A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [381]
General Beauregard’s choice to replace Harris was Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, a veteran of the Mexican War and the author of a drill manual used by both armies. Hardee had been looking for a new post since falling out with General Hood in Georgia, and he came with his own staff of trusted and experienced officers. Feilden’s friends were determined to ensure that Hardee realized he was gaining an officer of exceptional quality. Colonel Thomas Jordan, Beauregard’s chief of staff, wrote to General Hardee about Feilden on October 12: “He is of English birth and education and has seen service in the British Army. At first he was on inspection duty, but I had him transferred to my office, where he became my right-hand man—and I can recommend him as a judicious, well-informed, well trained staff officer.”26 The letter languished in Hardee’s “to consider” pile. The general was appalled by the bedraggled state of his new troops and immediately launched a campaign for supplies. The soldiers lacked blankets and coats; “very many of my men are absolutely barefooted,” he complained to Richmond on October 19.
Francis Lawley had seen for himself the weakened state of the Southern armies. It went against the grain with him to dwell on the Confederacy’s deprivations, but he could no longer ignore the truth. “I cannot be blind to the fact, as I meet officers and privates from General Lee’s army,” he wrote to Lord Wharncliffe from Richmond on October 12, “that they are half worn out, and that, though the spirit is the same as ever, they urgently need rest.” Their diet for the past 160 days had consisted of bread and salted meat, while the enemy had at its command “all that lavish profusion of expenditure and the scientific experience that the whole civilized world can contribute.”27 However, when Lawley praised “the patience and self-denying endurance of the troops,” he was stretching an ideal already abandoned by his friends. Earlier in the week, the chief of ordnance, General Josiah Gorgas, had privately conceded that the soldiers’ spirits were almost beyond saving: “Our poor harrowed and overworked soldiers are getting worn out with the campaign. They see nothing before them but certain death, and have, I fear, fallen into a sort of hopelessness, and are dispirited. Certain it is that they do not fight as they fought at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania.”28
Ill.55 Rendezvous of General Mosby’s men above the Shenandoah Valley, by Frank Vizetelly.
Frank Vizetelly witnessed the battles between Jubal Early’s similarly exhausted Confederates and Sheridan’s hard-driving cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley. Early was relying on the help of John Singleton Mosby and his Partisan Rangers to harass the Federals, and at first Vizetelly was dazzled by Mosby, whose guerrilla raids reminded him of the daredevil spirit of Jeb Stuart. “His achievements are perfectly marvellous,” wrote Vizetelly after hearing how the Rangers swooped down on a six-hundred-foot-long Federal wagon train in mid-August and captured the entire contents, suffering only two casualties in the raid.29 Mosby had been able to outlast his former rival Sir Percy Wyndham, but his new opponent, the English colonel L.D.H. Currie, could not be tricked into making the sort of mistakes that had been Wyndham’s undoing. Although Currie could not prevent Mosby’s raids, he kept the wagon trains moving and intact. Nor were the raiders much help to Jubal Early in a real cavalry