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The Anglophobia encouraged by Seward was growing in strength. The New York Herald was the worst offender. Its Scottish editor, James Gordon Bennett, had no qualms about printing incendiary articles if they whetted public appetite for more. The Herald had toned down its antiwar rhetoric after a mob tried to burn down the paper’s headquarters, but attacking England remained a popular alternative. New York had transformed from the ambivalent, even apathetic, city described by William Howard Russell in The Times into a noisy carnival of war. The shops along Broadway had become recruiting offices; posters and handbills advertising new regiments covered the city.

“The outbreak of the Civil War has given me a great addition of new and extraordinary duties, in the incessant applications for protection, and advice, etc,” wrote the British consul in New York, Edward Archibald.28 He was rising to the challenge with valiant enthusiasm. A career diplomat for almost thirty years, Archibald was a devoted family man who spent his Sunday afternoons visiting sick and needy Britons. Since taking up his post in 1857, he had diligently collected statistics, written reports, resolved commercial disputes, found lost relatives, sent home destitute Britons, and performed all the myriad duties, both practical and pastoral, that were a consul’s lot in a busy city like New York. Until Archibald shocked his superiors by denouncing the rebellion in an official dispatch, the Foreign Office had considered him their most reliable consul in the United States.29

Forced volunteering was not solely a Southern phenomenon, and the greatest call on Archibald’s time was the plight of Britons who had been imprisoned or punished for their refusal to join a regiment.30 His task was made more difficult by those who had joined willingly but had changed their minds and were looking for an excuse to escape.31 Despite Archibald’s efforts to publicize the Foreign Enlistment Act, Britons were volunteering in droves.5.4 The slightest hint of a conflict between the North and Britain had also encouraged thousands of Irish immigrants to join the war effort.

The language employed by Irish recruiters was so explicit that Archibald warned the Foreign Office to prepare for a new threat. Posters urged their fellow Irishmen to train in America in order to fight the British oppressors back home. At least three regiments in New York were filled with Irish recruits, the majority of whom were avowed Fenians. Michael Corcoran, the colonel of the infamous 69th Infantry Regiment—the unit that had refused to parade in honor of the Prince of Wales—was also the commander of the Fenian movement’s military wing.32 Another well-known Irish revolutionary in the 69th was Thomas Meagher, whose stature among the New York Irish community was almost godlike since his escape from a penal colony in Tasmania, where he had been banished for sedition.33 (Meagher’s friend and fellow escapee, John Mitchell, had thrown his lot with the South.)

A large number of British immigrants volunteered out of idealism, but there were just as many, like twenty-five-year-old George Henry Herbert, who joined to stave off destitution after the company that had recruited him from England went bankrupt. He had been unemployed since Christmas and was down to his last pair of socks. They were holding up well—“There is only one hole in the heel of one of them,” he had written cheerfully to his mother—but he could no longer continue without work. Such was the clamor for new recruits that even a man as short and overweight as Herbert could join a popular regiment like the 9th New York Volunteers, better known as Hawkins’s Zouaves.5.5 Unlike the majority of the new volunteers, who enlisted for ninety days, Herbert signed up for two years and in return was awarded the rank of first sergeant. He was grateful for any sort of position but harbored secret hopes of becoming an officer: “I study as much as I can,” he wrote to his