A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [75]
Vizetelly had accompanied the 2nd New York Regiment to their camp on the border between Washington and Virginia. The sounds of the forest did not frighten him; the thirty-year-old Vizetelly had spent the past ten years in the midst of battles and revolutions all over Europe. He had never known any other life than journalism. His father and grandfather were both well-known printers and engravers on Fleet Street. His three brothers were also in the trade; Henry, the second oldest, was one of the founders of the Illustrated London News, which was the first weekly newspaper to illustrate its articles with eyewitness drawings.
Vizetelly’s fame in England rested on his pictures of Garibaldi’s Sicily campaign. Dispatched by Henry to provide sketches of the fighting for the Illustrated London News, Frank soon abandoned any pretense of objectivity and allied himself with Garibaldi. It was not in his nature to be impartial: his drawings were not only skillful depictions of a moment or tableau but moving narratives that engaged the emotions of the viewer. His images demanded a reaction, not unlike Vizetelly himself, whose craving to be the center of attention was insatiable. “He was a big, florid, red-bearded Bohemian,” recalled an admirer, “who could and would do anything to entertain a circle.”45 Whether sitting around a campfire or dining in an officers’ mess, Vizetelly would transfix his listeners with vivid stories, replete with voices and accents, or lead them in boisterous sing-alongs that lasted until the small hours.
Ill.7 Attack on the pickets of the Garibaldi Guard on the banks of the Potomac, by Frank Vizetelly.
William Howard Russell envied Vizetelly in just one respect: he was unmarried and could travel wherever he pleased without upsetting his family. Otherwise he pitied him. Vizetelly constantly teetered between depression and mania, and when not distracted by the thrill of danger, he became self-destructive and reckless. Vizetelly partially understood his limitations and chose to live rough with the 2nd New York Volunteers, even though the camp was infested with rattlesnakes and “myriads of bloodthirsty mosquitoes,” rather than lounge in the saloon at Willard’s.46 Sometimes he visited the camp of the Garibaldi Guard to swap stories with the handful of genuine veterans in the regiment. (The colonel there was a Hungarian con man, and most of the volunteers were not Italian but adventurers from the four corners of the globe.) On one of the few occasions Vizetelly did go to the capital, he received an invitation to dinner from Seward. He arrived expecting to regale his host with stories about the American volunteers he had encountered among Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, but Seward was interested only in the tenor of his sympathies and whether he was planning to visit the South like that villain William Howard Russell. “I disclaimed any idea of so doing,” reported Vizetelly.47
Once Seward took against a person, it was rare for him to change his mind. Russell had sensed at their first meeting that he could be a dangerous enemy. During his return journey from the South, Russell had read enough of the Northern press to warn him of the reception awaiting him in Washington. But “I can’t help it,” he wrote on June 22 to his fellow Times correspondent in New York, J. C. Bancroft Davis; “I must write as I feel and see.… I would not retract a line or a word of my first letters.” He hoped that Northern newspapers would reprint his Times reports from the South, which would show that he was not a rebel sympathizer.48
Russell arrived in