A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [401]
The first wave of Union troops fought all Christmas Day, coming within seventy-five yards of the walls. Rather than being buoyed by their proximity to success, however, General Butler was blinded by the possibility of defeat, and when darkness fell he called off the attack. Admiral Porter was furious. Five hundred properly led men could have taken the fort, he claimed to the navy secretary, Gideon Welles. To compound Porter’s anger, the Banshee II and its vital supplies for Lee’s army managed to slip past the Federal fleet in the early hours of December 26. Taylor was fired upon by several gunboats as he dashed toward the fort: “It was an exciting moment as we crossed the bar in safety, cheered by the garrison,” he wrote, “who knew we had provisions on board for the relief of their comrades in Virginia.”25
The South knew that the Federal attackers would return. “If Wilmington falls, ‘Richmond next,’ is the prevalent supposition,” wrote the War Department clerk John Jones. “It is unquestionably the darkest period we have yet experienced. Intervention on the part of European powers is the only hope of many. Failing that, no doubt a negro army will be organized—and it might be too late!”26 President Davis decided to make one last appeal to Britain. With nothing left to offer, and with no threat of blackmail or an Anglo-American war to dangle, Davis resorted to the previously unthinkable: he proposed to abolish slavery in return for recognition of Southern independence. On December 27, 1864, he asked Duncan F. Kenner, one of his few remaining allies in the Confederate Congress, to go to London to speak to Lord Palmerston.35.5 Benjamin promised Kenner that he would prevent Mason and Slidell from interfering, and wrote to the commissioners that same day.27 He dared not describe the mission in explicit terms in case the letter fell into the wrong hands, but he stated that Kenner’s mandate came directly from the president and could not be questioned.28 Meanwhile, Davis arranged a secret meeting between Kenner and the Confederate congressional leaders, who reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative. Partly to explain his departure, and partly because his position as chairman of the Confederate House’s Ways and Means Committee made him the obvious candidate, Kenner was given additional powers to negotiate a government loan from European banks. Kenner would have authority to sell every last cotton bale in the South, if necessary, so long as he procured new funds for the bankrupt treasury.
But before Kenner could do any of these things, he first had to find a way of breaking the Federal stranglehold on the South.
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Francis Lawley paid a brief visit to Charleston after the Battle of Wilmington and was sorry that he did: the empty streets reminded him of Boccaccio’s description of Florence after the Black Death. Some blocks were nothing more than charred ruins, while others remained eerily pristine with “vacant verandahs and deserted sun balconies.” There was grace and grandeur amid the ruins—the tall spire of St. Michael’s Church remained intact, though no one would now dare, as Rose Greenhow once had, to climb the steps for a view over the harbor. “Nor can any one who visits Charleston to day be blind to the possibility,” he wrote in his Times report, “that before the 13th of April 1865, arrives—the fourth anniversary … a Federal watchman may from this same spire gaze down upon the sun-lit harbour and city beneath him.”29
The city was not entirely devoid of troops or civilians; there were still twelve thousand soldiers garrisoned in the surrounding area, and Henry Feilden was as busy as ever. His wedding to Julia had taken place in Greenville, South Carolina, on October 27, 1864, but he could not allow her to live with him in Charleston. “How I miss you, dearest, and all your kindnesses and