A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [92]
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Two days after the departure of the Bermuda, Anthony Trollope and his wife, Rose, set sail for Boston. They arrived on September 5, after a brief stop in Halifax, beating the Bermuda to America by two weeks. Trollope had long wanted to visit the United States in order to write a travel book. It would be a break from writing fiction and perhaps, he hoped, might even put an end to the notoriety attached to the Trollope name. His mother had intended to be amusing rather than offensive in her Domestic Manners of the Americans, but the book had caused such damage to Anglo-American relations that Trollope had often thought, “If I could do anything to mitigate the soreness, if I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well … I should.”68
Boston literary circles welcomed the Trollopes with warmth that belied the harsh statements against Britain in the press. The only sharpness they encountered was directed at Rose; people often asked her if she regretted writing Domestic Manners, to which she patiently replied that she was not her mother-in-law. Trollope had the occasional argument over Britain’s neutrality. Bostonians, in common with the rest of the North, believed that England’s greed for cotton was the real reason it had granted belligerency to the South.
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But no one abused Trollope with the freedom or viciousness with which Washingtonians insulted William Howard Russell. Every obstruction was now thrown in Russell’s way. Although General McClellan was unfailingly polite to him and never turned down his request for a pass, Russell found that the guards and sentries took a mean delight in turning him away. He did not know when his punishment would end, and while it continued, he was useless as a war correspondent.
Frank Vizetelly had no such impediments and was able to witness the rehabilitation of the 79th Highlanders when he visited them on September 11. Among them, Ebenezer Wells had been promoted to wagon master, a change that increased the young man’s chances of survival but kept him on the move all day long. During one grueling marathon, his raw and bloody feet swelled out of their boots. “After cutting my boots here and there,” he wrote, “I was obliged to throw them away and marched the last six miles on a stony road, nearly barefoot.”69 The 79th Highlanders were now deemed trustworthy enough to participate in a reconnaissance mission on a Confederate outpost near Lewinsville, a small town less than thirteen miles from Washington.
Vizetelly sketched the aftermath as McClellan greeted the returning soldiers with a dip of his hat. The artist was delighted to have something to occupy himself for a couple of days; the endless training was driving him mad.70 Russell was also bored. “Time passes away in expectation of some onward movement, or desperate attack, or important strategical movements; and night comes to reassemble a few friends, Americans and English, at my rooms or elsewhere, to talk over the disappointed hopes of the day, to speculate on the future, to chide each dull delay, and to part with a hope that tomorrow would be more lively than to-day,” he wrote in his diary on September 11. General McClellan would probably spend all winter pummeling his volunteer army into shape, a prospect Russell found extremely