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New Orleans had belonged first to Spain and then France until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 made it part of the United States. The original French and Spanish settlers called themselves Creoles, and their descendants still lived in the sixty-six blocks downtown known as the Vieux Carré, or the French Quarter. Here they built their houses in the Caribbean style with inner courtyards, pastel façades, and ornate balconies that allowed the occupants to see and be seen from the street. The English-speaking newcomers had congregated uptown, on the other side of the canal that ran through the city, in the so-called Garden District. They pointedly built their houses in the Greek Revival style, using red brick instead of plaster, and planted lush gardens that screened the buildings from the street.

New Orleans’s French culture was reflected in the number of volunteer regiments for the Confederate army with names such as Chasseur, Lafayette, and Beauregard in the title. Russell noticed that the foreign immigrants tended to cluster together; hence there was the Irish Brigade, the Garibaldi Legion, and the European Brigade.5.2 Russell was especially taken with the Dickens-inspired “Pickwick Rifles,” though the name itself suggested Mure had not been entirely successful in persuading Britons to adhere to the Foreign Enlistment Act.7

It was not the willing recruits that concerned Mure, however, but rather those who were forced to volunteer whether they wanted to or not.8 King Cotton ruled with a brutal hand in New Orleans. British subjects were being marched to recruiting posts by self-appointed vigilantes, “not in twos or threes, but in tens and twenties,” the consul told Russell. One woman had complained to him that her husband was held hostage and beaten for three days until he agreed to enlist; his face was so badly disfigured when they brought him home that she failed to recognize him. Dissent was treated in the same harsh manner. “Every stranger is watched, every word is noted,” Russell wrote in one of his dispatches to The Times. People who stated “their belief that the Northerners will be successful are sent to prison for six months.”9

Throughout the Confederacy intense pressure was being exerted on the 233,000 foreign residents to prove their loyalty to the South. For William Watson, a Scotsman working as a mechanic in Baton Rouge, failure to follow his friends into the Pelican Rifles of the 3rd Louisiana Infantry would have been unthinkable. “I would never take up arms to maintain or enforce slavery,” he wrote in his memoirs. But Watson’s friends told him he would be fighting for independence, a cause so worthy that he could not remain aloof “without injury” to his honor.10 A Welsh immigrant in Texas joined for similar reasons: “Every man and child that can carry a gun is a soldier in the South,” he explained to his family.11

In Arkansas, another Welsh immigrant, twenty-year-old Henry Morton Stanley (who would later achieve fame by “finding” Dr. Livingstone in Africa), was shamed into enlisting in the Dixie Grays of the 6th Arkansas Infantry by a neighbor who sent him the Southern equivalent of a white feather. He received a parcel “which I half-suspected, as the address was written in a feminine hand, to be a token of some lady’s regard,” he wrote. “But, on opening it, I discovered it to be a chemise and petticoat, such as a Negro lady’s-maid might wear. I hastily hid it from view, and retired to the back room, that my burning cheeks might not betray me.”12

Even without the threat of ostracism or harassment, there were other, more prosaic forces bearing down on the British community. The blockade was not only hurting the city financially, it was also an impediment to those who wished to leave the South. Many unemployed Britons were trapped in New Orleans; “nothing remains for them but to enlist,” admitted Russell.13 Two Anglo-Irish siblings from England, Mary Sophia Hill and her twin brother, Sam, were among the early victims of the blockade. The merchant families who sent their daughters to Mary