A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [327]
On March 25, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., set sail back to the United States. The brothers had been surprised by how much they enjoyed each other’s company. Henry even accompanied him to Liverpool and waited on the tugboat as Charles Francis Jr.’s steamer pulled out of sight. “Henry nodded to me good-bye from the tug,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “and I, with a bitter taste … in my mouth, was off for home.”49 His departure for America was followed a few days later by that of Rose Greenhow for France. Little Rose sobbed when her mother appeared at the convent. Her distress made Rose dread the inevitable parting. “I know I ought not to be miserable,” Rose wrote in her diary as she reflected on the decisions that had brought them to Europe, “and yet I am, and tears which I try to keep back flow down my cheek and blind me.”50 On April 2 she celebrated little Rose’s eleventh birthday with the one gift that her daughter craved above all: her undivided attention.
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27.1 That same night, in the Kell household, far away in McIntosh County, Georgia, six-year-old Jonny Kell cried as his mother buried his little sister, Dot, near the house. Jonny’s younger brother, three-year-old Munroe, was too shocked to speak. Jonny frightened his mother by saying he wished to join “little Sissy” in heaven. Four days after her daughter’s death, Mrs. Kell was relieved to hear that Munroe had regained his words. “Jonny, you may have my marbles,” he said, “I don’t want them any more.” That evening he showed the classic signs of diphtheria. He was dead by the morning. “Oh God have mercy on my desolate broken heart,” wrote Lieutenant Kell’s despairing wife. “He has been gone so long, so long! Three long sad years.”9
27.2 Captain John Ancrum Winslow had been searching for James Morgan’s ship, the Georgia, when storm damage forced USS Kearsarge to put into Queenstown, Ireland, on November 3 for emergency repairs. While it was there, a local newspaper printed a story that the U.S. ship had come expressly to enlist volunteers. The following day the Kearsarge was surrounded by rowboats filled with men clamoring to be chosen. The Kearsarge set sail on November 5 with sixteen extra men. Winslow’s explanation of the incident failed to say how the sixteen climbed aboard unnoticed and managed to find such perfect hiding places on an unfamiliar ship.
27.3 The eighty-year-old premier had been cited as the guilty party in the divorce proceedings of Timothy O’Kane against his wife, Margaret, prompting the society joke: “She was Kane, but was he Able?” Benjamin Disraeli grumpily predicted that the case—though spurious—would do wonders for Palmerston’s popularity and no doubt give him a sweeping victory at the next election.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A Great Slaughter
Grant takes command—A disastrous campaign—Lord Lyons labors on—The new volunteers—Return to the Wilderness—An unstoppable force
General Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Washington on March 8, 1864, to accept his promotion to lieutenant general. In giving him command of all the Union armies in the field, Lincoln promised that he would not interfere as long as the strategy remained one of relentless attack. They both knew that the South could not possibly compete with the North for manpower or resources.1 The Capitol’s gleaming new dome—finished on December 2, 1863—was a powerful advertisement for the healthy state of the U.S. Treasury, especially compared to the hyperinflation and financial chaos that were crippling the South.28.1
Yet the year had not begun well for the North: the Confederate cavalry under General Nathan Bedford Forrest had hampered Sherman’s attempts to wreck Mississippi’s rail system; a Union incursion into Florida was beaten back in late February; and in Charleston, the Federal navy encountered a new and potentially devastating weapon of war: the submarine. The experimental CSS H. L. Hunley