A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [354]
Griffith Evans was concerned for Lyons when he visited the legation on July 20, though the minister sheepishly declined his sympathy. Evans should reserve his pity for the country’s leaders, Lyons told him: “Mr. Lincoln is not the man to look at that he was four years ago.” The Welshman realized the truth of this statement when he visited the White House a few days later. He walked through the “Grand Reception Room,” which he thought was “very seedy looking,” into Lincoln’s office without anyone’s challenging his presence. Lincoln was so exhausted and put upon that he did not think to ask why a stranger was in his office. “He shows marks of mental overwork,” decided Evans after a few minutes’ conversation.24
The pressures on Lincoln were increasing. Grant’s failure to capture Richmond and Jubal Early’s raid near Washington had shaken the cabinet’s confidence. The tense divisions between the members resurfaced in violent quarrels and a resumption of the old plots and counterplots against one another. Seward, whose son Will had been wounded while defending Washington against Early, turned some of his frustration on Lord Lyons. He rudely dismissed as exaggeration the minister’s complaints that the Central Guard House in Washington was using water punishments against alleged deserters. Lyons had evidence from six separate cases, and he was outraged by the State Department’s explanation that a cold shower was pleasant in the summer. Turning water cannons on prisoners was not “in conformity with any law or regulations,” he bluntly wrote to Seward on July 25. It was used for one reason only: “for the purpose of extorting, by the infliction of bodily pain, confessions from persons suspected of being deserters.”25 Nor was this his only complaint against the army. That same week, Lyons received evidence from the New York consulate of British subjects being hung by their thumbs until they agreed to sign confessions of desertion.
The legation’s only success in July was the rescue of Admiral Usher’s grandson, Henry, who had walked into the New York consulate on the thirteenth, painfully thin and unsteady on his feet. “Usher has been for about a week in hospital in this place, too ill to report to me until today,” recounted the deputy consul. Now that they had him, they were not allowing him out of their sight. One of the clerks went to the ticket office to purchase a berth for the boy, and another stayed by him until he boarded the steamer. The attachés celebrated the news that young Usher had departed from New York by having a drink at Willard’s.
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The president has “called for 500,000 more recruits,” Lyons reported to London on July 22. “It will depend very much on the events of the present campaign whether he gets them.”26 Thurlow Weed believed this new draft to be an act of political suicide.27 The army knew little of Grant’s intentions, and its spirits sank as the soldiers broiled and sweated in their camps, waiting for orders. “Here we are just where we have been so long and no one knows anything,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., complained to his brother. “I am tired of the Carnival of Death.”28
Charles Francis was unaware that the five-hundred-foot tunnel at Petersburg was almost complete. In a couple more days, Grant intended to blow up the center of the Confederate lines. In preparation