Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (35 page)

Napoleon was playing for different stakes and was well aware that should the Union triumph against the Confederacy, it would surely turn its wrath on the French presumption to carve out a colony in North America. A Union defeat then was the guarantee of a continued French free hand in Mexico. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress were all too happy to confirm that guarantee as the price of recognition and alliance. They had to swallow hard because in January of that same year, Davis had to chastise severely the French consuls in Richmond and Galveston for, in the words of the Austrian ambassador in Washington, “imprudent ardor to foment a revolution in Texas against Mr. Jefferson Davis” in hopes of creating a buffer state under French protection. The French were being more than prudent. There had been enough evidence before the war of a decided Southern interest in annexing more of Mexico. That interest had not disappeared. Both sides had smiled and pretended that each would not immediately repudiate the agreement when the time was right.
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Bazaine was a product of colonial war. He had gained renown in fighting in North Africa, where he had become a colonel of the Foreign Legion, and as had Williams in Canada, he had gained fame in the Crimean War. In Mexico he had handled a division with great skill, defeating a Mexican army and compelling the surrender of Puebla in May, which opened the way to Mexico City for the French Expeditionary Army. This French general was nobody’s fool; he could put the Union’s political generals to shame. He was aware of France’s ambitions in this region and made sure they supported his own. Much glory would accrue to the French general who liberated New Orleans.

He would not have to rely only on the troops he was bringing from Mexico. A strong French fleet was at this moment sailing toward Galveston to break the blockade and disembark strong reinforcements. The fleet then would support his attack on the first city of the South. The emperor had been known to say privately that his uncle’s sale of that city and the immense territory it governed had been a colossal mistake. It had occurred to Bazaine that once the city was again in French hands, the emperor would be loath to give it up. The future was pregnant with such opportunities.
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Ever since his son had arrived with the ship that brought the news of war, Rear Adm. John Dahlgren had been looking over him in unguarded moments. He was searching to see if the gallant lad who had gone off to war early last year, still a teenager, still showed some spirit, or if losing a leg had also killed something in him. Lincoln had been a good friend in writing him of Ulric’s recovery.
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It had been an ongoing agony for the father to know that he had two sons hovering near death in Washing-ton—Ullie wounded at Gettsyburg and Charlie wracked with fever from Vicksburg. Dahlgren had written,

The Sabbath arrives, and with it the brother who, wasted by the malaria and summer sun of the Mississippi Valley, had had just sufficient strength to crawl homeward for care and cure under his father’s roof. Both are but wrecks of the active, care-free lads who went out from their home and offered their mite to the great cause.… In retrospect there is nothing to regret.
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He had known no more joy than seeing Ullie waving to him from the dispatch boat that had brought him to the flagship. In the next few hectic days his gaze would linger on Ullie as he hobbled on his crutches across the deck or struggled awkwardly to learn to walk with his new cork leg. Dahlgren’s stern Swedish heritage kept him from showing the emotions that pulsed through him as he remembered the lithe, leopardlike grace of the splendid horseman and dancer who had swept away the heart of every girl in Washington. He could see that same intensity in Ullie that had made him excel at everything he had attempted. He was the same as his little boy, who would fall down and get right back up. The boy had mastered horses, dancing, and the saber. What was the cork leg then? Twenty years old and already a hero and a full colonel.

The day after he arrived, his father watched Ullie intently studying the gun drill of the crew, especially the Marines manning the 5.1-inch Dahlgren rifle on the spar deck. He remembered little Ullie at the Navy Yard, not yet ten years old, watching the gun drill his father had modified for his new guns with just as much intensity. The sailors had thought him a lucky mascot and were glad to have him around. When his father was not around, they had let him help serve the gun in practice. Initially, the Marines had been nervous about having an Army colonel—a Navy captain equivalent—watching so closely, especially the admiral’s son and a “peg leg” to boot, but he seemed to know his way around the guns as well as any man and better than some. After a while, the earnest and engaging young man became a favorite of the Marines.

It was only a glance here and there the admiral could spare. It had not been lost on him that he was most assuredly going to be the first American naval officer to command a full fleet action. Heretofore, the U.S. Navy’s battle record had been mostly in single ship-to-ship combat or small contingents at most. Oliver Hazard Perry had come closest in 1813 on the Great Lakes, but what Dahlgren faced would dwarf that combat.

His South Atlantic Blockading Squadron numbered seventy-eight vessels but could not have resembled Admiral Milne’s force assembled at Bermuda less. As the name of Dahlgren’s force indicated, it was designed to blockade the shallow coasts and harbors of the South. Milne’s command was designed to fight great fleet actions on the high seas. Of Dahlgren’s almost four score ships, only four were traditional, wooden, purpose-built warships—one frigate and three sloops. Nine more ships were the new ironclads—the broadside ship
New Ironsides
and all eight
of the
Passaic
class single-turreted monitors. There were another ten gunboats. The rest were small screw or side-wheel steam ships, small sailing ships with mortars, or supply ships, and none were more than a thousand tons (see
Appendix B
). Secretary Welles had promised him four new monitors when they were completed within two months. Dahlgren concluded that it might as well be a year for all the good they would do him. He could smell war on the wind from Bermuda.
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Of all his ships, only twenty were off Charleston when he received the news of war with Britain on September 28. The rest of his ships were covering the numerous small islands, river mouths, and islets along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia or were at the squadron’s main forward operating base a hundred miles to the south at Port Royal.
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A few small, fast ships prowled the waters from Bermuda and Nassau for blockade-runners.

Dahlgren immediately ordered the assembly of his squadron off Charleston. The repair crews at Port Royal were ordered to bend every effort to get the three
Passaic
class monitors there in the repair yard back to sea and on the way to Charleston. Welles had warned him that the British might make an attempt to break the blockade at Charleston or Wilmington. Dahlgren had no doubt it would be Charleston even if Wilmington was a more active and successful port for blockade-runners. The war had started here, and here is where the Navy kept its heavy punchers. He was ordered to give battle and under no circumstances abandon his station. It was obvious that he could not meet the Royal Navy in deep water. His slow monitors would be at the mercy of the faster-sailing British ships, and his purpose-built frigates and sloops and gunboats would be overwhelmed by the firepower of ships of the line. He concluded that the advantage would lie in forcing the British to operate in the shallows, where their deep-draft ships would be at a disadvantage. He must have warning that the British were coming, and to ensure that, he scattered his lighter, fast ships across the path the Royal Navy would have to take from Bermuda. He wondered what measures the commanders of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington and the forces in Hampton Roads based at Norfolk would be taking.

Admiral Milne had given serious thought to those questions as well. Around him from the bridge of his flagship, HMS
Nile
, he could see the largest and infinitely more powerful fleet Britain had sent into battle since Trafalgar. The four huge ironclads surged ahead, the sharp
spearhead of the fleet, followed by ten ships of the line and fifteen frigates, sloops, and corvettes. Behind them trailed a flotilla of supply ships. For their common objective along the South Carolina coast another squadron of four ships of the line and eight smaller ships had just departed the main force for its rendezvous with the transports carrying the four thousand men of the West Indian garrison of Barbados and the other islands.
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Milne was thinking several moves ahead, which is why his thoughts turned to the enemy’s naval forces at Wilmington and Hampton Roads. Beyond them was the broad mouth of the Chesapeake, leading to the enemy’s capital, which was captured and burned in a similar foray by his predecessors in 1814. To repeat the feat within forty-nine years would surely make the Americans choke on their insufferable pride. He would iron the smile right off their faces.

First he would have to deal with Dahlgren’s force at Charleston. And of that force, he was fully apprised of its numbers, strengths, and weaknesses. Except for the monitors, Dahlgren had few ships that could match any of his, certainly not his ships of the line. Even the monitors, he thought, were overrated. His captains, on port visits to the Northern states and among their forces at sea, had heard the same complaints—monitor duty was unpopular, the conditions were brutal, and, of course, there was no opportunity for prize money, something the British naval officer could fully understand. But he did not underestimate John Dahlgren. The American’s reputation stood very high in the Royal Navy for developing his remarkable series of guns. Already he was called the “father of American naval ordnance.” Milne, however, chose to emphasize the fact that Dahlgren had had only eight years at sea and never commanded anything of this size or complexity. Even with the vaunted monitors he had not been able to subdue the defenses of Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter, though beaten into a rubble pile, still stood defiant, as did the forts on the two opposing shores of the harbor.

The “deep-breathing furnaces, and the sullen, monotonous pulsations of trip hammers” of the great cannon West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, were much on their minds of two men. This greatest iron foundry in the world was producing hundreds of the U.S. Army’s splendidly accurate Parrot rifled cannons a year and close to a million shells. As accurate as
the British Armstrong but more reliable given its muzzle-loading design, this gun was an insurmountable advantage for the Union that the Confederates could only lag behind. They could only acquire such guns through capture or by importation of a very few British Whitworth rifled cannon, a poor substitute for Vulcan’s workshop on the Hudson.
²⁰

Lincoln himself had toured the huge facility early in 1862, walking through the mud as delighted with the raw power of the technological wonder as any boy at the circus.

Lincoln watched 100-pounder and 200-pounder Parrott rifles hurl their heavy shells thousands of yards through a gap in the highlands to the precipitous banks of “Crows Nest,” while the deep clamor of gunfire echoed back from the hills like the roar of a great battle. Afterwards, he tramped delightedly about the plant, regardless of mud and rain. Raised a few inches from the ground on sleepers were bars of iron four inches square and sixty feet long, ready to be heated red-hot and coiled around mandrels by machinery. Near by, Lincoln saw these coiled bars welded by a great trip hammer, turned down, reheated and shrunk onto guns—forming the bands which were the trademark of the Parrotts. His face felt the heat and dazzle of the foundry where the guns were cast. He looked on as they were bored, rifled, turned and polished. And in another building he watched workmen turn out Parrott shells, distinguished by the brass expanding ring for taking the rifle grooves. Before Lincoln left Cold Spring, he had had seen about all there was to see in the making of rifled cannon.

Three days after Lincoln left, the first batch of guns was shipped to Major General McClellan, who was fighting on the approaches to Richmond. But it was not the great pieces that Lincoln saw at the testing range that armed so many of the field batteries of the Union field armies. It was the 10- and 20-pounder medium and heavy field guns. The latter, posted on Little Round Top, had cut long, gory furrows through the ranks of the Virginians and North Carolinians who had marched to glory and slaughter in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. One shot alone brought down almost fifty men.
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This beating fiery heart of the Union war effort was much on the minds of two men as Albany’s funeral pyre sent its smoke down the
Hudson River Valley. British raiding parties steaming down the Hudson or striking nearby cities were scorching the ability of the Union to make war. Barely ten miles to the north of Albany, Schenectady, a growing industrial city of ten thousand, was the first to feel the enemy’s hand. British troops marched into the city to destroy the Schenectady Locomotive Works, which had already produced eighty-four superb locomotives for the federal government’s war effort. Thirty miles south of Albany, the thriving river port of Hudson was the next target because of the Hudson Iron Company’s ironworks. It was also the country’s major inland refining and distribution center for whale oil. All it took was one overeager Canadian militiaman to throw a torch into one of the warehouses filled to the ceiling with refined oil. The fire exploded the building, sending flaming jets of whale oil through the air and flooding down streets. Its magnificent opera house was quickly wreathed in flames as the liquid fire licked up the walls. Soon the entire town was ablaze, and a huge pall of black, greasy smoke floated down the valley.
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