A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [331]
The news that he was being transferred to the command of the military operations in North Carolina and southern Virginia below Richmond caught Beauregard by surprise. Although he had felt sidelined in Charleston, he was anxious about leaving when the Federals were building up their fleet for another assault. He had so little confidence in his replacement, General Sam Jones, that he decided not to take all his staff with him in the hope that some continuity would be maintained. The English volunteer Captain Henry Feilden, whose admiration for the departing commander bordered on hero worship, was crestfallen to learn that he was one of those staying behind. The general called him to his office on April 19 to explain the situation, promising to send for Feilden if his new appointment became permanent. “I don’t think I have any chance of getting to Virginia with him for some time, though I flatter myself that he has too much regard for me to debar me from sharing the privations and dangers of the field with him,” Feilden wrote after the meeting.15
This was not what the recipient of the letters wished to hear. Feilden had recently become engaged to twenty-six-year-old Julia McCord, the daughter of the late congressman David James McCord—known in his day as “Handsome Davy”—who had been a powerful figure in South Carolina politics during the 1830s. Julia should have been brought up amid great comfort and security, but the early death of her parents had robbed her of both. Before meeting Feilden she had lived quietly and obscurely with a spinster cousin in Greenville, South Carolina.
Julia had fallen in love with Feilden when she visited his office in June 1863 to obtain a military pass to visit her half-brother. (She preserved the little piece of paper for the rest of her life.) Her effect on Feilden was equally dramatic: “I have only one thing to say and that is you must have no doubts of my love for you, darling,” he promised in one of his earliest letters to her.16 His protectiveness toward her extended to playing down the dangers that faced Charleston. “Don’t be alarmed about my overworking myself, the business of the office is already decreasing,” he lied on April 30. As soon as various troop movements had been completed, “we shall have a very quiet summer.”17 But with Beauregard gone, a Federal fleet of almost fifty ships gathering outside the harbor, and General Jones so short of manpower that the city’s fire brigade was being used in place of real soldiers, there was no chance of a quiet or peaceful summer.18
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“I doubt whether people in Europe are aware of the extent of the progress of this country in military strength,” Lord Lyons had written to Russell during Grant’s Chattanooga campaign. In answering Russell’s question as to whether Britain could still defeat the United States in a war, Lyons had replied that any British invading force would be outnumbered “by five to one” and would have no chance of winning. But he did not “think the government here at all desires to pick a quarrel with us or with any European power.”28.4 19 Lyons’s conviction that an Anglo-American war was now unlikely did not mean that he was any less dispirited by his failure to change U.S. attitudes toward Britain. “It is not my purpose here to explain the bitter feelings of the great majority of the American people against England,” he wrote to Russell on April 25. “The feeling is the less to be combated, because it is utterly unreasonable and utterly regardless of facts or arguments.”20 Recently, The New York Times had speculated with undisguised glee on the hope of a war between Britain and Germany. A new German navy would arise, the newspaper predicted, “manned, equipped, and armed” in American ports.21
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Lyons was not