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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  As the French army died, the captain of the French steamer pushed his boilers beyond the danger point to take Bazaine up river. With every mile the steamer’s captain marveled at the absence of American ships and rejoiced at his good fortune. He would have not been so elated had he known that they were concentrated at Baton Rouge assisting in the destruction of the French army. As for Bazaine, he was more than elated. He was convinced that his star was still strong and it would carry him to his army in time. A few miles below Baton Rouge, that run of luck ended with the sighting of that pall of smoke that signaled a battle ashore followed by an American ironclad coming downriver. Bazaine ordered the captain to put him ashore even if it meant running the steamer aground, and that was just what it took. He jumped his horse into the water and struggled ashore, put his spurs to it, and galloped north. It was not too long before he encountered the chasseurs fleeing the fall of the city. They were spent men, drained of courage. They followed him reluctantly but peeled away a few at a time till he rode alone. Still he rode on.

  KENNER, LOUISIANA, 8:25 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 1864

  This small town on the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad was just settling into bed when the trains came down from Ponchatoula one after another and sped south the eight miles to the Crescent City. Ponchatoula had fallen six days before, but the Confederates had had no direct word other than the broad hint that none of the trains they had sent north had returned and that the telegraph had gone dead. The railroad ran on a raised bed through thirty-five miles of swamp with lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas on either side, a rather effective barrier to communications.4

  It had occurred to Grierson after the capture of Ponchatoula now that he was driving the French back to Baton Rouge that the Corps d’Afrique would be unemployed. He was a firm believer that when offensive operations were underway, no one should be sitting on his hands. As a result the men of the corps filled the railcars speeding through Kenner, all five thousand of them. A half hour later they erupted from those cars into the main railroad station in New Orleans. The city fell as quickly as it had to Admiral Farragut’s fleet in April 1862. New Orleans was profoundly undefensible. It had no advantages of ground and instead possessed the ruinous disadvantage being at sea level. The Confederate brigade and French regiment in garrison were caught in their barracks and camps able to offer only a brief though spirited fight.5

  Clio Dulaine and Pryce Lewis crawled out of bed that next morning after a wild night celebrating the fall of the city to the thunder of guns. Clio threw open the French doors to the wrought-iron balcony to see the Stars and Stripes waving over city hall once again as the libres filled the streets in a spontaneous festival that put Mardi Gras to shame.6

  THE DOGGER BANKS, 8:10 A.M., MONDAY, APRIL 11, 1864

  A fishing smack drifted through the fog that blanketed the sea. A rich fishery of cod and herring sixty-two miles off the eastern coast of England, the Dogger Banks covered 6,800 shallow square miles and ran 161 miles north-south and fifty-nine east-west in the middle of the North Sea.7 It was into this that Dahlgren had steered their stolen boat in order to hide in plain sight. The banks were heavily fished by large numbers of British trawlers and among them he calculated the smack would arouse no curiosity.

  The smack had led a double life, a legitimate fishing boat to any inspector and a smuggler by night. Woolen sweaters and slickers found onboard gave them an unobtrusive look as they slipped eastward through the marshes and out into the North Sea on a late tide with falling darkness to hide them from the Royal Navy patrols. Luckily those patrols had thinned as the British concentrated their warships to isolate Ireland.

  Although they shared no language, Dahlgren and Feodor worked wordlessly together in the language of small boats. Collins’s time was devoted to whatever unskilled help Dahlgren needed but mostly to tending Rimsky-Korsakov, whose wound was getting worse. The rations they had found aboard had lasted until the day before, and the water would run out in only another day or two. Luckily the fog was so thick that it seemed to congeal on the skin and run down the face. Simply sticking out the tongue would refresh a man, but ultimately it could do little more. The fog that acted like a cloak of invisibility also meant that the wind was still. They drifted among the trawlers, only occasionally seeing a vapor-blurred lantern and then a shrouded shape loom out of the fog.

  Dahlgren had hoped to slip through the British trawlers in the Banks and then dash for the entrance to the Baltic. His goal ultimate was St. Petersburg, the only allied port in Europe. From the Russian capital he could get back into the war, and Kolya could return the Imperial colors in his charge. Other ports such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Copenhagen were closer and safer but would mean he would be interned to sit out the war. But as Kolya sickened, it became clear that he would be dead before they ever reached the eastern Baltic. Already he was delirious. In any case, the rest of them would be dead of hunger and thirst shortly thereafter.

  Those cheerful thoughts were cut off by the low eerie moan of a foghorn and the sound of a paddle wheel slowly churning water. Dahlgren instantly went on guard. Collins and Feodor froze. Collins leaned over and put his hand over Kolya’s mouth. The fishing trawlers were all sail-powered; what was coming near was not a fisherman. The slap-slap of the paddle wheel grew nearer. The foghorn sounded its fugue warning, low and deep, ghostlike. The slap-slap drew nearer. There was nothing they could do; the air was still as the sound came on them. The ship appeared dimly through the fog, a bare glimpse, its gun ports open, its great encased paddle wheel, cascading with water, then was swallowed up by the fog again. Another low rumble of its horn told them it was steaming away.

  HEADQUARTERS, HER MAJESTY’S FORCES IN NORTH AMERICA, MONTREAL, 1:11 P.M., TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1864

  Sharpe may have disrupted the British spy ring in Washington, but Wolseley’s agents were thickly spread across the entire Canadian-American border. He did not have to have a transcript of the American decision to knock the British out of Canada to conclude what was coming. Detailed information of the concentration of the Army of the Hudson at Kennebunk told him all he needed to know. Hope Grant listened carefully to all of this and merely grunted, “Of course, that’s what any fool would do.”

  He hobbled along on his cane and sat in a sunny window to gaze out at the river below. His wound still pained him, though he would not say a word. “Doyle will be lucky to delay Sherman. Damned railway.” The Americans were finally using their numbers where it would count. Lt. Gen. Sir Hastings Doyle, who had finally taken Portland, had fewer than fifteen thousand men. Sherman would be coming at him with sixty thousand or more. Even that instinctive sense of British superiority blanched at those odds. They would not be facing savages armed with sharpened mangos either.

  The operational problem was not just one of numbers. Unless Portland and the area immediately to the south could be defended, it would not matter if Doyle was able to delay Sherman’s drive north. The loss of the railway would be fatal, and the railway ran through Portland up the Maine-Vermont border to Quebec A decisive battle would have to be fought to save the railway south of Portland. Grant just sat in the sun and thought. An occasional word or grunt was all Wolseley could hear.

  HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, BRANDY STATION, VIRGINIA, 9:20 A.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 1864

  Ever since Babcock’s scouts had begun to bring him information on the movement of Longstreet’s corps, Meade rejoiced at the opening to strike Lee with one-third of the Army of Northern Virginia absent. He did more than rejoice. He ordered the Army of the Potomac to be ready to move. Lee represented not just the main army of the Rebellion and not just a great general whose reputation was enough to unnerve an enemy. For Meade, Lee was the source of his mortification. Lee had oh-so-cleverly humbugged him last year to slip past him and attack Washington. The nation’s capital had come within an ace of falling to the combined British-Confederate attack. Lincoln had withstood tremendous political pressure to relieve him. He had not fo
rgotten Gettysburg. Meade’s reputation, an officer’s most precious possession, now depended on vindicating Lincoln’s faith in him.

  That meant crushing Lee. It was one thing, however to withstand Lee’s hammer blows at Gettysburg and entirely another to smash him in a battle of maneuver. If ever there was a man determined to try, it was Meade. The reequipment of half of his infantry with Spencers and the incorporation of dozens of Gatlings was an advantage he was eager to employ.

  The telegram from Grant that morning was all he needed to order the army to march toward Lee, who was concentrated at Gordonsville. The grass was not yet high enough to graze the tens of thousands of horses and mules of the army. Yet he calculated that it was not high enough to feed Lee’s animals either. Instead, he emptied every wagon that carried tents or personal property to fill them with fodder.

  Lee for his part had had a healthy respect for Meade even before Gettysburg, and the battle had only certified it.8 Yet, he thought he could avoid a pitched battle and delay Meade by maneuver and entrenchment long enough for Longstreet to snap the supply lines that sustained the Federals in the James Peninsula and at Norfolk. Lee was confident. For the first time in the war, his men were well-clothed, well-shod, and well-fed. There was an abundance of everything now that an army could want, and all made in England or France. That included several batteries of excellent breech-loading Whitworth rifled guns whose accuracy at long range was legend. Gone were the days when a British visitor like Wolseley would stare open-mouthed at a Confederate division marching past with the seat out of hundreds of pair of trousers. Lee had said that was no problem since the enemy never saw that part of them. The despondent war-weariness that had settled over his army after Gettysburg had been replaced with a sense of optimism that the war was now winnable with the British and French on their side.

  YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA, 8:20 A.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 1864

  The alert from Sharpe that Longstreet was on the way never reached Baldy Smith, who had only assumed command of the new Army of the James in the last few days. The 9th Virginia Cavalry, whose specialty was scouting and raiding, had cut the tenuous Union communications across the Northern Neck. Longsreet’s First Corps sped by train from Gordonsville to Richmond and then force marched to Yorktown on the James Peninsula, its advance guard actually passing on the road one of Van Lew’s messengers trying to get through Union lines.

  Smith had been played a very bad hand. His Army of the James included the X and XVIII Corps, all very fine on paper, but the troops for them had not been able to be gathered into the planned order-of-battle because the British controlled the waterways of the bay and the rivers that would have allowed for their distribution. Most troops were in the Plymouth-Norfolk area across the James River from Fortress Monroe. Most of the regiments evacuated from enclaves on the coasts of North and South Carolina had put in there along with the North and South Atlantic Blockading Squadrons. The X Corps and most of the troops intended for XVIII Corps crowded into the area, numbering over forty thousand men.

  Worse off was XVIII Corps, only recently under the command of Maj. Gen. Godfrey Weitzel. Another of the U.S. Army’s superb engineers, Weitzel had been rewarded with corps command for his accomplishments as chief engineer of the Army of the James. Now it was the very defenses he had constructed that bared Longstreet’s way. Those defenses consisted of the remodeled Confederate fort at Yorktown on the York River and the other fortifications that stretched across the three miles across the peninsula all manned by only one brigade. At Newport News on the James there was a brigade and some cavalry and artillery. The garrison of Fortress Monroe was barely two thousand men, mostly heavy artillery, who would be no use in the field. Outside the Fortress itself in the vicinity of the ruined town of Hamilton were the five thousand men of two brigades from the force that had been besieging Charleston when the war began.

  Of all the forces evacuated with the blockading squadrons, these two brigades had been landed on the James Peninsula instead of Norfolk. One brigade was made up of four regiments of hard men from New Hampshire and Maine commanded by Col. Thomas G. Stevenson. The other could not have been more different. Commanded by Col. James Montgomery, it consisted of the 54th Massachusetts and 3rd and 34th U.S. Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.).9 The first two regiments had been raised from free men of color in Boston and Philadelphia. The last had been recruited from liberated slaves in South Carolina. Montgomery had one of the most unsavory reputations in the army. A Kansas Jayhawker, he was described as “a sincere, if unscrupulous, antislavery zealot.”10 He had burnt undefended Southern towns, stating “that the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.” He had raised the 34th from escaped slaves, and discipline had never been strict, not much called for in the burning of defenseless plantations and towns and in brushes with state militia.11

  Bivouacked near the ruins of Hamilton, Montgomery’s regiments were in the midst of the more than fifteen thousand contrabands from nearby areas of Virginia, most of the adults employed as a workforce for the army. The hallelujahs rang to the heavens when they beheld so many black men smartly wearing Union blue. Montgomery’s regiments marched north to join Weitzel’s single brigade at Yorktown, for upon assuming command, the corps commander had ordered all three brigades forward. With them was the 1st U.S. Colored Cavalry Regiment. It had recently been formed, but had been recruited from veteran infantry and the so-called “outlaw negroes” who had roamed the swamps of eastern Virginia and North Carolina, men who had already freed themselves.12

  Smith had no inkling of the approach of the mighty First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, his attention was now riveted by the renewed assault by the Royal Navy on Fortress Monroe. He watched awestruck as the heavily armored gunboats, mortar vessels, and floating batteries of the Great Armament poured shot and shell at the granite walls of the fort and lobed the huge 36-inch mortar shells, inside. turning barracks, hospitals, repair shops into a shambles.13

  The gun crews cheered as 15-inch shot from the giant Rodman guns in the fort’s casemates spat their 440-pound shot to hole a number of those same batteries. One was already sinking and another floating away on fire as its exploding ammunition threw debris high into the air. The British fire hardly slackened; there were dozens of those vessels. Behind them steamed frigates, and especially the great broadside ironclads, HMS Warrior and Defiance in case the surviving U.S. Navy’s monitors dared come out and fight again and risk being “Bazelgetted” again as the expression came to be.

  Smith was no longer a witness to this grand spectacle. He had collapsed inside the casemate from which he was watching the battle. His staff rushed to him as he shivered and writhed on the stone floor, a cold, clammy feel to his skin. One of them said, “It’s the malaria again.” They made him as comfortable as they could; to move him was to run the deadly risk of crossing the mortar-swept central yard of the fort. Nor did anyone think to inform the commander of the XVIII Corps that he, as senior officer of the Army of the James, was now in command of the army.

  WARWICK COURTHOUSE, VIRGINIA, 9:20 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 1864

  Weitzel, even if he had known of his succession to the command, had enough to do for at that moment Longstreet fell on the defenses of the peninsula with two of his divisions. It was a magnificent show, but little more than that, for the Confederate field artillery was not all that effective against substantial earthworks. It was enough, though, for Longstreet’s purpose—to fix the enemy’s attention on his front. Just by sitting on the peninsula, he severed Union resupply of both Fortress Monroe and Norfolk.

  A flotilla of barges led by Confederate gunboats came down the James and landed just below the outlet of the Warwick River near the Warwick (County) Courthouse. For the first time in almost three years, the Confederates no longer had to fear the superior U.S. Navy presence on the James. A shortage of coal kept the gunboats that normally patrolled the river moored at the N
orfolk Navy Yard. Hood’s old division, now commanded by Maj. Gen. Charles W. Field, poured ashore and struck east for the road that led to Fortress Monroe. A hard-fighting, able man, Fields wasted no time. It was twelve miles to Hampton, the town outside Fortress Monroe. As he rode to the head of the column, he shouted to each regiment, “March on, boys! March on!”

  Colonels Montgomery and Stevens were at the same time also urging their men forward on the same road but going north. The brigade from Newport News was taking a parallel road at the same time. Eight thousand Union and Ten thousand Confederate troops were about to collide, to each other’s total surprise. This was the classic meeting engagement in which the side that attacks first and aggressively would usually win by seizing the moral ascendancy. That rule was about to be modified by circumstances. The point of collision was in three-mile strip of wooded country cut by swamps and waterways with almost no room for maneuver. It was near one of the first skirmishes of the war in 1861 at Big Bethal.

  It turned ugly with the first shots. The 1st Texas of the famed Texas Brigade was in the lead and marching to a fight, though they did not expect it for another six miles. The lead Union regiment was the 34th U.S.C.T. with Colonel Montgomery riding at its head, the senior officer. A quick-witted Texan’s bullet punched a hole in his forehead.

  The Texans responded to the sight of black troops with a burst of rage that drove their bayonet charge deep into the ranks of Montgomery’s men. The 34th, both ill-disciplined and surprised, panicked and broke with the Texans pursuing them with no-quarter. Behind them the 54th formed across the road at the opening sound of gunfire. In minutes fugitives from the 34th were pushing through their ranks. The Texans’ bayonets were within yards of them when the 54th fired. Stunned by the point-blank fire, the Texans hesitated. The 54th charged and drove them back upon 4th Texas, which in turn fired and stopped the Union attack. Now both sides began to try to find the enemy’s flanks by extending their lines with new regiments on either side of the road in the woods as they came up. They quickly found swamps on either flank, leaving a gap of barely a quarter mile. So it became a slugging match. The 3rd U.S.C.T. held the 54th’s right while Brigadier General Stevens came up to assume command of the fight and feed his own regiments to the left. A few miles to the west, the Newport News brigade ran into a Confederate brigade also trying to use that parallel road. They too were also hemmed in by the woods, waterways, and swamps and could only crowd together to pound away at each other. The Second Battle of Big Bethal in its first minutes had surpassed the butcher’s bill of the 1861 skirmish. Neither side could gain an advantage as they went on killing. Luckily for the 1st Colored Cavalry, they could take no part in what was an infantry donnybrook. Stevens threw them out on his far right flank, beyond the natural obstacles, to cover a wide expanse of open fields lest the Confederates attempt to flank the Union brigades. As senior officer on the field, he also assumed control of the Newport News Brigade fighting to the east and ordered its 3rd New York Cavalry to reinforce the 1st Colored on his open flank.