A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [433]
Other British volunteers became true Anglo-Americans in the manner of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who moved easily between the two countries until she fell out with her sister Emily over the management of the New York infirmary and went to live permanently in England in 1869. The most colorful example of this new breed was Henry Morton Stanley, the serial deserter. He jumped ship from USS Minnesota in February 1865 and spent the next two years pursuing various ventures in America, including gold prospecting in Colorado, while simultaneously trying to launch a career in journalism. His ability to spin a tale eventually brought him to the notice of James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, who hired him as a foreign correspondent. In 1871, Stanley set off on his famous expedition through present-day Tanzania to find the missing missionary Dr. David Livingstone, father of Robert, the British volunteer who had died in a Confederate prison camp shortly before the war’s end. After spending almost two decades in Africa, Stanley returned to England in 1890, where he subsequently became an MP and was knighted in 1897.
The Britons who chose to go home took with them not just memories (and in some cases wounds) but also new attitudes based on American ideals. James Pendlebury received $875 from the army, which he spent in just two weeks and had to work his passage across the Atlantic. But his experiences had changed him for the better. “What did I learn from all this?” he asked in his memoirs. “I have learned that I never need want for bread as long as I have health and strength.… Nothing that is honest demeans a man and if he does not like his work; well, let him mend himself as soon as he can. This is what I learned in America.… Today, through going to America I am an independent gentleman.” Pendlebury became a successful businessman and tried hard to stay off drink. In 1877 he took his family to the Isle of Man, where, according to his obituary, he purchased a mansion and became “a prominent figure at many public meetings … [unafraid] to express his opinions in the most vigorous language.”8
The America that Pendlebury was describing did not extend to the South. Eighty-eight percent of America’s wealth now resided in the North; in the Cotton States there was neither the industrial base nor the manpower to fuel economic growth. One in four white Southern males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five—some 258,000—had been killed in the war, and at least 260,000 had suffered debilitating injuries.9 Nine thousand miles of railroad track had been destroyed, three-quarters of the South’s merchant shipping was gone, and almost all the banks had been emptied of specie. Without slavery, the entire commercial infrastructure of the South collapsed. For the first year after the war, bartering was commonplace in many villages and communities. The labor-intensive cotton plantations were worth only a third of their prewar value, and even the parts of the South that had been untouched by actual fighting were soon brought to poverty and ruin. Frances Butler, Fanny Kemble’s youngest daughter, had never shared her mother’s pro-Northern sympathies, and in 1865 she returned with her father to the family’s rice plantation in Georgia. For the first couple of years she lived in utter squalor:
So I cook, and my maid does the housework, and as it has rained hard for three days and the kitchen roof is half off, I cook in the dining-room or parlour. Fortunately, my provisions are so limited that I have not much to cook; for five days my food has consisted of hard pilot biscuits, grits cooked in different ways, oysters, and twice, as a great treat, ham and eggs. I brought a box of preserves from the North with me, but half of them upset, and the rest were spoilt.