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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut flew his pennant from the Dictator. At sixty-three years of age, Farragut had spent fifty-three of them in the navy. His father was a merchant captain from the Spanish island of Minorca and fought for the Patriots in the Revolution. On his death, his good friend, the future naval hero, David Porter, adopted the seven-year-old boy. By age nine, Farragut was a midshipman, and by eleven had seen action in the War of 1812. At age twelve he commanded a prize crew. By the start of the Civil War, if any man was navy to the bone, it was Davey Farragut, whose reputation among the old salts of the fleet was second to none. He proved that by boldly fighting his way past the river forts guarding the approach to New Orleans and capturing the city in April 1862. His support of Grant in the Vicksburg campaign was essential to that victory.

  Men followed him because he was fearless, innovative, and possessed an unerring good sense for the dynamism of naval combat and for getting the best out of his men. One story that made its way around the fleet had him on his quarterdeck in the attack on Port Hudson in March 1863 unbraiding Lt. Winfield Scott Schley. “Captain, you begin early in your life to disobey orders. Did you not see the signal flying for near an hour to withdraw from action? . . . I want none of this Nelson business in my squadron.” In Farragut’s cabin later, he said to Schley, “I have censured you, sir, on my quarterdeck, for what appeared to be a disregard of my orders. I desire now to commend you and your officers and men for doing what you believe right under the circumstances. Do it again whenever in your judgment it is necessary to carry out your conception of duty.”19

  As the lines had been cast off Dictator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a courier had rushed up to the ship and leapt on board. He delivered a telegram from the President. Fearing some reverse of plans, Farragut opened it, only to smile. It read: “Fair seas and following winds. A. Lincoln.”

  FORD’S THEATER, WASHINGTON, DC, 3:22 P.M., MONDAY, MAY 2, 1864

  Booth knocked on the stage door. He waited and knocked again, this time rapping on the door with the silver end of his walking stick. He turned to Harney, who was dressed as a day laborer, and smiled confidently. The man began to look nervous. Booth said, “I told you not to worry. Monday is not a performance day. Everyone else’s is resting from Sundays performances. We will find very few people here today.”

  Just then the door opened, and the old doorkeeper, John Peanut, named for the snacks he sold during performances, looked out. “Oh, Mr. Booth is it?”

  “Peanut, I have a trunk for my dressing room.” Peanut glanced down at the large leather-bound trunk on the ground and the workman standing by it. He would normally have offered to help, but Booth was known to have no use for little people. Even though a tip was customary, he said nothing but only held the door open.

  Harney heaved the trunk to his shoulder and followed Booth inside where Booth asked the old man, “Anyone else here today, Peanut?”

  “No, Mr. Booth. Mr. Ford was here earlier, but he went home.” Without another word Booth walked down the hall to the dressing rooms. Peanut shuffled off to tend to his sweeping.20

  As soon as he was gone, Booth changed direction to the backstage. He lit a lamp, lifted the ring of a trap door, and descended. Putting the lamp on the hard-packed dirt floor, he reached up as Harney slid the trunk down to him. After Harney followed, Booth led the way with the lamp to the end of the passage that curved a bit after reaching where stage right would have been. Booth pointed to the ceiling. “Up there is the presidential box where the tyrant will be sitting. Plant your device there.”

  Harney retrieved the trunk and took out his bomb, filled with fifty pounds of gunpowder. He placed the bomb on top of a brick wall on which oak beams for ceiling rested, fitting just between the beams. “The wall will force the explosion upward.”

  “Just where we want it.” said Booth.

  Harney dusted off his hands, took one last look at his handiwork. He connected the clockwork timer that would trigger the detonation to the bomb. “Now, don’t forget to set the timer as I showed you. You should have plenty of time to get out after you set it.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed, man.” He laughed softly. “You see, this passage leads to another trap door and runs to the Star Saloon next door. I will have time to set it and be leaning over the bar savoring good Southern bourbon when the bomb blows King Lincoln to hell.”21

  ENTRANCE TO CHESAPEAKE BAY, 3:44 P.M., TUESDAY, MAY 3, 1864

  It was with just such fair seas and following winds that Adm. James Hope and his iron fleet had crossed the Atlantic and now entered America’s great waterway. Hope immediately assumed command of all Royal Navy forces operating in the bay and meet with Longstreet to coordinate the reduction of Fortress Monroe. Hope offered the use of more heavy mortars, siege guns, and several companies of Royal Engineers (sappers) that had arrived in a convoy of transports. Longstreet eagerly accepted.

  Since the British were in such a giving mood, he was not shy in suggesting other ways they could be of assistance. Two days later, a large British naval force and transports steamed up the bay past the mouth of the Rappahannock and turned into the Potomac River. Washington panicked as the word spread that the Royal Navy was again attacking the capital. A steady stream of carriages and packed trains went north past large areas of the city that were still mounds of rubble and ashes.

  Lincoln sauntered over to the telegraph office at the CIB right across Lafayette Circle from the White House. The War Department’s telegraph office would be haunted by Stanton, whose tendency to alarm was unsettling. Lincoln found Sharpe’s offices to be island of calm and information. “Well, boys,” he said as he eased himself into the stuffed chair that Sharpe had reserved for him, “What have Jeffy D. and Bobby Lee put Her Majesty’s navy up to this time?”22

  Sharpe was scanning the latest telegram. He looked puzzled. “It seems that they are not coming up the river; they have stopped at its mouth opposite Point Lookout.” Then he just said, “Damn!”

  It was Lincoln’s turn to look puzzled.

  Point Lookout was the southern tip of Maryland’s St. Mary’s County. It was also the location of Camp Hoffman, the largest POW camp in the Union. Established after Gettysburg to confine the more than five thousand unwounded Confederate prisoners taken in that battle, it covered thirty acres barely five feet above sea level. By this time, the number of prisoners had swollen to more than ten thousand.23 These men were a resource more precious than gold to the Confederacy. The flood of British equipment and supplies that had reoutfitted the Confederate forces could only go so far. What the South needed was men. She had scrapped the bottom of the manpower barrel already, and British arms and uniforms were no use if there were no men to use them. There were indeed men, many tens of thousands, but they were POWs in the North. Since U.S. Grant had suspended the cartel that exchanged prisoners, the steady return of released men to the armies had come to a stop.

  The Royal Navy was doing something about that. Its guns had leveled the small forts around the POW camp and the camp for the Union guard regiments. Their ships boldly sailed up to the docks to threaten further mayhem as transports unloaded Confederate infantry. The stockades were ringing with the rebel yell, and even before their rescuers could free them, the men inside burst out through the gates and tore the plank walls apart with their bare hands. Their guards had fled.

  Capt. Cowper Coles was given the honor of taking HMS Prince Albert a few miles up the river to trail the Royal Navy’s coat in front of Washington. He went a little further and lobbed a few shells at Fort Washington a few miles south of Alexandria on the Maryland side of the river. Then with a triumphant shriek of the ship’s steam whistle, she turned her backside to the American capital.24

  13

  Running the Roads

  THE LINCOLN REDOUBT, DUBLIN, 12:35 A.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  Meagher passed not too steadily along the parapet of the great redoubt named for the American president. He was trying to encourage his boys as the British ar
tillery flared through the early morning darkness with an endless rain of shells. Behind him trailed Brigadier General Kelly and Sergeant Major Wright. Kelly could tell that it was not the impact of the shells that made Meagher sway so. He turned to Wright and grabbed him by the arm, “For God’s sake, Sergeant Major, get him back to the castle.”

  Meagher had grandly rejected the seductively generous terms of surrender and declared he would fight on for a free Ireland. Napier had promptly put Dublin under close siege. “Not so much as a mouse shall get in or out of Dublin,” he had said. Briefly that had worked for Meagher and his Fenian council, who in the absence of contradictory information, were able to speak boldly of how the entire island had risen and an army of volunteers was massing to break the siege. But Disraeli’s policy of pacification was strangling the rebellion. It was not long before the emptiness of those words began to seep into the mind of every man.

  Kelly had not even that long to come to the awful conclusion that the game was up. After Tallaght his spirits had soared like everyone else, but when the volunteers stopped coming, and the British threw down heavy siege, he recognized the inevitable. That same hopelessness had not been lost on Meagher, who found solace in the bottle, and on the Fenian council, which fed its doubt with endless sterile argument as if words alone had magic. For all that Kelly had been the soul of the defense. A man of a valiant but practical nature who had the love of his “brave byes,” he prowled the defenses, buoying morale and seeing with that unseen eye the weak and vulnerable points. He also seemed to have the knack of being on the spot to commit his reserve whenever the British attempted an assault.

  For their part, the British were unable to smash their way into the city. There had been great reluctance to damage the architectural gem that was Dublin. Disreali had been quite clear in his instructions to Napier: “We cannot be put in the position of saving Dublin by destroying it.” Such savagery would undermine the pacification policy and damage British prestige in Europe, something that had already suffered immensely by the Dahlgren Raid and the fall of Dublin. Disraeli had made it quite clear that a negotiated surrender was the result the government wanted. So Napier’s gunners were constrained to target only the makeshift earthen defenses of the city. Within that constraint, though, they were accurate and deadly. Hunger was also working for them. Rations had been cut and cut again for the men, and the civilian population was getting desperate.

  Napier did more than passively let hunger do its work but actively used it to affect the enemy’s morale by proclaiming that any civilian in Dublin would be escorted through the lines and fed. Meagher had clutched at the opportunity to rid himself of hungry mouths, and the streets were filled with people fleeing the city. Napier ensured that field kitchens lavishly fed the refugees in sight of the defenders.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC, 9:22 A.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  As soon as Lincoln left the White House he tipped his hat to the squad of Sharpe’s 20th New York that served as his escort whenever he walked nearby to either the War Department or CIB. If he was going any distance by carriage a platoon of Sharpe’s 3rd Indiana Cavalry rode with him sabers drawn. Sharpe and the entire cabinet had insisted after the assassination attempt during the battle of Washington last October. Normally, he would have had a joke or story to tell the boys, but today he was clearly preoccupied. “Let’s go see Mr. Stanton, boys,” was all he said.

  Today it would all be coming together. The armies and the fleet were all on the move from Maine to Virginia. Only yesterday morning had the awful news of the fall of San Francisco to the British arrived. The stock market had crashed because of the loss of the enormous gold reserves of California. Overnight the Treasury could not sell a single bond. To prove the old wives’ tale that disasters came in threes, Sharpe had just informed him that newspapers smuggled out of Canada were confirming with undisguised glee the dispatch of Britain’s entire ironclad fleet to the Chesapeake. That would be the one thing that could wreck the joint effort to regain control of the bay. Then events would just drift the country into defeat. National morale was an exhaustible quality, as was the stockpile of niter. He did not think it could survive another severe setback.

  His shoulders sagged with the weight of the world. It was not just this crisis, but the relentless tide of them in his presidency and its accumulated weariness that bore down on him so. The war had laid more than the burden of responsibility on him. It had taken his darling boy Willy of typhoid two years ago. He had found in Sharpe an open heart and had said to him, “Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead? Since Willie’s death, I catch myself every day involuntarily talking with him as if he were with me.”1 This glimpse into the dark place in Lincoln’s soul where ghosts flitted about had taken Sharpe aback. Had all the storms of the last few years seriously weakened the roots of this oak of a man? If he gave way, the nation would topple with him. He had discussed this with Lincoln’s devoted secretaries, John Hay and John Nickolay, both of whom had similar worries.

  In an exercise of will, Lincoln forced himself to think of what lay on the credit side of the ledger of war without which this new crisis would have swamped the country already. Chief among them was the creation of a national intelligence service and the appointment of George Sharpe to lead it. The man and his organization proved to be what future generations would call a combat multiplier, doubling the strength of the armed forces by providing the intelligence that allowed for their most efficient use. Efficiency and innovation were the pillars of the reorganization of defense production under the guidance of the War Production Board and its chief, that little Scotch devil, Andrew Carnegie. Because of these reforms, repeating weapons in great numbers were reaching the armies and production of submersibles, aerosphips, and ironclads were bearing fruit. The Army had delivered two victories in the field—driving back the British attack in Upstate New York and destroying the French army in Louisiana. The latter had bonus effects of seriously weakening the prestige of the Louis Napoleon and French arms and calling into question the strength of his regime itself. Defeat was a great sower of doubt.

  Across the Atlantic, Disraeli was thinking through a similar calculation. He had ridden to power on a drumbeat of defeats unparalleled in British history of the last three hundred years. He did not bear the blame for them, but he thereby assumed the responsibility to set things right. Instead, more blows had fallen on the British Empire in the last month. The defeats in October had been on the distant battlefields of empire. Those of this April had struck at the center of British power. He had to admit that the raid into Essex was brilliant by spreading panic that an American army of invasion was about to descend on London. That and the Russian squadron savaging commerce in the Irish Sea had struck at British prestige and that unique English sense of invulnerability. The fall of Dublin had been more dangerously concrete and followed by the disaster at Tallaght, the first defeat of British arms in Ireland since Cromwell’s time. For a few terrible weeks, it seemed the whole island would burst into flames. Then had come the news he was dreading most—the Russian declaration of war.

  Although the British had the wealth of empire to finance the war, it did not mean that the cost would be borne easily. American commerce raiders had seriously panicked British shipping all the way from the Indian Ocean to the South China Seas. Insurance rates by Lloyds had skyrocketed, especially after the Russian commerce raiding in the Irish Sea and the ease with which the Americans had made two serious landings in the British Isles. The loss of the enormous American market was compounded by the new loss of the Russian market as well. These two countries were also the major suppliers of grain to both Britain and most of the rest of Europe.2 The wheat supply from Canada was now tenuous at best. The loss of access to foreign grain had been a major cause of the huge death toll in Ireland during the famine. Bad harvests in Russia were compounded by the Europeans buying up the American surplus first, leaving none for London when it realized the extent of the catastrophe.

&nbs
p; Now with Russia’s entry into the war, Britain was caught between two stools. The conflict in North America was such that it could not be fought on the cheap. It was all or nothing. Canada hung in the balance. With Russia opening a theater almost half the planet away, India now would also hang in the balance. Canada had three million loyal British subjects, blood of British blood, and bone of British bone. To abandon them would make Britain’s reputation stink for hundreds of years and place it on a par with Bourbon France that had abandoned the Quebecois in 1763. India, on the other hand, was the treasure chest of the empire. Lose Canada, and the Empire would survive; lose India, and it would collapse. It made Solomon’s judgment sound easy.

  Disraeli found himself paying special attention to the growing voices demanding an end to the war. They were resonating off the deep animosity to slavery in the British public. Despite Disraeli’s private urging of Jefferson Davis to begin to do away with the South’s peculiar institution, the Confederate president was resistant. He thought he could have it both ways. It was said that he could teach a mule about obstinacy. Other voices spoke of the millions of kin that had emigrated to the United States, making this war one of fratricide. John Bright repeatedly gave voice to these sentiments in the House, ending every speech with “Make peace, you fools!”

  In the ledger’s positive column, Disraeli could point to the collapse of the rebellion in Ireland and the inevitable recapture of Dublin. In New York the British Army had administered a drubbing to the Americans at Chazy, ironically the same battle Lincoln counted as a victory. California, where Midas has left his golden touch, had been snatched from the Americans. The Iron Fleet had been dispatched to secure the control of the Chesapeake, secure the naval base at Norfolk. The permanent loss of the bay would cripple American attempts in the eastern theater to defeat the Confederacy. In fact, British rearmament of the Confederate armies made them more dangerous to the Americans, taking pressure off Canada. British greatest advantage was her status as the foremost industrialized country in the world many times the size of the United States and Russia combined. The shipyards, steel mills, cotton mills, and thousands of other enterprises pouring out a stream of the weapons of war unparalleled in history, not least of which were the scores of ironclads on the ways. Finally, there was something positive in the French defeat in Louisiana. Britain had no interest in France reestablishing itself in North America, which had plainly been Louis Napoleon’s aim. An independent Confederacy would find its sole patron in London and not in Paris.3