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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  The cipher clerk returned to hand Sharpe the message. He read it and jumped out of his seat. “We need to find Grant and Hooker immediately.”

  THE NEW YORK–CANADIAN BORDER, TWO MILES NORTH OF ROUSE’S POINT, 1:20 P.M., FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  Hope Grant sat his horse in a copse of trees out of sight of the American pickets a mile away. His greatcoat was buttoned tight against the early morning cold. His woolen scarf, a gift from some Canadian girl, “a war of red and white in her cheeks,” wrapped his neck. “Damn,” he muttered. He wondered if he might actually campaign in decent weather somewhere. India was, well, India, the proverbial sweatbox crawling with flies and doubling you over with Dehli belly. And Canada was an icebox that could turn fingers and toes black if you weren’t careful. Nothing in between. Of course, there had been the north China plain in summer when he had led the expedition that sacked the Imperial Summer Palace and humbled All Under Heaven. Who would have thought China could be so hot?

  He forgot the cold as the 9th (The Queen’s Royal) Lancers trotted by with a troop of the Royal Guides riding ahead and a battery of Armstrong guns behind. At that very moment south of Rouse’s Point, a handful of disguised Guides were cutting the telegraph wires to Plattsburgh. The 9th had been his own regiment in India, and under his command Victoria Crosses had rained down on its men for their deeds in the crushing of the Great Mutiny. They had earned from their enemies the epithet of “The Dehli Spearmen” and had been described by an ally as “the beau ideal of all that British Cavalry ought to be in Oriental countries.” They wore a distinctive Uhlan type helmet with a brass badge of two crossed lances with a Crown resting above and “9th Lancers” below. Their dark-blue winter coats hid their blue and scarlet uniforms. Red and white pennons flew on their lances.

  Following the lancers was the 1st Montreal Brigade, which had fought at Claverack, its Imperial and Canadian battalions brought back to strength by drafts from England and local recruiting. The First Battalion, the Rifles, uniformed in forest green and black, were out for revenge. The sting of defeat at Clavarack was still sharp. That had been the first field from which the Rifles had been driven since fighting the French in Spain, an intolerable shame that could only be wiped out in blood. Grant had kept them brigaded with the three Canadian battalions they had fought with, the oldest in the Canadian militia: 1st Battalion the Prince of Wales Regiment that had torn the hole through the Yankee ranks, that had almost collapsed their army; the 2nd Battalion Queen Victoria’s Rifles; and the 3rd Battalion, Victoria Volunteers Rifles of Montreal (Appendix B). English-speaking Canada had been stunned by the defeat and such loss of life. But defeat presents a fork in the road, one to the emotional relief of surrender, the other to resolve. Canada had chosen the latter and was in this war to the knife.

  Right after the Rifles came two full batteries of Armstrong guns. A lot of thought went into this unorthodox use of the guns. That use was meant to counter something the Americans had used to turn the tide at Clavarack.

  Behind them came the 12th Brigade. First in column was the 78th (Highland) Regiment of Foot, the Ross-shire Buffs, their scarlet coats and buff facings, also hidden by their dark-blue greatcoats. Their shakos bore the elephant badge with the word “Assaye” to commemorate the future Duke of Wellington’s great victory in India in 1803 and their fifty-four years service in the subcontinent (1803–57). Their motto was “Cuidich ‘n Rhi” (Help to the King), as legend has it from the cry of Lord Kintail, ancestor of the MacKenzies of Seaforth, as he saved the Scottish king Alexander III from a charging stag. This war had found them at garrisoned at Dover from where they took ship in the great reinforcement that had brought Grant himself to Canada.16

  Grant recognized its acting commander, Lt. Col. William McBean, VC. Home on leave from his own regiment, the 93rd Highlanders, the command of the 78th had fallen to him when its commander dropped dead of a heart attack. McBean had been in London at the War Office paying his respects when the word of the vacancy arrived by telegram. Timing was everything.

  McBean was a man after Grant’s own heart. He had risen from private to lieutenant colonel all in the 93rd and had won his Victoria Cross in the main breach of the Begum Bagh at Lucknow in 1858. A flood of mutineers were trying to escape when then Lieutenant McBean threw himself into their path, and with his heavy cavalry saber cut down ten in single combat. As a havlidar (officer) of the mutineers came at him, the Highlanders made ready to shoot him, but McBean called them not to interfere. So like heroes on the plains of Troy they fought it out with their swords, until McBean feinted a cut but then drove his point through the enemy’s chest. As the rush of Highlanders passed him, he paused to pull out of his thigh the sword left by another mutineer. When the general pinned the VC on him and remarked that it was good day’s work, McBean replied, “Tuts, tuts, it dina tak me aboune twenty meenits.”

  Behind the Highlanders marched the 26th Foot, which had been stationed in Gosport, Hampshire, and embarked at the same time. “More old friends,” thought Grant. The 26th had been with him in China and now wore a dragon badge on their shakos in memory of that campaign. They had embarked along with the 73rd (Perthshire) Foot, which had marched down from Aldershot. This regiment had originally been the 2nd Battalion of the famed Black Watch (42nd Foot) and befitting its origin with the senior Highland regiment of the army, it had combat record of great distinction. Its self-sacrifice had become legend. In 1851 off Cape Town their transport sank. The women and children had been put into the boats when their officers told the men that the only way they could save themselves was to swim for the boats, but that might endanger the women and children. Not a man stirred from the ranks, and of the 357 men who drowned that day, fifty-six were from the 73rd, the most of any regiment on board. In 1862 the regiment had had the honor of Perthshire added to their designation in honor of their Highland origins.

  Bringing up the tail of the column were several battalions of Canadian militia, for a brigade strength of over four thousand men and twelve guns. Behind them came another brigade. Grant had concentrated a full British division of four brigades, over seventeen thousand men. Another division was concentrated at St. John, ready to move.

  Grant’s mind was no longer with the marching columns, but casting deep across the border. Thanks to the Royal Guides and Wolseley’s agents in the United States, he had a clear picture of the Army of the Hudson. Geography was the key to Hooker’s fate. New York south of the border was sparsely inhabited. The thick forests of the Adirondack Mountains still hemmed men in to a narrow ribbon of partially cleared land of fields and orchards paralleling Lake Champlain, which still was too ice-choked to be anything but another barrier. Emptying into the lake were numerous creeks, most flanked by marshes. Most of the few towns were trumped-up villages hugging the lakeshore. The railroad was the only easy communication running along the lake.

  Hooker’s pursuit of the beaten British after Claverack had taken him as far as the border when an unseasonable blizzard had closed operations until spring. The harsh winter made it impossible to maintain his army in camps. He had to string out his regiments in the small towns running as far back as fifty miles from the border. Rouse’s Point, just inside the border and next to where the Richelieu River emptied into the lake, was his forward position, which he garrisoned with a single brigade. Opposite Rouse’s Point across a bridge was a small island on which the Union had built the three tier limestone Fort Montgomery now manned by artillery troops. Two miles to the west in the town of Champlain was another brigade. Six miles south was the third brigade in small town of Chazy (pronounced shai-ZEE).17 These were the three brigades of the 2nd Division of Maj. Gen. John W. Geary’s XII Corps.

  The rush of volunteers and of discharged men returning to the colors after the joint blows of the British invasion and the Copperhead rising had filled out Geary’s shrunken regiments, which required a major reorganization, as it did in the rest of the field armies of the Union.18 For example, Col. Charles Candy’s 1st Bri
gade (2nd Div, XII Corps) had marched to Clavarack with six regiments. The entire division consisted of 4,100 men in fourteen regiments. With the regiments now near full strength, only three were required to make a brigade. He now had eight thousand in nine regiments. Hooker formed the extra regiments into two more brigades, repeating the process throughout the rest of the Army of the Hudson. The extra brigades allowed him to create enough new formations so that both corps were at full establishment of three divisions of three brigades each, over fifty thousand men. Similarly his cavalry division, commanded by the boy wonder, the newly promoted Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, had been raised to three brigades at five thousand men. With artillery and other arms, Hooker commanded over sixty thousand, a far cry from the twenty thousand he had led onto the field at Claverack.

  On the other hand, Hope Grant had barely thirty thousand men south of Montreal, an equation that Hooker was looking forward to solving in the Spring. The Spring. It was a month away at least this far north. Even in Virginia Hooker had to wait until the end of April for the road to be dry enough and the forage beginning to sprout before beginning the Chancellorsville Campaign. He calculated he had another month before it was feasible to attack, and he would be across the border on the first good day and plant the Stars and Stripes on old Montreal’s citadel. He had been given to commenting, “Third time’s lucky,” to his staff, a reference to the American failures in the War of 1776 and 1812 to conquer Canada. He was too clever by half, and word of it had traveled to Washington and back up to Canada by way of Wosleley’s organization in the North. He had leaked it to the press, which screamed it from every front page in British North America. You could hear the resolve tightening from Halifax to the Great Lakes.19

  The story had also stopped off at the White House by way of Secretary of War Stanton, who had never been overly enamored of Hooker. Lincoln just shook his head. “Stanton, I tell you, if there is a man for counting his chickens before they are hatched, it is Hooker. Do you remember how before Chancellorsville, he had said, ‘May God have mercy on General Lee for I shall have none’? To my mind, blaspheming is not a tactful way to start a campaign when you need everyone you can get on your side. Now, Hooker at least this time has not goaded the Almighty. I suppose there is that to be grateful about.”

  Stanton felt this was time to insert a knife. “I would not be surprised if he has started to talk again about how the country needs a dictator.”

  Of that Hooker was entirely innocent. He had taken that lesson to heart. Besides, he thought, the election was in November. Why talk about dictatorship when the presidency was guaranteed once he sat as conqueror in Montreal? For that reason, no man was more impatient for the daffodils to appear than Joseph Hooker. Yes, daffodils and Montreal. They made an appealing vision but one that was at least six weeks away. Right now his problem was entertaining U.S. Grant. After his victory, he would have Grant’s job, and then after the election, he would have Lincoln’s. He laughed to himself when it occurred to him that there were two Generals Grant standing in his way, briefly standing in his way, he thought.

  HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE HUDSON, PLATTSBURGH, NEW YORK, 1:20 P.M., FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  U.S. Grant was puffing hard on his cigar as Hooker used the map to show the location of all his divisions. “I don’t like it, Hooker, you’re spread out too far. Geary’s hung up there on the border all by himself. Your next division is here in Plattsburgh, all of twenty miles from Geary. That’s a day’s hard march.”

  “General, I can have this division there in a few hours by train.”

  “That’s a mighty big assumption. Do you remember, Hooker, what the sergeants at West Point used to call the definition of the assumption? The Mother of All Fuck Ups. I found that out at Pittsburg Landing two years ago. It is not an edifying experience, I can tell you.”

  He got up and stabbed at the map with his cigar. “I want you to concentrate the XII corps in the area of this triangle of Champlain and Rouse’s Point and Chazy. Then I want you to have your next corps within supporting distance.”

  “But, General, the weather is still …”

  “Hang the weather. I tell you, you should never toy with a man named Grant,” he said. Grant hoped Hooker was clever enough to catch the double entendre. “Sharpe has filled me in on him. The man is the best they have. He moves like lightning and strikes like a sledgehammer. Much like someone we used to know in the Old Army, a certain Thomas Jackson. You remember Cadet Jackson, don’t you?”

  The mention of Stonewall Jackson, the author of Hooker’s humiliation, only served to get Hooker’s back up. He took a step forward when he heard loud voices in the outer room. Then the double doors swung open, Sharpe and McEntee followed by Knight stormed in followed by a clucking chief of staff and aides.

  Sharpe spoke. “Gentlemen, I must speak to you alone. It is of the greatest urgency.” Hooker signaled, the gaggle of onlookers fled, and the doors closed.

  “The cipher that our man in Montreal passed to Sergeant Knight warns us that the enemy plans to attack us by the twenty-first. The British commanding general has ordered the concentration of thirty-five thousand men just south of St. John.”

  Hooker snorted, “Impossible. The weather works for him as little as it does for us. We are equally bound.”

  Grant said, “If I recall Prof. Mahan’s class. That’s what the Romans thought of Hannibal and the French of Suvorov.”20

  THE CANADIAN–AMERICAN BORDER BETWEEN LACOLLE AND ROUSE’S POINT, 2:07 P.M., FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  The Rifles fanned out in open order with the Prince of Wales Regiment to their right and the other two Canadian battalions following to the rear. Both batteries rode behind the last battalions. They came out of the woods to cross a strip of fallow fields. On the other side was another woods hiding the American picket line. The pickets had been alert and were firing. A courier was galloping to summon their supports. The Rifles and Canadians made good time across the still frozen ground and burst into the woods driving the pickets back in a rush and out across the fields on the other side. Just as the Rifles and Canadians began to follow, a stream of fire laced along their front dropping a dozen men. As if on signal the rest fell back into the woods and took to the ground.

  The next woodline was thickening with men in blue, the 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, but the source of that concentrated fire was a battery of what looked at that distance like small artillery pieces. These were the rapid-firing repeating coffee mill guns that had turned the tide at Claverack and cut down the Grenadier Guards like grass before the scythe just as the guardsmen were about to seal the British victory. American factories had worked around-the-clock shifts to send battery after battery to the field armies. Some were even getting the new repeating gun built by Mr. Gatling in Cincinnati. But Hooker had had priority for the coffee mills guns and had almost one battery of six guns per brigade.

  For the attacking brigade to continue across that beaten zone would have been suicide. Just such a moment had been planned for. The Imperial batteries rode up into the woods; the guns were dragged through the trees and carefully positioned just inside the wood line. Spotters climbed up the trees and pinpointed the coffee mill battery. The steel breeches of the Armstrongs flew open to take their shells. They shone with polish, not a speck of rust. Too many had failed at Claverack because of lack of such elementary care. That had been taken care of through intensive retraining of the artillery, especially the NCOs, till it was a greater sin to find a speck of dirt on the inside of the breech than an unpolished button. These were the most accurate guns in the world and the first all-steel breech-loaders. There had been much conservative resistance to a gun that loaded from the wrong end, but defeat had been the most effective reformer.

  It took only a few shells for adjustment and soon they were converging on the coffee mill battery in a hail of splinters that swept away the crews then began to fall among the trees shattering limbs to send swarms of deadly wooden splinters into the American
infantry. Then the Rifles and Canadians rose to their feet, glad to be off the cold ground, and swept out of their woods. Their guns continued to fire over them driving the Americans deeper into woods. The infantry was able to close without much loss and drive the disconcerted Americans back from tree to tree.

  The commander of the 9th Lancers waited with his men along the road to the rear watching the smoke from the infantry fight, impatient for his part. Then a rocket shot out of the woods, and he gave the command forward at the trot down the road. They passed through the woods just in time to see the Americans racing to the rear from the same woods over more farmland interspersed with orchards. They would have been easy to ride down, but he had other orders and continued along the road. They had not gone five hundred yards when they ran right into an American 3-inch battery galloping to the sound of the guns. Lances leveled the British cavalry rode right in among the guns and caissons, spearing man after man off horse and vehicle. In ten minutes the battery was a shambles, its 150 men dead, captured, or fled. The prisoners were let go to run away as the commander resumed the ride down the road. He had not time or men to waste on escorting prisoners to the rear.

  After that taste of blood, the 9th was in high fettle. Cavalry hated the guns. Instead of more guns, they came across only an occasional rider or supply wagon and let them go minus their transport; nothing was to slow them down until they reached their objective, the railroad bridge over the Great Chazy River four miles south of the border. With the bridge taken, Geary’s railroad communication with the rest of the Army of the Hudson would be cut and Hope Grant would have a sizable water barrier as an excellent defensive line.