Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  To a man and a woman they had detested slavery, and Britain’s unofficial alliance with the slave power had set aside any lingering loyalties. Sharpe underlined this by saying, “In fact, sir, Britons living in the South have been reliably Union men.” So it was the attachment to their new homes and abhorrence of slavery had steeled them to the choice.

  Lewis was clearly one for whom the conflict of divided loyalty had been a painful nettle to grasp. His new attachment to the American flag had been followed almost immediately by the war with Britain. He had candidly told Sharpe after he had returned to Washington, “I’ve served this government well and taken the Secret Service oath of loyalty over and over again. But when it comes to swearing that I’ll take arms against my own sovereign, I’ll seem them damned.”13 If ever there was a conflicted man it was Pryce. Yet it was human nature to hold conflicting beliefs, such as the theories of Darwin and of the Bible’s creation.

  The lawyer in Sharpe, not the litigator but the artful fashioner of solutions, saw an opportunity rather than a stone wall in Lewis’s outburst. “Lewis, my man, this is not an obstacle. This country owes you much for what you have done, risked, and endured for its sake.”

  Lewis looked puzzled, but Sharpe went on, “We still have need of good agents against the Rebellion. And the Rebellion has friends who do not speak English.” He leaned back in his chair and tapped the ash off his cigar. “You know how events have turned against us in Louisiana due to the French.” The words “the French” immediately stiffened Lewis’s back. Yes, an appeal to a Briton’s opinion of his traditional enemy was always sure to get a rise. “I could use a good man in Louisiana to help us against the Rebels and the French.”

  Lewis snatched at the offer.

  So it was that the meeting in the White House took place. Lewis had just returned from a few months in New Orleans. Sharpe thought his report important enough for Lincoln to hear it himself. “I passed myself off as a British cotton buyer, which earned me a lot of trouble with the French who are crawling all over the city. It is clear they consider New Orleans and Louisiana to belong to them already. More than one of them told me that. The changing of the French honor guard at the Cathedral of St. Louis is quite a spectacle that attracts a large crowd every day.”

  “What do the locals think, then?” Lincoln asked.

  “Well, sir, the whites of French or Spanish descent would look very favorably on a permanent French presence. Most of the English-speaking people are Rebels to the bone. Those who were Unionists were hunted down after the city fell.”

  “I want to know what happened to the freedmen,” Lincoln said.

  “Many fled. The rest were rounded up by the slave hunters and returned to their masters. But the free coloreds, the libres, as they’re called, were left alone. The city would come to a halt if they were oppressed.”

  Sharpe added, “This is the kernel of the issue.”

  Pryce-Lewis went on. “The French are spreading a lot of gold around New Orleans; it’s buying a lot of friends. And they are spreading it among the libres even more liberally. Bazaine’s mistress, Clio Dulaine, is a libre and my chief contact.”

  Lincoln looked thoughtful. “And the Rebels cannot be deaf, dumb, and blind to all this.”

  Sharpe said, “No, sir. But what can they do? My agents in Richmond tell me Jeff Davis is seething over this, but the Confederate Government has taken huge French loans. Unlike the British, the French have signed a formal treaty with Confederacy, and they owe the recapture of New Orleans to them. They had to acknowledge French hegemony over Mexico, a bitter pill for them. They were auditioning for that same role.”

  Lincoln seemed to enjoy his counterpart’s dilemma. “Yes, take money from someone, and you put yourself in an inferior position.”

  “Bazaine is clearly acting on orders.”

  “Yes, of course. It is bad enough that the French aid the Rebellion, but that they want to then claim Louisiana and Texas for the French Empire is a new level of perfidy.”

  “A national trait, I’m afraid, sir.” Sharpe had lived a year in Paris after law school perfecting his French.

  “And do they think that Davis will ultimately take that as a price for continued alliance?”

  “That would be naïve of the French to think so, and that is not a national trait. Our job then is to help the Rebels and the French along with the falling out that is sure to come. Where there is chaos, there is profit.”

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY, 7:25 P.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  John T. Ford was delighted to share the train ride to Philadelphia with Edwin Booth. He was hoping to persuade the great tragedian to play Hamlet in Washington at his theater. It was cold on the platform, and he paused to pull up his coat collar when he saw a tall young man on the platform edge pushed by the shoving crowd against the car. The train began to move, and the young man lost his balance and began to slip down between the wheels of the train and the platform. The train whistle blew, signaling its departure. Ford looked on in horror at the young man’s inevitable death.

  Booth saw the same thing, dropped his valises, stuck his ticket in his teeth and pushed through the crowd. Before the young man slipped all the way down and under the wheels, a powerful hand reached down, grabbed his coat, and hauled him up. The young man instantly recognized Booth and blurted out, “That was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth! Thank you so much, sir. You saved my life.” He reached out to shake Booth’s hand and introduced himself. “Lincoln, Robert Lincoln.14

  Booth replied, “Anyone would have done the same.” It was time to board; they quickly shook hands and boarded separately. It had not occurred to Booth or Ford that the young man was the oldest son of Abraham Lincoln, who was traveling from Harvard to Washington to visit his parents. Young Lincoln had not wanted to call attention to his father’s position.

  OFFICE OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT SECRET SERVICE, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, 7:30 P.M., MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1864

  Richard G. McCullough was in what some might call the poison and dagger service of the Confederacy. He had been summoned to a meeting at the State Department’s Secret Service office for his expertise in sabotage devices. There he met a few men he already knew, as well as a George Nicholas Sanders, a planter from Kentucky. Saunders would be in charge of a new operation, one that had the interest of the highest levels of the government.

  The fifty-two-year-old Saunders was an intense man with a passion for destroying tyrants, of whom in his mind Abraham Lincoln was chief. From an early age he had been intoxicated by revolution, and as U.S. counsul-designate in London in the early 1850s had ostentatiously hosted men like Lajos Kossuth of Hungary, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi of Italy, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin of France, and Alexander Herzen of Russia. So blatant had been his association with these famous revolutionaries that it caused the U.S. government considerable embarrassment as their seeming sponsor. He went so far as to write an open letter to the French people encouraging them to overthrow the Emperor Napoleon III, a gross breach of propriety by an official of a friendly government. His true intention was assassination, a political action from which he did not shrink. His actions led to the Senate’s refusal to confirm him.15

  Someone had suggested to him now that there was a young actor in Washington who would be quite useful for his new mission if handled properly. He had worked for the Confederacy before.

  2

  “I Can Hang You”

  PICKET LINE OF THE 29TH FOOT, WEST OF ST. BERNARD-DE-LACOLLE, PROVINCE OF QUEBEC, 1:01 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 1864

  Muravyov-Karsky was behind in his news. Fenwick Williams had been replaced in October of the last year. Another commanded in British North America now, and there was not a Briton or Canadian in uniform who did not feel confident of the fact. Pvt. Timothy Dunn leaned his Enfield against a tree, pulled his greatcoat collar up, and stuck his hands in his pockets. It was cold in the shadows of the trees even in the early afternoon—cold and silent as only a windless winter day in a for
est could be. His thoughts went back to the rough passage from Ireland late last year. The commanding general himself accompanied the 29th Foot on the voyage, had earned their respect by his interest in their care, and, wonder of wonders, serenaded the men as part of an officer string quartet. Dunn replayed in his mind the sweet, lilting hymn, “Abide With Me,” that officers had played, and it did not seem as cold.

  Lost in his thoughts, Dunn did not detect the two men slipping through the trees nearby heading south. His battalion’s picket line was too widely spread, and the two American scouts flitted like shadows among in the shade of the dark trees. Sgt. Judson Knight was a big man with the talent becoming invisible. Bold he was, like so many redheads, and by turns clever and cool, which may explain why he was Chief of Scouts, Army of the Hudson. With him was Cpl. Martin Hogan, not two years from the crossing from Ireland, lithe and quick, and like Knight, cable of the most shameless daring.

  On cat’s paws they moved, silent and seeking the shadows. They bore a precious gift for Hooker. Locked in their minds were the sight of endless columns of great-coated British troops and Canadian militia moving south, tramping along country roads half mud and half ice. Just as precious and even more dangerous was the folded note in cipher hidden in Knight’s left boot. It was the payoff to satchels of American gold spread carefully in Canada by agents of the American Central Information Bureau (CIB), Lincoln’s new national intelligence organization and its master, Brig. Gen. George H. Sharpe. Knight had no idea what the cipher contained; that wasn’t his business. His contact in St. John just south of Montreal had passed it to him and fled.

  After hours, it seemed, Knight and Hogan had passed the British picket line and could breathe a bit freer and move even faster. That was their mistake and bad luck too. Coming in the other direction was another group of men on the same mission. Three men of the Royal Guides, who had just slipped back across the Canadian border from a scouting mission of the American positions around Plattsburg. They had just mounted their waiting horses when Knight and Hogan walked into the same small clearing. Now Knight had a rule that to be a good scout, you should avoid a fight unless it was life or death. This was life and death. The Canadians had just looked up to see them. Knight drew his pistol and shot the first man and ran forward so fast that he pulled the shot man off his saddle and mounted it himself. The second Guide had reached for his carbine when Hogan shot him too. The third man was quicker and cooler. His shot dropped Hogan. Knight spurred his horse into the third man and rode him down. He pulled around and jumped to the ground to find Hogan holding his shoulder.

  His hands brought Hogan up to a sitting position as he looked him over. “Luck of the Irish, it’s through and through, my boy.” He grinned at the young man, who did not feel all that lucky. “Come on, let me help you up onto one Her Majesty’s fine mounts.” Shouts jerked their heads around. The picket guard was rushing forward to the sound of the gunfire. He helped Hogan to a horse to put one foot in the stirrup when the guard burst into the clearing. They stopped only long enough to fire. Hogan’s horse went down screaming, and Hogan fell with another wound. “Go!” he shouted. “Leave me!” It took only a split second for Knight to throw himself into another saddle and gallop away, his body bent over the side of the horse away from the enemy, an old Comanche trick the Army had learned painfully on the Plains and taught him by Maj. Gen. Phil Kearny, who had fallen at Second Bull Run.

  More shots sang past him as he disappeared weaving through the trees as fast as his horse dared to go.1

  HEADQUARTERS, THE ROYAL GUIDES, ST. BERNARD-DE-LACOLLE, 4:05 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 1864

  Col. George Denison was not a happy man. The Royal Guides, as his militia cavalry troop had been called, was a family inheritance, raised by his grandfather and commanded as well by his father. Denison had trained them into superlative scouts, and their desperate charge at Claverack into an American cavalry division had won him imperishable glory. And captivity. It had not tempered his hatred of Americans. Upon his exchange in January he had rebuilt the Guides, and under the direction of his friend Wolseley had sent them across the border to fill their ears and eyes with the enemy’s activities.2

  Denison did not command from afar. He hovered over the border, keeping a close hand on his scouts. It gnawed at him that officers did not go on scouting missions, not a gentlemanly activity for either army. So he personally sent them off and welcomed them back to eagerly debrief them. Denison took any harm done to one of his lads as a personal injury. Now two of his boys were dead, one in hospital, and with only one prisoner to show for it.

  They had just brought the man from the surgeon’s patching to Denison’s forward headquarters nearby. If it had been up to Denison, he would have used medical care as a reward for a forthcoming man, but the new commanding officer’s orders had made it clear that the rules of civilized warfare would be strictly followed.

  “I can hang you for any number of reasons.”

  “Well, saar, it’s lucky I am to have a choice when most get none on how to die.”

  “I assure you they all end the same way, badly.”

  “Oh, saar, it’s ashamed you should be to so threaten an innocent man.”

  Denison’s fist made the table bounce. “Innocent man! The cheek! I know exactly who you are.” He went to the door and shouted out, “Sergeant Dumfries! You may fashion the noose now. And be quick about it.”

  He walked around behind his prisoner. “Hogan, is it?”

  “Yes, saar.”

  “Hogan, ever seen a man hanged?”

  “Yes, saar. Courtesy of Her Majesty’s government in Ireland. Some poor starving man was such a danger to the Crown that they hanged him good and proper for stealing a loaf during the Hunger. Yes, saar, I’ve seen a man hanged.”

  “So you admit to being a British subject.”

  “A misfortune of birth, saar.”

  Denison purred, “Ahhh.”

  “A misfortune I have corrected by becoming an American citizen as soon as I shook off the evil of the crossing.”

  “Alas, Hogan, you have no proof. I find you in arms against Her Majesty’s soldiers on the territory of Her Majesty, with the very brogue of your tongue proclaiming you a subject of the Crown. We hang traitors.”

  “Oh, saar, and it was George Washington himself who spoke with a British accent, no doubt, who ran your Tory grandfather out of the States and up here.”

  Denison reddened. No Anglo-Canadian liked to be reminded that most of them were descended from loyal Americans who could not abide the new Republic after the Revolution or were “encouraged” to leave. He tried something else, “Well, Hogan, you must be referring to my grandfather’s great good judgment. But we are wasting what little time you have left on this earth talking about MY grandfather.

  “Let’s just say I believe you are an American. Now I can hang you for being a spy. If I wasn’t in such a hurry to hang you, I could spend the day finding even more reasons.

  “Saar, it’s a soldier of the United States Volunteers I am, and I claim the protection of my uniform.”

  “Uniform, Hogan? I know that no matter what the Americans wear as a uniform, they will never look more than buffoons, but you are not wearing any uniform at all. Your rag-pickers clothes are most hangable.”

  “Well, saar, you accidentally got a mite of the truth in that sentence, all bent and inside out it was.”

  “I’m sure it’s enough to hang you, were it as small as the widow’s mite.”

  “I was wearing a Union cap when your men attacked us for no reason at all.” Under the laws of war, that was sufficient uniform to give him the protection of the laws of war among civilized nations.

  “Cap, I see no cap.”

  “Well, saar, it was lost in the scuffle as those blackguards of the 29th who beat me black and blue. And me just taking a walk through the woods for me health.”3

  ST. BERNARD-DE-LACOLLE, 5:22 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 15

  Lt. Gen. Sir James Hope Grant
commanded Her Majesty’s forces in British America. He had swept in like a whirlwind to crush the American relief of Portland at the battle of Kennebunk, Maine, in October but was too late to avert the catastrophe that befell the main British army at Claverack in upstate New York. Widely acknowledged as the best of Victoria’s generals, it had not been his skill that had saved the Province of Quebec from Hooker’s invasion, but the white curtain of a sudden early winter.

  The snow was still on the ground when he began moving his Imperial (British) and Canadian battalions out of their winter quarters into field camps to the south of St. John, which the Quebecois insisted on calling Saint-Jean. He seldom saw his own headquarters as he moved from one camp to another down the still icy roads through the intermittent French farms and their enveloping forests of maple and oak, still black and leafless against the snow.

  He met Brig. Gen. Garnet Wolseley at a country inn at Lacolle within rifle shot of the New York border. The one-eyed hero of Claverack had rallied the survivors in a running fight with Hooker’s cavalry led by that wild yellow-haired brigadier. It was a brilliant retreat that already London was ranking with Sir John Moore’s escape after Corunna. Jumped from lieutenant colonel to brigadier, he had become Grant’s right-hand man.

  Before long they were joined by Denison, who briefed them immediately. “A damned Irishman. An American scout, of course. Trying to get back to his lines, it seems. There were two; they stumbled upon my Guides coming back from the American side. Vile coincidence. There was a shootout, and two of my men were killed. Both Americans would have got away, but the picket guard came up too fast.”

  Wolseley’s one eye focused. “God knows how long they had been behind our lines and what information they were bringing back. Did you get anything out of the Irishman?”

  “No, damn his eyes. A cool one and impertinent.” He recounted the interrogation, to his advantage, of course. His imitation of Hogan’s brogue was quite good. At that Grant and Wolseley burst out laughing. Wolseley had a great contempt for the Irish. He had been born in Ireland, but made it clear at every opportunity to state he was not Irish but Anglo-Irish, a world of difference. He would have been only too happy to hang Hogan, but his reason had a sure break on his prejudices. “Well, let him think on the hangman’s noose for a while, while we ‘look’ for this mysterious Union cap. It may curdle his Gaelic effrontery. Dead he’s just another Irishman who won’t be missed. Alive, he still may be of use to us.”