Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (38 page)

He had wanted to trap the Americans inside the bar at Charleston and starve them out or destroy them when they came out to fight, but his plans had been countermanded by the Admiralty under intense pressure from the cabinet as well as the merchants of the great textile-manufacturing cities for immediate access to the millions of pounds of prime Southern cotton warehoused in Charleston. Factories were closing rapidly now in the second year of cotton starvation of Britain’s mills. The government had also concluded that full employment was a prudent counter to any lingering sympathy for the Union among the mill workers. Beyond this was the cabinet’s strategic calculation of the need to eliminate the Union’s stranglehold on the South. He was ordered to
immediately break the blockade by destroying the American South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The strong squadron led by the
Black Prince
was more than enough to sweep away Dahlgren’s little ships, overwhelm his frigate and sloops, and pound the monitors, admittedly at close range, into junk with their vastly superior weight of metal.

Milne had no choice. He would rely on his accurate long-range Armstrongs to do as much damage as they could before his ships closed with the Americans. The main effort would then be borne by the mainstay of the fleet, its 68-pounder gun. Milne had emphasized again and again to his captains who would go up against the American ironclads to close to within two hundred feet. The Admiralty reports indicated that only at that range would the 68-pounder be able to punch through American armor. It would be a matter of hard pounding at close range, something from which the Royal Navy had never shrunk.
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Rear Adm. Sir Michael Seymour, commanding the strike against Charleston, may have shared Milne’s assurance that his force could make short work of the Americans inside the bar, but getting to grips with them was no easy matter. The normal prudence of a sailor and his experience in the blockade and bombardment of the main Russian naval base in the Baltic at Kronstadt during the Crimean War had confirmed to him the dangers of attacking through confined waters and into major estuaries. At the age of sixty-one and the son of an admiral, Seymour was about as experienced and competent a senior officer as the Royal Navy could produce. In the Kronstadt expedition, he had been second in command. After the war he had commanded the Royal Navy’s East Indies Station and destroyed the Chinese fleet in June of 1857 during the Second Opium War and had taken Canton. The next year he had taken the forts on the Pei Ho River, forcing the Treaties of Tianjin on China. He was made Knight of the Bath the next year and sat as a member of Parliament for Devonport since 1859. When the Admiralty had sent Seymour out with the Channel Squadron reinforcement, Milne found him the natural and politic choice to command the Charleston expedition. Dahlgren would be facing a fighting man.

The Southern pilots Seymour had engaged at Bermuda had assured him that
Black Prince
, on which he kept his flag, and his other deep-draft ships of the line and frigates would be able at high tide to cross the bar off Charleston. The bar was a great ridge of mud pushed out to sea
by the combined flow of the Ashley and Cooper rivers that swept around Charleston and emptied into the harbor, flowing around Fort Sumter before they met the sea. It was like a great undersea parapet behind which the Americans safely sheltered except when the tide ran in twice a day.

In the morning Seymour could see Dahlgren’s ships across the bar. The large bulk of
New Ironsides
stood out in the middle of the American line. She was their toughest and largest ship, he had been informed, but less than half the size of
Black Prince
. Fore and aft of her floated four of the low-profile monitors, their black turrets more like bumps floating on the calm sea. In a parallel line behind them were the wooden warships, the frigates
Wabash
and
Powhatan
, and the three sloops,
Pawnee, Housatonic
, and
Canandaigua
. He was surprised to see so few ships—ten in all. There were supposed to be seven monitors, but the sharpest eye aloft could only count four:
Lehigh, Montauk, Nahant
, and
Catskill
. Seymour did not know that the remaining three monitors (
Patapsco, Weehawken
, and
Passaic
) had been sent to Port Royal for repairs.
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A few smaller ships hung in the distance to the south, hugging the shore off Morris Island. Seymour took these to be the support vessels of the American squadron trying to stay as far away from the action as possible. The small submersible tender with its two boats was not in evidence, hidden behind the American flagship as
Atlanta
hid behind the bulk of the
Wabash
.
²²

Seymour had to suppress a sense of elation that he had caught Dahlgren before he could concentrate his command. His Southern informants had provided detailed information on the strength and location of the almost eighty ships of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Dahlgren’s command numbered more than eight thousand men scattered in ships up and down the Georgia and South Carolina coasts and at Port Royal and a few other enclaves in offshore islands. Not more than twenty ships were actually at Charleston. Almost thirty were at Port Royal, under repair or coaling. The rest were spread up and down the coast.
²³
What Seymour did not know was that Dahlgren had indeed been able to concentrate his sloops and frigates as well as the gunboats. The latter Seymour had mistaken for the support vehicles clinging to the shallow water of Stono Inlet off Morris Island. Their shallow drafts had allowed most to slip up the inlets and out of sight.
²⁴

Seymour’s nineteen ships carried eight thousand men, or 13 percent of the strength of the Royal Navy, and mounted six hundred guns, the largest concentration of naval power the Royal Navy had committed to battle since Trafalgar. Seymour would have been even more
encouraged had he known he outnumbered Dahlgren almost four to one in men. The American’s crews numbered not even 2,200 men manning 114 guns, but 90 of these guns were Dahlgrens.
²⁵

The odds were with him, Seymour concluded. He paused to recite a passage from Thucydides. In the long days at sea as a midshipman, he had taken to heart the words of the Spartan king Archidamus II in the Peloponnesian War:

In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good. Indeed, it is right to rest our hope not on the belief in his blunders, but the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.
²⁶

His thoughts drifted back to those golden days of his youth when ships were all powered by cooperation of God’s wind and man’s sail and did not trail a smudge of dirty coal smoke. He also summoned another comment memorized in his younger days, an American quote at that. It was from their Adm. Stephen Decatur on his observation of one of the first steam engines to power a ship: “Yes, it is the end of our business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good as the best of us.”
²⁷

Seymour brought himself back to the present. He walked over the deck, put his hands on the sun-warmed railing, took a deep breath, and looked around at the wide expanse of sea and sky and the wide mouth of the Charleston Harbor entrance. He could take unalloyed pleasure that the weather would not be another adversary this day. Only the lightest breeze stirred the air in a cloudless sky, a perfect early October day. There was just enough wind to carry off the smoke.

If he had any qualms about the coming battle it was over the safety of HRH Albert, the nineteen-year-old son of the Queen (and second in line to the throne), a newly promoted lieutenant aboard the corvette HMS
Racoon
, on which he had been serving since January. It was a general consensus in the captains’ cabins and crews’ quarters of the fleet that Albert was a zealous and competent officer, but he was also had an angry and rude personality. He earned no love beneath decks, where they called him “the King of the Greeks.” Just that year the Greeks, having disposed of their overbearing Bavarian royal line, had voted to make young Albert “King of the Hellenes.” Victoria had not been amused. It
was enough though that Britain’s treaty obligations prevented a member of her royal family from ascending the Greek throne. The offer was politely declined.
²⁸

Dahlgren was also thanking the weather for its neutrality. A heavy sea would have been a greater danger to his monitors than the enemy would be. They were hard enough to handle in calm water without rough weather swamping their decks. It was lost on no one that the original
Monitor
had sunk in a storm. His monitors needed flat seas to steady their ungainly shape and allow the twin heavy Dahlgrens in their turrets clear aim. The admiral, like his British opposite, also had a young man to worry about—Ulric was all energy, pacing awkwardly with his new cork leg up and down the deck. Dahngren suggested a place of safety in the upcoming fight. “Ullie, I want you to be with me in the pilothouse.”

Something flashed across Ulric’s eyes, but he softened it into a smile. “It will be more exciting with the Marines, Papa. I will just get in the way in that tiny pilothouse, and I am familiar with the gun drill of the Marine gun crews. You of all people should know how well I can get around a Navy gun. How many times did I practice with them at the Navy Yard?”
²⁹

Dahlgren forced himself to tuck that worry away; the service was his life, and he owed it his complete attention. He had been in bad health for longer than a month now; it had deepened the lines of his already gaunt face. Now he summoned from the depths of will and duty every fiber of his ability for the supreme moment that was coming. Seymour was aware of Dahlgren’s pioneering work in ordnance, but it was a general sort of awareness that did not seriously contemplate how much that expertise might weigh in the coming fight.

It had not taken long for the word to spread through Charleston and its defenses that the British had arrived off the bar. The city emptied as people rushed down to the river and crowded the docks from the slave market all the way down to the Battery at the tip of the peninsula that held the city. The well connected found places in the balconies of the mansions that lined the Battery. From one of them, Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard had given the order to fire on Fort Sumter almost two and half years ago. That was the event that had triggered this grinding war. The little Louisiana Creole dandy ostentatiously chose the same balcony
to watch the distant battle, though little more than smoke would be visible at the five- to six-mile distance. Now many were quick to hope that they might witness the end of that war from the same vantage. With him was Capt. Duncan Ingraham, the commander of the Charleston Naval Station. To his immense chagrin, he had nowhere else to be. The two Confederate ironclads under his command,
Palmetto State
and
Chicora
, were idled by engine repairs. Had that not been the case, nothing on this earth would have kept him from joining the upcoming battle.
³⁰

The war had just about ruined Charleston. Hardly a blockade-runner got through Dahlgren’s ships anymore. The warehouses along the docks were crammed to the rafters with bales of cotton. The white brick warehouse at the end of East Ager Dock just south of the battery alone held thousands of bales of unrealized wealth as the paint peeled from its walls. Once the leading port for the export of the South’s “white gold,” Charleston’s economic life was near death; it was now plain shabby and its dwindling population increasingly threadbare and pinched.

It had become an article of faith among the people of Charleston that the mere arrival of the Royal Navy would practically usher in the Second Coming. They had pinned such hopes on foreign intervention to save them from Lincoln’s remorselessness that hope became faith and faith a dream.

Seymour crossed the bar on the afternoon tide just as Dahlgren expected. He came in two divisions line abreast. The first division was led by the
Black Prince
followed by ship of the line
Sans Pareil
; the big frigates
Mersey
and
Phaeton
; the corvettes
Racoon, Challenger
, and
Cadmus
; the sloop
Bulldog
; and the gunboat
Alacrity
. The armored frigate
Resistance
, captained by William Charles Chamberlain, led the second division, followed by ships of the line
St. George
and
Donegal
; the big frigates
Shannon, Ariadne
, and
Melpomene
; the corvette
Jason
; the sloops
Desperate
and
Barracouta
; and the gunboat
Algerine
.
³¹

Just as Dahlgren expected, Seymour was determined to break the American line in the spirit of Nelson. Once the line was broken, his weight of fire could be used to overwhelm the American ships one by one. While the big ships broke the line in two columns, he would envelop the Americans as well with his sloops and corvettes. But what had worked so well for Horatio Nelson in 1805 against demoralized French and Spanish ships at Trafalgar was not as applicable in 1863 against experienced American ships whose crews were as instinctively combative and jealous of victory as their British kin. It would be hard pounding then, and Seymour’s ships had the great advantage in numbers and overall weight of metal.
³²