• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

* * *

24.1 Maffitt could not resist lingering in the Channel in the hope of snatching a last-minute prize, and he was rewarded for his daring with the Anglo-Saxon, a U.S. ship carrying coal to New York. He removed the passengers, appropriated the coal, and burned the ship. The Royal Navy was affronted by Maffitt’s cheek at carrying out a raid so close to British waters and sent a frigate to patrol the area. But by then Maffitt had docked at Brest.

24.2 The Duke of Argyll told Sumner that he would not show his letters to Lord Russell because the foreign minister would dismiss them as gibberish. The duchess also tried to reason with him. “I like you to be quite frank with me, but wish you did not hope for what is impossible,” she wrote earnestly. “We must be neutral, as a Government.… I sent some of the newspaper extracts you sent me to Lord Russell. He replied: ‘We must be neutral.… We do not “fit out ships by the dozen,” and Mr. S. must know the allegation to be untrue. One—two—three ships may have evaded our laws, just as the Americans evaded the American laws during the Canadian Contest.… You will have seen that the Government did their best in the Alexandra case. As to the ironplated ships, there seems to be great difficulty in getting at the truth.’ ”9

24.3 Nine years later, in 1872, while taking a break between wars, an old friend from the Vicksburg campaign went down to Oxford to pay Dr. Mayo a visit. The friend was General Sherman.

TWENTY-FIVE

River of Death

Colonel De Courcy wins and loses—Longstreet arrives at Chickamauga—The Confederate generals’ revolt—Two English travelers—Contrasting goodwill tours—“They are all down on us”

The timing of Longstreet’s arrival in Chattanooga depended on eastern Tennessee’s remaining under Southern control. If the railroads or the road through the Cumberland Gap stayed open, Longstreet would be able to reach General Bragg in a matter of days. If these were closed, the only other possible train route went south through the Carolinas, west through Georgia, and finally north to Chattanooga, taking at least a week, if not two. However, Federal forces led by General Burnside captured Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 2, 1863, cutting the Virginia–Tennessee rail link. This left the Cumberland Gap, which had been guarded by a garrison force of 2,500 Confederates since starvation drove out Colonel De Courcy in 1862. The new Confederate commander at the Gap, Brigadier General John Frazer, was struggling. Only two regiments were in a fit state for duty; the other two had been so depleted by illness and desertions that they were in a state of near mutiny. Frazer had been receiving conflicting orders about whether to evacuate or defend the fort. In the end, he decided to fight.1

Burnside did not want to be caught up in an arduous struggle for a single pass when he had an ideal candidate for the task in Colonel De Courcy, whose familiarity with the area was unmatched. Burnside assigned to him an independent brigade of 1,700 men, with orders to attack the Confederates from the northern side of the Gap. For De Courcy, the command signaled that his rehabilitation was complete, his reputation no longer tainted by the accusations of cowardice at Chickasaw Bluffs.

De Courcy’s happiness was shortlived. He discovered after the expedition had begun that he was leading a brigade that consisted of the flotsam and rejects of Burnside’s army; one regiment was just three months old, another a mere two weeks. Worse still, the ordnance supplies had failed to arrive on time. His artillery regiment had lost most of its guns; his two cavalry regiments had no revolvers; and the infantry regiments were down to thirty bullets per man. Their bread ration was enough to last them for four days, perhaps seven if cut in half. De Courcy ordered a slow march, hoping that the rations and munitions would catch up with them along the way. None came. By September 7, De Courcy had grown so outraged by the lackadaisical incompetence of Federal headquarters in Kentucky that he was bombarding them