• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Confederates were no less shaken by the six weeks of relentless fighting. Francis Dawson had suffered so many near misses that he was certain the next bullet would find him.13 But his spirits had recovered since the return of Lawley and Vizetelly, who ran the blockade at Wilmington together on June 5. Vizetelly had brought with him a letter from Dawson’s mother. “Little did I think, when years ago, I saw drawings and sketches in the [London] Illustrated by our ‘special artist F. Vizetelli,’ or even when we had many a frolic together in the mountains of Tennessee,” Dawson wrote home on June 26, “that he, the same joyous, corpulent artist would have proved a source of such happiness to my dear parents and myself.” Dawson’s happiness was complete after Vizetelly drew a picture of his corps on a midnight march through burning woods.14

“I am satisfied General Grant will make no more onslaughts upon the Confederate breastworks,” Lawley wrote from Lee’s headquarters on June 27. “Weeks and weeks will probably pass without amending Grant’s prospects before Petersburg.” The Confederates’ defenses stretched for over thirty miles in a protective semicircle of trenches and bombproof shelters, connected by walkways that in some places were six feet deep and up to twelve feet wide. Lawley recognized that the real danger to the Confederacy came from Sherman in Georgia. Only Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and the Army of Tennessee stood between Sherman and Atlanta, the last strategic target of the South. The great question on Lawley’s, indeed everyone’s, mind was whether the Northern electorate would decide to end the war before Sherman reached Virginia.

Ill.51 A corps of the Confederate army marching by night through burning woods, by Frank Vizetelly.

Ill.52 View of Petersburg from General Lee’s headquarters—watching the Federals through binoculars, by Frank Vizetelly.

Three days later, on July 1, Lee’s artillery commander, General Edward Porter Alexander, arrived at the Confederate headquarters with disturbing news. He had seen activity that convinced him the Federals were digging a tunnel under the trenches. Lawley asked him how long it would have to be to clear their works: “I answered about 500 feet,” Alexander recalled. “[Lawley] stated that the longest military tunnel or gallery which had ever been run was at the siege of Delhi, and that it did not exceed 400 feet. That it was found impossible to ventilate far greater distance.” Alexander reminded him that the average coal mine went much farther and it would not be too taxing for the Federals to ask any volunteer from the Pennsylvania mines about ventilation. Lee had no option but to wait and see who would turn out to be right.15

Lawley and Vizetelly suffered as the summer heat cast a pall over the trenches. To pass the time, Vizetelly drew portraits of Lee and his staff watching the Federals through field glasses. The biggest excitement was the arrival of a captain from the British Army, G. T. Peacocke, who reported to duty as a volunteer aide to General Pickett.16 Lawley filled his reports with stories of “African savagery” and Federal brutality toward women and children, but he neglected to describe the hunger that now afflicted Lee’s army. One of the more colorful English blockade runners, the Hon. Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, the third son of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, whose later exploits with the Turkish navy won him the title “Hobart Pasha,” visited the front lines in July. He came armed with boxes of sausages and sardines, which were eagerly gobbled up by the grateful Confederates. “For months past [they] had tasted nothing but coarse rye-bread and pork washed down with water,” wrote Hobart-Hampden. “There were several Englishmen among the officers composing the staff,” he added with surprise. “I often wonder what has become of them.”17

Hobart-Hampden saw Petersburg and Richmond, where nearly every other female was dressed in deep mourning, and even snatched a half-hour conversation with Lee himself, yet still he believed Lawley’s optimistic