The Lost Gettysburg Address (16 page)

After breakfast on Saturday, Gilligan arrived with a beautiful
scarlet flower. As he was showing Kitty its description in his Spanish
floral dictionary, a messenger knocked on the door. The boy
delivered a note from Kingsbury. He had discovered a plot to capture
Anderson as soon as he reached Matamoros. The family needed to
be at the river in two hours. The
Ursulita
, captained by William M.
Dalzell, was a ninety-four-ton steam schooner bound for Vera Cruz.
Eliza and her daughters climbed aboard. The ship left the mouth of
the river at eight at night for the three-day passage. She was barely
under way when Eliza and
Belle became seasick. Kitty managed
better, but she felt apprehensive and alone. Hardly anyone aboard the
vessel spoke a word of English.

Accommodations on the
Ursulita
were Spartan by any standard.
Passengers slept on cane-bottom benches, when they could sleep at
all, in the dirty, air-starved hold of the ship. The vessel rolled and
pitched at the slightest wind or wave. Eliza and Belle took to sleeping
on the floor with blankets in a vain attempt to quiet their angry
stomachs. Kitty found that a sea chest was a more comfortable bed than
her berth. She awoke one morning to a two-inch roach skittering
across her hand. Their quarters were lighted by two small portholes,
which was also the only source of fresh air in the humid, stinking
hell on water. The sweet crackers they brought turned so musty that
they fed them to their dog, Sumter. This gave him just enough energy
to chase the tailless cat around the ship. To make matters worse, a
sailor named Don Manuel Cruzado had taken an immediate interest
in Kitty. All day long, she caught him leering at her. He turned away
each time she intercepted his glance. Thank goodness they would
only have to endure this for a few days  .  .  .  or so they thought.

Unknown to the passengers, Captain Dalzelle had miscalculated
their route and veered far off course. After several days at sea, he
had no idea where he was. Meanwhile, the weather was about to
turn nasty. Eliza and Belle had begun to feel better and were even
eating a little by Thursday. The moonlight danced on the water with
an enchanting, phosphorescent glow. The old ship was five days out
when the wind started blowing from the north. The breeze was
refreshing and welcome at first, but as it grew in strength, the
passengers bore the brunt of it. By Friday night, the
Ursulita
was enveloped
in what locals called a full-blown “norther.” Huge waves roiled the
craft from side to side, first pitching and then heaving in a violent
display of nature’s fury. Crew members closed the portholes and the
smothering heat became unbearable.

At one point, Kitty persuaded the sailors to open one of the small
windows so she could stick her head out and breathe fresh air. She
stood grasping the side of the spasmodic ship, her hair blowing wildly
in the breeze and the lightning blinding her intermittently. It was
both frightening and exhilarating. Suddenly, a big wave catapulted
her backward into the darkness of the crowded cabin. The storm
raged on through Saturday, blowing the ship past Vera Cruz and into
the open waters of the Gulf. Kitty lay on the floor of the cabin,
regretting the fact that she shared some of the same religious doubts as her
father. “I vowed in my heart that I would try to love my God
more
and serve him better,” she wrote. “How ungrateful and contemptible
to seek so loving a Master in an hour of distress and darkness more
than in days of joy and peace!”

When the storm finally ceased on Sunday, the ship was a long way
from its destination. The
Ursulita
had exhausted her supply of fuel
and had to rely solely on her sails to make it to Vera Cruz. The storm
was followed by a dead calm, and the ship lolled languorously while
the crew and passengers regained their bearings. Several days passed
with occasional glimpses of shore, until finally on November 28, at
about four in the afternoon, they reached the port of Vera Cruz. Eliza
and her daughters had been at sea for more than eleven days. No one
was there to greet them.

The Andersons found their way to the house of the U.S. consul,
Mark H. Dunnell. From there, the party found rooms that looked
quaint and foreign, even to such seasoned travelers. The single beds
were quite high off the ground and the floor tiled with square bricks.
A stout iron door was the only opening in the windowless room, and
a set of narrow stairs led down to a surprisingly fine French
restaurant. They had been settled less than a day when a well-dressed Don
Marcos Cruzado called and boldly asked Kitty to accompany him to
Mexico City. She politely refused. All that was left to do now was to
wait for word from her father.

Charles Anderson was 140 miles out of Monterrey when he was
greeted by a welcome and familiar face.
Will Bayard had escaped
the same day that Anderson had arrived at Governor Vidaurri’s
residence in Monterrey. Bayard joined Anderson near Victoria for the
trip to Tampico. The two fugitives spent many happy hours on the
road together on the way to their port of liberation. When they
finally arrived at Tampico on November 28, the city had been under
siege by the rebel forces of Don Luis de Carvajal for eight days. Not
long afterward, half the town, including the U.S. consulate, would be
burned down to mere ashes. The escapees were warmly received by
U.S. consul Franklin Chase, who was preparing to abandon the city.
Bayard took the schooner,
Sallie Gay
, bound for New York, while
Anderson boarded the British Royal Mail Packet,
Clyde
, bound for
Vera Cruz and Havana.

When Charles stepped ashore in Vera Cruz just days after his
family’s arrival, he was greeted by Consul Dunnell, who rushed Anderson
to his wife and two daughters. Tears flowed in abundance at their
reunion. The family had plenty of time to swap stories and reconnect
on the voyage to Havana. Once there, the Andersons transferred to
the U.S. steamship
Columbia
and sailed for New York, where they
finally disembarked seventy-three days after their first attempt to leave
Texas. Their arrival on December 11, 1861, created a sensation.
³

T
HE LAND WAR HAD BEEN
going badly for the Union while
Charles Anderson and his family were on the run. Since the
embarrassing defeat at Manassas in July, federal armies had
failed to make significant progress in Virginia. They had not yet
established firm control in Kentucky. Lincoln realized that he was in for
a long conflict. Despite successes on the seacoast, ultimately the war
had to be won on the ground. He needed new leadership.

Robert Anderson had taken command of the Department of
the Cumberland a short time after he surrendered Fort Sumter.
Overwhelmed by the enormity of what he had already experienced in
the war, and having never fully recovered from his old wounds in the
Mexican War, he finally succumbed to nervous strain and resigned
his commission. By early October 1861,
William T. Sherman had
replaced him in command of the department. Aging general
Winfield
Scott, a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War,
resigned on November 1. He was replaced by thirty-four-year-old
general George McClellan. Lincoln’s new top general led a force that
exceeded seven hundred thousand men. With most of the fighting
done for the winter, the Northern press was hungry for some good
news. When Charles Anderson arrived in New York, they christened
him a hero.

Anderson was the talk of the town. He and his family lodged in
the finest hotels, dined at the best restaurants, and were visited by
the cream of New York society. He gave numerous interviews and
appeared at festivals and private dinners. His most prestigious
invitation came from
Peter Cooper, who asked him to speak at the heralded
Cooper Institute on the night of December 21. This Anderson did in
typical dramatic fashion, telling the story of
Major General David
E. Twiggs’s treachery, the Alamo speech, and Anderson’s subsequent
escape. The
New York Times
described
Anderson’s story as “among
the most moving and romantic episodes of the war.” The capacity
crowd loved it. Two days later, as Eliza and her daughters were
traveling back to Ohio, Anderson and his brother Robert were feted at
Astor House during a meeting of the New England Society. The
dinner was lavish. The table included a scale model of Fort Sumter with
toy cannons that fired and smoked. When the toasting was done,
Robert’s suddenly famous little brother boarded a train bound for
Washington to meet with Winfield Scott. Scott and Anderson were
attempting to arrange an exchange for
Will Jones. After just a day
in the capital, Anderson left for Ohio and arrived in Cincinnati, two
days after Christmas.
¹

Back home in Dayton, Anderson began the New Year by seeking
ways to contribute to the Union war effort. His son Latham was still
fighting valiantly in New Mexico, where he was brevetted a major
at Val Verde in February. Seven of Anderson’s nephews were in U.S.
Army service at various locations. Cousins, neighbors, and friends
had rushed to the aid of his beloved Union. Anderson was now in
his late forties and hardly the soldierly type. Surely he had other
talents he could lend to the cause. His first priority was to assist more
than three hundred Union troops, including the brave officers who
had helped finance his escape, still held hostage back in Texas. On
January 9, Anderson began a withering, two-month letter-writing
campaign to military and administration officials in Washington.
Writing to Edwin M. Stanton, Anderson mentioned that he had
already appealed to generals Henry Halleck and Lorenzo Thomas,
along with former New York governor Hamilton Fish, among
others, to rescue his friends. His efforts and those of others would take
months to succeed, but by the end of April all of the remaining
prisoners had been exchanged.
²

On January 10, Anderson addressed the Ohio General Assembly.
His speech, in tone and content, established consistent themes that he
repeated throughout the war. Political leaders and the general public
needed to have an intimate understanding of the true nature of the
terrible conflict and the causes that precipitated it. The war was the
result of treason, pure and simple. It was planned by evil, ambitious
politicians intent on establishing an oligarchy based on slavery. They
had to be stopped and the Union restored at all costs before it was too
late. Anderson felt it was his urgent duty to proceed to Washington
and offer his services.
³

He arrived in the capital on Thursday, January 16, and met with
both President Lincoln and General McClellan the following day.
“The president strikes me as one of the most unreserved, honest men
I ever saw,” Anderson wrote to his wife.
“General McClellan
impresses me exceedingly.” Despite Eliza’s worries that her husband
would be made a brigadier general and Larz’s latest scheme to get his
younger brother the post of minister to Mexico, Anderson vowed not
to seek any office. He trusted that the president would help him find
a role in the effort to restore the Union. Lincoln did just that.
⁴

The president asked Anderson to use his most powerful
weapon—his speaking ability—to support the Union cause. The prelude was
a brief tour of New England with the famed poet and editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
,
James Russell Lowell. Lowell had admired Robert
Anderson who, in Lowell’s words, “served for a brief hour to typify
the spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty” during his ordeal at Fort
Sumter. He saw similar qualities in Robert’s youngest brother. When
Lowell reflected back on their brief acquaintance years later, he
remembered Charles Anderson as “the handsome, fair-haired Norseman
who, with all his refinement, had a look as if he would cheerfully have
gone out with a battle-axe to a holmgang.” Anderson returned from
his eastern tour excited and energized, for he was about to undertake
an important mission: Lincoln was sending him to England.
⁵

A critical foreign policy dilemma facing the
Lincoln administration
was the prospect of recognition or aid from England landing in the
laps of the nascent rebel government. The Confederacy had sent
commissioners to London in early May 1861, but the British were not
eager to upset their delicate relationship with the United States. In
October, Louisiana governor Thomas O’ Moore banned the
shipment of cotton to Europe in the hope that this action would pressure
those nations to recognize the Confederate government. Opinion in
England was split. The London
Times
supported the Union, while the
Post
expressed sympathy for the Confederacy. A Union naval
blockade of Southern ports put additional pressure on European relations.

On October 12, the Confederate commissioners to France and
Britain, John Slidell and James Mason, slipped past the Union
blockade at Charleston on their way to Cuba. They intended to purchase
arms for the Confederacy in Europe. As the commissioners sailed in
the British packet ship
Trent
on November 8, they were intercepted
by the USS
San Jacinto
and taken prisoner. The
Trent affair, as it
came to be called, created an international crisis, with talk of possible
war between England and the United States over this alleged breach
of international law and diplomatic protocol. The rebels could not
have been more pleased with this turn of events. The crisis dragged
on for months. Finally, on December 26, the United States agreed to
release the two commissioners into the custody of Great Britain and
admit that their actions were not legal. Serious damage had been
done to relations between the two powerful nations, and
embarrassed British politicians were lining up to support recognition of the
Confederacy. Southern blockade runners using British ports created
additional tension.