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By Root 6610 0

The Confederates were curious about him, and he was constantly peppered with questions, such as whether the Coldstream Guards really wore scarlet into battle. Inevitably someone would ask him whether he thought British soldiers could fight as well or better. During one train journey there was a lively debate in the carriage as to whether the British could have defeated Lee at Fredericksburg.

It was May 28 when Fremantle arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where General Bragg and his long-suffering army were encamped. He was not the only visitor at Bragg’s headquarters. The staff introduced Fremantle to an unexpected guest: three days earlier, Clement Vallandigham, the dissident Democrat and leader of the so-called Copperheads, had been unceremoniously dumped in front of Confederate pickets and ordered by his Federal guards not to turn back.

The exiled politician was outraged at his treatment by the U.S. government. On May 1 he had attended a rally in Ohio where he gave one of his usual antiwar speeches. It was a deliberate provocation, and General Burnside—who had been transferred to run the Department of Ohio, which oversaw all military matters across seven states from Wisconsin to West Virginia—fell into the trap. On May 4 Burnside sent soldiers to Vallandigham’s house in Dayton. They smashed down his back door and dragged the politician off to a waiting train. Vallandigham’s arrest had the effect that he was hoping for: newspapers throughout the Midwest declared him a martyr to free speech and freedom of conscience. Burnside hastily assembled a military tribunal of eight army officers to “try” the case. It was a farce, Vallandigham indignantly told Fremantle; one of the officers was not even American. (The unknown officer was Colonel John Fitzroy De Courcy, who had returned to duty and was anxious to be of use to Burnside in the hope it would lead to his reinstatement with the 16th Ohio.)

The tribunal listened to the evidence for two days and came to a unanimous agreement on the defendant’s guilt. They had more difficulty deciding what to do with him. One thought he ought to be shot; another suggested exile; eventually they agreed he should be imprisoned in a fort somewhere.31 But the ensuing national uproar over Vallandigham’s trial severely embarrassed the administration, and Lincoln swiftly commuted the sentence to banishment. But Vallandigham had no more wish to be in the South than the rebels had to receive him. He had been made, in Fremantle’s words, “a destitute stranger” in his own country. General Bragg was puzzled as to how to treat his reluctant visitor; Vallandigham’s platform of compromise and reunion was no more popular in the South than Lincoln’s policy of forced reunion. He was relieved to learn that Vallandigham wished to travel to Bermuda, where it would be possible for him to take a ship to Canada. Vallandigham preferred not to mix with his hosts while they waited for permission from Richmond to allow him to travel to Wilmington. He did not consider himself a Confederate sympathizer and was not interested in meeting foreign supporters of the South; he politely declined an introduction to the sole English volunteer on Bragg’s staff.

Colonel Fremantle, on the other hand, was delighted to meet his compatriot. “Ever since I landed in America, I had heard of the exploits of an Englishman called Colonel St. Leger Grenfell,” he wrote on May 30, two days after his arrival at Bragg’s headquarters. “This afternoon I made his acquaintance, and I consider him one of the most extraordinary characters I ever met. Although he is a member of a well-known English family, he seems to have devoted his whole life to the exciting career of a soldier of fortune.” Grenfell was Bragg’s inspector general of cavalry, having left the raiding outfit led by the Confederate guerrilla John Hunt Morgan the previous Christmas. Fremantle was surprised to learn that Grenfell was fifty-five years old and that he had a wife (who had thrown up her hands some years before and was running a successful girls’ school in Paris) and two grown-up