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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  “Indeed, I am, sir.” Dahlgren was more than surprised at the question.

  The captain took his hand in both of his and shook them vigorously. “We know about you in Sweden, hero of Gettysburg! Three times I have been stopped by the British to search my ship in the last four days. I ask them why, and they tell me they look for you. ‘And why?’ I ask. And they tell me what you have done. They are so angry they could spit nails.”

  “I am afraid I have been without news for three weeks, Captain . . .”

  “Oh, my bad manners. I am Olaf Abrahamson, captain of the Vasa. We are bound for Stockholm. Yes, the British tell me also that there is great rebellion in Ireland, but that is all I know. I take you to Stockholm with me.”

  “We cannot pay you, Captain.”

  “Pay? You go first class to Stockholm, young lion of Sweden!”

  HEADQUARTERS, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, SPOTSYLVANIA COURTHOUSE, 4:00 P.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 1864

  “Just pitch into him, Meade!” Grant was visibly impatient.

  General Meade did not like the way the General-in-Chief of the Armies had just addressed him. Meade was a good and loyal soldier but prickly about his due as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

  “I would gladly, General, but Lee gives me no opportunity.” He went on to describe how Lee would repeatedly deploy for battle and then slip away before Meade could “just pitch into him.”

  “If he doesn’t give me the slip, then I find powerful entrenchments in my way, so powerful I would never attempt an assault. How I wish Lee had never been an engineer.” That was bitter praise, for Meade himself was an engineer.

  “Sharpe tells me Lee has no more than sixty thousand men now that Longstreet is in the Peninsula. You have twice that many with another twenty-five thousand men of VI Corps on the way.18 I suggest you stop dancing to his tune. Fix him with part of your force seeming get ready to assault those entrenchments and march toward Richmond with the other. That will have him running after you for a change.”

  Grant had made the decision to plant his flag with Meade’s army. Longstreet’s descent into the Peninsula had thoroughly upset his strategic plan of Canada First. Worse yet, Lee’s Old Warhorse after his victory at Second Big Bethal had trapped what was left of Weitzel’s XVIII Corps in the defenses of Yorktown on the Peninsula and put Fortress Monroe under siege from the land. If Longstreet was not driven away, the dominos would begin to fall—Yorktown, Fortress Monroe, X Corps, and Norfolk Naval Base—fifty thousand army and naval personnel and most of the Union fleet. It would be a catastrophe of the first order. Raids on the British Isles, though they had sent Northern morale sky high, could never balance such a loss.

  Through the night, Grant and Meade worked out the next step in

  the campaign.

  They were not the only ones working through the night. Gus Fox prowled the secret facility at the Washington Navy Yard to push through the completion of the Alligator class of submersibles and equally haunted the dock to watch the USS Shark and Barracuda rush through their shakedowns in the East Branch river. Stingray and Dolphin would be ready to splash into the water the next day and be ready with God’s help in two weeks. It had taken superhuman efforts to get them this far ahead of schedule.

  The Navy Yard was more than busy. Every square foot was in active use, and not just the rebuilding efforts from the damage done by the British attack in October, but the casting of guns, repairs, and new construction of all sorts. The yard was also the home of both the army and navy’s balloon corps, or as Fox kept insisting for the latter, the Naval Aeronautical Service (NAS). The fact that the yard was also constructing the new class of attack aeroships for both services made things even more tense. No man was more navy in his soul than Gus Fox, and he naturally felt that possession was trump in any argument with the Army. He wanted all the aeroships under construction for the U.S. Navy. That put him on a collision course with Sharpe because the Army’s Balloon Corps reported to him. After it had been allowed to disband itself through command indifference after Chancellorsville, Sharpe had revived it as a reconnaissance tool for his new CIB. He assigned individual companies to support the various armies with the proviso that they worked directly for each army’s intelligence staff. These were the stationary balloons that had already been in use but larger and more capable. They were not the issue. The issue was the allocation of the new attack class.

  It was Fox who had seen the potential for naval warfare from the way a single balloon had sunk two British warships in the East Branch during the attack on Washington. He had the vision as well to see that the naval lieutenant who had gone up in the balloon with Thaddeus Lowe had been promoted to captain and given command of the new NAS. Already Will Cushing had had a reputation for daring intrepidity as well as immortal good luck. Fox hoped that good luck would rub off on the NAS.19 And it had most wonderfully. Under Cushing’s command, the new Stephen Decatur had helped sink two British blockade ships allowing the Meagher and Dahlgren expeditions to escape into the open sea. That immense cigar-shaped airship was now tethered at the Navy Yard along with the Army’s George Washington. The brand new John Paul Jones and Andrew Jackson rested next to them undergoing the last stages of construction.

  If ever there was a man eager for interservice collision it was Fox. On the other hand, if ever there was a man who could pour oil on troubled waters it was Sharpe. The Bible was full of similar words that Sharpe used to good effect on Fox, soft words to turn away the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s wrath. He had set the mood with a fine dinner, an excellent wine, and fine cigars that they were both puffing away at in the dining room at the CIB headquarters. They were the only two at the table. Fox had arrived ready to cross swords, but was now in a far better mood than when he had walked through Sharpe’s door.

  When the sliding doors shut, he flicked an ash. “All right, Sharpe. What do you want?”

  Sharpe smiled and drew a long drag on his cigar and took his time to blow a perfect smoke ring. “What I want, Mr. Assistant Secretary, is for us to avoid forcing the President to play Solomon with the balloons. Babies and balloons both do not do well when divided by a sword. And it’s tough on the mothers too.”

  Fox laughed. “Depends how tough the mother is, Sharpe.”

  “I think it depends on how smart the mother is.” He got up and pulled down a map of the Chesapeake and Virginia. “Look at the situation.” He could see Fox starting to get his back up at another attempt to put forward an army position. “Calm down, sir. You misunderstand me. The issue at hand is control of the Chesapeake. Control gives us a base for the fleet right on Jeff Davis’s doorstep. And that base means we can easily support an army moving on Richmond. Everything pivots on control of the Chesapeake.”

  Fox was surprised. “I’ve never heard an army officer speak with such sense, General. Of course, everything pivots on control of the Chesapeake.”

  “Given that, sir, we are faced with limited resources. There are not enough aeroships for both the Army and the Navy to have separate fleets.”

  Wary again, Fox said, “I will not give up the Navy’s balloons.”

  “I’m not asking you to. The Army will gladly put the George Washington and the Andrew Jackson under the Navy’s operational control in the upcoming operations to free the Chesapeake.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “For nothing.” He smiled. “Only, when Army needs are paramount, we expect the Navy’s aeroships to support ground operations. It makes no sense for the Army’s aerosphips to remain idle when the Navy has a critical need for them. It works the other way as well.”

  Fox was still wary. “And who decides whose needs are paramount?”

  “Only you and I, Mr. Assistant Secretary, only you and I. That way any knock-down-drag-outs we have over the issue will stay in this room.”

  Fox stood up and extended his hand. “Done,” he said.20

  GORHAM, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 9:22 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1864

  John Lynn,
the stationmaster of Gorham, was a responsible man. When the British had come down from Canada, he agreed to continue running the station and swore an oath to take no action injurious to the Crown. Upon returning home, he had put the hand he had raised in affirmation into the fire; it had taken it months to heal. From that day, that maimed hand had slowly begun to lay like a weight upon the railroad. Schedules were missed again and again, cargoes misplaced or sent in the wrong direction, and a wave of sabotage of the line began to plague it across the state in the thirty miles from Groveton to Shelburne growing as the weather improved. That thirty miles was the responsibility of John Lynn, not as stationmaster but as new covert head of the Coos County militia. What better place than a major locomotive yard and repair facility such as Gorham to wage war against the occupier?

  His activities had brought Sergeant Knight rapping on his door late one night. Jim McPhail was most interested in what mischief the men of New Hampshire could make to ease the advance of Sherman’s army and had sent his chief of scouts to find out. Lynn like all upper New Englanders was not one to boast. Instead, he just said, “Come with me tonight.”

  That night Lynn was riding the Portland train in the locomotive as far as Shelburne to assuage British frustration of the very problems he was organizing. It was a goods train, no passengers. At the last minute, he brought along a new assistant, a tall redheaded man. Tonight’s problem would serve to divert suspicion away from him. He looked at his watch; they should be in Shelburne in twenty minutes. “Well, ‘should’ is a subjective term,” he thought. The White Mountains hung darkly on the right; there were no farms or towns to throw out a bit of light. “It should be anytime now,” he thought. He wrapped his arm around an iron handhold and motioned Knight to do so as well. The engineer and firemen similarly braced themselves. The two Canadian militiamen guards with them did not notice. They were sitting smoking on the woodpile. It was here where the train had to slow down to make a difficult curve in the line. Then he felt it, the sudden jolt as the locomotive slipped off an unbolted rail in a high-pitched screech and plowed into the soft ground next to the track. The two Canadians went flying with the wood into the dark.

  12

  A Long Shot With a Limb in Between

  DUBLIN CASTLE, 2:11 A.M., THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1864

  Taking Dublin had been easy; feeding it was another matter. The greatest city in Ireland with over a hundred thousand people required a huge amount of food on a daily basis. Meagher’s planning had been somewhat excessive in its optimism and equally deficient in its planning for the mundane requirement of eating regularly. The English would immediately have identified it in one snide word what they considered an Irish trait—fecklessness.

  The problem of feeding the city was compounded by the season; crops were still being sown, not harvested. What stocks remained were from last year’s harvest, and, of course, the Royal Navy slammed the door shut on importation with its blockade. But then there was the potato. Blight-resistant varieties had returned the potato to its central place in the Irish diet, and it stored well and for up to a year in the straw-lined pits of the country people or even in the ground. It was also difficult for a government tax collector or army requisition to snatch away, but it might be bought or even donated if the owner were sure which way the wind blew now. Meagher sent out foraging parties with British gold looted from the Lord Lieutenant’s funds to encourage the surrounding countryside to bring their produce into the city.

  The countryside was in a chaos spreading throughout the island. News of Tallaght had run through the island shattering Royal authority except for Ulster where the Protestant Supremacy was ensured by a hardheaded majority. The fence sitters started jumping. Unhappily for Meagher, the chief fence sitter was Paul Cullen, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, and he was not budging. He had condemned Fenianism as a secret society, forbidden to good Catholics, and he and the other Irish bishops had encouraged the pope to condemn it as well. It was a matter of principle from which he would not retreat. To it he added the argument that the church, as much as it wished Ireland to be free, could not condone rebellion against lawful authority that would consume the lives of countless innocent people and bring down the wrath of the English on the Catholics of Ireland and their church. Without the lead of their parish priests, many of the fence sitters would stay where they were.1

  Still, thousands of recruits poured into Dublin in the week after Tallaght from the surrounding counties. Then they suddenly stopped coming. Gen. Scarlett may have been down, but he was not out. He threw his cavalry around Dublin to cut it off from all contact with the rest of the island. Foraging parties from the city were repeatedly attacked, until they required a whole regiment as escort. Even then every attempt was like running a bloody gauntlet in order to bring back a pitiful sustenance.

  The cordon was getting thicker as British reinforcements poured into Ireland. Western England and Scotland were stripped of their regular garrisons followed by Aldershot and the channel port garrisons that had already not shipped off for North America: nine infantry and seven cavalry regiments plus fifty-four RVCs, almost sixty thousand men. Another forty RVCs were being prepared to reinforce them if necessary.2

  The RVCs closest to the great embarkation ports came from their own or adjacent counties; the green-clad volunteers of Cheshire and Lancashire in England and Flintshire in Wales boarded ships in Liverpool on the Mersey, and those from Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, and Lanarkshire in Scotland assembled in Glasgow on the Clyde.3

  For Capt. Henry Hay Norie, commanding 9th Company, Ayrshire RVC, soldiering had become all too real. He had left a wife and newborn in the care of his in-laws as he nervously shepherded his men to their assembly point, entrained for Glasgow, and then the shipping out for Ireland. The 9th Company was the type usually found in a rich Lowland agricultural country like Ayrshire. It was an independent company essentially since there were not enough men in any one locality to form an entire RVC. The 9th and thirteen other companies were scattered over the rich coastal potato and berry fields and in the rugged Galloway Hills.

  Norie was a good sort, the gentleman farmer who volunteered to command the company when it was formed in his district a few years before during the war scare with the French. There was no thirst for military glory or peacocking around in his uniform. Rather, it was an obligation of his social position, something a gentleman would naturally lead. With that obligation was also a middle class conscientiousness to his duty that made for a solid unit. He was considered a fair man who other men took their quarrels to for an honest resolution and hands shaken afterward. His seventy-three men were of the middling social set, well-off enough to buy their own uniform, equipment, and rifle. There were some small farmers and farm workers whose expenses had been paid by subscription that Norie had encouraged and been the first to contribute to. By and large, they were men of good Presbyterian sense, education, and seriousness. Norie had one hope—that he would bring them all back home.

  These columns in scarlet and green were not just reinforcements for Scarlett’s force around Dublin. The cavalry especially fanned out throughout the island, the most immediate and impressive expression of British might followed by a large number of RVCs. Disraeli had insisted that a full-blown rising be prevented at all costs, by a great show of force to remind the country of the power of the government and to bring back as many as possible to their allegiance and remind the rest that they had made the right choice by taking no action. The scarlet-clad regular infantry regiments were reserved for the capture of Dublin itself.

  Disraeli was able in a widely and applauded reported speech to the House to state that “this Kingdom has not only sent a mighty expeditionary force to North America, but has sown the dragons teeth in its warlike English soil to summon a mighty host for Ireland, a host greater than was sent to the Crimea at which the world then marveled.” Disraeli understood morale.4

  HAMPTON ROADS, 2:35 A.M., SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 1864

  Flashes of artillery
and the fiery arcs of mortars from Longstreet’s siege train pummeling Fortress Monroe from the land lit the night sky. By day the Royal Navy’s Great Armament pounded it from the sea, giving the garrison no rest. This night, the view from Hampton Roads showed the fort silhouetted against the flames of burning barracks and clouds of smoke with the crack and thump of artillery racing over the water. It was an unforgettable sight for the boat’s captain, Lt. Josiah Mason, as he watched from the observation hatch of the USS Shark as it steamed semi-submersed past the fort. He ducked back down inside the hull and said, “Sir, you must come up and see this!” Lieutenant Colonel Wilmoth climbed up the ladder to take in the fireworks. The light flickered across his awestruck face. Behind him by two hundred yards similarly transfixed was the captain of the Barracuda.

  So it was a question of who was more surprised when Shark ran into a British longboat looming out of the dark. The longboat was lifted half out of the water, spilling its crew of tars and jollies into the water. One man fell right onto the hatch, knocking Wilmoth down the ladder and himself falling in after. The man was dazed from landing headfirst onto the metal deck. A sailor whacked him alongside the head with a wrench for good measure. It was a Royal Marine officer.

  Mason shouted for full speed and then scrambled back up the ladder. He was just in time to give the order to put the boat hard to starboard to avoid another collision. He hoped Barracuda would avoid what appeared to be dozens of boats heading to the fort. The boat’s engine soon distanced Shark from the boats, and in fifteen more minutes the darkened water battery with its great Rodman guns could be made out against the red glow from inside the fort. A sentry’s shot pinged off the hull next to him as he shouted, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! U.S. Navy!”

  A bullet grazed his sleeve and another splashed in the water. He heard a cacophony of voices shouting, “Shoot it!” and “Hold your fire!” all at the same time. Cutting through the confusion a command voice bellowed, “Silence!” And there was silence. Stentor himself could not have done it better. “What the hell are you, Navy?” Mason could see an officer standing on the scarred parapet.