A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [336]
The 5th Battery, New Jersey Artillery, containing the English private James Horrocks, was among the units placed under Butler’s command. When Horrocks saw Butler in person he was startled by his notorious ugliness. “Imagine a bloated-looking bladder of lard,” he wrote to his parents. “Call before your mental vision a sack full of muck … and then imagine four enormous German sausages fixed to the extremities of the sack in lieu of arms and legs.”45 Butler had been ordered to drive hard toward Richmond, smashing the rail link between Petersburg and Richmond as he went. But Horrocks did not notice any particular sense of urgency after his regiment arrived on May 5 at a deserted City Point, less than twenty-five miles from the Confederate capital.
The day was warm and sunny, far too pleasant to waste idling on the banks. “I took a walk with another fellow,” wrote Horrocks. “We passed several little shanties, and at every one the soldiers … were ransacking and taking everything worth taking.” Horrocks and his friend hurried on. “We walked on about a mile and a half and then came to a fine residence of a planter, in which about a dozen soldiers were making free with everything.” As they approached the gate, a couple of soldiers came out laden with struggling livestock. A headless lamb was slung over the shoulder of one, its neck still dripping with blood. The gray-haired owner of the house sat hunched on the doorstep, moaning as Horrocks stepped around him. Once inside, he heard screams and the crashing of wood as soldiers forced open every door and cupboard. The black house servants were cowering in the corner of the parlor while the elderly wife of the owner shouted hoarsely at the men to leave. Horrocks walked down the hall to escape the noise. “In the next room, which was extremely well furnished, was a piano. I sat down and played Home, Sweet Home! with variations.” The playing soothed him, and without another thought, he joined in the looting. “I took a flute and a package of beautiful wax candles and a piece of scented soap.” He also found a wad of Confederate notes, which he was about to pocket when the old lady entered the room and shamed him into putting them back. Suddenly, Horrocks wished to slip away as quickly as possible.
The troops were starting to move out when Horrocks returned to the landing place. No one had missed him. They marched for several hours through thick piney woods. “Every now and then we passed some poor fellow who had given out and lay on the side of the road with his knapsack and musket alongside of him and then we passed portions of their kit … scores of blankets and overcoats, and boots and shoes.” Like Frederick Farr, these men had been left behind, “thrown away,” in Horrocks’s words, “in order to lighten the load.”46 Horrocks promised his parents that he would take the greatest care with his life; he expected to be fired at soon and was curious how it would feel. “When I have felt it, I will tell you how it is.”47
Horrocks’s eagerness to encounter Confederate bullets was delayed by General Butler, who, instead of blocking the approaches to Richmond from the south and west, had become diverted by the nonexistent need to build fortifications and trenches, giving the Confederates enough time to insert General Beauregard’s small force of 18,000 men between the Union Army of the James and the capital. Butler’s failure to reach Richmond meant that Grant would be setting his spring campaign into motion with his plan damaged from the outset.
The Army of the Potomac began moving on May 4. If Grant’s ultimate objective was to reach Richmond, Lee’s was just as straightforward: to hold down the enemy long enough to convince the Northern public to vote for a pro-peace president in the November election. He was relieved