A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [434]
The exploitative aspects of Reconstruction—the punitive taxes, questionable expropriations, and legal chicanery that often ran unchecked—also hindered the South’s recovery. Captain Henry Feilden, the English volunteer on General Beauregard’s staff in Charleston, lost the title to his house, forcing him to live apart from his new wife, Julia. He went to Orangeburg, some seventy miles from Charleston, where he tried to set up a wagon hauling business, while Julia remained in Greenville with her aunt.11 They endured the arrangement for a year before accepting defeat and moving to England. Feilden was reinstated in the British Army and served as paymaster in the 18th Royal Hussars. In later life, he combined his military service with a second career as a naturalist and eminent polar explorer. The marriage was a happy one, though childless, and a timely bequest in 1901 brought them a beautiful seventeenth-century house in the village of Burwash, Sussex. There, Rudyard Kipling and Feilden became neighbors and close friends. After Feilden’s death in 1921, Kipling wrote, “He was the gentlest, gallantest English gentleman who ever walked.”epl.1 12
Francis Dawson, General Fitz Lee’s English ordnance officer, was also driven to manual labor. As soon as he had recovered from his shoulder wound he worked as a field hand on a plantation near Richmond. The job sustained him until businesses began to reopen and his education made him a desirable employee. In 1866 he joined the staff of the Richmond Examiner for a short time before becoming the assistant editor of the Charleston Mercury. Unlike Feilden, however, Dawson not only made the South his home, but he played a significant part in its revival as the editor of the Charleston News and Courier. His second wife (the first having died young) was the writer Sarah Morgan, an older sister of his longtime friend Lieutenant James Morgan—who rounded out his own picaresque career by becoming the U.S. consul general to Australia. Dawson was playing an increasingly prominent role in Democratic politics when he was killed on March 12, 1889, during an argument with his neighbor. Southern culture had always been more aggressive than Northern, but the weakening of social and official authority after the Civil War led to even greater levels of violence. Dawson’s contribution to the pacification of the South had been a long campaign against dueling, an effort that a courtroom jury repaid by acquitting his murderer.
Neither of the two British participants in Jacob Thompson’s guerrilla war against the North—Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell or Bennet G. Burley—ever returned to the South. Grenfell’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas Islands, seventy miles west of the Florida Keys in the Gulf of Mexico. His other cellmates were the four conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination who did not receive capital sentences. One, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated the injured John Wilkes Booth during the actor’s flight from justice, became good friends with Grenfell, and in 1867 he sent a description of Grenfell’s treatment to his brother-in-law:
Colonel St. Ledger Grenfel [sic] is kept in close confinement under guard. A few days ago, being sick, he applied to the doctor of the Post for medical attention, which he was refused, and he was ordered to work. Feeling himself unable to move about, he refused. He was then ordered to carry a ball until further orders, which he likewise refused. He was then tied up for half a day, and still refusing, he was taken to one of the wharves, thrown overboard with a rope attached, and ducked; being able to keep himself above water, a fifty pound weight was attached to his feet. Grenfel is an old man, about sixty. He has never refused to do work which he was able to perform,