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Ill.46 The Royal Navy keeping watch over the Lairds’ rams in the Mersey.

and inserting a piece of lead pipe into the hole they got all the liquor they (temporarily) wanted. This they distributed among the crew and soon there was a battle royal going on the berth deck which the master-at-arms was unable to stop.… Here was a pretty kettle of fish! … I suddenly leaped upon the man and bore him to the deck, where, in a jiffy, the master-at-arms placed the bracelets on his wrists. The other mutineers, quietly extending their arms in sign of submission, were placed in irons, and confined below. The discipline of the ship needed as much repairing as the vessel did herself. It was time the Georgia sought a civilized port for more reasons than one.33

Clerks at Fraser, Trenholm had carefully stored the crew’s letters, to be distributed on their eventual return to port, and receiving news from home helped calm the febrile atmosphere on the ship. “There was great rejoicing for all save me,” recorded Morgan after the letters were delivered at Cherbourg. He had received two: the first told of the death of his brother George, a captain serving in the 1st Louisiana Infantry in Virginia; the second, that Gibbes, his other brother and a captain in the 7th Louisiana, had died a prisoner of war on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie. Morgan’s adventures at sea suddenly seemed trivial to him after the terrible news from home. From this moment, his one ambition was to return to the South and fight the Federals.

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In the Southwest, the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson had brought a temporary quiet to the Mississippi region. General Banks’s XIX Corps returned to camp, and the 133rd New York Volunteers, Colonel Currie’s regiment, resumed its garrison duty in Baton Rouge. Currie had recovered from his wounds, and much as he retained a fondness for his men, he loathed inaction more and had applied for a transfer. “I have at least one strong arm left,” he wrote to Thurlow Weed, “and I am only desirous that any merit I may possess … may meet with equal favor with my compeers.”34 Currie’s eagerness to be in the thick of danger was rare: most of the injured and sick wanted to be as far away from the fighting as possible.

Ebenezer Wells and Dr. Charles Mayo were both sent north, Wells to a hospital in Kentucky and Mayo to Saratoga Springs in New York to recover from typhus. His last weeks in Vicksburg had been a blur to him, but the illness saved his life in an unexpected way. On August 18, Mayo had become so unwell that a friend insisted he spend the night in town with him rather than on his ship, the City of Madison. During the night there was an explosion on the Madison that claimed the lives of all those on board. After this near brush with death, the authorities finally took pity on Mayo and shipped him out of Vicksburg. The War Department accepted his resignation from the army on September 8, although it was another two weeks before he was well enough to sail for England on the twenty-second, never to return to America.24.3

Mayo’s quiet departure contrasted with the noisy and sometimes violent integration of the thousands of new army recruits produced by the draft, many of whom were determined to desert at the first opportunity. Even the volunteers were often cynical about their situation. “As I fully intend to desert if I don’t get good treatment, I enlisted under the name of Andrew Ross,” James Horrocks wrote to his parents on September 5, 1863. The nineteen-year-old had run away from Lancashire to escape the financial burden and shame of having fathered an illegitimate child.35 Volunteering in the Federal army seemed like an excellent prospect to the prodigal son: “I shall get when mustered in $200 from the state of New Jersey, 50 dollars from Hudson City (where I enlisted) and 25 dollars from the Government. This, together with a month’s pay in advance, will make $288 cash down,” he told his parents. “I shall be able to save more money as a soldier than as a clerk with 400 dollars a year (that is a pretty good salary in New York).