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By Root 6810 0

on, and obtained ample supplies. Had I not done so, we should have been in an awkward predicament by the time that we reached Knoxville. Had anything been lacking, it is certain that the blame would have been placed on me.”8 The army reached its destination with less than half the number of wagons and animals required for a campaign. But Dawson’s prescience protected him from Longstreet’s growing fury as the general watched his army wilt under the twin assaults of hunger and cold.9 The capture of a Federal wagon train on November 15 eased some of the pain.

Longstreet desperately wanted to avoid a siege, and hoped to make Burnside fight him outside the town. On November 16, he thought he had succeeded. Burnside’s army was strung across a narrow valley outside Knoxville—a “beautiful position” for taking, recalled a Confederate officer. But the situation began to go wrong almost at once. When the cannons opened fire, Dawson was horrified to discover that the ammunition he had worked so hard to acquire was defective. Instead of raining fire and shot upon the enemy, the shells exploded prematurely or not at all. Two days of fighting ended with severe losses to the Confederate corps.

Longstreet vacillated while his enemy built stronger defenses. “There was a good deal of delay, for one reason and another,” wrote Dawson, “and we were so near the town that we could hear the tunes played by the band at Fort Sanders. The favourite air then was: ‘When This Cruel War Is Over.’ ”10 Longstreet had assured Bragg that Knoxville would be captured long before Grant’s reinforcements arrived at Chattanooga. This was impossible now that Burnside occupied the town. But since he had not heard from Bragg for several days, Longstreet wrongly assumed there was no imminent danger to the besiegers.

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Francis Lawley, Frank Vizetelly, and Fitzgerald Ross left Georgia in early November, once they knew for certain that General Longstreet would not be returning to Chattanooga. Vizetelly and Ross set off for Charleston, while Lawley, who was mystified by his friends’ enthusiasm for danger, headed for Richmond. Charleston was again being bombarded; if the Federals succeeded in taking the city, it would be one more disaster that Lawley would have to fudge for his readers. The strain of always putting the best face on Confederate fortunes was beginning to show in his most recent dispatches. When he arrived in Richmond on November 14, Lawley wrote a report for The Times that admitted far more than he perhaps realized. The enemy, he wrote, “hems in the edges of the ‘rebellion’ on every side.” The North had surrounded the South “with a cordon of vessels so numerous as for the first time in 30 months to make access to the Confederate coast really dangerous and difficult.”11

Lawley thought the city looked beautiful. A light dusting of snow covered most reminders of the war and imparted charm to even the most dilapidated buildings. President Davis had returned to Richmond a few days earlier, having toured Charleston’s defenses and delivered an encouraging speech to its embattled citizens. During his absence the Confederate cabinet had learned that the precious Lairds rams were almost certainly lost to them. The secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, still hoped that James Bulloch would find a way to rescue the vessels; with the exception of the Alexandra, the agent had always come through. But the rest of the cabinet thought the news vindicated its decision to expel the British consuls. They were convinced that the Royal Navy could have broken the blockade at any time during the past three years if the British had been truly in favor of Southern independence. The existence of the British blockade runners made no difference to Southern resentment toward Britain—though without them Lee’s army would be suffering even greater privations.

Lee had not fought a battle since Gettysburg and yearned to launch an attack against General Meade and the Army of the Potomac. It went against the grain with him to remain on the defensive, but, as he had explained to his wife