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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Farragut’s force arrived in the midst of Hope’s efforts to form a battle line just to the east of the fort in the bay. The Americans gun crews had their orders to aim for the enemy masts when they could. His object was to force his way past the British ships. To slug it out ship to ship would trap him in a knock-down-drag-out fight when his objective was to get into Norfolk. A demasted ship’s movement was hindered if not paralyzed by the mass of shattered mast, spars, and sails dragging over the side.

  The British ships began to fire as soon as their guns could bear. Some of their rifled guns had the range on the American smoothbores, but they chose to concentrate their fire on the monitors rather than the wooden warships and supply ships in the center of the American formation. HMS Royal Oak found herself at the apex of the American formation. Her broadside of six 7-inch Armstrong breech loaders and twelve 68-pounders concentrated on Farragut’s flagship, but Dictator’s low freeboard and single turret were very small targets. Those hits it did get on the turret merely left dents in its 15-inch armor. But when Dictator’s own twin 15-inch Dahlgrens spoke, Royal Oak shuddered under impact of two 400-pound shells tearing through her armor and detonating inside. Onandaga and Monandnock’s twin Dahlgrens also spoke. The mainmast snapped and fell over the side. Fires were breaking out when the American formation passed on either side, each ship firing into her. Royal Oak’s hull was wooden; originally laid down as a ship-of-the-line, she had been cut down to a single gun deck and remodeled as an ironclad. Her wooden structure had made it impossible to build any watertight compartments or fit transverse armored bulkheads as had the all-iron Warrior and Resistance classes. She now paid the price for this shortcut. With great sections of her ironclad wooden hull smashed open, she began to flood.

  Capt. Cowper Coles’ Prince Albert on detached duty had been cruising the bay and instantly turned about when the American ships had been sighted. She came up on the starboard of the Americans and immediately engaged the closest monitor, the USS Mahopac, the last in line. Prince Albert’s four 9-inch smoothbores were the most powerful guns the Royal Navy possessed, and Coles was determined to use them at the closest range his guns could be depressed for Prince Albert rode higher in the water than the American ship. As he closed the range, Mahopac’s guns fired with one shot a clear miss and the other striking across his deck to miss the mainmast but sweeping away the funnel. The men in Mahopac’s turrets were knocked to their feet and stunned in the midst of reloading by the double impact of British 9-inch shot. Coles’s second and third turrets fired down at Mahopac’s deck with shells that easily tore through the deck armor and exploded inside. The American ship slowed and fell out of line, a huge plume of smoke gushed from the hole in its deck. She began to settle; no one emerged from the ship as the water lapped over the deck and poured through the holes in the deck. She went down quickly.

  Farragut broke through with all of his transports despite the loss of Mahopac. In what would become known as the battle of Running the Roads, both sides had drawn blood. It would not be the last.13

  BIDDEFORD, MAINE, 3:55 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  Biddeford’s fame had long been hidden under a bushel. Massachusetts had so long and loudly claimed to have the first English settlement in New England at Plymouth, that almost no one knew that Biddeford had been settled in the winter of 1616–17, about four years earlier than Plymouth. Its next claim to fame would definitely be better remembered. Both the British and American armies in Maine were marching to that very spot.

  Biddeford was a logical place to fight, with rolling fields and pastures offering good maneuver room for both sides to the south, especially since both sides were determined to attack. The town was almost equidistant from Portland and Kennebunk, about fifteen miles. The Saco River ran just north of the town, and a twin town, also named Saco, lay just across a bridge on the north bank of the river. The Saco divided into two falls that dropped forty feet (twelve meters). There was only one problem with the rolling countryside south of Biddeford as a battlefield for the British. They would have the Saco River at their back. On the other hand, the town with all its substantial factory buildings could become a fortress that could cover a British retreat across the Saco River bridge.

  Doyle’s small cavalry brigade (9th Lancers and 11th Hussars) trotted across the bridge in the middle of the afternoon and rode south to find the Americans that the army’s scouts reported were advancing north on the main road. They did not have long to look. Custer’s lead brigade met them about a mile and half south of the town. At the same time the leading patrols of both sides clattered onto opposite ends of a covered bridge over a small stream. The Hussar officer in the lead drew his saber in one fluid motion, spurred his horse forward, and screamed, “Charge!” The horse hooves on the wooden bridge planks echoed and magnified in the covered bridge. He crashed into the American officer who was still drawing his pistol and cut him out of the saddle. His men flew past to hack and stab and the enemy now halted on the bridge. The impact knocked men off their horses to be trampled on the plank floor. It was almost impossible to turn a horse around or fire a pistol through the screaming, heaving mass of horses and men. The Americans at the rear got out finally and galloped back the way they came with the Hussars in pursuit.

  It was then that the Hussars found out how their less than efficient carbine was outclassed by the American colt revolvers and Spencer repeaters. The fight on the bridge alerted Custer’s 1st Michigan coming up the road with their general at its head. They were ready when the survivors of the first patrol came hurtling past them with Hussars in pursuit only to run into the repeater and revolver fire from the charging Michiganders.

  Custer’s men chased the Hussars back across the bridge just as the British cavalry brigade came into view down the road. Custer’s horse artillery and Gatling batteries were just bringing up the rear when both sides began to deploy. He had had the good judgment to send an aide racing back to Sherman to announce that contact had been made. The British cavalry commander had done the same thing when he realized that Custer was streaming across the bridge, but his message arrived a half hour after Custer’s. Sherman put that thirty minutes to good use. The pace of the infantry was increased on the parallel routes being taken by his two corps. Like Napoleon, Sherman was a great believer in marching separately and uniting to fight together. Two corps marching on the same road one behind the other would mean that the second formation would take much longer to get into battle than the first, just when mass was vital. By marching on a parallel route, both corps would bet able to get into the fight at the same time.

  A second courier announced that the British cavalry had been sighted and were with infantry marching up behind. With luck, Sherman thought, he could trap the smaller British force between his two corps if Custer was successful in getting the enemy to deploy. He had done just that. General Doyle immediately ordered his two divisions to spread out from column to an advancing line. Wolseley argued forcefully against such an early deployment without greater knowledge of the enemy’s position and action, but Doyle informed him that the army commander had made a decision, not invited debate.

  HANOVER JUNCTION, VIRGINIA, 4:10 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  Stuart had also made a decision. He had to break the Union cavalry with one brutal shock. He could not budge them with a series of small unit actions. In response Wade Hampton’s large division spread out in regimental columns and advanced toward Gregg’s division. His trumpeter signaled the advance, which was echoed by regiments and companies all along the dusty advancing front. Sabers flew out to glitter in the clear May sun. Stuart rode along their front his famous flack plume whipping behind his gray hat.

  Sheridan realized that Stuart had gone for broke and rode along the front of Gregg’s division waving his hat. “Break ‘em, boys! Break ‘em!” Each regiment cheered as he passed, the men caught up in the intoxicating excitement of the moment. Gregg ordered them forward, and thousands more sabers rasped from their scabbards.<
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  Sheridan was not about to get completely lost in the glories of the arm blanche.14 His field artillery batteries had already been positioned on the few small rises and began to fire. Shell’s burst among the Confederate cavalry, emptying saddles and sending animals crashing in sprays of blood. As they got closer, the guns switched to case shot, which swept away whole sections, but still they closed up.

  The columns met in a wide stretch of wheat fields with the young grain just fresh and green. Horses went down in the impact, throwing their riders into the mass of hacking and shouting mounted men. Here and there the more practical had sheathed their sabers and were firing with their pistols, but it was a still a fight of steel on steel. Men would say this was the most savage cavalry fight of the war—men from Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and men from Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

  Both Stuart and Sheridan bided their time until the moment when they each would fulfill the primary role of the senior commander in battle, the commitment of the reserve. For Stuart it was Young’s Brigade of the 7th and 20th Georgia Cavalry and Cobb’s Legion (9th Georgia). In the 7th Georgia, the four Zipperer boys had come through the entire war unscathed. They had always taken care of each other. Their mother, unlike so many in Effingham County, had received no bad news. Each day she would walk to the post office and ask if she had mail. On the days that she didn’t, the kindly old postman with his droopy mustache would say, “Don’t worry, no news is good news.” Now that burden of taking care of his younger brothers, Jeremiah, Telbert, and Phemuel, was especially heavy on Lt. Christian Edward Zipperer; he could feel in his gut that everything rode on this fight. Other men in the reserve had their burden as wells. Maj. Ashley Wilkes in Cobb’s Legion had one of a different sort. He had two women to go home to in Clayton County, and only one was his wife. But it was the sort of problem a man kept to himself. The men trusted him because he was a gentleman—fair, brave, and careful of their lives, though a bit wistful at times.

  For Sheridan the reserve was Merritt’s brigade of regulars. Yet it was Sheridan who had the greater dilemma. Fitzhugh Lee’s scattering of Wilson’s 2nd Brigade put the Confederate division on Gregg’s flank whenever he finished chasing Wilson’s men. From the survivors of the attack, he thought Wilson’s entire division had been wrecked and was mystified that a commanding officer of such caliber as Wilson could let that happen. Sheridan realized he had one reserve and two contingencies. Merritt’s Reserve Brigade could not be in two places at once. To the rear they sat their horses nervously waiting for the call to action.

  Right there on the wheat fields of Hanover Junction in the struggling mass of men and horses was the fulcrum of the American civil war. The men sensed it and did not hold back. Those not in the fight strained to be in it. Only the occasional wounded man staggered away on foot or leaned, bleeding over his mount. Riderless horses darted from the fight. Regiments pulled out of the melee, collected themselves, and attacked again. A dull roar hung over the trampled wheat punctuated by the clash of metal on metal or the retort of pistol shots. A Confederate participant would write there “was a great and imposing spectacle of squadrons charging in every portion of the field—men falling, cut out the saddle with the saber, artillery roaring, carbines cracking—a perfect hurly-burly of combat.” A Union officer echoed him. “The fighting was hand-to-hand and of the most desperate kind.”15

  Stuart waited for the moment to commit his Georgians. He was wondering what the hell had happened to Fitzhugh Lee. He did not have long to wait. Lee had chased Wilson’s men just far enough to get them off the battlefield. He had several hundred prisoners as well, mostly men who had been tearing up the tracks when his men came hooping and hollering down upon them. Surprise more than anything had shattered this veteran brigade. Now Lee had gathered his command and turned east where the sound of the guns called. It was then that Stuart’s messengers found him to be able to guide him to Sheridan’s rear. Lee was not the only one marching to the sound of the guns. The routed men of the 8th New York Cavalry had found the tail of Wilson’s other brigade and alerted him to the disaster. Now Wilson was also on the move east to pick up the pieces and get in his own licks.

  Elsewhere, more men were on the move also sensing that the climax was approaching. Shortly after he had dispatched Stuart to Hanover Junction, General Lee stole away from the Army of the Potomac. Meade would only discover that the next day, but Hancock’s Army of the Rappahannock was already on the move to the junction, only two days behind Sheridan. From the James Peninsula Longstreet’s corps was marching rapidly to the junction as well.

  ONE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE POTOMAC, 7:25 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  Capt. Will Cushing wished he could will Stephen Decatur to go faster than her seven knots, but was thankful that the glistening Potomac below shone like a silvery highway in the deepening shadows of early evening. Nicknamed The Barbary Pirate by her crew, the Decatur was Cushing’s flagship.16 He had been with her when she had sunk the HMS Nile. She was now the flagship of the aeroship squadron that Cushing commanded. Decatur and John Paul Jones formed the Navy Division and George Washington and Andrew Jackson the Army Division, the fruit of, some would say, unnatural interservice cooperation fathered by Fox and Sharpe. It would be the first time that aerosphips went into battle as a formation.

  As he paced the small deck, Cushing looked out at the other three great aeroships. His thoughts then went to the Navy’s submersibles steaming down the same river. He had to smile to himself about something the ship’s namesake had once said after seeing one of Robert Fulton’s early steamboats. “It is the end of our business; hereafter any man who can boil a tea-kettle will be as good as the best of us.”17 Yes, indeed, the Navy had changed from the day of wood, wind, and sail. Now it was all steam and iron. It was a young man’s navy, too, in so many ways. The young grasped the new technologies that seemed to disquiet the older senior officers. For Cushing, this was not enough, for steam and iron were only tools of action. They earned reputation, promotion, and glory—the unchangeable rewards of the man of war.

  Soon the stars had come out to reflect on the river, which soon gave way to the great bay, and eventually the gun flashes of the relentless siege of Fortress Monroe confirmed Cushing’s navigation. The running lights of the other aeroships showed that the formation was intact. Cushing hoped that the British crews kept their eyes off the skies. Running lights were needed to keep the squadron together on its way to Norfolk. Of course, if the transport with the hydrogen generator wagons and ground crews had not made it with Farragut to Norfolk, this flight would amount to only a one-way training voyage.

  Below him off Hampton Roads, the Royal Navy’s fighting ships swayed gently at anchor. Admiral Hope had kept the men busy for the big fight that was so near men could taste it. Busy eventually meant tired, and most men gladly fell into their hammocks when they could. The watches, though, were time for men to gaze not just across the water but upward at the majesty of the heavens to refresh the soul. Not a few men, then, noticed the four sets of moving lights in the night sky in the direction of Norfolk. The news was taken directly to Admiral Hope who instantly thought of the fate of the blockaders off New York last March. He thought to himself that the Americans would not have it all their way the next time.

  HANOVER JUNCTION, 11:10 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  The three younger Zipperer brothers searched over the day’s carnage hoping against hope that they would not find their big brother’s body on the field, rather that he was a prisoner. Lieutenant Zipperer had been conspicuous in the breakthrough of the 7th Georgia, and somewhere in the regiment’s death ride he had disappeared.

  Stuart had seized the moment when the 8th Pennsylvania had been fallen back under a charge by the “Comanches” of the 35th Virginia Battalion. A gap had opened, and Stuart waved the reserve straight into it, riding at their head, shouting, “Give them the saber, boys!” The three regiments headed straight for Sheridan’s
guns and trains. The 6th New York Independent Battery had an advanced position right in the path of the charging Georgians. “The gallant fellows of the battery hurled a perfect storm of grape” into them, a survivor would write. Still, they rode right through it, leaping downed horses and men, and into the battery, hacking and shouting at the gunners who fought back with pistols and sponge staffs. No quarter was asked or given, and almost every man of the battery was dead or wounded when the Georgians resumed their advance.

  To the west Fitzhugh Lee’s men attacked as well. His four Virginia regiments and the 1st Maryland Cavalry Battalion made a grand sight as they advanced, too grand for Sheridan. He had been about to commit Merritt’s Reserve Brigade to save his guns when the Virginians appeared on his flank. The guns would have to take care of themselves as Merritt threw his regulars at Lee’s men.

  The breakthrough of the Georgians had done more than endanger the guns and trains. It had shattered the Union line, which frayed, snapped, and then began to fall back. Like a thrown spearhead, the Georgians flew forward to the next two batteries to the right, the 20th and 21st New York Light Batteries—Gatlings.18

  This was the last time the Zipperer brothers saw their older brother. He disappeared in the sheet of lead that brought the entire front of all three Georgian regiments crashing into the ground in a bloody tangle of dead and screaming horses, fallen and wounded men crushed by their mounts or slashed by their flailing hooves. There were no intervals between blasts that men could advance through as with the artillery. The bundles of six steel barrels on each Gatling just kept spinning and whirring as they fired, stopping only briefly to slide a new magazine into the gun. It was leaden storm that piled up the Georgians in a wall of equine and human flesh. Finally, they could stand no more and fled–fled, not retreated.