William Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861-1862

Abstract

Having won renown in the 1850s for his vivid warfront dispatches from the Crimea, William Russell was the most celebrated foreign journalist in America during the first year of the Civil War. As a special correspondent for the Times of London, Russell was charged with explaining the American crisis to a British audience, but his reports also had a great impact in the United States. They so alienated both sides, North and South, that Russell was forced to return to England pematurely in April 1862. My Diary North and South (1863), Russell's published account of his visit, remains a classic of Civil War literature. It was not in fact a diary but a narrative reconstruction of the author's journeys and observations based on his private notebooks and published dispatches. Despite his severe criticisms of American society and conduct, Russell offered in that work generally sympathetic characterizations of the Northern and Southern leadership during the war. In this new volume, Martin Crawford brings together the correspondent's original diary and a selection of his private correspondence to resurrect the fully uninhibited Russell and to provide, accordingly, a documentary record of this important visitor's first impressions of the United States during the early months of its greatest crisis. Over the course of his American visit, Russell travelled widely throughout the Union and the new Confederacy, meeting political and social leaders on both sides. Included here are spontaneous - and often unflattering - comments on such prominent figures as William H. Seward, Jefferson Davis, Mary Todd Lincoln, and George B. McClellan, as well as quick sketches of New York, Washington, New Orleans, and other cities. Also revealed are the anxiety and despair that Russell experienced during his American visit - a state induced by his own self-doubt, by concern over the health and situation of his wife in England, and, finally, by the bitter criticism he received in the United States over his reports.