A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [296]
The mine’s failure to explode merely whetted Burley’s and Maxwell’s appetite for danger, and they officially joined Beall’s Party on August 13, 1863, the day their navy commissions as acting master came through. Having acquired two small boats, the black Raven and the white Swan, the raiders went on to harass Federal shipping around Cape Charles and Fortress Monroe so successfully that a joint U.S. military and naval expedition was ordered to find them.39 Beall’s dream of emulating Mosby had come true.
John Mosby himself had received a bullet wound in August and had only recently returned to active duty. He decided to prove his recovery by reprising his spectacular raid against Sir Percy Wyndham in March. This time the target was Francis Pierpont, the governor of pro-Union West Virginia, who was staying in temporary quarters in Alexandria. The raid was unsuccessful, but it reminded Wyndham, whose recovery from his leg wound had been reported with great excitement by local newspapers, that the contest between them was still alive.40
Wyndham’s New Jersey Cavaliers were camped at Bristoe Station, right in the center of Mosby country, but Wyndham was unable to indulge his fantasies of revenge, having again been moved up to brigade command. Union general George Meade had ordered his cavalry corps to find out where Lee was moving with the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite almost constant skirmishing with Jeb Stuart’s troops, the cavalrymen were able to report that Lee had dispatched General Longstreet and the First Corps to an unknown destination. “I should be glad to have your views as to what had better be done, if anything,” Meade asked General Halleck on September 14. Lincoln wondered what Meade was waiting for: “He should move upon Lee at once,” the president wrote impatiently to Halleck.41
Meade did indeed move, but slowly and deliberately, to the relief of the Confederates. President Davis and General Lee had decided that there was no alternative to sending Longstreet to Tennessee, which was in danger of being captured by Union general William Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. If Rosecrans succeeded, yet more vital railroads would be lost, railroads that were Virginia’s only lifeline to the much reduced Confederacy. Tennessee lay across the top of the South like an elongated anvil, touching the borders of Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia; the Confederates feared that its conquest would allow the North to carve up the South like a joint of beef. The implications of such a disaster added to the Richmond cabinet’s anguish after the summer of defeats. The chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, mourned in his diary: “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”42
During July, Rosecrans had pushed his Confederate adversary, Braxton Bragg, into the eastern corner of Tennessee. Bragg still held Chattanooga, with its all-important rail depots, but the irascible general was leading a demoralized army that had already been defeated twice in battle. Bragg’s bullying manner made him despised by his officers and loathed by the men. “I had seen men shot, and whipped, and shaved, and branded,” wrote Sam Watkins, a private in the 1st Tennessee Regiment. He thought he was used to Bragg’s ways, but at Chattanooga worse was to come. He watched the hanging of two “Yankee spies.” “I saw a guard approach,” he wrote, “and saw two little boys in their midst.… I saw that they were handcuffed. ‘Are they spies?’ I was appalled; I was horrified; nay, more, I was sick at heart … the youngest one began to beg and cry and plead most piteously.… The props were knocked out and the two boys were dangling in the air. I turned off sick at heart.”43