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

by Peter G. Tsouras

  This necessity was the greatest drag on the guns’ speed of fire, a problem the broadside ironclad did not suffer. The XV-inch gun in the monitor’s turret took an average of six minutes to fire, which could sometimes be reduced to a minimum of three. The XI-inch gun’s speed was about half that average. The broadside-fired Dahlgrens were another story entirely. The IX-inch could be fired every forty seconds, and the XI-inch every 1.74 minutes for about an hour. Comparing monitor and broadside ships, it was a trade-off between invulnerability and rate of fire.13

  There was no trade-off in punch. The XV-, XI-, and IX-inch Dahlgren shells with explosive charges weighed 350, 136, and 72.5 pounds, respectively. Their shot was even heavier, weighing in at 400, 169, and 80 pounds. The largest British shot, on the other hand, were the 110-pounder Armstrongs and the standard 68-pounder. Most British guns remained the venerable 32-pounders. Unlike the Armstrongs, the entire Dahlgren line was a byword in safety and reliability. The captain of the sloop the USS Brooklyn believed his IX-inchers to be well-nigh perfect and stated that “the men stand around them and fight them with as much confidence as they drink their grog.” Unlike most British guns, the Dahlgrens had been designed to fire both shell and shot, giving them a powerful versatility. Because of the Monitor-Virginia standoff the year before, Dahlgren had rigorously tested his guns against armor plate. He found that they could easily stand to increase their powder charges by 50 to 100 percent in order to easily drive holes through iron plate and wood backing of thickness and composition similar to the British Warrior class—“4- to 4.5-inch thick iron faceplate, bolted to about twenty inches of wood, sometimes with an inch-thick iron back plate, set up against a solid bank of clay. In most cases, the Dahlgren shot penetrated clean through the target and embedded itself deep into the clay bank, even with the target angled steeply as fifteen degrees.”14

  The exploding shell was all the rage in naval ordnance, and no gun delivered the destructive charge against wooden ships better than the series of guns Dahlgren had devised. Against ironclads, the shells were less effective. Dahlgren’s guns were equally able to deliver solid shot. Dahlgren had also taken to heart the error that had prevented the original Monitor’s XI-inch Dahlgrens from punching holes right through the CSS Virginia’s iron casemate. Navy policy had mandated that a powder charge only 50 percent of the maximum tested charge be used. Subsequent tests by Dahlgren showed that not only could his robust guns fully stand the use of a 100 percent charge for long use but that they would tear 5-inch armor apart. At the time, Dahlgren had been particularly incensed by the comment of the British First Lord of the Admiralty that his guns were “idle against armor plate.”

  During the Civil War two opposing schools of thought arose as to the best means of destroying armored warships. The “racking” school held that projectiles should smash against the ship, distributing the force of the blow along the whole side and dislocating the armor. Once the armor had been shaken off, the vessel would be vulnerable to shell fire. The “punching” school held that the projectile should penetrate the armor, showering the ship’s interior with deadly splinters in the process.… Dahlgren had concluded that racking was more effective against armored vessels than punching. Racking favored his low-velocity smoothbores over high-velocity rifled cannon.15

  Dahlgren had had the satisfaction in June of seeing the monitor USS Weehawken force the ironclad CSS Atlanta to strike its colors after hitting it at three hundred yards with only a few XV-inch shot. One shot alone dislodged the armor plate, sending a mass of iron and wooden splinters into the casement battery, spilling all the shot in its racks, and killing or wounding forty men.16 The prize had been repaired at Port Royal and was on the way to Philadelphia when Dahlgren intercepted her. He asked for volunteers for a scratch crew and captain and found himself with more than enough seamen and with a score of ambitious lieutenants who could smell promotion in the air. Of them he chose Lt. B. J. Cromwell.17

  As the Philadelphia was essentially unarmed, the admiral transferred his flag to the New Ironsides, from which he had commanded the previous attacks on Fort Sumter and the other harbor forts. His son, Ulric, had insisted on staying with the Navy rather than be sent ashore to join Gilmore’s troops. “New Ironsides has been in action more than any ship of the squadron. Where else would I be, Papa?” he asked. He had already hit it off with the ship’s captain, Stephen Clegg Rowan. An Irish immigrant, Rowan had joined the Navy in 1826 and fought “in the Seminole and Mexican Wars and had distinguished himself in the North Carolina sounds early in the Civil War.” Under his command, the New Ironsides became the most feared of all Union ships to the defenders of Charleston.18

  With Flambeau’s warning, a prearranged signal rocket from New Ironsides set the American squadron into motion. The lightest ships moved south to hug the shallow waters of the coast along Morris Island where the deeper draft British ships could not enter. These included eight steam gunboats, most of barely five hundred tons, and each armed with only a half dozen or so guns but sixteen of them Dahlgrens. He pulled his frigates and sloops inside the bar to join his ironclads.

  The squadron had barely sorted out its formation when masts from at least a dozen ships dotted the horizon. Smoke plumes soon topped the masts as the engines were engaged. The inefficient engines gulped vast quantities of coal, and warships used sail as much as possible before switching to their engines for propulsion. Now that their objective was almost within sight, the British black gangs swung into work to stoke the fires that would give their ships that mobility and agility that sail could never match.

  Finally, the last of the picket ships steamed through the bar to signal the flagship of the enemy’s imminent approach. One by one the masts increased until fifteen and more could be counted. The captain of the picket ship came alongside to report that he had counted four ships of the line, the rest frigates and smaller ships. The captain shouted through his megaphone, “But leading them is the biggest ship I have ever seen in my life, Admiral. She’s black from fore to aft. Must be the Warrior.” There was a stir on Dahlgren’s bridge among his staff, but the admiral’s face did not show a flicker of change. Captain Rowan just smiled. He had fought his ship and had the utmost confidence in her and her crew in battle. He knew the Warrior’s captain, or for that matter, the captain of most Royal Navy ships at this time, could not say the same.

  In fact, the picket ship’s captain had been wrong. The great black ship he had seen was not the Warrior but her sister ship, the Black Prince, commanded by Capt. James Francis Ballard Wainwright. An able officer, Wainwright had commanded his ship for more than eighteen months and, as a mark of his ability, had served as second in command of the Channel Squadron.19 The squadron sailing toward Charleston was only the smaller part of Milne’s concentration at Bermuda. He shrewdly concluded that with the massing of the Royal Navys there was a clear indication that Charleston was its objective. The element of strategic surprise had never been realistic. He would have wagered to a certainty that the enemy knew the British were coming to Charleston. They already knew in Washington that the Royal Navy had seized Portland Harbor, though the town itself was still under siege. They were even more painfully aware that ships from Halifax were raiding the sea-lanes to New York and Boston. Their eyes were drawn north and south. It was toward the middle coast of the Atlantic seaboard that Milne was sailing with the bulk of his force—for Chesapeake Bay and the approaches to Washington and Baltimore. Admiral Cochrane had showed the way in 1814, inflicting great damage and even greater humiliation on the Americans by ravaging the shores of the great bay. Since they had seemed to have forgotten that lesson, he was determined to repeat it in such a forceful manner that it would linger and produce a national flinch whenever the thought of crossing the Royal Navy even occurred to them. Milne knew that the Union could never be physically destroyed, but it would give up the game if enough pain were inflicted. The second loss of their capital in less than fifty years would be a mighty weight dropped against the scales
of their morale and will to fight.

  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.20

  HMS BLACK PRINCE, OFF THE CHARLESTON BAR, SOUTH CAROLINA, 9:30 AM, OCTOBER 8, 1863

  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.21

  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.