It is my wish, then, to plant the idea in your mind — and heart — that should I get through all this, I will be looking forward to the day when I will see you and your family in England again, and that you will find me as suitable a son as any fine lady might ever want. Please write me, if you can; but if you cannot, rest assured that I remain your son, always, in this world or in the next.
With my dearest affections,
Henry Stanley
AT AN EARLY HOUR on the morning of April 6, 1862, a Sunday, just before the sun had begun to rise, while Clemens was still asleep somewhere out West, Stanley’s regiment, bivouacked in a damp and miserable field, had been mustered into battle formation, the Confederate army creeping through the misty gloom of a forest to sweep down and overrun the Union lines, which they had hoped to push into the Tennessee River or slaughter. Equipped with a muzzle-loading rifle, tedious and time-consuming to load, Stanley had been among the troops who, with whoops and rebel yells, had come charging with fixed bayonets in a frantic run out of the woods. Their volleys cut down the Yankees as they, just stirring awake, half-dressed and unarmed, were completely caught by surprise in their encampments; and it seemed as if the many Yankee dead and wounded lying in the field augured for a quick Confederate victory, despite the length of time it took them to load ball and buckshot and paper charges into their muskets. Shortly, however, once the Union forces had been mustered and had formed their own lines, the Confederate advantage was quickly nullified — Confederate soldiers, under a furious fusillade of bullets and shells, fell everywhere around him. Then the Yankee artillery came into play: men and horses were blown to pieces, and many a torn-open gut, entrails exposed, sent swirls of steam into the cool morning air. Taking refuge with some dozen of his fellow soldiers behind the trunk of a fallen tree, Stanley turned to see one of the men he had written a tender letter home for, a young lieutenant, shot between the eyes, his pupils wide open and dreaming — of who knows what: then he saw the soldier known as John Bull, his face blown off, collapsed on the ground. Stanley’s remarkable ability to feel detached from himself in the most troubling of circumstances served him well in those moments, for, later, keeping his calm, he survived to join a line of troops advancing toward a second Yankee encampment. It was while he had been charging across a field, behind enemy lines, that he was knocked over — a piece of shrapnel having hit the buckle of his belt; stunned, but spared mortal injury, he lay quietly for a long time before managing to crawl, exhausted, behind a tree.
Just as it seemed as if all were lost, he heard the command for his regiment to regroup. Night was falling. He ate some rations and tried to sleep—“Oh, Mother; oh, Father,” he muttered to himself again and again — sharing with his fellow soldiers the widespread fear that the Yankees might be upon them come dawn. But by the morning, he had recovered his nerves enough not only to join a line of infantrymen who were ordered to advance toward the Yankee lines in “good order” but also to do so with great valor and enthusiasm, outpacing his fellow soldiers and penetrating so deeply into the enemy campgrounds that soon no gray Confederate uniforms were to be seen. Searching for a place to hide, he ran toward some trees, only to find himself in an exposed clearing, Yankee uniforms everywhere surrounding him: And, just like that, with half a dozen soldiers converging upon him, their pistols drawn, he found himself in ankle chains and taken as a prisoner of war.
He was sent upriver by steamboat to St. Louis, then by rail to Illinois. A few weeks later, he arrived at Camp Douglas, outside of Chicago, the long huts of this federal prison abundant with vermin, its trench latrines overflowing with human ordure, and the men, clustered two and three to a wooden bunk (in dense rows, like small boats), suffering from dysentery or typhus or their own septic wounds, dying in their own filth, their bodies carried away to the death wagons each morning, like “loads of New Zealand mutton,” as he would later write in his journal. Ill himself with a very bad case of dysentery, Stanley, brooding and weary, supposed that sooner or later his would soon be among the bodies carted out of that place.
But in those days, his orderly manner attracted the attention of the Union commanders: His achievements — keeping inventory of the meager food rations that were appropriated for his barracks, a list of which he maintained in neat columns in his careful script (he was, after all, a clerk) — impressed them very much, as did his skills as a marksman. Such officers, thinking that he might be of some use to the Union cause, and reviewing his status as a British national, offered him a way out, which was to enlist as a soldier on the Union side. And while his sympathies for the South were mainly a matter of geography — it had been four years since he had arrived in New Orleans — and because he feared for his own life, he, after some six weeks in that hellish place, took the Union oath of allegiance and signed on with the Illinois Light Artillery. Sent south, to a camp near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, he had a short-lived stint in a blue uniform: Collapsing during a drill, he was deemed unfit for service. For two weeks he lingered in a Union hospital, and, released from his duties, wandered, deathly ill, on foot, traveling some twenty-four miles over the course of a week into peaceful Maryland, where, finding refuge at a farm, he recovered well enough to partake, with some gratitude, in the apple harvest.
(How beautiful that was, so long ago, he thought, to be walking in the shady groves of those trees, a patch of blue to be glimpsed now and then through the briary cross-hatching of branches, as he serenely went about practicing the peaceful activity of picking apples and dropping them into a basket in the spring sun.)
In that time a terrible homesickness for Wales came over him, a longing for the quietude of dulcet vales, and so upon his recovery (and with the help of the kindly family he stayed with) he left for Baltimore, finding work on an oyster schooner in Chesapeake Bay. Later, as a hand on a ship bound for England, he spent a month in the crossing, then walked some forty miles from Liverpool to north Wales to Denbigh. There he sought out the company and welcoming embrace of the mother who had long ago abandoned him: Seeing him in rags, she — Mrs. Robert Jones, née Betsy Parry — put him up for a night, and then sent him away from her door the next morning.
Then followed a year of further travels as a hand on various ships — water, like paper and disease, always playing a part in his life: Girgenti, Italy; Marseille, France; and Athens, Greece, being among his ports of call. On one of his journeys, he was shipwrecked in the seas off Barcelona. October of 1863 found him in New York City, working as a clerk in a legal office on Cedar Street, in lower Manhattan, his employer an alcoholic judge with whom he boarded in Brooklyn. Some six months later, young Stanley, at twenty-three, cooped up in an office and craving further adventure, enlisted again, this time in the Union Navy, as a clerk and admiral’s secretary on the warship Minnesota. It happened that he had been aboard the Minnesota on December 24, 1864, during the Union fleet’s bombardment of Fort Fisher, a Confederate stronghold on the coast of North Carolina, one of the last great naval engagements of the Civil War. Witnessing this conflagration and deciding to write some news dispatches, he later sold several of his descriptions of the battle to notable newspapers, among them the New York Herald. By the following February, bored again and judging the record-keeping facilities of the Union forces haphazard enough to risk taking an unauthorized leave, Stanley shed his uniform and, in the company of a fellow mate, slipped off the war brig as it lay in harbor one night at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, awaiting repairs. For a time he lingered in New York; by May of 1865, hearing much about the frontier lands and thinking that he might become a journalist, he headed west.