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confused the pilot on board the Condor. Thomas Taylor was the “supercargo,” the officer in charge of a ship’s cargo. Though only twenty-four, Taylor had the highest success rate of any English blockade runner. But his luck had run out the night before the Condor’s arrival. The Night Hawk was chased onto a sandbar and boarded by Federal sailors, who “acted more like maniacs than sane men, firing their revolvers and cutting right and left with their cutlasses,” recalled Taylor. After beating up the crew, they set fire to the ship and left, not caring whether the blockade runners burned or drowned. Taylor had wanted to fight the flames, but his men dragged him onto a rowboat, “though the boiling surf seemed more dangerous to my mind than remaining on the burning ship.”18

33.3 Feilden promised the family he had stayed with in Florida that he would send them a reward if they ever found the ring. Two years after the end of the war, he received a small package with the ring inside. He kept his promise and sent all the money he could afford.

33.4 During a battle on September 24, 1864, at Front Royal, an English volunteer substitute, Private Philip Baybutt (1844–1907), seized the regimental flag of the 6th Virginia Cavalry. The prize enabled him to receive the only Medal of Honor awarded to a British subject during the Civil War.

33.5 Sheridan ordered his troops to hang prisoners of Mosby’s Rangers rather than treat them as prisoners of war, and six were executed on September 22, 1864. Mosby retaliated and executed five Union prisoners, chosen at random, on November 6. A week later he wrote to Sheridan suggesting that they call a truce on the executions.

33.6 The colored troops in the Darbytown Road engagements received fourteen of the sixteen Medals of Honor awarded to black soldiers during the Civil War.

33.7 Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, a French journalist and liberal politician, was in New York on a similar cultural voyage as Stanley. He observed: “Between Broadway and the Hudson River there exists a filthy, rundown neighborhood inhabited by Irish immigrants and colored people exclusively. It is impossible to imagine anything more depressingly poor.… From time to time one sees with amazement a trolley car ride by which carries a sign: ‘Colored People Admitted.’ What in the world can be the meaning of this? Are there separate laws here for Negroes? No, but public prejudice persecutes them more powerfully, more tyrannically even than law.”39

33.8 For example, the English volunteer Thomas Beach, who had adopted a new identity as a Frenchman named Henri Le Caron, was able to leap from being a private in the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry to a lieutenant in the 15th U.S. Colored Infantry.

THIRTY-FOUR

“War Is Cruelty”

The Confederates invade Vermont—Colonel Grenfell’s mistake—War at sea resumes—The impact of Lincoln’s reelection—March to the sea—Death in a prison camp

Instead of feeling restored by his holiday in Canada, Lord Lyons felt incapacitated by intense bleakness. Nothing inappropriate had taken place between him and Feo Monck; nor did he expect ever to see her again. But she had awakened something in him, a half-realized sense of liberty that would not be stifled and yet could not be indulged, and the prospect of Washington now seemed intolerable. Lyons could no longer avoid the truth: he did not belong in America, where his quiet eccentricities were out of step with the harsher rhythms of the young republic. The legation had been a haven for the past four years, but even this was about to be taken away from him, as it was time for his staff, including Edward Malet, to be transferred to new posts. In a couple of months Lyons would have to start all over again with a new set of faces.

Lyons’s visit to New York in mid-October was uneventful until the night of the twentieth, when he attended a dinner party at which the guests included General John Dix, the military governor of New York State. Suddenly a messenger burst into the room and handed a telegram to the general, who read it and rushed out.