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Chapter 34: “War Is Cruelty”

1. The Private Journal of Georgiana Gholson Walker, ed. Dwight Franklin Henderson, Confederate Centennial Studies, 25 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1963), p. 113, October 11, 1864.

2. William Tidwell lists five separate Confederate “cells” operating in Canada: in Toronto, under Jacob Thompson; in Hamilton, under Cassius F. Lee; in St. Catherine’s, under Clement Clay; in Windsor, under Steele; and in Montreal, under Patrick Charles Martin and George N. Sanders. April ’65: Confederate Covert Action in the American Civil War (Kent, Ohio, 1995), p. 135.

3. John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York, 1906), p. 265.

4. Mabel Clare Weaks, “Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell,” Filson Club History Quarterly, 34 (1960), p. 12, Grenfell to Mary, October 11, 1864. Stephen Z. Starr says it is only speculation that Grenfell was Hines’s deputy, although well-founded speculation. Colonel Grenfell’s Wars (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), p. 183.

5. Stephen Starr writes, “There is unfortunately no way of discovering what thoughts passed through his mind as he sat quietly in his hotel room in the dreary hours of a November night.” Ibid., p. 203.

6. Duke University, Malet family MSS, Sheffield to Malet, November 11, 1864.

7. PRO 30/22/38, f.120, Lyons to Russell, October 28, 1864.

8. Bulloch’s successful manipulation of the legal system made it appear as though there was a vast conspiracy by the British to help the Confederacy. Dudley reported to Seward on November 15 that the owners of the Laurel and the Sea King were British. They both sailed under the British flag and the sailors were British. “The armament, shot, shell, guns, powder, and everything down to the coal in the hold are English, all the produce and manufacture of Great Britain. Even the bounty money paid for enlisting the men was English sovereigns and the wages English coin, pounds, shillings and pence. It seems to me that nothing is wanting to stamp this as an English transaction from beginning to end.…” NARA M. 141, roll t-29, d. 386.

9. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 731, Bulloch to Whittle, October 6, 1864.

10. Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray (New York, 2006), pp. 58–64.

11. Chester G. Hearn, Gray Raiders of the Sea: How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union’s High Seas Commerce (Camden, Me., 1992), p. 152. The American merchant marine had shipped over 5 million tons before the war. The latest statistics point to a decline of 4 million tons.

12. The ship and her crew had been continuously at sea since sneaking out of Brest on February 10, 1864. Yet the flight from the U.S. flag meant that in eight months the Florida had only managed to capture thirteen prizes. Short of coal, and worried that his bored crew might mutiny unless given their shore leave, Captain Charles Morris (Maffitt’s replacement) had sailed into Bahia, Brazil, where he was pounced upon by the waiting USS Wachusett.

13. ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 736, Bulloch to Stephen Mallory, October 20, 1864. R. I. Lester, Confederate Finance and Purchasing in Great Britain (Charlottesville, Va., 1975), pp. 190–91.

14. Virginia Historical Society, Raphael Semmes MSS, MSS1Se535a/53–65, Maury to Tremlett, October 23, 1864.

15. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York, 1906), p. 514.

16. John Bennett, “The Confederate Bazaar at Liverpool,” Crossfire: The Magazine of the American Civil War Round Table, 61 (Dec. 1999).

17. David Hepburn Milton, Lincoln’s Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2003), p. 121.

18. Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie (eds.), The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857–1865, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1948, 1949), vol. 2, pp. 1346–47, November 7–8, 1864.

19. Sheffield Archives, WHM 460a/47, Spence to Wharncliffe, November 2, 1864. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), p. 664, Varina Davis to Mary Chesnut, October 8, 1864. The source for the quotation in the first