Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (36 page)

Maj. Gen. Lord Paulet’s orders, courtesy of Wolseley, had included a red-line paragraph to send a raiding party downriver, if practicable, to destroy the foundry at Cold Spring. With Watervliet Arsenal a gutted ruin, Paulet’s appetite had been whetted. A guards’ officer did not normally think in terms of destroying the enemy’s industrial base, but he did often think of fame. And Wolseley had spent a great deal of time exciting Paulet’s ambition by explaining how well this stroke would be received in England, where the idea of the world’s greatest foundry being in America did not sit well at all.

The other man with the foundry on his mind was Lincoln. He vividly remembered the heat of the blast furnaces on his face and the smell of metal as it was cut and shaped by the great lathes and hammers. The place was as alive to him as a beating heart. He knew the Union could lose whole armies before it lost the foundry. He personally went to the War Department Telegraph Office and wired Hooker to protect it if he did nothing else.

Hooker did not need to be told twice. For all his defeat at Chancellorsville, Joseph Hooker was a remarkably good soldier. As a corps commander he had been one of the best the Union had produced. As an Army commander he had introduced innovative reforms that revitalized the Army of the Potomac and gave it the organization with which it had whipped Lee at Gettsyburg. Hooker was that rare transformational man
who could see the future and summon it to the present. He had been Sharpe’s patron and the godfather of the first real professionalization of intelligence. Thus, he saw at an instant how vital the foundry was to the Union. The two corps that formed the striking power of his new Army of the Hudson would not arrive soon enough.

The aide had to fight his way through the crowds of Irishmen at Meagher’s recruiting offices to present Hooker’s instructions to report to him at once. Meagher was ushered immediately through the headquarters’ hive of activity into Hooker’s presence. The big, blond general rose and walked across the room, extending his hand to Meagher. “Tom, you don’t know how glad I am to have a Third Corps man I trust here. Congratulations on the promotion and the recruiting. Are you trying to bring the old corps back up to strength all by yourself?”

“Yes, if it includes my old brigade. I must have the Irish Brigade. I must bring it back to life.”

“Well, I doubt Lincoln will deny you anything with all the thousands you have recruited in so few days. But the President needs a bold man now, Tom, and I cannot think of a bolder man than ‘Meagher of the Sword.’ Come, let’s look at the map.” His finger touched down on Cold Spring just across the river from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “This is the situation, Tom. I have a direct presidential order to save the foundry. Without it, we would be hard pressed to stay in the fight. My two corps have not arrived, and neither has recovered from the Gettysburg bloodletting; together they might make one full-strength corps.”
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He paused briefly, his thoughts running along a different path. “The Germans of XI Corps, you know, the ‘Damned Dutch,’ they ran at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Well, Tom, I ran at Chancellorsville, too, in a way. I ran away from command. I just lost faith in Joe Hooker. At least they had a better excuse. It’s a rare soldier who will not flinch when his flank is turned, and the enemy is shooting you in the back.” He looked out the window silently for a few moments, his thoughts lingering over that stricken field just over the Rappahannock in distant Virginia. His reverie broke, and his blue eyes were all business. “Well, Tom, both the Damned Dutch and I have a second chance.”

Meagher’s heart had been touched that his old commander would honor him with this confidence so straight from the heart. From his own heart, he said, “And well I should know it, General. I, who nearly swung on the Queen’s gallows and was sent to rot in the desolation of western Australia, was rescued by America, which gave me back my life and my
hope. This is the land of second chances, and third and fourth, and is always generous to those who don’t quit. I am a living testament to that.” He paused, “And so will you, General, you and the Damned Dutch.”

Hooker half smiled to himself, buoyed by the Irishman’s pluck. “Well, back to the point. I must keep the regiments I have in the city or the people will panic. The smoke from Albany has terrified them, and they did not need much after John Bull sailed into the Upper Bay ten days ago. How many veterans can you assemble among your recruits? Just veterans.”

“At the very most, several hundred men I would trust with arms.”

“Draw arms, equipment, and uniforms for them immediately. I will write out the order now and arrange for the transports to take you there. Secure the foundry until I can send a brigade up there. Leave tonight with the men you can ready. ‘It is better to be at the right place with ten men than absent with ten thousand.’ I always thought Tamerlane had a perfect sense of these things.
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“And Tom, think. If you are lucky, the redcoats will come.”

Robert E. Lee’s style of military intelligence was old-fashioned in that like George Washington, he was his own intelligence chief. Over time, it was no match for Sharpe’s superior organization and resources, but it worked when it had to. This was one of those times.

Gettysburg had sorely tried not only the strength of his Army but its faith in itself. Twinned with the loss of Vicksburg, the South had lost almost sixty thousand men in those few days in July. The progress of defeat had seemed inexorable until Providence had set the British and the Yankees at each other’s throats. Now victory, so seemingly perched on the enemy’s shoulder, was offering her laurels again to the Confederacy, and Lee had leapt to grab them.

His intelligence sources told him accurately of the reinforcements stripped from Meade’s army and sent north to stem the British tide. That left Meade with barely sixty thousand men. Even with Longstreet’s corps at Chattanooga, Lee numbered his troops at fifty-three thousand, near parity. Given that he had always been heavily outnumbered, parity was a sheer, undreamed of advantage. He marched.
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Meagher had reached Cold Spring early that afternoon. Upriver, the smoke from burning boats and towns was hanging over the Hudson Valley. Major General Paulet had followed Wolseley’s advice and ravaged his way south. At Albany and other river towns he had seized ships to carry raiding parties down the river to harry and panic the Americans. He had succeeded in sending waves of refugees from the river towns and farms south toward the city and into the countryside.
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Meagher and his scratch command of barely two hundred men had gone upriver in a commandeered steamboat past hordes of craft coming south, their decks filled with refugees. The captain had refused to take them until Meagher had stuck his pistol in the man’s mouth and said, “I’m not joking, sir,” as he cocked the piece. The captain suddenly gushed cooperation and hastened the transfer of Meagher’s men aboard. A strange lot they were, too. Meagher had been lucky to find two hundred veterans among his horde of Irish volunteers. Half were from his old Irish Brigade, and most had been invalided out for wounds. There were too many limping legs and favored arms, but they were volunteers, and they wore their kit and handled their rifles as if it were second nature to them. He had seen more than one pair of eyes glow as man after man grasped the Springfield muskets fresh from the armory. Mc-Carter had arrived on the morning train. Meagher had promoted him sergeant major on the spot to pick the sergeants and corporals and whip them into the semblance of a unit in the few hours they had. Finding the uniforms had been impossible, all except the caps with the brass infantry bugle. The women had come to the rescue with red, white, and blue
bunting armbands. That and the oath he administered would satisfy the laws of war that they were lawful combatants.
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At the last moment, as the men lined the railings while the crew threw off the lines and the ship began to edge away from the dock, a carriage clattered up the dock with a young woman carrying a green flag on a staff. It was Libby, Meagher’s beautiful, young wife, her red hair bright around the edges of her bonnet. She alighted from the carriage and, carrying the flag, ran up to the ship. “Oh, Tom, Tom!” she cried out to the crowd on the railing. “Do not forget the flag, Tom!” It was the color of the 69th New York, one of the regiments of the Irish Brigade, and presented to him by the survivors when he had resigned. It had stood in the corner of his study ever since, ragged and stained with dust and blood, but its emerald green field and golden harp still were bright.

The men on the deck stirred at the sight, which was more than feminine gallantry but instantly evoked images of Ireland itself anthropomorphized in this young woman. Almost as if commanded by this goddess of myth, the ship edged back to the dock and the gangway was lowered. As it touched the dock, Meagher hurried down and took his wife into his arms. The kiss was long and passionate as the men cheered Meagher of the Sword and his goddess, lady of Erin. Then, flag in hand, he bounded up the gangway.
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The kiss was still sweet on his lips as the ship docked at Cold Spring and was challenged immediately by young men in cadet gray. The commandant of the U.S. Military Academy across the river had sent over a hundred of his cadets to guard the foundry under the command of one of their officer instructors. Meagher was pleased to see that that they had not wasted their time but had trundled a half dozen of the 10-pounder Parrot guns from the foundry down to defend the dock with the aid of many of the foundry’s fourteen hundred workers. The officer had organized his cadets into gun teams, and they seemed to know their way around the pieces, which had been admirably hidden from direct view.
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Meagher barely had time to inspect the ad hoc defense when a cadet came racing down the street on long legs, his cap lost and blond hair whipping behind him, and clutching a telescope in his hand. He stopped in front of his officer and then recognized Meagher’s major general’s stars in a moment of confusion. He blurted out, “They’re coming. I ran down from the church steeple, sir, where you stationed me to look. There’s an armed boat with red-coated men aboard coming down the river.”

Meagher asked, “How long, boy, before they get here?”

“Sir, twenty minutes at most.”

In eighteen minutes the ship steamed up to the dock. Meagher peered, half hidden, through a window next to the battery screened by a wall of empty barrels. Two Armstrong field pieces were mounted on the deck, which was crowded with several companies of British troops. He was surprised to see with what confidence they came right up to the dock, confidence borne of meeting little or no resistance as they fired their way down the Hudson Valley. He was even more surprised to recognize the big men whose uniforms bore the facings of the Scots Fusilier Guards. Others, not so uniformly robust and big, had different facings and somehow did not move with the easy assurance of the guards. Canadian militia, no doubt. Canister would make no such distinction, but the Queen would feel the loss of her own guardsmen more deeply than the colonials would. Well, he thought, it was time the world’s most famous widow had something else to mourn.
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The ship bumped up against the dock. Shrill voices of the NCOs echoed up the street as the men began double-timing down the gangplank. They began to fan out over the docks when Meagher gave the command to fire. The barrels masking the guns were knocked over and canister—tin cans filled with hundreds of bullet-sized lead balls—scythed into the men rushing over the docks, crowding down the gangplank, packing the decks, and clustering around the deck-mounted Armstrongs. Rifle fire from his hidden riflemen cut down the men who had made it to the street. The cadets leapt to the guns, as they had in their artillery training, to swab out the barrels and ram home new powder bags and canisters. Again they fired.

“Cease fire!” Meagher shouted to give the smoke a chance to clear. The ship was a charnel house, riddled and splintered, with its decks and gangplank piled with the dead and wounded. The pilothouse was a wreck as well. “Charge!” His Irishmen sprang from cover with a howl as he ran down from the battery to join them and dashed across the dock to the ship. The enemy had been so stunned that hardly a shot was fired as Meagher’s men climbed over the bodies on the gangplank to swarm over the ship.
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The USS
Flambeau
raced toward Charleston like a stormy petrel, the famous sea bird that races ahead of an ocean storm. She was one of the
picket ships that Admiral Dahlgren had thrown out to sea to warn of the British approach. Dahlgren dreaded this moment. His orders to maintain the blockade against any attempt to break it had presented him with a deadly dilemma. He dared not sally out of the bar to meet the British, yet to remain inside the bar would mean that he in turn would be blockaded. That would end in inevitable surrender as coal and supplies ran out. He had had the foresight to intercept every coal and supply ship bound for the main operating base at Port Royal and keep them with him off Charleston. He had ordered the evacuation of as much of the stores at Port Royal as possible. At the same time the repair crews were working around the clock. He needed every fighting ship at Charleston. Everything that could not be repaired or carried off was to be destroyed.

Dahlgren had another reason as well for not abandoning his station off Charleston—the eight thousand troops under the command of Major General Gilmore who had been reducing the harbor forts on Morris Island. There were also four thousand of the Army’s troops garrisoning the Navy’s forward operating base at Port Royal. The Navy would never survive the shame of abandoning the Army.