A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [414]
Federal troops entered Charleston on February 18 and almost immediately went on the rampage. The contents of the houses, including pianos and four-poster beds, were either plundered or destroyed, depending on the humor and taste of the invaders. Consul Henry Pinckney Walker reappeared and invited any British subjects in the city to register at the consulate, although he did not offer the building as a refuge.3 Some women were not only afraid to leave their houses, but were unable to do so, since looters had stolen their dresses.
It was ten days before Feilden had another opportunity to write. During that time he had not changed his clothes or slept in a real bed. “I do not know how much more we have to endure,” he wrote on the twenty-eighth, “but as far as I am concerned I am a stronger Southern Man at this moment than ever I was before, and I shall not give up till the very last moment.”4 His devotion was not a universal feeling among the retreating Confederates. General Hardee had come down with typhus shortly before the order to evacuate and was barely able to walk, let alone inspire courage or fortitude among his demoralized troops. Months of defensive duties had made the soldiers unfit for forced marches, and the struggle through frozen swamps in unceasing downpours caused many to faint with exhaustion. Whole companies disappeared in the darkness.5 The officers’ ability to prevent desertion during daylight was hardly more successful, and the small army was losing almost two hundred men a day. Hardee’s destination was a small town north of Wilmington called Fayetteville, in North Carolina, an important supply base for the Confederates. General Johnston—whom Lee had recently reinstated—had ordered all available troops to meet there to make a last stand against Sherman’s advancing forces.
Confederate regiments were already gathering at Fayetteville when Thomas Conolly, an Anglo-Irish MP from County Kildare, Ireland, arrived on March 2. Conolly had invested in the blockade runner Emily II and sailed to Bermuda with her, intending to run the blockade at Wilmington. A less eccentric character might have chosen to return home after the fall of Fort Fisher, but Conolly saw no reason to let a Northern victory get in the way of his visiting “Dixie.” Leaving the Emily II at Nassau, he persuaded Captain Maffitt, who was taking his ship, the Owl, to Havana, to make a slight detour by way of the North Carolina coast and drop him off somewhere near Cape Fear. On February 26, Conolly and two friends climbed into a skiff and rowed through the pouring rain over the sandbar and into the neck of the Shallotte River, some thirty-seven miles north of Wilmington. Soaked to the skin and hungry, they called at several houses until they found someone willing to give them shelter for the night.6
It was only after he landed that Conolly learned of General Sherman’s arrival in South Carolina. The news made him drop his plans to tour Charleston in favor of reaching Richmond as quickly as possible. He arrived at Fayetteville on March 2 to find it mobbed with wagons and soldiers. “The bar-room of the large Hotel is crowded with men in uniform, and a fine young fellow, very handsome, is hobbling about on a new wooden leg,” Conolly jotted in his diary. The three travelers passed two days in the town while Conolly tried to negotiate the purchase of a horse. “So we make the best of it,” he wrote, “and order a banjo band and whiskey to our room and ask all the wounded officers about and have a capital evening’s amusement up to 1 o’clock dancing and singing.”7 Two days later, they ran into Frank Vizetelly, who obligingly offered to take them to Richmond.
The small party arrived at the capital on March