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A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [488]

By Root 6899 0
January 11, 1863.

49. Anon. (Wolseley), “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 93 (Jan. 1863), p. 17.

50. Captain Hewett wrote of Northern officers: “At the end of a day’s march the officers look out for themselves; never see that their men are properly and completely encamped, or fed, much less that the poor horses are fed or looked after; that the men’s arms, accoutrements, or artillery or cavalry harness is cleaned or repaired, or in fact anything at all till the general order to fall in for the next day’s march.” Preston, “A Letter from a British Observer,” p. 53. William Howard Russell had previously noticed that the social hierarchy of the South was replicated in the Confederate army, which shored up the chain of command between officers and men.

51. Wolseley was surprised and amused by the ever-present immediacy of the Revolutionary War. Wherever an Englishman wanders, he wrote, “his fellow-passengers in railway carriages or stages will invariably begin talking to him about Smiths, Browns, and Tomkinses in the same strain that we are accustomed to hear allusions made to the Pitts and to Marlborough or Wellington … If this war has no other result, therefore, it will at least afford American historians something to write about, and save them from the puerility of detailing skirmishes in the backwoods or on the highlands of Mexico, as if they were so many battles of Waterloo or Solferino.” Anon. (Wolseley), “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters,” p. 16.

52. Ibid., p. 14.

53. Ibid., p. 18.

54. Hoole, Lawley, pp. 31–32, The Times, December 30, 1862.

55. G.F.R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1898; repr. Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 554, fn.

56. Anon. (Wolseley), “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters,” p. 21.

57. The Times, December 30, 1862.

58. If Wolseley had seen them in action, he might have revised his opinion. Another English observer thought that neither side was particularly adept at traditional cavalry engagements. “They approach one another with considerable boldness, until they get to within about forty yards, and then, at the very moment when a dash is necessary, and the sword alone should be used, they hesitate, halt, and commence a desultory fire with carbines and revolvers.… Stuart’s cavalry can hardly be called cavalry in the European sense of the word.” Quoted in Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), p. 21. On the other hand, both sides learned how to use their cavalry as effective scouts.

59. Heros von Borcke had arrived in the Confederacy in early May, via a blockade runner named the Hero. He was a tall, strapping German with a shock of blond hair and an unintelligible accent. He had decided to volunteer out of boredom with garrison duty, or, according to another version, to annoy his father. He was close in age to Stuart, and they became friends immediately. Borcke wrote his own highly colored reminiscences of his Confederate career. Nevertheless, his wounds were real and a bullet remained permanently lodged in his lung. After his return to the ancestral castle, Borcke occasionally flew the Confederate flag from the turrets.

60. William Stanley Hoole, Vizetelly Covers the Confederacy (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1957), pp. 58–59.

61. Ibid., pp. 555–56, quoted from Heros von Borcke, “Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 99 (Jan.–June 1866), p. 90.

62. Anon. (Wolseley), “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters,” p. 24.

63. Ibid., pp. 24–25, 29.

Chapter 14: A Fateful Decision

1. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, p. 1076, September 30, 1862.

2. Duncan Andrew Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 103.

3. Countess of Stafford (ed.), Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville, vol. 4 (London, 1905), p. 73, September 29, 1862.

4. Clare Taylor, British and American

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