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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  “The British had no such spur, only the challenge of the French broadside ironclad Gloire class. They did not go beyond that concept except in superior detail. They are building ships like the Black Prince and Resistance that we sank at Charleston. They are stuffed with much smaller guns than our monitors which are invulnerable to them. Our eleven and fifteen-inch Dahlgren guns, on the other hand, tear the guts out of British ships. The only innovation we are aware of, thanks to General Sharpe, is that the British have remounted some of their smaller-caliber Armstrong breech-loading rifles to shoot at balloons.

  “They have built what they themselves call ‘iron towers,’ ships much bigger than ours but less capable. Their crews number often as high as six hundred, five to six times the crews of our monitors. They need that many men to work such a large ship and to work all those guns that do us little harm. Their ships are sinkholes of men for little value. They have fifteen of these old designs under construction [Appendix C]. Perish the British Empire rather than suffer British officialism to be urged beyond its wonted pace!

  “Look at the tables, sir. We are going to reap the benefit of the monitor-building programs already underway. You will see that we will have twenty new monitors joining the fleet this year, with five at the end of this month and two more in April, seven more in June and July, four in August and September, and the last two in December [Appendix D]. As you, know we are also laying down the hulls for ten more of Mr. Ericsson’s Dictator class. He has also thrown himself into developing the new, larger Washington class as well.”

  Carnegie took up the argument. “We have achieved remarkable results in just the four months the War Production Board has been operating. The most important improvement we have made was the bill you pushed through Congress to put the various Army and Navy ordnance and supply bureaus under our supervision.” His bright-blue eyes twinkled as he went on. He was a world-class charmer. “The Bureau system, I must say, was an ingenious device for giving to incapacity, indifference, and stupidity the solemn sanction of official utterance; for reducing the pace of the swiftest to that of the lowest; the zeal, intelligence, and energy of the ablest to the capacity of the most sluggish in comprehension and the most inert in action.”

  Lincoln nodded. “Ah, yes, the Stevens-Sumner Contracting Reform Act was another one of those helpful measure we were able to slide through Congress. It seems they only do the sensible thing when they are scarred witless. It was just after the attack on Washington last November when I recalled Congress. The sight of the half-burned city was enough to grease a lot of reform.”6

  Fox leaned forward to summarize, “It’s going to be a fine Navy day, Mr. President, a fine Navy day. I have no doubt that this year we will see the blockade off. We will even be able to cross the ocean and see how England likes to be blockaded.”

  McPhail’s clear, calm voice cut right through the optimism. “The Central Information Bureau disagrees.”

  Fox whipped around, his face flushed. McPhail locked eyes with him and did not blink. Carnegie had feared just such a scene. The CIB and the Navy profoundly disagreed over the downstream ramifications of this information. It had taken all of the little Scotchman’s charm to keep Fox and Sharpe from going to war over this issue. It did not help that Sharpe was an Army officer. Fox was naturally pugnacious and protective of the Navy’s interest and resented Sharpe’s meddling in what he insisted was solely a naval issue. He had once said, “I feel my duty is twofold, first to beat our Southern friends, second to beat the Army.”7

  Their eyes remained locked until Lincoln said, “Tell me why.”

  “The Navy’s figures are one hundred percent correct, sir. But they are not the only figures that matter. They must be compared to the Royal Navy’s building program. I do not think Mr. Fox realizes the extent to which the shock of Charleston has shaken the foundations of the Admiralty.

  “Disraeli has used their defeat to shake things up and clean house, much as we have done. The British press has announced wholesale retirements and resignations. Our sources in Britain also inform us that a new class of monitor-like ships, the Revenge class, of at least twenty ships, designed by Capt. Cowper Coles, the inventor of the British turret system, is being laid down as we speak. He has the favor of the Queen because the late Prince Consort Albert had been his patron. More importantly, he has the support of Disraeli and the Cabinet.

  “What worries Gen. Sharpe, sir, is the fact that British industry is many times ours. We know that the Britain produced 3,827,000 tons of iron in 1860. Last year’s estimate is 4,510,000 tons.8 That compares to the 920,000 tons we produced in 1860. Most of our production, however, is from out-of-date processes, from small bloomeries and furnaces only a half dozen of which employed more than 1,500 men. Only in the past decade have we begun to exploit the immense coal deposits that lie between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Even by 1860 fully seventy percent of our iron production was fueled by charcoal. And we have not been able to meet domestic requirements from our own production. Fully half of our yearly requirement for rails in 1860 was produced in Britain. We produced 205,000 tons of rails in 1860 and over 300,000 last year; this year we expect to reach 400,000 tons and will be self-sufficient.9

  “We believe that almost forty percent of British iron was shipped to the United States in 1860.10 The British will not miss the loss of our market. Our sources tell us an almost endless numbers of rails are being shipped to the South to replace their worn out or destroyed systems. And Britain’s shipbuilding and other armament industries will soak up the rest. We assess that those twenty monitors of the Revenge class will be at sea in eighteen months at most, surely with more classes following right after.”

  Lincoln asked, “You’re sure about this eighteen months?”

  McPhail replied, “Sir, General Sharpe believes this a conservative estimate. The British yards are working in three shifts.”

  Lincoln turned to Carnegie and said, “How are we doing in finding a substitute for niter, Carnegie?” Niter was the one ingredient for gunpowder that the United States had to import. And Britain had a monopoly based on its sources in India. Chile’s deposits had recently opened up, but the blockade made that irrelevant. Lincoln was so concerned about the country’s niter supply that he had personally engaged a chemist to find an alternative ingredient for gunpowder, but that had failed. His concern, however, had ensured that by the time the war with Britain had begun, four thousand tons of niter had been stockpiled. Still, it would not last in a long war, a year at most. Then the United States would be reduced to turning over dung heaps and raking cave floors for the niter crystals that formed naturally. The Confederates had been forced to these measures and could barely produce enough to keep their end of the war going.11

  Carnegie frowned. It was one of the priorities Lincoln had given him last November, and it had not yielded even to his charms. “Dupont tells me that his experiments with niter substitutes have gone nowhere. Guncotton is a possibility, but it has proved too volatile so far.”

  Lincoln slumped a bit in his chair.

  Carnegie thought it best to get other bad news out of the way at this time. “Luckily, we are self-sufficient in almost everything else. With two exceptions—we face a shortage of rubber, sir, and whale oil. Rubber has so many uses these days in industry, I don’t know where to begin. With the loss of our whale oil reserves when the British burned Hudson last year,12 we should have already started to run out. The oil wells in Pennsylvania have come to our rescue. The Standard Oil Company has been able to begin distilling kerosene on a large scale as a substitute to light the country’s lamps.”

  A smile crossed Lincoln’s face. “That reminds me of a comment someone made the other day about how cooperative the State of Pennsylvania has been with Standard Oil. Yes, it’s because Standard Oil has done everything with the Pennsylvania state legislature but refine it.”

  When the snickers had died down, Lincoln got back to business and said, “Carnegie, all well and good. But what I need a
re big numbers to solve this arithmetic problem. What about the repeaters?” It was Lincoln who had introduced the inventive genius, Chris Spencer, to Carnegie and recommended that he figure out some way to get the young man’s superb repeating rifle into large scale production. The result had been that the Colt Firearm Company had subcontracted to produce the Spencer at its huge factory in Connecticut and discontinue its own Colt repeater, a less capable weapon. Colt would profit enormously by this because it acquired 50 percent of the Spencer patent in the deal.

  Good news now. “It took Colt a few months to retool his factory to make Chris Spencer’s repeater, but I can report, sir, that they are coming out at three thousand a week now, and we expect that to go up to five thousand by next month and ten thousand by June. Springfield Arsenal is also retooling to produce the Spencer and should be ready within six weeks to begin production. By the end of the year, we expect to be producing fifty thousand Spencers a month.”

  One of the first decisions of the WPB, at the canny suggestion of Colt’s general manager, was to designate the Spencer the new standard infantry rifle. Production of all other types was to halt as soon as Spencer production came on line. Springfield Arsenal and other producers of the standard Springfield muzzle-loading musket were also converting that weapon into a single-shot breechloader based upon a simple design that the former chief of the Army’s Ordnance Bureau had suppressed. The Sharps Rifle Company (no relation to Maj. Gen. George H. Sharpe) people took this decision to standardize the Spencer badly since they too produced an excellent repeater, but a common sense exception was made for them since they were already in production and able immediately to produce ten thousand weapons a month. The Board felt that this bridge production was vital to cover the period when Colt and Springfield as well as other manufacturers had halted production to retool.

  PORT HUDSON, LOUISIANA, FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864

  Just as Lincoln adjourned the meeting, a French shell blew through the top foot of a parapet at Fort Hudson, spraying clods of red clay in every direction and then bouncing down inside the bastion. It spun as its fuse threw off sparks. Every man within a dozen yards threw himself to the ground just as the shell exploded. It had been like this for days, an endless shelling by the big French siege guns arrayed around the Union fort at Port Hudson. After New Orleans had fallen to the Union in April 1862, the Confederates had built this great fortress to control the Mississippi only a hundred miles upstream from the Crescent City. It was twin to Vicksburg further up the river, and for over a year the two fortresses had closed off the vital waterway to the Union. But Vicksburg had fallen on the Glorious Fourth of July 1863 and starving Port Hudson four days later.

  Now it was the Union that held Port Hudson and manned its miles of expertly laid out earth works that artfully followed the deep gullies and ravines around it. The Confederates had built well, and into this refuge the remnants of the Union army destroyed at Vermillionville the previous October had staggered after an epic retreat through swamp and bayou. Their commander, Maj. Gen. William Franklin, now senior officer in Louisiana, quickly drew the remaining Union forces in the fortress, burning the vast depots at Baton Rouge just ahead of Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor’s Confederates.

  The echoing of a dozen French bugles drew the men of the 1st Corps d’ Afrique to their feet. They were Uhlman’s Brigade of the 6th through 10th Regiments, Corps d’Afrique. Their origin was in the Confederate Louisiana Home Guards, a militia regiment of free blacks and black officers. After New Orleans fell to the Union in early 1862, one tenth of the regiment volunteered to serve the Union. By the next year the Corps d’Afrique was formed on a regular basis made up of, at first, free Louisiana blacks. So many runaway slaves were eager to join that regiment after regiment was formed. The 1st Regiment, which had retained its black line officers, distinguished itself in the unsuccessful May assault on Port Hudson. All other regiments were allowed only white officers. Their chaplains were their own black ministers.

  Now they dusted the red clay powder off themselves and stood to their positions, every ear drawn to signal for an attack. A chaplain walked behind the firing line, his back straight as he passed the crouching men, his deep voice reciting the warrior verses of the Old Testament

  “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in the darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth by noonday.”

  A voice began in a cross between a hum and a hymn, a living rhythm. It spread down the parapet till the entire corps was filling the stillness before the assault with this fervent accompaniment to the chaplain.

  “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand by the right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.”13

  The French had driven parallel trenches within a few dozen yards of the forward bastion. They were now packed with men ready to attack, black and white men, Sudanese infantry and French officers, in the forward trenches. They heard the singing and the words of the chaplain as it flowed over the wall and down into their trenches. Every eye instinctively turned upward, every ear compelled to hear even what they could not understand.

  “It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect. He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms. Thou hast also given me the shield of salvation.“

  The men in the trenches had seen the red hand of war all too often no to be disconcerted by the power above them. These men would take much killing.

  “I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: neither did I turn again till they were consumed. I have wounded them that they were not able to rise. For Thou has girded me with strength unto battle; Thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me. Thou hast also given me necks of mine enemies that I might destroy them that hate me. They cried but there were none to save them: even unto the Lord, but He answered them not. Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind: I did cast them out as the dirt in the streets.”14

  The chaplain threw his arms upward in supplication, and shouted:

  “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.”15

  The corps responded with a thunderous amen that turned the heads of the French and Confederate senior officers hundreds of yards away. As if it had been choreographed, a French rocket shot up over beaten ground.

  Suddenly the trenches erupted with hundreds of men in red trousers and blue coats rushing forward, the tricolor waving here and there above them. Shouts of “En avant! En avant!” rose above the din. The French artillery redoubled its efforts sending shell after shell into the bastion over the heads of their assault parties.

  Although the French and Confederate armies had closed on Port Hudson in October, it had taken since then for the French artillery siege train to cross the Atlantic. That was the easy part. Just above New Orleans, Union gunboats still controlled the Mississippi blocking the water route for the heavy guns. They had to be taken by a combination of rail and road to the siege works around Port Hudson. And this is where the problems of the Franco-Confederate forces began to multiply.

  Supplies and reinforcements flowed into Port Hudson thanks to the U.S. Navy’s control of the river. By the late winter, Franklin commanded an army barely smaller than his enemy. He used cavalry aggressively to raid the Franco-Confederate supply columns and continuously threatened them with infantry sallies through the vast piney woods that surrounded Port Hudson, all of which drained men from the siege works. But with each month more and more French troops arrived until Marshal of France Françoise Achille Bazaine counted sixty-five thousand men under his command in Louisiana, more than double the Confederate troops in the entire District of the Gulf. Confederate Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor found the French day by day more overbearing. Bazaine continued to purr about Napoleon III’s benign intenti
ons, but he took greater liberties with each week. The latest was to place a French guard of honor at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, the prerogative of a sovereign monarch. It had not gone unnoticed. Worse were the rumors of French confidential discussions with influential Creole leaders in the city on the possibility of a return to French sovereignty for Louisiana. Hints of titles and offices and gold francs were scattered about—delicately, of course. The fact that these discussion were carried out in French with a Francophone New Orleans elite only added weight to their intent and worry in Richmond.

  There was no head of state more jealous of the sovereignty of his government than Jefferson Davis. General Taylor, his son-in-law, kept him well-informed of Bazaine’s activities, but Davis was on the horns of a dilemma. The French alliance, which was formalized in the previous December with the Treaty of Richmond, was vital to the survival of the Confederacy. Bazaine’s army was the only reason the Union had been driven out of New Orleans and back up the river. Bazaine had crushed the Union army under Nathaniel Banks at Vermillionville the previous October, for which he had received a marshal’s baton, but not the title he had craved. And it was French loans (and British) that had relieved so many of the difficulties of the Confederacy. Not the least of which was the want of luxuries; now every woman of quality seemed to be displaying the latest Paris fashions. Three years of stored cotton bought a lot of French quality in all of the finer things of life.

  Davis could push back only so hard with the French; he realized that when you took someone’s money, you were no longer a completely free agent. Yet push back he did wherever possible only to find he was pushing against a French pillow. The French never confronted, resisted, or insisted, but they did suggest, delicately, of course. Their suggestions for all their exquisite manners had the same sort of power of a reminder that the Confederates were in no position to argue the point.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1864