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By Root 6671 0

8. Conolly’s penchant for bright red breeches looked incongruous amid the browns, grays, and deep mourning. “The aspect of Richmond at this time is wretched,” he wrote. “Shops with nothing in them except enough to show how miserably they are run out. Stores with open doors and empty bales and broken up packing cases and dirty straw.” Government clerks were quietly packing their archives in anticipation of having to leave the city. Vizetelly deposited Conolly at the Ballard Hotel and went in search of Francis Lawley. The Ballard was “now miserably furnished, scarcely anything in the bedrooms except the beds and a few broken chairs,” Conolly recorded. The carpets had been torn up and sent to the army for coats. “Almost all the crockery in the Hotel is cracked and broken, and we had to buy 3 tumblers for our room at 25 dollars each.” He was annoyed to discover that a bottle of brandy set him back $60.8

The first resident to receive a visit from Conolly was the wife of James Mason, the Confederate commissioner in London. “Plucky dear old Lady,” he wrote. She was nursing her son, James M. Mason, Jr., who was one of the few survivors of a recent skirmish against General Sheridan.9 The day had been proclaimed by Davis as one of fasting and prayer, and Conolly confined himself to muffins for tea, followed by oysters and cocktails. During the next few days he attached himself to various generals, his open and liberal purse helping to soften any objections to his presence. His persistence paid off, and on March 13, he received an invitation to supper at the Confederate White House at 9:00 P.M.

Conolly was impressed by President Davis’s calm demeanor. “I never saw quiet determination more strikingly manifest in any person than in Jeff Davis,” he wrote. “His conversation is easy, copious in illustration from foreign countries, and rich and animated!” Varina Davis, on the other hand, was less adept at hiding her true thoughts; though obtuse at times, Conolly knew when he was being put down. “Mrs. Davis is a very different character,” he decided, “a great talker and very bitter. She is calculated to damage any cause however good.”10

Had Conolly appeared a day later, it is unlikely that the Davises would have invited him to dinner. Lord Russell’s protest to the Confederate commissioners was delivered to Richmond on March 14, the morning after. “Britain gives us a kick while the Federal generals are pounding us,” the War Department clerk John Jones wrote bitterly.11 But by then, Conolly had already left the capital and was being entertained by General Lee at Petersburg. Conolly’s reaction to meeting Lee was similar to Colonel Wolseley’s in 1863. Even in the hour of his greatest trial, Lee still retained an aura of magnificence. “The Hope of His Country is also the handsomest man in all that constitutes the real dignity of man that I ever saw,” wrote Conolly. The general drew the line at allowing Conolly to stay the night, and General Pryor’s wife was prevailed upon to take him in. However, she was quickly won over by Conolly’s charm: “The MP proved a most agreeable guest,” she wrote, “a fine-looking Irish gentleman with an irresistibly humorous, cheery round of talk.”12 During Conolly’s final dinner at Petersburg, Lee opened a bottle of “very old Madeira.” “Excellent! Just 2 glasses,” wrote Conolly mournfully, not realizing that he had consumed all the vegetables and the only turkey in the mess. After saying goodbye to Lee, who gave him his photograph and a Confederate flag, Conolly braved a storm to attend a party at Petersburg with “some nice young fellows” and a bevy of pretty ladies.

The Confederate Congress was holding what would turn out to be its last session when Conolly returned to Richmond on March 18. Four days earlier, the politicians had agreed to allow owners to volunteer their slaves as soldiers, having voted unanimously “to prosecute the war with the United States until … the independence of the Confederate States shall have been established.” But today the members adjourned with no thought of when they would meet again.13