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By Root 7039 0

Court House in Virginia. The celebrations were not as jolly as those of the previous Christmas, though Stuart chivalrously lent them his own tent, and Ross was delighted to meet Stuart’s new assistant inspector general of the cavalry corps, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell. After their visit, Ross wrote that the English cavalry officer had “told us some capital stories of his various adventures.… The Colonel … has only lately been transferred to this army, and looks back with regret to the stirring and fighting time when he was with [General John Hunt] Morgan in the West … [they] adored their ‘fighting old Colonel,’ and would have followed him anywhere.”3

Grenfell had failed to achieve the same popularity among Stuart’s men. When the Englishman had resurfaced in Richmond after his mysterious disappearance from Bragg’s army, his value as an expert cavalryman convinced the Confederate authorities not to prosecute him for his original crime of helping a slave to escape, or for having jumped bail ahead of his trial. But Grenfell’s placement on Stuart’s staff in September caused fierce resentment among the tight-knit group. By the time Ross met Grenfell, the colonel had become so fed up with his treatment that he was on the verge of joining forces again with General Morgan. The Kentucky raider’s recent escape from a Federal prison in Ohio had raised his reputation in the South still higher, and hundreds of volunteers were answering his invitation to form a new guerrilla outfit.4

After Christmas, Ross and Vizetelly returned to Richmond to say goodbye to Lawley. Though his spirits were waning, those of Richmond society were not; amateur theatricals were the craze that winter. Vizetelly had been the mainstay of every production—painting scenery, rehearsing songs, adapting parts, and sometimes even acting. On January 12, 1864, he performed in a comedy before a select audience that included President Davis and General Stuart. Vizetelly’s part “was to dandle and stifle the cries of a screaming baby,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, while three soldiers behind a curtain simulated the child’s cries. “When Mr. Vizetelly had exhausted all known methods of quieting an infant (in vain), his despair was comic. He threw the baby on a chair and sat on it,” prompting great roars of laughter.5

Two weeks after Lawley left for England, Vizetelly realized that he, too, was exhausted and should return home to rest before the fighting resumed in the spring. In his last dispatch from the South, Vizetelly admitted that his two years in the Confederacy had affected him more than any other assignment; “every soldier of the army of Northern Virginia was a comrade. We had marched many weary miles together, and I had shared in some of their dangers,” he wrote. “This brought me nearer to them than years of ordinary contact could have done.” As he rode away from Jeb Stuart’s camp in late January, Vizetelly stopped to look back at the little gathering of tents, suddenly afraid for “the many friends who were lying there, some of whom would breathe their last in the first glad sunshine of [the] coming spring.”6

Ill.48 Winter quarters of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, by Frank Vizetelly, who sketches himself on the left.

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As Lawley and Vizetelly made their separate journeys across the Atlantic, each having run the blockade at Wilmington, news of CSS Alabama’s latest raids on Northern ships was spreading. Captain Raphael Semmes daily expected to see a Federal fleet bearing down on the Alabama, but none came. “My ship had been constantly reported, and any one of his clerks could have plotted my track … so as to show [Gideon Welles] where I was bound.” Instead, laughed Semmes, the U.S. navy secretary played an endless and unwinnable game of chase. All Semmes had to do was estimate how long it would take for intelligence of his whereabouts to reach Washington and make sure he left ahead of his pursuers.7

Since the Confederate commerce raider’s launch in 1862, Semmes had burned or released on bond forty-two vessels, sunk the gunboat USS Hatteras at Galveston,