The mayor fell over himself in blubbering agreement. The station master just folded his arms and looked daggers at Dahlgren. The younger man paused to consider the station master’s emphatic body language, then said, “Station master, is this railway schedule correct?” The plan hinged on whether the one excursion train from London was on time.
“That is for you to find out, sir.”
“I’m sure I will. Sergeant, take the mayor outside and shoot him.” The man cried out in terror as the Marine dragged him outside. “Now station master, it would be easier all around if you would answer my question.”
“You may shoot me as well, but I will be damned if I help an invader.”
“Then, sir, you should be able to understand the sentiments of my countrymen.” They could hear the mayor outside begging for mercy. Then a shot, and he was silent. The station master looked at Dahlgren and despised him for smiling. His fists balled as he took a step forward to growl, “Do your worst.”
Dahlgen pulled himself to his feet. “I assure you, sir, you would not enjoy that at all.” He looked at the station master, a hint of admiration in his face. A distant train whistle turned his head in its direction. He took out his pocket watch and flipped open the cover. “Well, station master, it seems your schedule is correct after all. You could have saved the mayor an ordeal.” He touched his fingers to the brim of his cap and walked out. He passed the sergeant, who was holding a bound and gagged mayor. “Take him back in, Sergeant, and let him clean himself.”
The train slid to a stop at the station, the doors flew open, and light crowd on early holiday descended upon the platform to be herded together by the Marines. Dahlgren heaved himself onto a box and shouted for order. “Listen to me, all of you. Essex is now under the military occupation of the United States army of invasion. You will be confined to this town until the army of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant completes the conquest of this kingdom. As I speak that army is landing all over England.” He paused for a moment to point to Rimsky-Korsakov and the imperial banner. “And also the forces of the Russian tsar.”
Dahlgren rather enjoyed that. See how the hell the English liked that, even if it only a rumor to scare the bejuzus out of them. Then he added, “Our monitors have defeated the Royal Navy in a great battle. You are now defenseless.” This island race had become far too used to carrying war to someone else’s country. The stunned look of “the world turned upside down” on their faces told him how sharp would be the arrow that flew on the wings of that rumor.
Confirmation came marching up in the column of the 1st Massachusetts, their saddles and bridles over their shoulders marching up to the platform. Adams rode a horse onto the platform and saluted Dahlgren. “You like her, Ulrich? Found her in the riding stables and a dozen more. Better yet, the transit corrals were filled, just like Wilmoth said.” Essex was a horse-raising county with a number of large horse-farms that bred and trained horses to the saddle. Most were destined for the British army cavalry remount school at Maidenstone in Kent and were collected from the horse-farms in this part of Essex because the London-Tilbury-Southend line was one of the few railway spurs off the main line that ran from London northeast through Colchester and on to Norwich in Suffolk.
“No time to waste, Charlie. Get your people going.” If either of them were believers in luck, they did not seem to question how long their surfeit would last. As for Dahlgren, he had come to believe that he rode the lightning.
Aboard the Kearsarge, Lamson nervously paced his quarterdeck while at the same time envying Dahlgren and Adams their adventure. They would be consumed by action while his ship and Vanderbilt sat alongside Southend Pier watching the commerce of the world sail in and out of the Thames estuary as they waited the raiders’ return. “Hurry up, Uly, for God’s sake hurry.”
DUBLIN CASTLE, 2:49 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
The great coat of arms that hung over the entrance to the state apartments, the Lion and Unicorn of the United Kingdom, came crashing to the pavement below. It was Meagher’s first official act after declaring the Irish Republic to the Fenian crowd that had thronged to Dublin Castle as word spread through the city that the Americans and Meagher had arrived. They had cheered themselves to a state of near intoxication as the Union flag (of the United Kingdom) fluttered down and the green flag raced up the flagpole to snap triumphantly in the Spring breeze.
No one was more elated that Meagher. The city had fallen within eight hours of their landing. The dream had come true. All of the barracks had fallen with their garrisons surrendered. They did not have a chance. Aside from a duty officer, the regimental officers of each regiment had been at home or in church. Ammunition had been safely locked away, and the men had been sleeping late on their only free day. Even those inclined to resist found themselves confronted with American bayonets with Irish brogues rushing into their barracks with cannon and Gatlings to back them up.
In his elation, Meagher shrugged off the failure to seize the Viceroy of Ireland at his lodge in Phoenix Park. He could thank the British captain who had spurred his horse to take the park wall rather than surrender. People were already crowding the balcony of the lodge and the entrance, pointing to then smoke rising from the Royal Barracks as they listened to the sound of gunfire rising from the other nearby barracks. When the captain rode up all eyes fixed on him as he shouted, “Where is the Viceroy?”
A man on the balcony replied, “I am he, Captain. What news?”
“American troops are in the city, Your Lordship. I barely escaped a column marching up Infirmary Road to Marlborough Barracks.” There was a sharp gasp from the group around the viceroy.
“Are you sure, Captain? I find it . . .”
“They shot Captain Butler, who was riding at my side. I only escaped by jumping the wall. They were Irish men in American uniforms, my Lord.”
“Then ride to the Curragh and tell the garrison I order them to Dublin at once.” He turned to a servant. “My horse immediately. We are leaving.” Meagher’s detachment reached the lodge just as the viceroy and the captain galloped off to the northwest.
Meagher shrugged it off. He had what for him was a more pressing problem. He was on his own; Lisovsky had departed immediately with the afternoon tide. Barely two hundred of native-born Catholic soldiers who had taken the Fenian oath came forward when called to declare themselves from among the British prisoners. There would have been more, but half the normal garrison had already taken ship for Canada and been replaced with English and Scottish RVCs. Still, there should have been more for over one-third of the garrison of Ireland before the war had taken the oath to a free Ireland.7 The oath was heady thing to give when its fulfillment remained only a dream. Now it was here, a real and hard thing, more than a line to cross but an abyss to stare down into and make the soul shiver. Others found on their shoulders the hand of the spirit of their regiments, the honor of countless men who had shared the hard comradeship of these living families of men. Those who had lived by the unspoken iron code that they could never let the regiment down, dreaded to face not only their mates but on judgment day the ghosts of the regiment, and found their feet fixed to the ground.
To these few hundred a thousand more volunteers from the civilian population had already come forward. Meagher formed the veterans and the volunteers into the 1st (Brian Boru) and 2nd (Daniel O’Connell) Regiments of the Army of Ireland. There were more than enough captured Enfields to arm them, and when the Magazine Fort fell, more than enough ammunition. Their regimental colors were at hand, sewn in America by Irish seamstresses. Green they were with the Golden Harp in one corner and the regimental number in red in the center on a white shield. Yet there were two dozen such flags meant for many more volunteers.
Meagher remained confident that he would quickly issue those flags, but for the moment the two were just enough to take posts of honor on either side of the throne in the white and gold presentation room of the castle. The room had been converted to a symbol of royal authority for a visit o
f the late King William IV. Victoria herself had sat there when she had visited Ireland during the Famine to receive the well-fed Anglo-Irish elite. Now the room was filled with the Fenian leadership of Dublin, their voices rising in waves of growing elation.
Meagher stepped to the platform upon which the throne stood. Out flashed the sword he had carried on the Peninsula, in the awful and glorious charge at Antietam, and in the carnage of Fredericksburg. The blade glittered in the light that poured through the windows as he held it high. Then he turned, held it in both hands, kissed it, and laid it over the arms of the throne. The shout of approval rolled out through the window and turned every head in the yard below. It was the grandest such gesture with a sword since Brennus, the Celtic chieftain who sacked Rome, threw his own blade onto the tribute scales in the spirit of vae victis—woe to the vanquished. Come what may, at that instant Meagher of the Sword had become legend.8
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA, ESSEX, 2:55 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
The five remaining companies of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry cheered as the train bearing the other five companies left the station yard. Adams turned to his assembled company commanders and said, “You know what to do.” 9 They returned to their units, and in minutes the companies trotted out of Southend on the roads that would take them throughout southeastern Essex.
Dahlgren put them out of his mind to concentrate on what lay ahead for him and the rest of the 1st Mass. He knew Adams would raise enough hell to thoroughly confuse the British while he slipped through. He rode in the locomotive with a few of the Massachusetts troopers, who had been railroad men in civilian life, to watch with guns drawn over the British crew. That crew had refused to cooperate until they saw the mayor taken out behind the station house followed by that shot. Time would work for Dahlgren; it was only thirty-five miles from Southend-on-Sea to Romford, and coincidentally the train’s normal speed was thirty-five miles an hour. So one hour to Romford, bypassing the usual stops along the way with another half hour for stops between stations for his men to jump out and cut the telegraph wires that paralleled the track. They rattled through the small towns along the route stations—Benfleet, Stanford-le-Hope, Hornchurch—noting the puzzled looks of the few passengers on the platforms. Dahlgren flipped open his watch. Yes, he said to himself, on schedule.
Adams was also on a schedule, but his was not one driven by railway timetables. His five companies had broken up into twenty detachments, each with an American flag, each and every one to proclaim in every village and town that they were the vanguard of General Grant’s army of invasion, declare the inhabitants now under the military authority of the United States Army, and put every municipality under contribution. To emphasize the point, they burnt Crown property of military value, such as it was in quiet rural Essex. Before too long trails of smoke climbed into the sky following the north and westward ride of the raiders. The British would later make much of the destruction of the occasional bridge, railway station, and post office, likening it, with a very un-British exaggeration, to the swath of wanton ruin left by William the Conqueror through southern England after the battle of Hastings in 1066.
Ultimately, the Massachusetts men would reach the railway line between Colchester and Romford, twenty miles away, where they would tear up the tracks here and there. Adams with the largest detachment headed fourteen miles due north to the port of Maldon. A major railway spur connected the port with the main railway. It would provide another focus of alarm for the British, a burned port and severed railway, hopefully enough confusion to cover Dahlgren’s dash. That was the plan.
But unfortunately plans are nothing; planning is everything, and even Wilmoth’s superlative ability to gather intelligence for this operation was not omniscient. An intelligence gap was now about to pour its friction into the plan. Wilmoth had provided Dahlgren with the location of every RVC in Essex and the information that they drilled on Sundays once a month, but he could not tell them if they all drilled on the same Sunday, and if so, what Sunday of the month. Dahlgren had decided that the odds would be three to one in their favor that the RCVs would not be drilling on that Sunday even if they all had the same training schedule. He was wrong on both counts. As his train sped through Hornchurch, he did not see the 15th RVC assembled on the green and shielded by the town.
THE IRISH SEA OFF DUBLIN, 3:45 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864
Lisovsky did not allow the success of transporting Meagher and his men to Dublin to blind him to both the peril and opportunity that beckoned. His squadron was in the Irish Sea, the Mare Nostrum of the British Empire, a lair of the Royal Navy, unviolated in living memory by any enemy. That was peril, indeed, more than to cause all but the boldest to fly to safety. But what God in his mystery took away with one hand, he gave with the other. The Irish Sea teemed with shipping. The Mersey’s rushing tides sent great Liverpool’s endless stream of ships into that sea as did countless other smaller ports in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Liverpool had grown rich as the main British terminus for trade with the Americas and infamous as the builder of the Confederate commerce raiders that had sparked this war.
For the Russians there was no question of the choice between peril and opportunity. The Imperial Navy had much to avenge. Its last triumph had to been to sink the Turkish fleet in Sinope harbor in 1853, the very event that triggered the British and French declaration of war. Their fleets had driven the Russian fleet into its own naval bases where they were bottled up as at Kronstadt outside St. Petersburg or pounded to pieces as at Sevastopol in the Crimea.
Now they could feed on such seaborne wealth as no one since Drake and the sea rovers, who had tormented Spain’s new-world treasure fleets 250 years before, encountered. Lisovksy’s first catch simply sailed into his arms on course to Dublin, then another and another. White sails and columns of coal smoke speckled the sea as ships funneled into Dublin. He could simply act as a weir and the let the ships swim on their own into his trap. And that he did, netting eighteen ships in three hours until the smoke of their funeral pyres hung over the Liffey mouth like an announcement of doom that would draw every Royal Navy ship for a hundred miles. Soon he sailed directly across the sea to raid the Mersey mouth itself hoping to catch a large number of ships waiting to take the morning tide up the Mersey into Liverpool. Let the people of England’s second city watch the smoke from the ships that were their commercial life’s blood ascend into heaven. He could not think of a greater humiliation for Great Britain and for the Royal Navy.
Lisovsky was beyond amazement as his squadron darted out to sea again. Where was the Royal Navy? Its ships should have doubled their patrols almost immediately after the declaration of war had been delivered late yesterday. The entire operation, Meagher and Dahlgren’s expeditions, had all been timed to follow immediately on the heels of Russia’s declaration of war. That timing was of no importance to the Americans who were already at war, but vital for the Russians if they were to have any diplomatic standing. The Americans had acceded to their ally’s necessity. Still, he thought, it could all be the natural result of the fact that most of the Royal Navy’s bases were on the Channel coast best able to war with their traditional enemy, the French. Many of their ships were already on station now in North American waters. Yet, there could not be this much good luck.
The answer to his question lay in the Foreign Ministry dispatch box sitting in Lord Derby’s study in his country home. He had come down late for breakfast and only opened it at noon to find its only contents a letter from the ministry duty officer and the sealed message of the Russian ambassador. He was surprised in reading the letter that de Brunnow had called so late on a Saturday. It was utterly out of character with that dignified old man and the punctilious traditions of the Russian diplomatic corps.
He leaned back in his chair to read it carefully. His face turned white, and his jaw went slack. Then he shot to his feet and shouted for his private secretary. It was not long before two carriages raced out of his graveled driveway, his secret
ary heading for the nearest telegraph station while Lord Derby headed directly for London with Russia’s declaration of war.
OFF VICTORIA ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 7:52 A.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 186410
Admiral Popov had brought his entire squadron, the three corvettes, Bogatyr, Kalevala, and Rynda, and the screw clippers Gaidamak and Abrek, north to Victoria Island to trail his coat down the coast of British Columbia snaring British shipping sailing in and out of the San Juan de Fuca Strait.11 That strait was a large body of water about ninety-five miles (153 km) long, forming the principal outlet for the Georgia Strait and Puget Sound to the Pacific and the boundary between the United States and Canada. The strait wrapped around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Popov was hoping also to tempt out whatever British warships were at the Esquimalt Royal Navy Dockyard on the southern tip of Victoria Island, which bordered the strait on the north. The dockyard was only a secondary base of the Royal Navy in the Pacific; its primary base was at Valparaiso in Chile, a continent away from California.
It was a bold move, and Popov’s instructions directed him to do as much damage as he could to British and French shipping. Those instructions had calculated that war would be declared by this date and directed him to act regardless of formal notification. For his part he calculated that the richest pickings would be found in these waters. Even more important was the opportunity to inflict a defeat on the small force the Royal Navy had based at Esquimalt, two corvettes and a handful of gunboats. Such a defeat would give His Imperial Majesty the clout to demand in any treaty negotiation the annexation of this part of Canada along the Pacific to Russian America (Alaska). If the Americans had similar aspirations, their absence would deprive them of any right to the spoils.12 Rear Adm. Charles H. Bell, the commander of the American California Squadron, refused to take his major ships, the steam screw sloops, USS Lancaster and Narragansett, away from the defense of San Francisco. Already British ships had been raiding the coast off southern California and intercepting traffic off San Francisco itself. Popov had talked himself blue in the face trying to convince Bell to send those ships with him. The eleven 9-inch Dahlgren guns aboard the Lancaster and the huge 11-inch on the Narragansett would have been the heaviest guns in any fight with the British. If Popov had seen the tension between his missions of commerce raiding and decisive engagement, he did not seem bothered by it.
Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South Page 23