Herbert and his comrades disembarked at Portsmouth Naval Yard. The regiment stood listlessly under pelting rain as