November 2023
Those behind them went madly rushing on, the drivers being quite indifferent whether glory or disgrace led the way, provided they could find it. In the midst of this extraordinary spectacle, an officer, escorted by some dragoons, rode through the ruck with a light cart in charge. Another officer on foot, with his sword under his arm, ran up against me.
“What is all this about?” “Why, we’re pretty badly whipped. We’re all in retreat. There’s General Tyler there, badly wounded.” And on he ran. There came yet another, who said, “We’re beaten on all points. The whole army is in retreat.”13
Russell put his dispatches onboard a steamer for London, and by the first week of August— pretty fast, when you think about it—they were appearing in the London Times. Three weeks later, they were being reprinted in the New York papers. “His description of the rout at Bull Run immediately set up a howl of outrage from Northern throats,” writes Allen Guelzo. Death threats came in the mail; sentries at the Potomac bridges took pot-shots at him. Journalistic colleagues distanced themselves. “We do
not know and do not care what he saw,” growled the Chicago Tribune; “we should be justified in believing that he was not at the battle at all.” When Secretary of War Stanton prevented him from covering McClellan on the Peninsula, Russell boarded a steamer and on April 9, 1862 left America.14
Russell never ceased working. He covered the Franco-Prussian War, reported the Zulu conflict in South Africa, and was knighted in 1895. He was still traveling and corresponding when he died in London in 1907, aged 86.15
Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1965 [1940]), 348-49.
W. C. Corsan Two Months in the Confederate States: An Englishman’s Travels Through the South, ed. by Benjamin H. Trask (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 140. Foreigners, Lonn, 350; Gary W. Gallagher, Lee: The Soldier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 184.
E. Merton Coulter, Travels in the Confederate States: A Bibliography (Baton Rouge: 5.
10. William Howard Russell, My
11. V.C. Jones, “First Manassas:
14. Guelzo, “Gentleman from the 15. Ibid., 45. Louisiana State University Press, 1994 [1948]), 220.
The Walter Lord, ed., Fremantle Diary (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952 [1863]), 204-205.
Kate Mason Rowland, “English Friends of the Confederate Confederacy,” Veteran, vol. 25 (1917), 200. Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Beringer, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 425; William C. Davis, An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 268.
Alfred Grant, The American Civil War and the British Press (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2000), 122; Allen C. Guelzo, “The Gentleman from the Times,” Civil War Times Illustrated, vol. 18, no. 7 (November 1979), 4.
Martin Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861-1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), xxv, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvii, 174; Louis M. Sears, ed., “The London Times’ American Correspondent in 1861: Unpublished letters of William H. Russell in the first year of the Civil War,” The Historical Outlook, vol. 16, no. 6 (October 1925), 253. Diary North & South, ed. by Fletcher Pratt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954 [1863]), 197, 199.
The Story of the Bull Run Campaign,” Civil War Times Illustrated (Gettysburg, 1973), 7-12, 16-19; William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 234-36.
My Diary, 215, 217, 223; Richard Wheeler, A Rising Thunder: From Lincoln’s Election to the Battle of Bull Run--An Eyewitness History (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 383-84.
The Moore, ed., Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, etc., 11 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1861- 1863, and D. Van Nostrand Co., 1864–1868), vol. 2, Documents p. 57.
Stephen Davis became a Civil Warrior around 1957, the year CBS aired “The Gray Ghost” on television. A lifelong Atlantan, he earned degrees at Emory and Chapel Hill. He served as Book Review Editor for Blue & Gray Magazine, 1985-2005, and has written widely for popular Civil War magazines and academic journals.
Steve resides in northeast Georgia with his wife Billie and their cat Cha Cha, who navigate around his library of 3,000 Civil War books. He’s the author, with Atlanta journalist Bill Hendrick, of The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer
“I Thank
Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) received a strong education and was
the Lord I
a successful writer and educator. Her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
surely ranks among the most observant
Yankee...”
and intelligent wartime memoirs by a Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride. Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes
on Confederate General John Bell Hood have won several prizes, including the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
