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Horrocks was surprised by the large number of foreigners who had enlisted with him. “The Company I am in is a motley assembly—Irish, Germans, French, English, Yankees—Tall, Slim, Short, and Stout. Some are decently behaved and others uncouth as the very devil,” he wrote home. One-fifth of the regiment was English, including all the sergeants. Nevertheless, he was pretending to be a Scot in order to avoid the anti-English prejudice among the Americans.37 The desertions began as soon as the men received their bounty money; but far from deserting himself, Horrocks was sent out with several others to find the absconders and returned with more than a dozen. The ecstatic spirit of patriotism and duty that had animated the first wave of volunteering in 1861 had died out; Horrocks’s desire “to keep myself pretty secure and safe” reflected the feelings of a large majority of the new soldiers, especially among the conscripts.

In the South, where there were neither untapped reserves of young men nor legions of foreigners arriving each week, part-time raiders and guerrilla outfits were playing an increasingly important role in the war effort. Northern Virginia, where Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stationed, was Mosby country. The eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, two hundred miles to the south, had become John Yates Beall country.

As with Mosby, the war had enabled the twenty-eight-year-old Beall to redefine himself. His father’s death when Beall was twenty had forced him to sacrifice a promising legal career in order to care for his widowed mother and five younger siblings. Service in the Confederate army had provided an honorable escape route from domestic responsibilities, until a bullet to his right lung seemed to cut short his military career.

Beall moved to Canada in 1862, where he tried to establish a business selling game, until a friend told him about the Confederate navy operations in England. It sounded so exciting that he wanted to “join them and take of their fortune for good and evil.”38 In the time it took Beall to reach Richmond in February 1863, he had changed his mind about going to England, however, and instead saw himself as a waterborne version of John Mosby. The Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, was skeptical of the idea. He appointed Beall acting master on March 5—the usual commission for gentleman volunteers—but gave him no other help or encouragement: Beall would have to supply his own boat, uniform, weapons, and volunteers, none of whom could be eligible for conscription. Furthermore, although they would be able to keep whatever booty they captured, they would not be paid.

Beall set about recruiting from the groups still open to him—the middle-aged, stranded foreigners, and wounded veterans like himself. By September 1863, his Confederate Volunteer Coast Guard, or “Beall’s Party,” as it was known, had grown to eighteen and included two newspaper editors and their apprentices, a couple of sailors, and two Scotsmen: Bennet Graham Burley and John Maxwell. Burley had recently been imprisoned in Castle Thunder, the converted warehouse in Richmond that housed spies and political prisoners. The twenty-three-year-old Glaswegian had arrived in the South the previous year, bearing designs for a powerful underwater limpet mine, which in theory could penetrate armor plating. (The explosive device had been invented by his father, Robert Burley, Jr., the owner of a toolmaking factory, who, unable to secure commercial interest in his invention at home, had given the plans to his son to take to America.)

Bennet Burley had chosen the South on the assumption he would have a better chance of being noticed. His hunch was correct, though for all the wrong reasons. Fortunately, the new chief of the Confederate navy’s Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography, John M. Brooke, was also an inventor. As soon as Brooke saw Burley’s plans, he knew that the youth was no spy and arranged for his release. Having regained his freedom, Burley displayed the daring and initiative that later made him one of the most famous war