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Among the three thousand casualties on August 14 was Robert Moffat Livingstone, the eighteen-year-old son of Dr. David Livingstone, the celebrated missionary and explorer. The boy had been missing for more than a year. Livingstone had ordered Robert to sail from England and join him in Kilmane, Portuguese East Africa, in early 1863, but the wayward youth had changed his mind and journeyed only as far as Natal, South Africa, where he absconded with the ship’s money box.30.4 43 Robert worked his passage to America and joined the 3rd New Hampshire Infantry in January 1864, enlisting under the name of Rupert Vincent. His regiment had suffered several losses at Deep Bottom, including their colonel, Josiah Plimpton; but it was actually heatstroke that felled Robert, a common problem that week. He was taken to a field hospital, where he became lost in the system for more than a month, leading his commanding officers to assume he had deserted. At least his family now knew where he was; Robert finally wrote to his favorite sister, confessing that army life was not at all how he had envisioned.44 “Robert has gone all to the bad,” lamented Dr. Livingstone when he heard the news. Despite his grief, Livingstone did not give up on him entirely, resolving that if Robert behaved himself, he would try to help him obtain an officer’s commission.45

The heat that had put Robert in the hospital was reaching some of the highest temperatures in recent memory. Lawley wrote in The Times that the past twenty days had been the worst he had ever known. “Night and day the mercury of the Fahrenheit has touched 90, and has sometimes gone considerably above that figure.” Visiting Richmond, he saw that people cleaved at all times to the shady side of the streets, flitting like “pale shadows” under the harsh sun.46 “The drought still continues to the total destruction, I fear, of all crops, especially of our vegetables,” the Confederate chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, wrote despairingly.47 Naturally, this was not something that Lawley cared to admit, and in his next dispatch he managed to turn every adversity into a seeming virtue. “Lee has, as usual, the odds against him,” he allowed, “and yet at no moment has the confidence of Secessia in the security in Richmond and Petersburg been more serene.”48 The true feelings of “Secessia” were more accurately expressed by Gorgas, who wrote in his diary on August 29: “Can we hold out much longer?”49

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30.1 Sir Percy briefly attempted to run a riding academy for cavalry officers in New York. Its failure convinced him to return to Italy to serve on Garibaldi’s staff for the next couple of years. Ever the roving adventurer, he moved to Asia and started a humorous journal in India, the Indian Charivari, and a logging business in Mandalay, Burma. He was killed in Mandalay at the age of forty-nine in 1879 while demonstrating a hot-air balloon of his own design, which exploded in midair.

30.2 Some of them were victims of crimpers, like twenty-one-year-old Edward Sewell from Ipswich, who had arrived in 1862 to work as a mechanic for a New York firm. He had been kidnapped in May while riding on the train to work: “I sat by myself in the corner and believe I began to doze [wrote Sewell]. About three or four in the afternoon I woke up and found myself on board a steam-packet on its way to Hart’s Island.… I found that I was then in uniform as a soldier, and had been robbed of my money, jewels, and clothes, except a ring on my finger.”30

30.3 A notorious example of Confederate rage against black soldiers had taken place only three months before, on April 12, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee. The Federal force of approximately 262 black and 295 whites surrendered to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, but fewer than 75 black soldiers walked out alive.

30.4 Since the death of Livingstone’s wife, Mary, in 1862, relations between father and son had become strained to the breaking point. Dr. Livingstone