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23.3 The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, had a strangely inflated idea of Lyons’s power. It was mortifying, he complained, “the extent Lord Lyons shapes and directs, through the Secretary of State, an erroneous policy to this government.” CSS Florida had recently sailed within sixty miles of New York, leaving a trail of burning ships and bruised egos in her wake. Welles sent six cruisers to chase after the elusive Captain Maffitt and his crew, but a false lead had led them up the East Coast toward Nantucket. This, too, was somehow Lord Lyons’s fault.44

23.4 The British consul was exaggerating; the number was less than a thousand. Lyons’s chargé d’affaires, William Stuart, telegraphed Rear Admiral Milne for his advice. Milne replied in the negative. It would be unthinkable, he wrote, to send in a ship now and interfere with Federal naval plans.

23.5 Francis Lawley’s optimistic reporting about the shelling of Charleston did not deceive William Howard Russell: “Such rubbish!” he wrote in his diary on September 28. “I really believe on the U.S. question the great John Bull has lost his head and is distracted by jealousy to such an extent that it has not only ceased to be just and generous but to be moderately reasonable.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Devouring the Young

Rose Greenhow arrives in England—The British government vs. the rams—Commissioner Mason leaves his post—A new breed of volunteer—General Bragg’s justice

With Rose Greenhow and her daughter on board, the blockade runner Phantom was the only ship to escape from Wilmington on the night of August 5, 1863. “We passed the Elizabeth and the Hebe, who had each got aground, but our anxiety was too great on our own account to bestow much thought upon our friends,” she wrote in her diary; “the Yankees threw up rockets, which revealed to us the fact that we were in the midst of five of the ‘blockaders.’ ” After rounding Cape Fear with the pursuers mercifully far behind, “Capt. Porter had a mattress spread upon deck, upon which I lay,” Rose continued in her diary, “watching the moon which had risen and was shining gloriously high in the Heavens, and pitying myself as the victim of that most unfortunate infirmity of seasickness.” Little Rose also felt wretched and “crouched by my side, amidst the cotton bales which crowded the deck.”1

The Phantom sailed unmolested into St. George’s harbor, Bermuda, on August 10, 1863. Rose’s steamship to England was not leaving for three weeks, which gave her ample opportunity to study Major Walker’s shipping operation. “The entire trade of the island is Confederate,” she remarked. The willingness of the British authorities to ignore his activities was a reflection of Bermuda’s desperate plight before the war. A devout believer in “the wise and beneficial system of servile labor,” Rose hoped that the British now regretted their folly in abolishing slavery in 1833. Had it not been for the Confederate community on the island, all of whom shared her prejudices, she would have been miserable during her stay; living cheek by jowl with a free black population seemed unnatural and offensive to her. But in contrast to her treatment at Richmond, Rose was the center of attention in St. George. “She is one of the most beautiful women I ever saw,” gushed Georgiana Walker. “She knows this and like a sensible woman, does not pretend to think the contrary.”2 The fact that Rose was traveling on a diplomatic mission made her seem even more glamorous.

Rose had expected to be in Liverpool by September 11 or 12 at the latest, and she was taken by surprise when the captain announced that he was changing their destination. The Harriet Pinckney was a new Confederate steamer, he explained, and too precious to risk becoming “Yankee prey” on the return journey. They were heading south instead, to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall. “This was unexpected to us all,” Rose wrote in her diary, “and everyone set to work to know where Falmouth was and what sort of a place.”3 The captain was being overly cautious;