Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (2 page)

Lincoln swallowed his pride and gave in to the British ultimatum to release the diplomats but ignored the other demand to offer an apology. He had no other choice but to back down. The North was in the throes of a painful mobilization and was suffering repeated reverses at Southern hands. If it could not subdue the South with less than one-third of its population and barely 10 percent of the country’s industrial base, it was a reasonable question to ask how it could hope to prevail against the immense power of the British Empire, which had so frightened the Russian bear.

Twenty-one months were to pass until war nearly boiled over again in September 1863. The casus belli for the Union was the construction and delivery of one commerce raider after another to the Confederacy from British shipyards. These ships were lethal to the American merchant marine. American-owned and operated merchant shipping was competing with the British everywhere around the world for the vast market of the international carrying trade. The Confederate commerce raiders destroyed more than six hundred ships and drove far more to take foreign flags or to be sold outright to foreign, usually British, interests. The level of anger in the North over these depredations stoked
white hot at the British, whose Foreign Enlistment Act seemed useless in enforcing the Queen’s neutrality. Worse than the abundant loopholes in the act was the outright connivance of British officials and courts in giving it the most liberal interpretation that always seemed to be in the interests of the Confederacy.

In 1862 the issue was already serious enough for the U.S. government through its able ambassador, Charles Francis Adams, to put enough pressure on the British government to stop the construction of the commerce raider Number 292 being built by the Laird Brothers in Birkenhead across the Mersey River from Liverpool. But a Confederate sympathizer in the Foreign Office warned the Confederate agent in Britain, James Bulloch. Recent speculation as to the source of this warning has centered on Austin David Layard, member of Parliament and undersecretary to Lord John Russell at the Foreign Office.
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As a result, Number 292 was taken out of port on a trial run for which it did not need the permission of the customs officer of the port. Number 292 just kept on going. It was renamed the CSS
Alabama
and married up in the Azores with its guns, stores, and crew, most of whom were former Royal Navy seamen. The names CSS
Alabama, Florida
, and
Shenandoah
struck terror to any ship that carried the merchant ensign of the United States.

Twinned with what the Northern people saw as British collusion to attack American shipping, British free trade policies encouraged British shippers to make immense profits running war supplies and luxuries to the Confederacy through the Union blockade of Southern ports. Despite an increasingly effective blockade, huge amounts of British-made war materials continued to reach Confederate armies. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was particularly incensed. He noted in his memoirs that the Confederate Army that surrendered at Vicksburg was uniformly armed with superior British Enfield rifles compared to the antiquated firearms his own men were using. During the siege of Petersburg in late 1864, he forwarded to the War Department shells bearing the stamps of royal arsenals. It was natural, then, for Northern public opinion to see a malevolent hand in British actions.

What neither public opinion, Ambassador Adams, nor Secretary of State Seward realized was that the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, was the major advocate in the cabinet for military intervention in the American Civil War to force an armistice. Such an armistice would result in de facto Southern independence. The Americans were convinced that Lord Palmerston was the one beating the drum for war, but, in fact,
he was the calming hand on Russell. Russia also consistently opposed efforts by Palmerston to enlist it and other European powers in imposing mediation by force.
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All through the winter, spring, and summer of 1863 American interest focused on the two new hulls, Number 294 and Number 295, being built for the Confederacy by the Laird Brothers. They were double-turreted armored iron ships, the first such built in British yards. Heretofore, all British armored ships had been broadside ironclads. What made these hulls even more unique was that they were fitted with rams, much like ancient triremes, to smash a hole in another warship. The ships’ overall powers were advertised as being able to outfight anything in the U.S. Navy and being capable of raiding at will Northern ports. That threat was taken with the greatest seriousness, and the tension rose month by month in Washington as the U.S. consul in Liverpool, Thomas Haines Dudley, reported the progress of their building. That tension became even more excruciating as Lord Russell turned down every representation of overwhelming evidence as being insufficient proof necessary to halt the delivery of the ships. Secretary of State Seward recommended that a warship be dispatched to British waters to intercept the rams once they left port. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles turned him down, stating that every ship was needed to maintain the blockade.

Ever since the Trent Affair, Lincoln had strictly followed a policy of “one war at a time,” in full knowledge that the Union had its hands full with the Confederacy.
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That is why it could do no more than offer moral support to the deposed government of Mexico in the face of a blatant French conquest. But even this policy had to be set aside as the losses to American commerce on the high seas became intolerable as did the threat of the Laird rams.

Finally, Lincoln instructed Adams to draw a red line for the British beyond which was war. On September 5, a desperate Adams penned one last remonstration to Russell and ended it with the statement that if the rams escaped, “it would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.” It is arguably the most famous line in the history of American diplomacy.
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Adams was unaware that Lord Russell had finally come around to the danger of taking no action and had informed Palmerston of his decision to detain the rams on September 4. The weight of evidence had finally brought Russell around. However, Adams was not informed of this decision until September 8, due in part to the Layard’s inexplicable delays in the notification of critical parties.
Layard did act with considerable dispatch, though only after the receipt of Adams’s last notes, by notifying the British embassy in Washington that instructions had been given to detain the rams.
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Interestingly, Russian and American interests crossed paths again at this time. In January of that year the Poles had risen in revolt against Czar Alexander II. His armies crushed the revolt with a typical heavy hand. He then abolished the kingdom of Poland whose crown he held. The crown had come to the Romanovs as part of the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, which re-created the Polish state. Britain and France were the guarantors of the treaty and Poland’s status. Now they threatened war. Alexander was determined that the Royal Navy would not trap his fleet in its bases as it had been in the Crimean War. He dispatched a strong squadron of the Baltic Fleet to New York and the Pacific Squadron to San Francisco, so that in case of war they could issue from neutral ports to savage British and French commerce on the high seas.

The Laird rams affair was a close-run thing. But this time, unlike the Trent Affair, the United States was in a much better position if war came. The Confederacy had suffered twin catastrophes at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July of that year. The Union armies were no longer armed mobs but veterans commanded by increasingly talented leaders. The Union Navy won no comparable dramatic victories but was slowly strangling the South with the blockade. More important, the Navy was riding a technological wave with the development and commissioning of its turreted armored warships of the monitor type. Of equal importance was the Navy’s powerful armament, the various calibers of the Dahlgren gun, developed by Adm. John A. Dahlgren, the father of American naval ordnance. Although they were muzzle-loading weapons at the dawn of the breech-loading age, they were the finest and more destructive guns in the world and outclassed anything the British had in reliability and destructiveness.

The U.S. Army’s efforts at similar innovation, however, were much less successful, despite the Civil War’s reputation as being the nursery of military technology. The Army’s story, unfortunately, was one of repeated lost opportunities. The Army simply did not have the structure to field new technology, develop doctrine, devise tactics, and integrate these with the armies in the field. Worse was the outright sabotage of the Army’s Chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Col. James Ripley, who had a determined phobia of “newfangled gimcracks,” such as breech-loading and repeating firearms, not to mention the first machine guns.

Lincoln was as open minded and visionary as Ripley was close minded and reactionary. It was because of Lincoln that the Balloon Corps entered the Army of the Potomac, where, by the battle of Chancellorsville, it was providing real-time intelligence to the Union commander. Lincoln was behind another innovation, the coffee mill gun, the first machine gun, which he personally ordered, bypassing Ripley. But Lincoln could not be everywhere and do everything. The Balloon Corps simply withered away when its founding genius, Prof. Thaddeus Lowe, was driven out of the Army by an officious captain set over him by senior officers jealous of his civilian pay. Ripley similarly sidelined the coffee mill guns and made sure those that were ordered ended up carefully stored and forgotten in the Washington Arsenal. Despite repeated remonstrations and indications of presidential approval, Ripley simply refused to order repeating weapons despite overwhelming evidence in the field of their effectiveness. If he was finally pressed by a presidential order, he made sure the fine print negated Lincoln’s intent. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton finally fired Ripley in September. By then, the production of the standard muzzle-loading firearms was meeting the demands of the huge Army.

Although repeating weapons were subsequently bought in large numbers for several mounted infantry brigades and proved dramatically successful in combat, there never was an attempt to reequip any of the armies in the field. Thus, the opportunity to go into battle with a seven-to-one fire superiority in the clash of field armies was never attempted. Not even legendary Southern valor could withstand the storm that would have ensured that there was no second round.

Nevertheless, at a time when the armies of the Confederacy had fought the Union to a standstill, war with the British Empire and France would have been a momentous step. A betting man would not have given the United States decent odds. The population of the United Kingdom was equal to that of the Northern states while that of France was 50 percent larger. British industrial production outweighed the Americans’ considerably, and the Royal Navy was significantly larger and stronger than the U.S. Navy. In a war, the United States could count on being isolated from the rest of the world and losing access to imports and money markets. Falling on the scales to balance these weaknesses was the vulnerability of British North America, a factor that obsessed the British and prompted the hurried reinforcement during the Trent Affair. American invasions of 1776 and 1812 had been with weak forces.
This time that would not be a problem as the Union armies now numbered in the many hundreds of thousands.

This alternate history pivots on the failure of the British Foreign Office to take seriously the protests of the United States over the Laird rams, which leads to war. Besides playing out the clash of armies and fleets, a significant element is the story of the acceleration of stymied military technology under the intense pressure of what will become for the Union total war.

The story is told largely through two characters—Brig. Gen. George H. Sharpe and Lt. Col. Garnet Wolseley. Their real lives were remarkable enough. Sharpe was the intelligence officer for the Army of the Potomac and would later rise to fill that function for Grant. Sharpe was a natural intelligence officer. He had probably received the finest education in North America, had trained the logic of his mind at Yale Law School, had traveled widely, served as the chargé at the embassy in Vienna, and was fluent in French. He was a sophisticated, thoughtful, and wily man. His contributions at Gettysburg and beyond gave the Union the vital edge in winning the war in the Eastern Theater. By the second night of the battle at Gettysburg he was able to report to Maj. Gen. George Meade that his staff had identified every regiment of the Army of Northern Virginia having been committed except those in Gen. George Pickett’s division. It was a priceless piece of intelligence that helped steel Meade’s resolve to fight it out. The raid he instigated to seize Jefferson Davis’s dispatches to Gen. Robert E. Lee added additional priceless operational and strategic intelligence. Sharpe had created the first all-source intelligence organization in military history, but tragically in its postwar penury the Army failed to institutionalize that achievement. All-source intelligence would only be reborn in World War I on the French model.

Wolseley was a rising star of the British Army who had lost an eye in Burma and won renown in the Crimea, in the suppression of the Great Mutiny in India, and in the punitive expedition against China in 1859. He had been sent out to Canada as part of the reinforcement triggered by the Trent Affair. He would later rise to be the greatest of Victoria’s generals, aided in no small part by the talent of surrounding himself with talented subordinates. In a famous escapade in 1862 he took leave to the United States, slipped through Union lines, and introduced himself to Robert E. Lee, for whom he developed a lifelong case of hero worship.
He had an intense dislike for Americans of the Yankee type, almost as virulent as his contempt for the Irish. He was in favor of war with the United States to ensure Southern independence in order to cripple America’s future potential to contest British power. For all that he was a man of rare military insight and organizational ability. Luckily for everyone, he would spend the rest of his tour in Canada, fishing, hunting, and chasing pretty Canadian girls.