A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [400]
The “gentleman” was Brigadier General Edwin Gray Lee, a cousin of Robert E. Lee’s. Edwin Lee suffered from chronic lung disease and was no longer fit for active service, but he had experience in clandestine operations. He found on his arrival to Canada, however, that Thompson was not prepared to leave quietly or hand over control.
Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin knew that the Canadian operations were their only means of striking directly into the North. The South’s last remaining army in the west, the Army of Tennessee under Joe Johnston’s successor, John Bell Hood, was smashed to pieces over the course of seven battles between September and November—in the last, the Battle of Franklin on November 30, the attack of the Southern army was so ill-planned and uncoordinated that General John M. Schofield was able to inflict one of the bloodiest defeats of the war. Six Confederate generals were killed, including Patrick Cleburne, the highest-ranking Irish general in the South.35.4 From then on, Sherman was determined to reach the Atlantic coast as quickly as possible. “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!” he assured Grant. “I propose to … make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms.”21 Leaving General Thomas behind to destroy the remnants of Hood’s army, Sherman was able to move forward between ten and fifteen miles a day and cause at least $1 million worth of damage to Georgia. He entered Savannah on December 21, 1864, having completed his three-hundred-mile “march to the sea” in thirty-six days. He telegraphed Lincoln: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
Richmond did not learn of Savannah’s capture for several days. But the Confederate government was transfixed by the threat to its last open port. “[Federal] Troops are moving toward Wilmington from here,” wrote the chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, “and a heavy armament has departed from Hampton Roads, supposed to be destined to the attack of that place. The great trouble to be met now is to feed the army here while the railroads southward are being repaired.”22 The situation was now desperate: the supply of food for the army would not even last the month without additional deliveries from Bermuda. The commissary general, Lucius Northrop, turned to Thomas Taylor, the English blockade runner, for help. “I said I would do my best,” wrote Taylor, “and after some negotiations he undertook to pay me a profit of 350 per cent upon any provisions and meat I could bring in within the next three weeks!”23 Taylor set out on the Wild Rover and returned from Bermuda on December 24, just as the long-expected assault on Fort Fisher at Wilmington by General Butler and Admiral Porter was about to begin.
Francis Lawley and Frank Vizetelly had both rushed to Wilmington from Petersburg fearing they would be too late to witness the attack. The largest fleet ever assembled in the war—sixty-four Federal ships in total—were arranged in a three-mile-wide crescent, blocking the entrance to Cape Fear. Opposing them were fewer than a thousand Confederates manning the fort, some of them boys who had never fired a gun before. (The Confederate navy consisted of only fifty vessels now, and Mallory had not even bothered to send a defense.) “For five weary hours upon the 24th,” wrote Lawley, “the iron hailstorm, without one instant’s cessation, descended upon or around the fort, tore great rents … set fire to the wooden quarters of the garrison, swept away every vestige of flag or flagstaff … without injuring a hair of the head of its defenders.”24 The Federals’ plan to explode a ship next to the