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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  He went on, “The lower class of Irishmen are the great danger. They have gone in such number to fill the ranks of the Northern Army, expressing the most decided hatred of the British government, forfeiting all allegiance to their mother country and vowing vengeance to all connected with it. The real born Americans might be treated as prisoners of war, as might the Germans and other foreigners, for thy owe our government no allegiance, whereas the Irish who may invade Canada are all traitors, having been born British subjects, they have no right to wage war against their real sovereign, and every Irishman found in Canada with arms in his hands ought to be strung up to the first tree they come to as traitors to their lawful king and country.

  “Besides these who may be taken in the ranks of the enemy are many of the same class who have gone to Canada and having the same feeling as the others will be more likely to assist than oppose their countrymen. These characters are to be found about all the towns in great numbers and will not be easy to deal with. They know the country and can point out the places most worthy of notice and eligible for plunder.”4

  Wolseley had warmed Denison to the subject of loyalty. “I can answer for Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects. The descendants of those who removed here from America are loyal to the core. They have been reinforced by generations of officers and soldiers who have settled here and were followed by immigrants of the better class from the old country. In all fairness there have been many Americans who have settled here, and their children are good and loyal subjects.”

  “But our French inhabitants are not of a very warlike habit, I must admit. If the Americans get across the border here, they will find themselves in French territory. At the same time they dislike the Yankees, and would not willingly submit to their rule. They are fonder of their own laws that they still possess and are more attached to them and their religion than they be to any rule Brother Jonathan might wish to introduce. They are quite under the control of their priests and will be guided by them. So it is not likely any Americans would be tolerated.” He grew thoughtful for a moment. “What they might be, were the Americans to win, is another consideration.”

  Grant had not said much. He was not a big talker, and what he did say was laconic to the point of obscurity. Whatever he said, though, was likely to be accompanied by a lot of praying. And now his mind was on the escaped scout. He had to assume the scout would report what he had surely seen. Grant struck his fist into the palm of his other had. He said, “We move now.”

  HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, GORDONSVILLE, VIRGINIA, 1:25 P.M., THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1864

  It was a worried Lt. Gen. James Longstreet who rode the last leg of his journey from Tennessee by train. His staff had never seen him so withdrawn and tactfully left him to his thoughts. He hardly noticed the fact that the train made the best time that line had seen since the war started was pulled by a new English engine of great power.

  His thoughts were with the two divisions of his once mighty First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia that he had led to Tennessee just in time to cinch the great victory at Chickamauga. They were in the long line of trains that would be arriving over the next few days. Only half the men he had led West were still with the colors. The rest were dead, filling the hospitals of Atlanta, or prisoners of war.

  Failure like shrieking furies gave him no piece. He had replaced Lt. Gen. Braxton Bragg, who had let slip a complete victory at Chickamauga and bungled the siege of the Chattanooga where the rest of the Union Army of the Cumberland had fled. Then, folly upon folly, Bragg had tried to relieve his chief of cavalry, the terrifying Nathan Bedford Forrest. He especially terrified Bragg as much as he did the Yankees. He tried to take Forrest’s cavalry away from him with an order sent by messenger so he would be as far away as possible when the volcano flew. Distance did not allow Forrest to cool. He tracked Bragg down to the other end of the Confederate lines, called him out, and shot him in the foot. Had he thought Bragg was any sort of a man, he would have shot him dead. Both armies were intent on the upcoming court-martial of the famous Forrest.

  The command of the Army of Tennessee had fallen into Longstreet’s lap almost by acclamation of the army; President Davis’s orders were a simple ratification. Now in command, Longstreet acted with all the determination and daring of the man Lee called “My Old Warhorse.” He threw his First Corps at Brown’s Ferry, the open jugular of the trapped Army of the Cumberland in Chattanooga. The Ferry was hardly defended, and he approached in the cloak of dusk. They had charged into hell. It was Malvern Hill and Pickett’s Charge all over again.

  He could still hear the high-pitched whine of what he later learned were Mr. Gatling’s repeating guns. All he could see in the gloom was the muzzles sparking orange as they fired and fired with that devil’s own high-pitched whine. He saved what he could that night.

  By late November, Grant had maneuvered and fought him out of his stranglehold on Chattanooga. Then it was a fighting retreat back into Northern Georgia, relieved only by the brilliant defensive operations of Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, whom Davis would call “The Stonewall of the West.” Lee insisted that Longstreet and his corps return to the Army of Northern Virginia. It was painful to turn over the army to another and more painful still to know that Davis had not appointed the man he had strongly recommended—Cleburne’s sin had been to write a manifesto in January recommending that freedom be offered to any slave (and his family) who was willing to fight for the Confederacy. He had concluded that even with the French and English as allies, the Southern manpower well had run dry and that slavery should be sacrificed for independence. Davis had been outraged and ordered the manifesto suppressed. He also blighted the advancement of the finest officer outside of Lee’s army.5 With his new allies, he believed victory was certain and required no concessions on the South’s peculiar institution.

  Lee and an honor guard were waiting for Longstreet at the Gordonville station. He quickly noticed that the guard and the band were in completely new gray regulation uniforms of good cut. Lee came forward as Longstreet dismounted the train and saluted his old commander. The furies seemed to recede out of respect for Lee. For a moment as he looked into Lee’s warm brown eyes, he felt like he was home again. Lee said simply, “Welcome back, General. The army is whole again with its First Corps come home. Let us ride to headquarters.”

  That ride was a revelation. Everything in the camp was new. There were acres of new white tents and row after row of fine new English artillery. As on the station, every man was in a new, well-cut regulation uniform, and the men no longer had that constantly hungry look. It was more than a shock; it did not look like the same army where there was no such thing as uniformity, a hungry army living from hand to mouth. There had been a certain virtue and fortitude in such storied want. This new plenty would take getting used to.

  There was more than that to widen his eyes. He saw dozens of men in British scarlet and French dark-blue tunics and red trousers, more of the latter, though. Lee could see his surprise and said, “Our liaisons, General. There must be several hundred with us, about two-thirds French, I would stay. President Davis is much put out that the English have not agreed to a formal alliance as have the French. The English say that a co-belligerence is sufficient to both our purposes.”

  Longstreet said, “We hardly saw a single Frog in Tennessee.”

  Lee went on. “More importantly, English and French weapons and supplies are coming in to our ports faster than we can unload them. Iron rails by the tens of thousands are allowing us to rebuild our railroad system. You know how often our subsistence hung by thread because the railroads were falling apart. There is no little satisfaction that these rails before England entered war were going to the North.”6

  Longstreet noticed that Lee was his old self again, not the man who had offered after Gettysburg to relinquish command the army that had become indelibly associated with the name Lee. Longstreet, though, rather than being reassured became suddenly apprehensive. He could hear th
e screeching of the furies and the high-pitch whine from hell.7

  HEADQUARTERS, FORTRESS PORTLAND, MAINE, 1:38 P.M., THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1864

  “Balloons! Balloons!” Every head turned to the south where the soldier pointed. A few men scrambled to the top of the piles of snow-crusted broken brick and timber that had once been the stout homes and businesses of Portland.

  “Hurrah!” rent the air as hats flew and men stomped the ground in glee. Maj. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain choked back the overpowering urge to burst into tears of relief. His brother slapped him on the back, “Lawrence, Lawrence, we’re saved. Hallelujah! God be praised!” Other men were weeping as Chamberlain composed himself.

  “Tom, get a hold of yourself. Run to the square and see that the crews are ready to secure the ropes.” The younger man was off in a sprint. Chamberlain sat on a stump of a wall to think now that hope had come alive again. Sharpe had come through. In the six months of grim siege, Chamberlain had clung to the order from the President that Sharpe had slipped through the lines. “Hold on, Gallant Portland. Help is on the way.” With the messenger, one of the fabled scouts of George H. Sharpe, were a pair of the most beautiful major general’s shoulder straps he had ever seen. His defense of his state’s capital had jumped him from colonel to major general in one leap. He laughed to himself when he thought that it had been his opponent, Lt. Gen. Sir Hastings Doyle, who had chivalrously informed him of his promotion, so cut off had the garrison been in the early stage of the siege.

  More of Sharpe’s messengers had slipped through in the succeeding months to keep Chamberlain apprised of events in the country and the efforts being made to come to the relief of Portland. Chamberlain could hardly believe what the men related. A great fleet of balloons was building, bigger than anything dreamed of before, able to carry the ammunition that was running low. As a harbinger of that promise, every few weeks a balloon or two of the size Chamberlain had seen with the Army of the Potomac drifted across the sky to settle among the ruins to unload a few hundred pounds of medical supplies and valuable small weight supplies and carry off a half–dozen wounded and sick.

  Somehow the word had got out of the fleet of giant balloons that would be the salvation of Portland, and now the entire garrison had come alive cheering and waving flags as the squadron neared. The word had got out to the British as well. Their camp had also come alive but with planned purpose.

  From four thousand feet and a dozen miles away, Col. Thaddeus Lowe scanned with his long brass glass the siege-shattered city, the enemy lines, and the Royal Navy ships that stopped up Portland Harbor. This was his hour, Commander of the United States Balloon Corps. He had been recalled from failure by Sharpe, who rescued him from the Army’s mismanagement and placed him under his own Central Information Bureau (CIB), with a purse that had no bottom. Plans that had been only dreams in the minds of America’s foremost aeronaut suddenly had been turned into reality as the workshops, factories, and foundries of the Union had bent to the will of war. Sometime in the winter the name was changed from balloon to airship.

  Lowe rode his flagship, the airship George Washington, the first of its class of fifty of the U.S. Army’s great ships of the air, followed by the Nathaniel Greene, the second of the great airships. Lowe looked about him at the Leviathan of the Air, as he called it, at the huge cigar-shaped balloon encased in its frame of the thinnest lathe. The lift given by the great hydrogen balloon was immense by any standard, five full tons of cargo. But even more amazing was the freeing of the balloon from the whims of the air’s currents. In a special frame was a small steam engine, adapted from the Navy’s steam launch engine, that powered a propeller that gave the balloon thrust. It had been reengineered to half its size and its body comprised of the thinnest possible steel, instead of iron, and galvanized with tin or plated with copper to prevent any accidental ignition. The new War Industries Board (WIB), under the steady hand of that “Scotch devil,” Andrew Carnegie, had assigned this project the highest priority to bring together the best engineers, machine-shops, and materials. But ten men had died until the exhaust filters had been devised to capture the smallest spark from the long exhaust tube that trailed behind the balloon.

  The British had seen the air armada as well. Hastings Doyle rushed out of his tent at the alarm. An aide ran up and handed him his glass. “Wolseley’s intelligence was spot on,” he said to himself, lost in wonder at the approaching armada of the air. The camp was all action now as the entire besieging force put the “balloon” plan, as it was dubbed, into operation. That plan was the result of analysis by the Montreal Ring as the group of talented men Wolseley had gathered around him was called. They had culled every bit of information from the Royal Navy’s experience in the Battle of Washington and that of their Confederate allies.

  The British government had been loath to enter into a full alliance with the Confederacy. It was a diplomatic high-wire act of sorts. To most of the British public, the Confederacy represented slavery, a thoroughly odious practice the Empire had outlawed in 1833. You could not find a Briton to support it though you looked high and low. So the war had to be dressed up in patriotic ribbons as an outraged response to the unprovoked American destruction of a Royal Navy frigate in British waters. That the American warship had been hunting down a British-built Confederate commerce raider that British connivance had allowed to escape Liverpool harbor, was something that was known in too many quarters. So diplomatic distance had to be kept between Her Majesty’s government and Mr. Davis’s. It was easier said than done, as a forest of masts of British ships loaded with the materials of war crowded the major Southern harbors no longer shut by the Union blockade, as the hospitals of Charleston were still filled with wounded British sailors from the Third Battle of Charleston, as the Southern navy yards serviced the Royal Navy before their own ships, and as the flow of intelligence from the Confederacy on their common enemy flowed unstinted.

  And now the fruit of that relationship was about to be tested. Crews rushed to the new anti-balloon gun battery. These were Armstrong guns that had been remounted on the strangest contraptions, more like huge lazy susans that could easily pivot in any direction. The guns were fitted into elevated carriages mounted on rails that would absorb the recoil.

  The airships were heading for the center of Portland when the battery opened fire. One shot passed directly over Lowe’s head and between the struts that held the balloon to the basket. He scanned the enemy camp with his glass and found the strange battery. He said, “Helmsman, take us over that battery. Signal the Greene to follow us.”

  The closer they got to the battery, the more accurate the guns became, sending shot after shot through the balloon gasbags. Unfortunately, simply penetrating the gasbags did nothing more than let out hydrogen. There was no ignition of the escaping hydrogen, which, lighter than air, drifted upward and away from the engines. Lowe was about to compensate for the loss of lift by getting rid of some weight.

  When they were directly overhead, the bombs went over the side, specially redesigned 72-pound 9-inch shells. As they fell earthward, a British shell found the Greene‘s basket. It disintegrated in a shower of debris, its engine falling like a huge stone to crash and careen through a line of tents as a spark ignited the hydrogen-laced air in a thunderous pulse of blue-orange fire. The Washington‘s bombs laced across the battery as the Greene died in flames and floated earthward. They fell over the battery, smashing the gun carriages on their pivots and wiping out their crews.

  Lowe was not satisfied and pointed to the helmsman a position behind the British lines. “Take me there.” The airship sailed over the British camp, alive with running men, many of them firing upward. There below them appeared the British ammunition dump upon which Lowe dropped the last of his bombs. The force from the exploding dump physically pushed the airship away even as it was turning back to Portland.8

  A SPECIAL RAILROAD CAR TRAVELING NORTH BETWEEN ALBANY AND PLATTSBURG, NEW YORK, 10:00 A.M., FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864


  Ulysses S. Grant looked out at the endless dense forests broken only by the occasional small town as his special train chugged north from the ruins of Albany. The view enforced a concentration which was just what he needed. He was on his way to inspect the Army of the Hudson and interview its commander. The three stars of a lieutenant general glittered on his shoulder straps. It was a rank only once held before and that by George Washington and no one since. Until now.

  Grant was not immune to ambition, but he controlled it better than the man he was going to see. He let his deeds carry his ambition. He caused Lincoln few headaches and just got things done, to the enormous relief of the commander-in-chief. So when Lincoln came to make the choice for a single all-powerful general-in-chief, he found it easy. Grant had never boasted that the country needed a dictator, as had Hooker before Chancellorsville. Grant had never created cabal after cabal to undermine his predecessors as had Hooker. Grant had just laid victories before Lincoln and asked for little.

  Hooker’s ego had been riding as high as one of Lincoln’s balloons after saving New York at the battle of Claverack in New York, the same day of the Royal Navy-Confederate attack on Washington. He had become the darling of the press, which he took great efforts to seduce. Hooker’s supporters had pointed out that Hooker had laid the glorious laurels of Claverack at the nation’s feet. Yes, but Grant had given the country Forts Donelson and Henry, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and latest of all, Chattanooga. He had come to the rescue of the trapped and dying Army of the Cumberland, saved it, and defeated his old friend Longstreet.