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only a trickle of blockade runners. John Jones, the War Department clerk in Richmond, had heard that the capture rate was one in four blockade runners; “we can afford that,” he wrote.41 But Jones had also heard in the War Department that soldiers were threatening to desert in order to feed their families and protect their farms. Grant’s victory at Chattanooga had given the Union a base from which to attack not only the heart of the South, but also its munitions and gunpowder factories in Georgia.

Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga—the three Confederate victories in 1863—had not taken the South one step closer to independence, whereas Gettysburg had restored the morale of the Northern public, and Vicksburg had showed that victory was possible. “The signs look better,” Lincoln wrote after the Mississippi River was reopened to travel and commerce. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Much of Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia north of Fredericksburg were under Union control; the Gulf and Atlantic coasts were also closed off from the Confederacy; and Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana were inaccessible to Richmond. But these advantages seemed less certain when the core of the Confederacy—Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama—remained intact; two formidable Confederate armies and the great Robert E. Lee were at Davis’s disposal; and the fighting spirit of the South remained unbroken.

* * *

26.1 Unwilling to volunteer for the regular Confederate army, Burley briefly tried his hand at journalism before turning to the stage. He joined the New Richmond Theatre, run by the British theater manager Richard d’Orsay Ogden. Burley’s first role was a small part in the aptly named The Guerrillas, a Confederate melodrama set during Stonewall Jackson’s military campaign in 1862.

26.2 This was also Robert Neve’s final day of the war. Already sick with dysentery, he was sent to the hospital after the battle and was never again well enough to fight. He mustered out of the army in September 1864 and returned to England. His health permanently damaged by the war, he died in his mid-thirties in 1879, and his wife, Charlotte, successfully applied to Washington for a widow’s pension.

26.3 In early 1864, De Courcy submitted his resignation. He received an ordinary discharge on February 19, which, after protests, was amended to an honorable discharge on March 3. He was forty-four years old. More than half his life had been spent in the service of one army or another, and he could not imagine beginning a new life in business or farming. De Courcy chose to go home to England. His future prospects were slim. But there was still one career open to him: he could marry well. On May 10, 1864, De Courcy married Elia, Comtesse du Bosque de Beaumont, a French widow of independent means.38

PART III

IF ONLY WE

ARE SPARED

TWENTY-SEVEN

Buckling Under Pressure

Time for a vacation—The Alabama—The Irish—Confederate woes in Europe—The Liberal government clings to power

“They are wearing out, down there,” Henry Adams wrote to his brother Charles Francis Jr. after The Times published Francis Lawley’s reports from Tennessee. “He says it took him forty hours to go by rail the hundred and thirty miles from Atlanta to Chattanooga, in the filthiest, meanest cars he ever saw.”1 The effects of the Federal blockade were far worse than Henry knew. The Confederate government cupboards were practically bare: in recent months the purchasing orders for its agent James Bulloch in Liverpool had broadened from military supplies to include such ordinary items as “one dozen erasers,” “two dozen memorandum books of different sizes, and 12 dozen best lead pencils.”2

Francis Lawley was feeling worn out himself. After three years of reporting from the field, he had decided to take a leave of absence in the New Year. He stayed in the Confederate capital over Christmas while his friends Frank Vizetelly and Fitzgerald Ross went to the headquarters of Confederate general Jeb Stuart near Orange