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enlisted: “A policeman came with me to see that I really did enlist. However, when I went under the standard, I was too short. They … ran me down to Williamsburg and there I was big enough to join the 69th New York Irish Brigade.… On joining I got 400 dollars down, so I thought I would send it home.” Instead, he spent it on whiskey. When the money ran out, Pendlebury’s ailments returned. The members of the Irish 69th were familiar with the problem:

Now if there is a drinker here [wrote Pendlebury], he will know how dreadful he feels after a spree, when he is nearly dying and can’t get any more drink—that was how I felt. When [the guard] answered I looked up into his face and said, “Can you save a life because I fear I shall be dead before morning.” He asked me what I meant, so I told him. He then poured me a tea cup of whisky and I drank it and fell asleep.35

Pendlebury had found a home for himself, and despite his English nationality, his Irish comrades accepted him among their ranks, finding an alcoholic volunteer preferable to a reluctant conscript.36

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Edward Lyulph Stanley, the headstrong younger son of the British postmaster general, Lord Stanley, arrived in Washington on April 14, 1864, having spent three weeks in New York listening to strangers make pointed comments about England’s treachery.28.8 He had not been the slightest bit fazed, being able to hold his own in any arena. According to family lore, when young Lyulph was five years old, “he was one day naughty and scolded by his mother; when she had finished, he said, ‘Proceed, you interest me.’ ”38 “Stanley is a clever young man,” wrote Lord Wodehouse after being introduced to him in 1862, “& will be very pleasant when he has rubbed off a little juvenile conceit, which however is pardonable, as he has just taken a first class at Oxford. He is a staunch Northerner which is singular and a finer Radical. I like to see a young man begin with rather extreme opinions. They ‘tone’ down fast enough.”39 But Stanley was showing no signs of toning down. He visited the Adamses before his departure and exhausted them all with his rapid, earnest talk about American politics.40

Seward was treated to a similar verbal onslaught when he invited Stanley to dinner on April 17. In contrast to Lord Edward St. Maur, Stanley saw no need to be circumspect simply because of his father’s position in Palmerston’s cabinet, and he grilled Seward on every subject that arose. “Mr. Seward struck me as sharp and on the whole a kindly amiable man,” wrote Stanley after the encounter, “but rather shrewd than really able or wide in his views, and prone to be captious and technical instead of statesmanlike in his way of handling great questions.” He was far more impressed by Lincoln, who, he wrote, “spoke very reasonably and without any vulgarity tho’ with some quaintness and homeliness of expression.”41 The president obviously warmed to the Englishman, since he allowed his private secretary John Hay to take the next morning off to show Stanley around Washington. (They went to General Lee’s former home, Arlington, which by Stanley’s standards was “dirty and small.”) Hay’s opinion of England had been colored by Lawley’s reports, Stanley noticed with regret. He discovered, like every visitor before him, that “Americans see hardly any English newspaper but The Times, which is considered here as the true exponent of English opinion.”

Stanley had come to America to learn how British supporters might help the soon-to-be-emancipated slave population, but he was not averse to visiting the front lines, too. On Friday, April 22, he took the train to Brandy Station in Culpeper County, Virginia, to visit the Army of the Potomac. Waiting for him at the station was Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Captain Adams’s contempt for his commanding officers had finally made him accept a transfer to General Meade’s cavalry escort, which meant that he was in a position to introduce Stanley to both Meade and General Grant. The former, wrote Stanley, was “a thorough gentleman and very captivating,” the latter “very modest