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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Lincoln observed the sudden body language ripple in both men and the glow that sparkled their eyes. They had volunteered without a word.

  Now months later with the waves pounding the Kearsarge, Dahlgren’s enthusiasm was submerged in thoughtful appraisal of the plan whose details he had helped work out with Lt. Col. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., the commander of the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, which comprised the raiding force aboard the huge SS Vanderbilt plowing through the waves behind the Kearsarge.4 The Vanderbilt was one of the tycoon’s gift to the United States and one of the fastest and largest commercial ships in the world.5 They would be flying false British colors all the way as a precaution, though the seas would be relatively empty in the hard winter weather, especially as Lamson was taking them out of the normal shipping lanes. Things would get riskier as they entered the North Sea and approached the Essex coastline, and riskier still as they entered the mouth of the Thames, then madness itself as they galloped the twenty-five miles to Enfield, and impossible as they galloped back to escape under Lamson’s wing. Even locked in cold contemplation, Dahlgren was game. The bold glory of it was more than worth the throw to him. He suspected, though, that Lincoln’s object would be satisfied if they simply raised hell, regardless of whether a man got home.

  In another part of the North Atlantic, Meagher was contemplating just the same thought through the amber hue of a bottle of fine Irish whiskey. He had not noticed the disappearance of Lisovsky’s smallest and fastest ship, HIMS Almaz. He sailed on the SS Northern Star, another of Vanderbilt’s ships. Five other ships, including another Vanderbilt vessel, SS Ariel, carried the rest of his brigade shepherded by Lisovsky’s squadron. For Meagher and the other Irish, there was no consideration of going home. For them, Ireland was home, the Old Sod, live or die. There would be no escape back to the New Sod as many of the Irish had come to call the United States. Unlike Dahlgren and his Massachusetts men, almost every one of the men in the Irish Brigade had been born a British subject. The British would be loathe to accept their new allegiance to the United States, especially since by declaring the Irish Republic, they would be renouncing their new allegiance and falling back within the jurisdiction of the Crown as rebels.

  Henry Adams had tried to finesse the point during the voyage. Meagher went over the young man’s arguments and found them too clever by half. The English were second to none as sticklers after points of international law, but when it came right down to a threat to their power, they could be world-class hangmen. The spirit of Judge Jeffreys came right out.6 Meagher himself had come within an ace of such a fate.

  Now, he thought, what would a well-brought-up man like young Adams know of such things. Adams had served as a private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, the ambassador to the Court of St. James, and by all accounts aped the studied uselessness of British society. His father had hoped to force some character into him and sent him off with Lamson back in September to be a political advisor should he need one while ensuring the Laird Rams did not escape from their yard at Birkenhead. In the fighting that followed he had surprised everyone by his astute political advice and even more by an act of gallantry in saving Lamson’s life. He had come back from the expedition something of a hero, and his elegantly written and argued articles in the American press had been used to justify the American actions to the civilized world in the chain of actions that had led to this war. The British Foreign Office had been to great pains attempting rather unsuccessfully to refute them. Seward had shrewdly picked him to be ambassador designate to the yet to be born Irish Republic. If the scheme failed, he would serve the useful purpose of the noble martyr.

  He had explained to Meagher that “throughout this expedition, General, the Irish Brigade will remain under the jurisdiction of the United States. Even after the proclamation of the Irish Republic, you will remain under that jurisdiction. You will assist and support those elements of the Irish population, your Fenian friends, that will ‘officially’ declare the republic, only in the capacity of an ally. Thus you retain protection under the laws of war. After Britain recognizes the Irish Republic, well then, that is something that will have to be worked out then.”

  Meagher could only think of Judge Jeffreys.

  ROYAL NAVY BASE, HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, 4:45 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1864

  The lieutenant was still obviously shaken from his ordeal. Tossing about the sea in this weather for three days in a crowded ship’s boat would try anyone’s nerves. Rear Adm. Sir Alexander Milne, commanding the Royal Navy’s forces in this theater, interviewed the man himself.

  The lieutenant was still shivering, and Milne pressed a cup of tea into his hands. “We saw them at dawn. Dozens of ships heading out to sea. Nile signaled to engage. I was with Captain von Donop on the bridge of Jason. We beat to quarters.” He held the teacup with both hands to soak up the warmth. His eyes closed for a moment; then he gulped the tea down.

  Milne was a patient man, but he had just learned of the loss of two of his blockade ships. HMS Nile was a ship-of-the-line, his own flagship, and Jason a corvette patrolling the waters off New York City.7

  The lieutenant looked up. The tea had done him good, and he put down the empty cup. “We never had a chance, sir. This huge monitor led the other ships, Russians, six of them. Then there was the balloon flying over them.”

  “Go on, Lieutenant.”

  “Nile gave her a broadside, the monitor, but she just plowed through the shot. When she fired, my God! Two of the biggest muzzles I’ve ever seen were in that turret. She gutted Nile like a fish. I can still see those shells, as big as boulders, striking Nile. The balloon circled us, circled us, sir, circled us, moved as if it were steered. I thought balloons went with wind, but this thing just flew around and over us. And it wasn’t round but cigar-shaped. Then it was dropping bombs on Nile. I saw them fall from the balloon. By then she had started to burn.” His eyes told Milne that he was back there then.

  “The Russians by then were all around us, two frigates and three corvettes and a sloop. Captain von Donop wouldn’t strike, and we went down. I saw him last on the bridge shaking his fist at the Russians. The last I saw of the Nile was her burning”

  “You said that there were dozens of enemy ships.”

  “Yes, sir, the rest were all merchantmen and transports.”

  “Did none of them stop to pick up survivors?”

  “Aye, sir, one did, but the weather picked up and our boat got carried off. It was only God’s mercy that your dispatch boat found us.”

  The balloon the lieutenant had observed was the U.S. Navy’s Steven Decatur of the Washington class, sister to the Army’s George Washington that had just resupplied Portland. The Navy’s new Naval Aeronautical Service (NAS) had been given the second balloon of the class, not without a knock-down, drag-out Army-Navy fight that had to be settled by Lincoln himself. A dozen more were building at the Washington Navy Yard. Lincoln’s Solomon-like solution was to have every second airship of the Washington Class go to the Navy. A smaller and lighter class, the Nathan Hales, were also under construction but in Connecticut. Their mission would be reconnaissance.8

  On the way back to their Long Island base, Capt. Will Cushing and crew broke open a bottle of champagne to toast the destruction of the first warships at sea by airship. His feat in the defense of the Navy Yard in the battle for Washington—sinking British ships in the East River by dropping bombs with Col. Thaddeus Lowe from his tethered balloon—had transformed the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant into a captain overnight and commander of the new Naval Aeronautical Service (NAS). His reputation even before that battle had been awe-inspiring for its daring ever charmed with success. The old admirals looked upon him as the personification of the intrepid ideal of a naval officer. He had excelled in the small boat operations on Virginia’s rivers where he led special operations under no one’s eye but his own. To a man, every crew he commanded wanted to follow him to his next command.

  More bottles
were also opened and a generous rum ration issued to the crew aboard the USS Dictator as it headed back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This action too was its maiden voyage, rushed to completion after the start of the war and exercised in the Upper Bay of New York and Long Island Sound. John Ericsson’s pet project was the leviathan of monitors at 4,438 tons and 312 by 50 feet. Her two 15-inch Dahlgren guns in a single turret and 174-man crew had outfought the smaller sixty-eight guns of the Nile and its crew of six hundred. Her captain walked the deck after the toasts and leaned against the metal railing to watch the bonfires that had been British ships slowing disappearing in his wake.9

  For Milne this news was unnerving. Two more of the Royal Navy’s ships destroyed so easily. And worse a large enemy force has broken into the Atlantic, six Russians and an enormous American monitor and a dozen merchantmen and transports. He did not know that the lieutenant had not seen the monitor return to the American coast.

  He immediately dictated a dispatch to the Admiralty detailing this information and its implications, the most important of which was that the Russians had committed an open act of war. That dispatch would go with the one he had written that very morning of the news of the battle at Hampton Roads, happier news, indeed—two monitors taken or sunk and Fortress Monroe being steady reduced to rubble by the Great Armament.10 Unofficial coordination with the Confederates would also be yielding dividends. Lee would send a strong force to attack the Norfolk Navy Yard from the land. With the Royal Navy controlling Hampton Roads, the great American navy yard with all its facilities would fall. The remainder of the monitor force that had defeated the Royal Navy would then be sunk or captured. The navy yard itself would be an enormous asset as a forward operating base almost on the doorstep of the American capital. And there was not a thing the Americans could do about it. Monitor construction was concentrated north of Baltimore. No city located on the waterways that fed Chesapeake Bay could build a monitor to send south to challenge Milne’s ships which could then eventually range north up the bay and into the Potomac and Patapsco Rivers to threaten Washington and Baltimore. With the eventual fall of Fortress Monroe, the James River would then be open to ocean-going ships destined for Richmond. That, in turn, would facilitate the support of the Army of Northern Virginia, now dependent on supplies coming through Wilmington, North Carolina.

  This news was the sort of slowly gathering strategic advantage that won wars by wearing down an enemy. Ask the French. Yet, on the heels of this news that would ring the bells of every church in the United Kingdom, came that of the escape of this Russo-American squadron with all its implications, especially that Russia was now in the war. The peal of the bells would then wring with foreboding.

  COOPERSVILLE, NEW YORK, 5:05 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1864

  Hope Grant recognized the culminating point of his spoiling attack into New York had passed.11 He had wrecked one American division on the eighteenth, taken almost three thousand prisoners, and unbeknownst to him wounded both Hooker and Grant. He had concentrated twenty-five thousand men for this effort, but realized that their continued presence in the area north of the Little Chazy River simply made them a stationary target for the rapidly concentrating Army of the Hudson which outnumbered him two to one. He strung out his brigades on the north bank of the Little Chazy with the 12th opposite the town of Chazy covering the bridge, the Dublin Brigade to the east covering the Stetson Road Bridge, and the 1st Montreal Brigade filling out the line to Lake Champlain. The 9th Lancers were his personal reserve on the river line. The Hamilton Brigade he strung out five miles to the west to the village of Sciota as an anchor to guard his flank against the inevitable flanking maneuver. His second division was already on the move south and should cross the border in two days. He wanted that reserve close at hand for a very good reason. (map)

  The enemy’s new commander had shown surprising skill and aggressiveness over the last three days. He was surprised when Wolseley informed him the commander was George H. Sharpe, the American spy chief. Grant rolled his eyes. “Setting a fashion. You started it, Joe. Spy chiefs commanding armies. What next, female generals?” He coughed up a very good “harumph!’

  Spy chief or no, Grant realized Sharpe needed watching. The man was not confining himself to the narrow strip of farmland paralleling Lake Champlain, barely three miles wide. Grant had that fingertip feel for the danger. Denison’s scouts were reporting movement of large cavalry and infantry forces through the woods to the west. At the same time Sharpe’s artillery was pounding the British severely from south of the Little Chazy River. The British simply did not have the ammunition for such an extended gunner’s slugging match. What he had was coming down the railway to a supply dump just over the Great Chazy River near Coopersville.

  He poured over the map. “See here, Joe,” he said to Wolseley. “Pull back to this river line.” He pointed to the Great Chazy River, which emptied into Lake Champlain three miles north of the Little Chazy River, their current defensive line. From the lake the river angled sharply northwest for eleven miles almost reaching the Canadian border before dipping south.

  “Yes, I see. We refuse our right by angling it up with river, and Sharpe’s outflanking move to the west will not catch anything. The weather is still too bad for them to stay in the field much longer.”

  “Give them a real twist too.” He meant that they would remain in possession of a sliver of New York, sure to gall the Americans. Then he added, “Get them moving at dusk.”

  At that moment, Custer was leading a cavalry charge into the small village of Sciota eight miles to the west.

  SHORELINE OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN, NEW YORK, 7:12 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1864

  The night with all its stars had just settled over the lake shoreline when two Union brigades in very open order, their companies on line, marched onto the ice of the lake. Sharpe had had parties out the night before cutting holes in the ice to measure its depth. It was still frozen deep, deep enough for thousands of men to cross with their coffee mill and artillery batteries. Even as he shivered in his greatcoat, Sharpe thanked God for the hard upstate winters. Now he stood on the ice, encouraging the men as they stepped onto the surface. Every man’s shoes were wrapped in cut-up blankets to protect against the cold and provide some traction. The frosty breath of thousands of men rose in wisps as they picked their down the bank onto the ice. 12

  The XI Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr, a former soldier in the German Brunswick Army, joined him to wish his boys well.13 This normally “cool, collected and judicious” officer was still apprehensive about this damned foolhardy maneuver he had called it to Sharpe’s face the night before when it had been proposed. Sharpe had just smiled. He raised his left arm and waved his hand. Then when the von Steinwehr was looking at the hand, he brought his right around in a sudden punch that stopped within an inch of his nose. The German instinctively stepped back, but it would have been too late had Sharpe intended to connect his fist with the man’s nose. “You see, Adolph, the simplest deceptions work. Our artillery has kept them focused on the river in front of them, and Custer’s encirclement to the west will draw them that way as well. They will be looking in every direction but the lake.”

  He paused then said, “Remember what the late great Stonewall said, Adolph? ‘Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.’ You and I were both at Chancellorsville, and it was on your flank that he fell, did he not?” Steinwehr could only nod, his mind flinching as it brought up the sheer terror and chaos as waves of shrieking Johnnies coming out of nowhere had shattered his command. “Well, then, hat’s off to a great teacher. Our enemies will find we have been diligent students.”

  NORTH BANK OF THE GREAT CHAZY RIVER NEAR CHAZY, 11:30 P.M., TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1864

  Wolseley found McBean in the steeple of a church. The Scot pointed south across the river into the night. Large fires dotted the hidden landscape for miles. “Dunna ken aboune you, but we’re in fer it come daylight.”

  “Hope Grant’s timin
g, it seems, was perfect, McBean. They will be on us in the morning.” They had been hearing the movement of artillery all night as well. McBean had already been informed by dispatch rider to get ready to pull out as the staff worked out the march order and route of the brigade.

  Sharpe was indeed massing most of the rest of his two corps south of the Little Chazy. He wanted to fix Grant’s attention on the south bank. The fires drew attention as nothing else would. They also served to keep the men warm as temperatures plummeted at night. A soldier from Russia had come forward with his experience in the tsar’s army on how to stay warm. So the men huddled around big bonfires or when sleep was necessary lined up in groups of a hundred each man holding part of a long rope in his hands, and then the group coiled up. A hundred men could sleep on their feet that way and stay surprisingly warm with all that massed body heat. Every hour or so, the huddle would uncoil and recoil the opposite way so the men on the outside could be on the inside.

  The British and Canadians were just happy to be on the move to generate some body heat. Despite their excellent cold-weather clothing, being out in this weather for days on end was starting to wear. There was a bustle all along the Little Chazy as they made preparations to move, all under the eye of Knight and his scouts. The British picket line had been too effective for them to slip across the frozen river, but there had been no pickets along the frozen lakeshore. It was Knight who had blazed a trail across the lake at night and sneaked in among the British from that unguarded direction. He had personally briefed Sharpe. “If a few men can get behind that way, a whole brigade could do it too.”

  And now five thousand men in two brigades were doing just that. Their way was lit by oil lamps sitting in barrels sawn in half up and down with their backs to the further lakeshore. The insides had been painted white to reflect the light. They were strung out in rows five hundred yards apart. As Knight was signaling with colored lights that the enemy was preparing to move, von Steinwehr’s brigades were following the barrel lights across the lake.