Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (34 page)

The lights burned late at the Navy Department as well. Gideon Welles may not have had Stanton’s greatness in a crisis, but he was steady
and a superb administrator. Backed up by a fighting assistant secretary, Gus Fox, he bent to his work. On his own, Fox had immediately dispatched ships to carry the news of war to the naval forces in Hampton Roads and the two blockading squadrons at Wilmington and Charleston.

In many ways the Navy faced a greater challenge than the Army did. Only a small part of the Army would or could be devoted to the British war. Most of it was locked in a struggle with the rebels and would have to remain so. Almost the entire Navy, save its riverine forces, would be going into harm’s way. Britannia’s mighty fist, its Royal Navy, would do everything in its power to bring the war home to America.

Already in Europe, American shipping was desperately sailing for neutral ports. Those that had not had the good sense to depart British ports after Moelfre Bay had already been seized. The Navy could do little to protect American commerce on the seas when it found strained to the breaking point to defend American harbors. Memories of the outrages perpetrated by the Royal Navy on the ports and coastal towns of the North sent a chill down the spine of every American. Those memories were also a spur to the naval service to see that they did not happen again. This time, the game was not so completely in the Royal Navy’s favor. But the chancelleries of Europe would have given the U.S. Navy only the longest of odds.

Certainly the Quay d’Orsay did not. What Napoleon III would not dare to do on his own, he would be glad to do now that the British led the way. The French ambassador, Count Edouard-Henri Mercier, delivered the emperor’s declaration of war the day after the British announcement, citing truly ludicrous justifications. Seward almost laughed in his face. Stanton and Welles could only count the addition of the French fleet and especially its large Army in Mexico to the order of battle of their country’s enemies.

The Russian alliance, when it became known, would serve to complicate British-French plans wonderfully. Forces that would have gone to North America would have to be diverted to bottling up the Russians again in the Baltic and Black seas. But this time, the cat was out of the bag. The presence of two Russian squadrons in American ports was proof the Russians were not about to repeat the errors of the Crimean War. The strong Russian squadron in New York was a vital addition to the protection of the port. For good reason that night Welles wrote in his diary, “God bless the Russians.”
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Towering over them was Lincoln, who rallied the English language in its majestic cadences drawn from the Bible and Shakespeare to the
defense of the nation. Men are moved by words and define themselves by words. While his secretaries of war and the Navy organized the nation’s defenses, Lincoln gathered and arrayed his words for battle. He addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against the British Empire in terms that riveted every member, Republican and Democrat alike. It was not a long speech, but expressed with a simple dignity, its elemental truth and directness had the members soaring. His words bound up all the hopes of the American democracy as the foundation stone, not only of the progress of the American people, but of all mankind. It was a speech for the ages, and men who had been with Lincoln since the beginning said it bested even his speech at the Cooper Union in Boston when he was seeking the nomination, the speech that had thrilled and moved his skeptical Eastern audience to set his feet on the road to the presidency. His words sang over the wires throughout the North and by ship across the seas to Europe and the Americas.
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A copy rapidly found its way to the tent of Robert E. Lee, who gave it his complete attention. The news of the British invasion had sparked a general celebration of deliverance across the South, but in his tent Lee read Lincoln’s speech. The man whose heart had broken in the choice between Virginia and the United States clutched the paper in his hand and wept.
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And well he might, for the Union people were tinder into which a match had been thrown. Doubts, demoralization, political differences were being consumed in the fire of an anger that had stirred them to their depths. A foreign invader on American soil, especially in a red coat, come to support the rebellion destroyed all restraint. The people were uncoiling their strength. Where the draft had failed to extract men, now volunteers flooded recruiting stations. New York State and the city, particularly, answered the call. It was not only the Irish who had done a volte-face. Patricians like Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., who had stood above the war and bought substitutes, now presented themselves for duty. Roosevelt organized a new brigade and commanded it through the rest of the war. His veterans remember that he came to the recruiting station with his little boy Teddy in tow.
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Sharpe’s office was deluged with reports that overwhelmed his order-of-battle analysts, even the imperturbable, tireless Wilmoth. At least they
had had a good understanding of the British forces before the war. The difficult part now was trying to identify where the different regiments were showing up and to put the operational puzzle together. The problem was that it was far too early in the game to get any results. They had only the wildest rumors from a few militiamen who had fled Albany, and their reports reeked more of hysteria than careful observation. Sharpe had to admit that they had absolutely no idea what was going on in Maine. There were rumors that the Guards Brigade was in Albany and that thirty thousand men were coming by train from Montreal. That latter tale was absurd; the British didn’t have thirty thousand men in all of their North American possessions. Even with the Volunteer Militia, they couldn’t put that many men together for one operation. It was not long before Wilmoth was pulling a few rabbits out of hats. While everyone had been focused on agent reports, he found some useful information in the British
Gentleman’s Magazine
on the strength of the imperial battalions sent to Canada, specifically a complete order of battle of the Guards Brigade. Sharpe shook his head, laughing to himself at how often open sources trumped the most carefully held secrets.
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But Sharpe needed time, and he needed a commander on the scene who understood the value of intelligence. He had been immensely relieved to find out that Hooker was commanding the new Army of the Hudson. There was no better friend of military intelligence, and he and Sharpe had parted on good terms when the former had been relieved as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker and Lowe had also been on the best of terms. For those reasons, Sharpe had sent a company of Lowe’s Balloon Corps to support the new field army.

In the seven weeks since he had assumed control of his beloved Balloon Corps, Lowe had worked miracles. Luckily, there had been six superb silk balloons and their gas-generating equipment in storage in the Washington Arsenal. Six more had been recently delivered. With Sharpe’s support, Lowe had reassembled the military personnel he had worked with before and the civilian aeronauts who had flown the balloons for him. The latter were now commissioned officers in the new Balloon Corps flush with money, equipment, and personnel. He had organized the corps into six companies built around pairs of balloons, with gas generators, crews, and support staffs. Two or more companies formed a battalion. Sharpe had been very clear that these companies could be attached to various field armies as were Signal Corps personnel, but their organization and support were in the hands of the Balloon Corps, which
reported to him. Lowe’s confidence was now unbounded that he had a resolute patron in Sharpe. It did not hurt that Sharpe had an even more resolute patron in Lincoln.
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Sharpe also plucked Capt. John McEntee from Major General Meade’s staff with the Army of the Potomac. McEntee had been one of Sharpe’s deputies when he ran the Army’s Bureau of Military Information as well as a fellow native of Kingston. He would set up a similar bureau on Hooker’s new staff. With him Sharpe sent an able lieutenant and a half dozen order-of-battle analysts, all recently pushed through the CIB’s new school in Georgetown. The Signal Corps had howled when Sharpe had raided its own Georgetown “camp of instruction” for bright young men. He had an ulterior motive as well, to acquire trained signalmen and cipher clerks.
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Meade would loudly protest the loss of McEntee, but he was getting a lot of practice at that. Poor George Meade. His war after Gettysburg had been far from satisfying. Lee had led him in a fruitless dance of maneuver across Northern Virginia, running out the clock on the last of the year’s campaigning season. Now his Army of the Potomac would suffer the death of a thousand cuts, supplying forces for the crises that were busting out all over the place. First the division from VI Corps had been sent to Buffalo, the three thousand Maine men had been detached, and then XI and XII Corps had been started north to Albany—a day late and a dollar short, to be sure, but still lost to Meade’s command. Now the rest of John Sedgwick’s VI Corps was heading north to save Portland. VI Corps was the core of the Army now after Gettysburg and Big John Sedgwick Meade’s most reliable commander; his corps had been held in reserve and hardly engaged at all. Every other corps, except XII Corps, had been badly cut up and the finest combat commanders killed or wounded at Gettysburg. Reynolds of I Corps fell on the first day, Sickles of III Corps lost a leg on the second day, and the day after Hancock of II Corps had been wounded severely in the thigh. Meade would have to go on the defensive and hope he could find a position as good as Gettysburg’s hills and ridges, for “Bobby Lee” could smell opportunity better than any man alive and would come sniffing right soon around his flanks.

Sharpe considered going up to New York himself to see that Hooker’s intelligence operation was put in order and to organize his other collection assets more tightly, but the telegram from Major Cline had set him on edge. Even more had been the roundabout way it had come because every telegraph line to the Midwest had gone dead over the last
two days. Cline’s message was already almost four days old. If the Copperheads had succeeded in freeing the Confederate prisoners in Indianapolis, that could explain a lot, he thought.

It was worse than he realized. Washington had been isolated for the last two days from quick communication with the Midwest—as the Copperheads and their Confederate and British advisers had planned. The capital was already reeling from the British invasion of New York and Maine and had barely steadied itself through the examples of Lincoln, Stanton, and Welles. Had the capital known that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had been engulfed in revolt, panic might have overwhelmed even these men’s courage.

Thousands of armed Copperheads had seemingly sprung from the earth, all too often led by Southern officers. Their agents in the telegraph offices and railroads had sabotaged communications thoroughly. Federal officials and Loyalists had been arrested, and more than a few had been killed. Larger numbers had swarmed soldiers guarding warehouses and railroads. Key railroads and river crossings had been seized. Worst of all had been the assault on the federal prisoner of war camps. Camp Douglas in Chicago, the largest of them all, had fallen. Seven thousand Confederate prisoners had been freed, armed, and organized in the heart of the largest and most important city of the Midwest. As Lincoln delivered his speech before Congress, unknown to Washington, the Stars and Bars flew over Chicago, snapping in the cold wind that howled down from Canada across broad Lake Michigan. It could have been far worse without men like Major Cline and Hooker’s Horse Marines scotching the attack on Camp Morton.

The French knew how to stage a military parade, and for their crossing of the border between Mexico and Texas at Brownsville they pulled out all the stops. To the light air of a cavalry march, Maj. Gen. François Achille Bazaine, commander of French forces in Mexico, led a regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique across the border into Brownsville from Matamoros. The forced cheers of the sullen Mexicans in Matamoros were in contrast to the wild cheers of the Texans as the gaudy French Colonial Cavalry clattered through the streets.
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The French occupation of Mexico had arisen out of a French-British-Spanish intervention to collect debts owed to their nationals. When
the British and Spanish left, the French stayed. Napoleon III had designs on the country now that the Monroe Doctrine had been suspended by the distraction of the Civil War. He was in the process of installing an Austrian duke as a figurehead emperor, backed up by fifty thousand French troops. Now this advance guard of twenty thousand troops was marching into Texas in their baggy red trousers, red caps, and dark blue coats. Their bayonets sparkled in the bright sun.
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Although the French jackal would not lead in this war, it would go where the British lion would not. The British had been faced with a conundrum in their decision to go to war with the Union, one they had mulled over as early as the Trent Affair two years before. Did war with the United States automatically mean recognition of and alliance with the Confederacy? Even then slavery had been so odious that the British had studiously decided to avoid any formal military cooperation, much less recognition and alliance. In two years slavery had not become any less odious, and the British had decided that they would separate the two issues officially. Napoleon had seen no necessity for such a distinction and followed his declaration of war with immediate recognition of the Confederacy, something he had not bothered to discuss with London. Lord Russell astutely understood that it would be impossible to come up with a formula on slavery “which the southerners would agree to, and the people of England approve of. The French Government are more free from the shackles of principle and of right and wrong on these matters… than we are.”
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