A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [395]
34.2 Formerly the home of Lady Byron, Hanger Hill was advertised by its current owners as a healthy retreat from London with the convenience of being only six miles from the city’s center. Henry Adams liked Hanger Hill’s aristocratic pretensions, but the unrelieved proximity to his family was a trial. Mary was weak and querulous, and “Loo will bore herself to death,” he told his brother Charles Francis Jr.
34.3 Maury was working on improvements to his mines and what he termed “torpedoes,” which were immobile electrical mines intended to detonate upon contact. Unfortunately, he failed to take into account the impracticality of using new technology that could not be easily replicated or repaired. Stephen Mallory could not afford to waste his dwindling resources on such rarified warfare. But the British Army had plenty of resources, and General Sir John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers supplied Maury with acid, batteries, insulated wire, and all other necessary ingredients for mine manufacturing without asking too many questions about how much was actually required for experimental use.
34.4 Spence had already assumed the task of unraveling Rose Greenhow’s estate on behalf of her daughters and balked at taking on any more work. “She had faults, but who has not,” Spence had written to Wharncliffe after learning of her death. His reference to her “faults” was a delicate allusion to the distrust she inspired in Francis Lawley and others as a shameless manipulator of men. Varina Davis, President Davis’s wife, could only feel so much pity for Rose, “her poor wasted beautiful face all divested of its meretricious ornaments and her scheming head hanging helplessly upon those who but an hour before she felt so able and willing to deceive.”
34.5 Percy Gregg, a writer whom Hotze had always suspected of being slightly unhinged, had started the trouble by refusing to allow Witt to edit his copy. Witt had retaliated by dropping his stories altogether—with good reason: they were the ravings of a violent racist. “Of the passages altered or omitted there is scarcely one that I would have let stand,” Hotze admonished Gregg on his return from Germany. “There are some I could mention to you which I should consider almost fatal to the paper.” Hotze had never intended for the Index to be a pulpit for slavery. He was trying to massage, not bludgeon, public opinion. “It is a matter of real disappointment to me that one of my chief calculations, resting upon you, threatens to fail.”21
34.6 Hundreds of Federal prisoners took part in the sham vote. According to an early chronicler of Kansas state history, “When Sherman started on his march to Savannah the rebel authorities believed that a detachment of the Federal army would be sent to release the prisoners at Andersonville. Accordingly, in October 1864, [several Kansan prisoners] were taken to Milledgeville, Georgia, and from there to Savannah. While at Milledgeville, the Union prisoners went through the form of casting their votes at the general election. The soldiers in the field were given the privilege of voting for President.… The rebels were very much interested in the outcome, and advised those who wanted the war to come to a speedy close to vote for McClellan. However, the result of this balloting was about two to one in favor of Lincoln.”34
34.7 By the middle of 1864 the South had become so desperate for men that Davis agreed to a simple exchange—soldier for soldier—without regard to race. Prison exchanges resumed in November, albeit slowly.
THIRTY-FIVE