A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (16 page)

With the success of Monitor and Passaic, the Navy leaped into the
modern age and let contracts for a number of classes of new monitors.
John Ericsson was again the foremost designer, and he provided the
plans for a light-draft Monitor class (subsequently the Casco class), of a
very simple design meant to penetrate the waterways that the draft of no
conventional warship could attempt. Ericsson then concentrated on two
leviathan monitors, Dictator and Puritan, and thereafter had little time to
spare for the shallow-draft monitors.25

Stimers hoped to replicate the success of the Passiac class with the
new Casco class and threw himself into the project with a praiseworthy
intensity. Unfortunately, he was also seized with a desire to achieve a
level of perfection in a new technology that was still groping forward. In
effect, he sought to out-engineer John Ericsson and, in so overreaching,
injected a level of complexity and confusion that contributed significantly to what happened at the Boston Atlantic Shipyard. He was constantly
sending changes to the builders who were forced to tear out and replace
already completed work. Unknown to anyone, significant errors were being made in the thousands of design computations done in Stimer's
office.

The builders were also experiencing the confusion and miscalculations inherent in the introduction of a new technology on an unprepared
and inexperienced industrial base. None of them had built an ironclad
before or even an all-iron ship. They severely underestimated the machine tools and skill levels necessary in their workforce. By late 1862, the
industrial base that Ericsson had estimated could absorb such programs
with ease was beginning to run into trouble. Severe competition arose
over materials, machine tools, and skilled labor. The Navy had also fecklessly let a number of contracts to shipyards on the Ohio River, failing
to take into account that its seasonal rise and fall as well as its winter icing would decisively influence when the hulls could be floated and the
ships moved. To add to the builders' attempts to cope with all this, the
government's payment system imposed a growing financial burden that
strained and then exhausted their credit.

For Stimers personally, the workload was overwhelming. As one
historian would note, he was dealing with everything from pay disputes
to shortages of bolts:

Simultaneously with altering the monitors in service, he was
making similar changes on those under construction. He was providing both original and revised drawings for Tippecanoe-class
and the light-draft (Casco-class) monitors. He was supervising
twenty-nine Tippecanoes and Cascos as well as Ericsson's Dictator
and Puritan. He was designing a "fast sloop of war ... and a twinturreted monitor. To top it off, he was subject to a court of inquiry.
"Stimers cannot properly superintend the 6 vessels and the planning of others at the same time," Ericsson had opined over a year
before, when Stimers had far fewer vessels to inspect. By the summer of 1863, the general inspector had been working at a killing
pace for over eighteen months.26

All these issues came to a head as that first hull floated halfsubmerged with all the pathos of a dead whale. The stink traveled to
Washington with such force that it brought the entire class to a halt as
the Navy realized the extent of the disaster. The class that had absorbed the lion's share of money, materials, and manpower was an abject failure
at the very moment when two enemy armies were marching through the
United States and her coasts and ports were under tight blockade.

LAKE BORGNE, LOUISIANA, 1:50 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

The Tricolor snapped in the cool October breeze from the stern of the
French ironclad Gloire as it steamed across the broad waters of Lake
Borgne. The armed might of France had not flown its colors on this body
since Napoleon I had sold Louisiana to the United States of Thomas Jefferson sixty years before. For the sailors, the very name was itself a piece
of wry humor, for borgne meant "one-eyed" in French.

When named in the early eighteenth century, it had been a freshwater lake, but a century and a half of nature's fury and relentlessness
had opened it to the Gulf of Mexico, and its water had become saline.
Lake Pontchartrain lay to the north across a narrow neck of swamps and
bayous and had almost direct access to New Orleans, but its canals and
rivers were guarded by strong forts. Gloire and the flotilla of warships
and transports ignored it and steamed west into Borgne. They had also
ignored the traditional route to the great city up the winding Mississippi through its long delta. There too were the strong forts that Farragut
had fought past to seize New Orleans the year before, but the forts were
much more powerful now in Union hands.

Gloire had been the world's first ironclad, laid down in 1858, and
had provoked the British to build the larger and more capable Warrior
and Defence classes. The French ship was smaller than both at 5,530
tons; its thirty-six 6.4-inch breechloading rifled guns were less capable
than the British Armstrong guns but more reliable. The British ships had
been all iron-hulled while Gloire was a wooden hull clad with a casemate
of 4.5-rolled wrought iron armor. The irony was that Gloire had been
more successful than its British counterparts. The American monitors
had sunk Black Prince, the second ship of the 9,200-ton Warrior class at
Charleston only weeks before. Gloire and the four follow-on ironclads
of her class had completely destroyed the U.S. Navy's unarmored West
Gulf Blockading Squadron about the same time in the battle of Galveston. Behind Gloire was her sister ship, Couronne, the first iron-hulled
French ship. Now both steamed on, their black guns also run out and
crews at battle stations.27

Aboard Gloire, nervous Confederate lieutenant general Richard Taylor paced the captain's quarterdeck. When the French lookout shouted
his sighting, Taylor swung his glass in that direction. Slowly, the threetired stone bulk of Fort Beauregard, looming over the small port of Proctorville, came into view one gallery at a time as the ship closed.

No alert sounded from the fort. It had never been completed and
was now derelict; it and the town below had never recovered from
the massive hurricane of August 1860. All that was left of Proctorville
was matchwood and the end of the Mexican Gulf Railroad that ran up
to New Orleans, a little less than thirty miles to the north. Black work
crews were languidly building a new pier and railroad terminal. Gloire
and Couronne took station as close as the pilot said was prudent for their
drafts, their guns covering what had once been a town. Small boats
darted out from the ironclads to the beach. French Marines jumped into
the surf and fanned out across the beach and into the town to clear it
of a nonexistent enemy, completely ignoring the workers who took advantage of the unexpected work break to stare. A signal rocket reported
all clear, and immediately the transports began lowering away dozens
of small boats, soon filled with troops in faded gray and butternut. The
boats scurried to the beach like a host of black water bugs.

One of the first to boats to hit the water had Taylor as a passenger.
His eyes fixed on the beach, he only turned back to wave a friendly
thank you to the French captain who had shouted, "Bonne chance, General
Taylor!" Taylor had promised him the best dinner in New Orleans, and
the captain had heard very good things about the wondrous Creole seafood cuisine.

Taylor pushed that thought to the back of his mind as his brigades
sorted themselves out ashore. As soon as each regiment formed, he put
them on the road north. Speed, speed, and more speed. Once taught by
Jackson, a soldier always felt the need for speed. He had drummed it
into his subordinate commanders and now was everywhere applying his
formidable presence to wherever the movement off the beach and onto
the road slowed. When two brigades were ashore and moving north,
Taylor rode after them. The follow-on brigades and artillery would have
to catch up. They would continue through the night, and with some hard
marching he would be on the outskirts of a largely undefended New
Orleans by the following night. The powerful Union army that would have stopped him cold was over a hundred miles to the west as the crow
flew, fixated on Bazaine's Franco-Confederate army that had marched
out of Texas.

Despite the pace of the march, the men enjoyed the cool and dry
marching weather, so rare in Louisiana that it buoyed their morale and
put a bounce in their step. Taylor put Mouton's brigade of Louisiana
regiments in the van- the 18th and 25 Louisiana, the Crescent Regiment,
and Fournet's and Beard's battalions. They were marching home, and it
quickened their stride even more than the weather. The Texas brigades
behind, no slouches at hard marching, had to hurry to keep up. The real
bounce, though, came from the sense that they were going to be in on the
kill after so much frustration and defeat. They could taste it.

The prize, the first city of the South and entrepot for the entire watershed of the Mississippi, was in their grasp. Its capture by the Union in
April 1862 had been the first great crippling blow the North had inflicted
on the Confederacy. The fall of the great river forts from Vicksburg to
Port Hudson in July had, in Lincoln's words, allowed the "Mother of
waters to run unvexed to the sea." Taylor was determined to vex Mr.
Lincoln all over again .21

BRASHEAR CITY, LOUISIANA, 2:00 PM, OCTOBER 21, 1863

The main Union supply base in Brashear City should have been as impregnable as a fortress with all the advantages afforded by surrounding nature. The town lay sixty-five miles slightly southwest from New
Orleans on the Opelousas and Great Western Railroad. There the tracks
ended, and supplies were conveyed to Banks's army by wagon train
along the main road that continued north another fifty-five miles up to
Vermillionville and then west again to Texas. The first twenty-five miles
was a narrow strip of land between Grand Lake to the north and impenetrable swamps, marshes, and bayous to the south. Winding back and
forth like the coils of a snake was the marshy Bayou Teche, offering an
endless series of chokepoints to even a moderately determined defender.

When Maj. Gen. Thomas Green, commanding a division of two
thousand five hundred Texas cavalry, arrived at Indian Village just beyond this twenty-five mile naturally defended corridor, he had accomplished Bazaine's order to cut Banks's communications with his main
supply base. Bazaine had overestimated the attention Banks would pay to the defense of the mountains of supplies accumulating at Brashear
City. Instead, he had left a green brigade recently arrived from the
North. The local country people swarmed to Green to tell him that almost the entire Yankee force was concentrated at Brashear City and none
too alert.

Green did not hesitate. He put his regiments in motion immediately. To the shock of the Union teamsters in the long wagon trains, his lead
units galloped past them, not even bothering to stop and accept their
surrender, which was later taken by the regiments bringing up the rear.
On the Texans galloped, so fast that they outraced the very news of their
coming.29