

The Inhuman Struggle
The British officer below had little knowledge of the American South prior to arriving in Virginia for a month’s visit in 1862 – but soon became a staunch advocate of the Confederacy. After returning to England, he penned an article for Blackwood’s Magazine entitled “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters” which the following is drawn from. His closing words in the article urged the British Parliament to recognize the Confederate States of America, writing that it was time to put an end “to the most inhuman struggle that ever disgraced a great nation.”
The Inhuman Struggle
“The first British soldier to visit the Confederacy had at one time expected to be fighting against the North. Lieutenant-Colonel Garnet J. Wolseley, a veteran of several of Queen Victoria’s wars, was part of a British force ordered to Canada during the Trent affair of late 1861. After the threat of war soon receded, he traveled to New York City in September 1862 to join London Times correspondent Frank Lawley for a visit to the American Confederacy. By the time the two men crossed the Potomac, General Robert E. Lee’s army was withdrawing from Maryland after the Sharpsburg campaign.
Even as he entered Virginia, Wolseley was favorably disposed toward the Confederacy, ostensibly out of concern for civil liberties in the wartime North. He described residents of Maryland as “stricken . . . with terror” by arrests ordered from Washington. Traveling by train from Fredericksburg to Richmond, Wolseley and Lawley shared accommodations with the wounded from Lee’s Maryland campaign. Their plight impressed even Wolseley, the professional soldier:
“Men with legs and arms amputated, and whose pale, haggard faces assumed an expression of anguish at even the slightest jolting of the railway carriages, lay stretched across the seats – some accompanied by civilian friends who had gone from Richmond to fetch them back, and others by wives or sisters, whose careworn features told a tale of sleepless nights passed in painful uncertainty regarding the fate of those they loved.”
When Wolseley reached Lee’s headquarters, he and Lawley were taken to meet the general. The British officer was impressed: “[Lee] is a strongly built man . . . He is slightly reserved; but he is a person that, whenever seen, whether in a castle or a hovel, alone or in a crowd, must at once attract attention as being a splendid specimen of an English gentleman.”
Wolseley found an appealing lack of pomp and ostentation at Lee’s headquarters, which, he noted, consisted of seven or eight pole tents, pitched on ground so rocky as to be uncomfortable to ride over. Lee’s staff lived two or three to a tent, a nearby stream being the only amenity.
Everywhere he was impressed with the tough, dedicated Confederate soldiers. Could such men be defeated, he would ask, “by mobs of Irish and German mercenaries hired at $15 a month to fight in a cause they know little and care less about?”
(British Observers in Wartime Dixie. John M. Taylor. Military History Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 68-69)