Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History

by Peter G. Tsouras

  Nikolai rubbed his own nose.

  WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C., 3:43 PM, JULY 15, 1863

  He was an impatient man, Thomas Francis Meagher “Meagher of the Sword,” hero of the Young Ireland Movement, the gallant Gael who had led the Irish Brigade into the teeth of hell through the cornfields of Antietam and up the cold slopes of Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg. Now an impatient man in civilian clothes, his resignation had been moldering for four months in some War Department file. He wanted it back. Hat in hand he had come from New York to retrieve his commission as brigadier general with a promise to raise three thousand Irish to fight for the Stars and Stripes and for the green flag of Ireland—the mystic golden harp on the emerald green field.

  President Lincoln had shown interest in his offer, and Meagher had come to Washington to see it through. Now he cooled his heels in the lobby of the War Department building as officers and clerks scurried about, stirred by the bloody riots in New York. Meagher was heartsick that his own people had raised their hands against their new country. He had argued again and again that the road to a new life in this country was to share its battles. And many had flocked to the colors. His own Irish Brigade, now death-shrunk through too many battles, had marched off full of enthusiasm a year ago. So much had soured since then. The Copperheads and the Democrats had seduced too many of his people to turn their backs on this country in its hour of peril. Too many had swallowed the lie that it was a nigger war to set the black man up above them. The Irish were not about to compete for last place. To many of them, coming to America had not been the choice of a new beginning, a bright future—it had been the simple choice to flee blighted Ireland or starve.

  Churning this pool of bile were the Fenians, the secret society bent on the independence of Ireland and possessed of a primal hatred of England. They saw the war for the Union as a distraction from their goal of Irish independence. Some did see a value in military service—to train the exiled Irish to form an army and filibuster the conquest of Canada from an American base. As far-fetched as it seemed, the thought was to trade Canada for Ireland’s independence. Meagher had fashioned an argument that would allow a man to serve both the land of his birth and the land of his refuge. Freedom was his cause, suckled on Ireland’s green, but he was a generous friend to it everywhere else. He saw it as a duty for every liberty-loving man to fight for the preservation of the Union and freedom. The Irish would do best to fight alongside each other. “I hold that if only one in ten of us come back when this war is over, the military experience gained by that one will be of more service in a fight for Ireland’s freedom than would that of the entire ten as they are now.”8

  No man had greater credentials and greater respect as an Irish patriot. He was cast in the mold of an Irish prince—proud, brave, gifted with the magic of words, and fey marked. He was also a gracious gentleman, with that extra touch of bearing that the Irish so admired in their leaders. In his bid for Ireland’s freedom, they had called him “Meagher of the Sword,” a title he treasured above all others. Ireland had made him a hero when his conspiracy to free Ireland was betrayed and he mocked the judge who held his life in his hand. Fame and exile to Australia followed. Greater fame fell on him in his daring escape that brought him to America.

  However, he was also a man who could not see an endeavor through, and his soaring spirit all too often fell into a bottle when the heat of battle had cooled. His drunkenness had become more than a whisper. His resignation after Chancellorsville had been accepted with an all too obvious alacrity.

  A clerk now interrupted his pacing. “I’m sorry, sir, but the Secretary is so pressed by business that he finds it impossible to set an appointment at this time.”

  “But I have a letter from the President authorizing me to…”

  “Yes, sir, many people have such letters, but Secretary Stanton has only so much time.”

  Meagher’s hand tightened on his cane but relaxed when he recognized Charles Dana entering the lobby. Dana was Edwin Stanton’s assistant secretary of war. Meagher walked briskly to him, “Dana, so good to see you again.”

  Dana was used to office seekers and politicians swarming around him, but Meagher was more than an annoyance. He was a presence, tall and thickset but graceful, with a shock of fine brown hair, penetrating green eyes, and the coiled power of a wolfhound. “Well, hello, Meagher. What brings you to Washington?” It was a question he instantly regretted.

  Meagher poured out his distress. Dana took him by the arm into his office. “I’ll not hide it from you, Meagher, but the Irish are in a bad odor at this time. The government wonders if the Irish can be trusted now.”

  “Trusted? By God, sir, that question was not asked on all the blood-soaked fields my brigade fought upon.”

  “The riots in New York were Irish-led; we can deal with only one rebellion at a time. If you want to be of service, wean your people away from the disloyal elements that have them in such thrall. Then we can talk of another Irish brigade. Right now Stanton will not hear of it.”

  Stanton was trying to make sure Lincoln heard no more of it either, but later the President brought the subject up again and asked how Meagher was doing. Stanton huffed that the Irishman had lost interest. Lincoln was surprised and replied, “Did you ever know an Irishman who would decline an office, or refuse a pair of epaulets, or do anything but fight gallantly after them?”9

  USS NANSEMOND AT SEA OFF WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, 10:15 AM, AUGUST 1, 1863

  The lookout in the crow’s nest shouted out, “Ahoy! Black smoke to the southwest!” Battle stations sounded, scattering men to their posts. The engines pulsed with heaps of coal-fired energy as the Nansemond turned after its prey.

  She had been built just the year before as a side-wheel steamer of four hundred tons and named the James Freeborn and taken into service as a blockade ship. Her speed of almost fifteen knots was enormous but necessary if the Navy was to intercept the even fleeter blockade-runners being built in Britain. She had taken the name of Nansemond, the James River tributary of that name, to honor the intrepid successes her new commander had won on that river. This twenty-five-year-old naval prodigy, Lt. Roswell Hawks Lamson, had been second in the Annapolis class of 1862. Under his hands, she raced through the waves.

  It was a rare navy that would allow one so young to trod his own quarterdeck as captain, but national crisis brought out talent, and Lamson’s hard fighting on the Virginia rivers had delighted the old admirals. They could not reward him fast enough for the qualities that were a premium in this grinding war against a resourceful and valiant foe. They called his skill “Lamson’s Luck,” though “luck” was not the half of it.

  He was commanding a gunboat squadron on the Nansemond River in late April during the Suffolk campaign. Lt. Gen. James Longstreet and his 1st Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had been sent there to counter an expected Union offensive fueled by reinforcements. When the reinforcements were sent elsewhere, he converted his defensive mission to an offensive one to cut the communications of the twenty thousand Union troops in the Suffolk area. He had to cross the Nansemond to do it. On the morning of April 14, Lamson was taking the USS Mount Washington down the river to Suffolk when he was engaged by a Confederate battery at Norleet’s Point. The first enemy salvo blew up his boilers, and the ship began to drift ashore under heavy fire. Another of his vessels pulled him off the shore, only to ground the Mount Washington in crossing the bar. Another ten pieces of enemy artillery and hundreds of riflemen opened up at 11:00 AM. He fought them from his stationary position on the bar until 6:00 PM. He reported later that

  her boilers, cylinders, and steel drums pierced and ten shells went through the smoke pipe, and the rest of the machinery much damaged. Her pilot house riddled, wheelropes shot away, and her decks and bulwarks completely splintered, everyone who has seen her says there has not been another vessel so shot to pieces during the war. The flag-staff was shot away, and when the flag fell into the water, the rebs chee
red exultingly; but they did not enjoy it for long before we had the dear old stars and stripes waving over us again, with everyone more determined than ever to fight them to the last timber of the vessel.10

  Followed by a master’s mate and seaman, Lamson climbed through the wreckage to the upper deck. They hauled up the flagstaff by the ensign halyards, raised and lashed it to the stump. He considered it a miracle that they all survived unscathed, only one of many miracles that seemed to fall on that ship amid the rebel shot and shell. “After the action was over, the sailors gathered around me on the deck, took hold of my hands and arms, threw their arms around me, and I saw tears starting from eyes that had looked the rebel battery in the face unflinchingly.”11

  The enemy had fared far worse. Ten of its guns had been smashed, and hundreds of the sharpshooters had been killed or wounded by the guns of the Mount Washington. More important, because of Lamson, Longstreet did not cross the Nansemond to fall like a wolf among the second-rate Union generals who cowered in fear of him. Lamson’s courage had stopped his plan dead in its tracks. With men like Lamson on the river, Longstreet would not chance the move.

  The Secretary of the Navy wrote that the Service “is proud to see in the younger members of the corps such evidence of energy and gallantry, and execution and ability as scarcely surpassed by those of more age and experience.”12 The Nansemond was Lamson’s reward. He fitted her out himself at the Baltimore Navy Yard but was only able to find a small part of his needed crew, though they were the pick. When he reached the flagship of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, the large frigate Minnesota, he asked the captain for permission to recruit the men who had served with him on the Mount Washington. When he went to fetch them, half the frigate’s crew begged to be included. He took fifty, “as true blue jacket as ever walked a deck, and ten officers.” A hundred officers had applied for his ship. His executive, Benjamin Porter, was a treasure.

  The Nansemond was as trim and well run as any ship that flew the Stars and Stripes, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, as the petty officers said. The old salts had already taken the measure of this young man and threw the weight of their goodwill on his side and set the tone for the ship. They whispered that he was Davy Farragut all over again and for good reason—he was Navy through and through. Lamson knew his job and everyone else’s. He was a teacher, vital in a navy that had ballooned from five thousand to fifty thousand men in two years. It did not take long for the word to spread that the Nansemond was a hale ship with a lucky captain who plucked fat prizes off the sea.

  A good-looking but not striking young man, with his carefully combed and slicked-down black hair, Lamson looked younger than his years—something he did not appreciate when a captain’s maturity was a given attribute of his ability. He grew a mustache and a goatee to make him appear older. Officers and men did not seem to care. There was something about him that compelled a willing obedience, something hard to put your finger on. It went beyond his considerable competence. His presence seemed to generate a certain excitement in others who wanted to be around him. He was like an electric current that caused others to glow. He was also a fighter, and men follow such a man.

  He was also lovesick. Every mail packet would carry a handful of his letters to his cousin and fiancée, Kate Buckingham. The ahoy had found him at his writing desk, where he had just had time to write, “Dear Kate, Again the Nansemond is dashing through the water, and

  Again on the deck I stand

  Of my own swift gliding craft”13

  before leaping through his cabin door and racing up the gangway to his quarterdeck.

  Porter handed him the eyeglass. “The vessel is running offshore, a blockade-runner for sure.”

  “Let’s give chase, Mr. Porter. Stand to intercept. We shall see what our new engines can do.”

  The Nansemond leaped through the sea like a hunting dog on the scent. By noon, she had gained so much on the vessel that Lamson opened fire on the chase, and the shots fell just short. The sextant reading told him they were gaining, when a strong breeze from the southwest came up to whip the sea into heavy swells. The Nansemond slowed as the waves struck under her low guards, but the quarry suffered the same handicap as well. Lamson pressed on, straining his engines to close the distance. The next two hours saw him gain. The pursued began to throw cargo overboard to lighten its load, but the Nansemond continued to close until 3:50 PM when a shot from her bow gun shattered the vessel’s figurehead. The vessel came about to signal her surrender.

  She was the Margaret and Jesse, seven hundred tons, registered in Charleston and bound for Wilmington from Nassau. Lamson sent two officers aboard to hoist the American flag. With a prize crew in control of the captured vessel, Lamson cut a course for the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Wilmington, and when everything was secure and under way, he returned to his cabin and picked up his pen to finish his letter to the fair Kate.

  The next morning in the early light the ships swung in among the squadron. Lamson, at his breakfast, was interrupted by a knock on the cabin door. “Enter,” he said.

  A tiny cabin boy, all of eleven years old, stood owl-eyed for few seconds until he blurted out, “Mr. Porter’s compliments, sir. Flagship signaling.”

  Lamson put his breakfast aside and went topside, nodding at Mr. Porter as he scanned the squadron bobbing in the sea. Most were converted merchantships like the Nansemond, meant to run down blockade-runners. There was also a handful of the purpose-built, prewar, steam-driven warships. As powerful as the squadron was, Lamson knew its strength paled compared to that assembled under Adm. John Dahlgren’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston. Admiral Dahlgren had command of the Navy’s new iron fist, all eight of the new iron monitors. Riding low in the water with their great double-gunned turrets, the Passaic class monitors were a marvel rushed to production after last year’s great duel on in Hampton Roads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, but not a one of these wonders bobbed here off Wilmington.

  “What is the signal, Mr. Henderson?” Lamson asked the acting ensign. He had been lagging in his signal recognition skills, and Lamson had had him at practice in every spare moment.

  Henderson blinked, read the signal flags, and then said quickly, “‘Captain Nansemond report squadron commander immediately,’ sir.”

  “Very good, Mr. Henderson.”

  INDIANAPOLIS RAIL YARDS, INDIANA, 3:22 AM, AUGUST 3, 1863

  “Traitor!” The speaker spat out the word, a letter clutched in his hand. But it was his eyes that glowed with hate. Big Jim Smoke was a hater by nature, but now he had a cause.

  The Copperhead rebellion could not succeed by merely hamstringing the war effort—it must succeed by an act as overt as the rebels firing on Fort Sumter, and for that they needed arms. Tens of thousands of small arms and tons of ammunition were siphoned off the open market to fill secret arsenals, but even that was not enough. Raids on federal arms warehouses followed.

  Such as the one on this warm summer’s night.

  Their target was the arms warehouse, one of many that fed the rail yards of Indianapolis, which poured arms and supplies south to the armies that had finally starved out proud and obdurate Vicksburg. Thirty men slid through the shadows. Wagons waited deeper in the gloom. Two o’clock in the morning is a dangerous time for sentries and in particular for these men who were members of the Invalid Corps, the light duty men released from the charnel house hospitals as unfit for field duty but able to do some valuable service. In these early hours a man could be seduced into the sleepy arms of Orpheus. It was burden enough to nurse a limping leg from a minié ball at Chancellorsville or Champion Hill without struggling also against leaden sleep.

  The man with the letter had tucked it and his anger away. He had work to do but had to wait while others did their own work. He stepped around a corner to be out of sight and lit a match to his cigar. The guards did not stir from their sleep as shadowy forms scurried through the lamplight. A few practiced motions, and t
he guards slumped to the ground, cut throats gushing black blood in the pale light. The wide double doors swung open with a creak, and the gang rushed in. A lamp waved back and forth down the street to summon the wagons.

  “You see,” Big Jim Smoke said to the young man who had joined him, “how easy it is.” Felix Stidger’s handsome, pale face had not even twitched when the guards were killed. Calm, self-control was the shield and buckler of a good spy, and Stidger was among the best. An ardent Unionist, Stidger had enlisted and served in the office of the Provost Marshal General of Tennessee. He had volunteered to infiltrate the Copperhead organization in Indiana and had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. With great charm he had ingratiated himself so well with Dr. Bowles that he had been appointed the group’s corresponding secretary, and the information flowed to Washington. Now, though, beneath that placid exterior he was worried. Big Jim and his gang should have been caught in a trap.

  Big Jim instead reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter. “Looking for this?” he sneered. Stidger’s eyes widened only a bit as he heard Smoke’s pistol cock and felt the muzzle stab into his belly. “You, of all people, should have known that we are everywhere, even the post office. And you mailing so many letters, and the Army making so many raids on our hidden weapons and making so many arrests.” He pressed the muzzle deeper into Stidger’s belly. “And now, if you please, we find this one, telling about this little raid of ours.” He grinned, his incisors gleaming in the lamplight, wet and wolf-like through his beard. He gave the muzzle another shove. “What gets me is how you got Bowles to trust you. But then he is too much the trusting fool. From the first, you weren’t right by me.”