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battle. Early had lost an entire brigade in a combined Union cavalry and artillery attack on September 24.33.4 Since then, he had been able to mount only insignificant skirmishes against Sheridan, who was carrying out Grant’s order to lay waste to the region. Vizetelly had covered many campaigns, but none that so explicitly targeted the enemy’s will to fight. The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of deliberately causing mass starvation among the civilians. Sheridan’s declaration that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” was repeated many times in the British press. This sort of “wanton destructiveness,” asserted the editor of the Illustrated London News, is “unknown to modern warfare.”33.5 30

There was nowhere safe for refugees anymore: families who thought they would find sanctuary in Richmond risked losing their adolescent sons to the Confederate army. Despite President Davis’s dictum against “grinding the seed corn of the Republic,” boys as young as fifteen were now being rounded up and marched to the trenches. “No wonder there are many deserters—no wonder men become indifferent as to which side shall prevail,” wrote the War Department clerk John Jones bitterly.31 Nevertheless, those who risked the journey to Richmond sometimes met with surprising generosity. “Virginians of the real old stock,” in Mary Sophia Hill’s words, gave her a corner to sleep in when she arrived ill and penniless in early October. The military tribunal in New Orleans had returned a guilty verdict with the recommendation of imprisonment for the duration of the war. But her defense lawyer, a “Union man” named Christian Roselius, had protested against the sentence and won a commutation to banishment from New Orleans. Consul Coppell also interceded on her behalf, offering to buy passage for Mary on the Sir William Peel, which was about to depart for England, but General Banks refused, saying, “She will have to run the blockade. She will have plenty of trouble; perhaps it will teach her to behave herself the rest of her days.”32

“He had his desire,” recalled Mary. “I did have plenty of trouble.” Despite the insistence of the new legation secretary, Joseph Burnley, that “everything that could be done in this matter has been done,” Mary was carried across the picket lines into Confederate territory and left by the road to fend for herself.33 Mary never revealed how she made the one-thousand-mile journey from New Orleans to Richmond without a horse or money, but the memory would forever haunt her, driving her to seek justice years after the war.

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Mary had arrived in Richmond shortly after the Federals captured another of the forts guarding the approach to the capital on September 29. The enemy, wrote John Jones on October 4, “is now within five miles of the city, and if his progress is not checked, he will soon be throwing shells at us.… Flour rose yesterday to $425 a barrel, meal to $72 a bushel.”34 Mary risked her life to look for her twin brother, Sam, who had been sent to the trenches with the other engineers in his office. While crossing a pontoon bridge she stood aside to allow General Lee to ride past. “I consider it an honor,” she wrote, “and a great one too, to have seen the General of the age, Robert E. Lee, the soldier’s friend, the Christian warrior.”35

Lee had grown used to such hero worship; his determination to endure the same hardships as his men was widely known, though it had not deterred Southerners, particularly women, from delivering food and gifts to his tent. But another side to Lee had become apparent of late. No man, not even the great “Christian warrior,” could withstand the relentless attrition of troops, supplies, and options without showing the strain. Francis Dawson was taken to Lee’s mess and subjected to a tirade of sarcastic remarks:

Ill.56 Punch’s terrifying depiction of the human cost of the Civil War, September 1864.

It was the most uncomfortable meal that I ever had in my life [he wrote].