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on January 5: “As one who has opposed the Northern Armies from Cedar Mountain fight which took place in August 1862 up to the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, and taken prisoner the day after that great Battle had terminated, I think it my duty to make this humble protest against the assertion of Mr. Seward that the prisoners taken by the Federals are so well treated that they are suffering no privations.” Another English recipient of Lord Lyons’s aid, Captain Hampson of the 13th Louisiana Regiment, wrote: “Looking in today’s Standard, I wish so far as lies in my power to corroborate [Taylor’s] statement in regard to the treatment of Confederate prisoners by the Federals. I have had personal experience of their kindness (!) to their fellow being whilst in their hands and prisoner.”

36.2 In late December, Bulloch triumphantly informed Mallory that he was on the verge of a significant breakthrough. He had always assumed that the French-made cruisers were lost to them. After the emperor had ordered their sale, one had been bought by the Prussians, the other by the Danes, to be deployed at sea against each other, but the contest never took place, because the Danes were defeated before they received the ship and it became clear to Lucien Arman, the ship’s builder, that the Danes had no use for his expensive vessel when it finally arrived in Copenhagen. Rather than insisting on the sale, Arman devised an outrageous plan to sabotage the ship during her trials, thereby providing the unsuspecting Danes with a legal excuse to break the contract. He already knew, of course, of a buyer who would pay twice the amount he had agreed with the Danes for such a powerful ship. Bulloch agreed to pay an exorbitant 455,000 francs for the return of the vessel.

36.3 A short time later, the Duke of Somerset received a parcel containing the plans of the U.S. Navy’s latest ships and their torpedoes. They had been secretly obtained by the master shipbuilder Donald McKay, who resided in New York but whose heart and family remained in Nova Scotia.

36.4 Sala had reported on the war for the Daily Telegraph and was, like Lawley, completely pro-Southern. In the introduction he provided for Belle’s memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, he claimed that she possessed scandalous information about members of Lincoln’s administration. Whether or not this was really the case, he helped her to draft a threatening letter to Lincoln on January 24 in which she offered to suppress her memoir if Hardinge was released by the beginning of March. “I think it well for you and me to come to some definite understanding,” Belle had written boldly.38

36.5 The former Confederate secretary of state, Robert M. T. Hunter, stated the conundrum in stark terms on March 7, 1865, during the Confederate Senate debate on whether to use slave soldiers. “To arm the negroes is to give them freedom,” he told the chamber. “If we are right in passing this measure, then we were wrong in denying to the old Government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery.” He, for one, was not prepared to be a hypocrite. But the majority of the Senate chose survival over principle. They all knew that General Lee was desperate to have the negro recruits for his army. A week later, on March 13, the Confederate House of Representatives followed suit after a raucous and bitter debate.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Fire, Fire

Tom Conolly, MP, crosses the bar—Welly!—The last train out—Richmond burns—Grant breaks Lee’s line

Henry Feilden reluctantly accompanied General Hardee as the Confederate army abandoned Charleston on February 17, 1865. “I cannot bear to think of leaving this dear old city which has been defended so long and gloriously,” he wrote sadly to Julia. “I have given our house to an English family who will endeavour to save it for me.” But he warned her, “We are going to see hard times.”1 His last view of the city before its fall was of golden flames flickering against the night sky as great fires consumed the wharves: the retreating Confederates had deliberately