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ambassador. I think with good care we may have some success, but they will be a hard crowd to deal with.”3 Feilden kept Julia amused with wry descriptions of his journey along the country roads of the Deep South. He made a brief stop in Savannah, Georgia, where he stayed at a plantation remarkably untouched by the war. His bedroom, he told Julia, was decorated with French china: “You will think me very foolish perhaps noticing all these things, but I am so fond of pretty house arrangements.” While he was there, he dined with an aging officer who remembered selling cotton to his grandfather, old Sir William Feilden.4

The South could not afford Feilden to return empty-handed. It had run through its reserves of able-bodied men, and there were now so few officers left that one of the Confederate brigadier generals killed at Deep Bottom was only twenty-four years old. The War Department clerk John Jones had heard that General Bragg was recommending “publication be made here, in the United States, and in Europe, encouraging enlistments of foreigners in our army.”5 Bragg had probably been inspired by the unexpected arrival in Richmond of four Polish army officers in early August who claimed that thousands of Polish exiles would fight for the South in return for grants of land after the war. The manpower shortage was so acute that Davis was willing to believe them; he authorized the South’s financial agent in Britain, Colin McRae, to spend £50,000 to charter transport ships for the Poles allegedly waiting to enlist.6 Benjamin also agreed to Henry MacIver’s request for passage on a blockade runner so he could return to Scotland and raise volunteers for the Confederacy. (The arrangement brought to a close the Scottish officer’s disappointing career in the Confederate army, which had ended with him sidelined to provost marshal duties and beset with health problems brought on by syphilis.)7

The Confederate Navy Department was lacking not men, but ships. At the beginning of August, the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, detached the Tallahassee from the fleet defending Wilmington and sent it on a commerce raid up and down the East Coast. The vessel was a former blockade runner purchased by Mallory from an English blockade-running firm and converted into a raider. The Tallahassee destroyed twenty-six vessels during its nineteen-day voyage—Northern papers reacted as though the entire Eastern Seaboard was under attack—but the brief sensation was won at a terrible cost to Southern supplies. Lee had argued strongly against the plan, and his fears were proved right. The Tallahassee consumed the last of Wilmington’s supply of smokeless coal, forcing blockade runners to burn the more conspicuous black variety, which led to the capture of seven ships. The Federal navy took advantage of the Tallahassee’s absence to double the size of the blockading fleet around Wilmington. Fresh sailors were sent to the U.S. Navy ships, including Henry Morton Stanley, whose previous history as both a Confederate and a Federal deserter was unknown to the authorities.31.1

The Tallahassee was an embarrassment to Lord Lyons as well as the U.S. Navy Department. The Northern press, Lyons informed Russell, constantly referred to the vessel as the “Anglo-Rebel pirate.” He suspected that the stalemate in Virginia and Georgia had created more than the usual need to find scapegoats, and advised the foreign secretary to refrain from making any sort of public statement about American affairs. “I should say the quieter England and France were just at this moment the better.” The subject was too volatile, especially since the “Peace Party” was becoming bolder in its demands for an armistice. Lincoln’s popularity had fallen precipitously since the slaughter in Virginia and the fiasco of the crater explosion at Petersburg. The latest news from Atlanta was also disappointing: Sherman had defeated Hood in three separate engagements, and yet the city remained in Confederate hands. Newspapers throughout the North harped on the administration’s failures: “Who shall revive