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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  Gregg’s men rallied by the guns and counterattacked. Merciful night fell to pull the exhausted regiments apart. By then it was doubtful if there was a single horse on either side that was in condition enough to charge. Merritt’s regulars had stopped the Virginians in a smaller version of the big fight to the north of the Junction. Fitzhugh Lee withdrew his men to join Stuart just in time to miss the return of a much chagrined Wilson and what was left of his brigade. Sheridan personally commended the crews of the Gatlings that night. It had been a close run thing, and he owed much to those crews. He had done what he had set out to do—cut off the communications of the Army of Northern Virginia. He wondered what options Stuart was contemplating until Stuart’s hat was brought to him, its black plume bent and smeared with blood.

  The Zipperer brothers finally found Christian Edward. His legs had been pinned under his dead mount. The whole field was dotted with lanterns as stretcher bearer parties sought out the wounded. A party of Yankees had found him first and were prying him out from under the horse when he cried out, “Have a care of my legs, boys. They’re both broke.” His brothers recognized that voice and rushed toward the lantern light. The stretcher bearers in blue took no fright when the Confederates appeared out of the night. Angels of the battlefield, they and their counterparts in gray were called, and it was unthinkable to harm one. They gathered around their brother as a Yankee held a lantern over him. Phemuel said, “Thank you kindly.” Telbert added, “We’ll take him, friends.” Christian Edward groaned as they tried to lift him. One of the Yankees said, “Leave him on the stretcher. You can have it. We’ll get another.”

  A few yards away lay the body of Major Wilkes, a bullet through his noble forehead. That bullet had spared him of years of dithering over which woman he really loved.

  HMS WARRIOR, 11:44 P.M., THURSDAY, MAY 5, 1864

  Admiral Hope sat up through the night pondering the results of the afternoon’s events. He had been shocked with how easily the American monitor force and its transports had broken through his ships and inflicted a good deal of damage. The loss of the Royal Oak had at least been avenged by Prince Albert’s sinking of a monitor.

  Captain Cowles had come over to personally report on the engagement. He was a striking figure with his slim figure and long, luxuriant blond beard. He also had the ear of both Disraeli and the Queen, a consideration not to be dismissed and instead put to advantage. Certainly Her Majesty would be more than pleased that the ironclad named for her dead husband had added an American monitor to the two Russian ships she had sunk. Hope was coming to realize that there was a basis for the confidence Prime Minister and Queen both had in this man, dispelling the cloud of ill-feeling an iconoclast invariably attracted.

  “The low freeboard of the American monitors has been a great advantage in presenting the narrowest of targets, but it has its own inherent weaknesses, Admiral. Bazalgette showed us one of them by his daring in March. Another one is that the low freeboard exposes the deck to plunging fire, and there decks have only one inch of armor. Our own ships have been criticized for their great height compared to the American ships, but that greater height allows our guns to fire down at a proper angle to strike right through their decks, especially Prince Albert with only seven feet of freeboard.

  “You should have seen the strike of my guns smashing open the enemy’s deck. One can only imagine the carnage in the small ships engineering spaces. She went down like a stone without a single survivor.”

  Hope flickered in Hope’s eyes. “Yes,” he said to himself, “turn the enemy’s advantage against himself.”

  MONTREAL RAILWAY STATION, 1:30 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  The special train with steam up sat next to the platform awaiting its single passenger. Hope Grant limped across the platform with a cane followed by a few aides. It felt so good to get out of that drafty headquarters and be doing something. His wounds still ached, but he felt his strength returning. Wolseley’s telegrams had stopped coming, and then word came of the attack on Brighton. He must get to Portland before the battle that he knew was coming.

  14

  “We’ve Got ‘em Nicked”

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, 2:23 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  The Confederate capital had held its breath all through yesterday as the great cavalry battle raged at Hanover Junction barely thirty miles to the north. Elizabeth Van Lew and her fellow Unionists were also full of expectations, though ones their Confederate neighbors would not have appreciated. Van Lew had had a huge American flag smuggled into her house to display on the day Union troops marched into this nest of traitors.

  She had something far more urgent, though, than getting to spread the flag over her roof. She was flitting through night to the home of Samuel Ruth, the superintendent of the RF&P Railroad, one of the most ardent Unionists in the city. Single handedly he had been waging a very effective second front against the Army of Northern Virginia. The RF&P was the main supply route of Lee’s army, and Ruth made sure it operated at a depressingly low level of efficiency. He diverted attention from his dead hand on the switch by being one of the most vocal supporters of the Confederacy.1

  He opened the door with a candle in his hand, saw who was there, pulled her in, looked about, and closed the door. “Miss Van Lew, what a chance you have taken by coming here! For both of us.”

  “Great risks must be taken now, Mr. Ruth. Longstreet will arrive in the city by noon and be rushed to Hanover Junction on your railroad.” She did not tell him that a clerk, one of her sources in the War Department, had brought her that information only an hour before. He already knew her sources were impeccable.“You must do what you can to slow him down.”2

  WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA, 3:03 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  Weitzel had come to that same conclusion as he had watched from Yorktown’s parapet Longstreet’s Corps marching at a hard pace out of the Peninsula. The early evening was still bright enough to see the columns as they passed and hear the jingle of equipment and the shouts of officers. Something was up. Longstreet was clearly needed elsewhere and needed in a hurry. The last of the besiegers of his position had barely disappeared at the tail of the Confederate column when Weitzel put his garrison in full marching order to pursue and wound them if he could. The men were eager; they had been cooped up far too long and felt the grudge. No sooner was the lead regiment out the gates, when Union cavalry came up the same road the enemy had come by. They were the remnants of the three cavalry regiments that had been driven into the defenses of Fortress Monroe after Big Bethal. The commander at Fortress Monroe had sent them out to tail Longstreet. They also had a score to settle.

  He sent the cavalry forward while at the same time sending couriers to Fortress Monroe ordering the surviving troops there north. The cavalry caught the last brigade in Longstreet’s column eleven miles up the road at Williamsburg at midnight. The gray infantry had been plodding along in that dreamy half-asleep, half-awake marching stride when the cavalry appeared out of the dark. The men in blue rode in among them firing pistols and slashing with sabers to bring them wide awake.

  NORFOLK NAVY YARD, VIRGINIA, 7:45 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  After bringing his flotilla into Norfolk, Farragut promptly transferred his flag to the broadside ironclad USS New Ironsides, the Navy’s only broadside ironclad. New Ironsides had been built in parallel with the USS Monitor to confront the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia two years before and had proved her worth as Adm. John Dahlgren’s flagship at Charleston. At 4,120 tons she was the biggest ship in the Navy, after USS Dictator, although less than half the size of HMS Warrior. But she packed more than twice that ship’s firepower with her fourteen 11-inch Dahlgren smoothbore guns that had battered Warrior’s sister ship, Black Prince, to death at Charleston. Her high freeboard made her the most effective platform from which to observe the battle and command the fleet. She differed from the British broadside ironclads in that her rolled armored hull slanted out downward at 17 degrees, the first ship to have su
ch armor intended to make enemy shot ricochet.

  Farragut had assembled his captains and unfurled from his flagship an entirely new flag. “Gentlemen, this is the flag of the 1st Fleet of the United States Navy, the first such numbered or named fleet in our history. It was presented to me by Mr. Lincoln himself at the presidential mansion. As I left, he said to me, “Admiral, I pray that every day this flag flies it will be a fine Navy day.” There was a happy murmur of approval at the commander-in-chief’s use of such a fond naval term. They all remembered Lincoln’s handsome praise of the Navy last year when he said, “Nor must Uncle Sam’s web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks.”3 Lincoln’s words had been much appreciated by the fleet, but his veto of a bill abolishing the grog ration cemented their devotion, especially below decks.

  More important than a flag was the round of inspections Farragut made of every major ship in the fleet. He counted the seven new ironclads he had brought and the surviving four Passaic class monitors that had also fought so well at Charleston and a fifth of the class, USS Sangamon, that had already been at Norfolk, each armed with an 11-inch and 15-inch Dahlgren in a single turret.

  With the New Ironsides that made twelve ironclads. There were also four prewar frigates, three sloops, and nine gunboats, giving him twenty-seven ships of all types. Gunboats usually mounted one to two guns and were used primarily in attacking coastal positions, but they had been used in the fleet action at Charleston where their large guns were particularly effective. There were also dozens of other smaller ships lightly armed, fit enough for blockade but suicide in a fleet action. These he stripped of crews to ensure full compliments aboard his other ships.

  As absorbed as Farragut was in readying the fleet, he was never too busy to take to take the enemy into account. When he asked Admiral Lee what he had learned of the enemy, he was surprised when Lee said, “I think you need to speak to that young army officer from Sharpe’s organization. He’s a walking encyclopedia. And Captain Cushing as well.”

  It took all of Farragut’s open mind to accept that an army officer could tell the Navy about an enemy afloat, but there was a calm seriousness about the young man that compelled attention. Wilmoth was at pains to explain how the CIB served both the armed forces. Then he laid out the enemy’s order-of-battle, listing every ship in the bay. Though the British had only seven ironclads to the American twelve, all but two of them dwarfed his turreted ships.4 In addition they boasted 124 guns to the 41 on the American ironclads. Wilmoth made the point of noting that all but two of the American guns were far more powerful than any of the British guns.5

  The wooden heavy hitters of the fleet were the heavy frigates Minnesota and Wabash and lighter frigate Powhatan bristling with ninety-five 8-, 9-, 10-, and 11-inch Dahlgrens, more firepower than all the British ironclads put together. The sloops and gunboats were armed with another twenty-three guns, of which nine were the hull-busting 11-inchers. The sloop USS Brooklyn that had escorted the supply ships was almost as heavily armed as the frigates with twenty-one guns.6

  Then Cushing laid out a diagram of their most recent deployment obtained by a personal reconnaissance flight he had taken the day before. Admiral Hope had drawn his ships back from Hampton Roads and into the widest part of the bay just inside its mouth, an area almost thirteen miles square where there would be ample room to fight a fleet action. Apparently he had placed his armored floating batteries as a barrier through which the Americans would have to fight. Behind them were the seven ironclads, one ship-of-the-line, seven frigates, six corvettes, and eight sloops—twenty-nine ships in addition to twenty-five gunboats and thirty-two floating batteries.

  Farragut had been thinking for some time of the inherent weakness of the American ironclads that needed to be masked. The first was low freeboard and vulnerability to the tactics of being rammed. The second was their speed of at most seven knots against the average of eleven for enemy ships. That extra speed would allow the British to maneuver with a flexibility and concentration he could not match with his own ironclads. Only his wooden ships matched the speed of the enemy. What to do?

  At sixty-three Farragut had the vigor of a man twenty years his junior. His white hair covered a mind that was active and innovative. Like Nelson he understood in his bones the laying of one ship against another to fight it out to the end. His mind was rapidly digesting the information these two young men had laid before him. He realized that tomorrow would be far more than the greatest naval battle in American history, greater than Charleston, and the greatest of all battles on the sea since Trafalgar. He was not afraid of the fight. Indeed, he looked forward to it; like Robert E. Lee, he was a naturally combative man who rather enjoyed the whole thing.

  What awed him was the forces being brought together for the first time. It was not only the unprecedented concentration of ironclads that made all the wooden ships on both sides nothing more than auxiliaries. He had drunk up every bit of information on the employment of ironclads and questioned everyone he could with firsthand experience. His command of the flotilla coming down the East Coast had also given him firsthand feel for their operation.

  What truly impressed his imagination were the aeroships and submersibles. He had met with Cushing after his successful attack on the enemy blockading ships with his aeroship and thoroughly picked his brains. They had spoken long into the night about the possibilities of such a new weapon, and next day Cushing eagerly took him aloft. Fox had given him a tour of the submersible factory at the Navy Yard, and again he squeezed everything of value of the manufacturer, inventor, and captain of the Shark. He insisted on going on a training mission on the boat as well in the Eastern Branch and down the Potomac. It crossed his mind that Nelson himself would have given his other arm to play with such toys.

  BIDDEFORD, MAINE, 8:23 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  The courier whipped his lathering mount on as he crossed the bridge over the Saco River into Biddeford and continued south. He rode into the rear of the army clearly deploying for a big fight. He found the command group, reported, and handed his dispatch to Doyle.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered as he read the dispatch. He straightened himself in the saddle and said, “Well, gentlemen, it seems the Guards have been detained a Brighton.” He passed it to Wosleley, who immediately understood the import. The railway had been cut. Brighton had been saved but Gorham lost. Militia were swarming the railway, cutting it everywhere and isolating the rail station garrisons. Even if the Guards marched to rendezvous with the Portland Field Force, it would take a week. By then the issue would be decided, if Doyle chose the fight in front of him.

  He turned to Doyle, “Sir Hastings, the loss of the railway changes the entire basis of the campaign. Even a victory on this field will serve no purpose in the defense of Upper and Lower Canada.”

  Doyle replied, “The enemy is before us, sir. We will strike them.”

  “Sir Hastings, let us fall back across the Saco and defend the river line until we can reestablish control of the railway.”

  Doyle was getting annoyed, firstly at Wolseley’s effrontery to suggest that a British army would withdraw from an enemy in the field and secondly that he throw away the opportunity to gain a victory. “General Wolseley, notice that the enemy is advancing. We should never be able to show our faces at home should we turn tail, even if Sherman would let me.”

  Wolseley desperately wished that Hope Grant were here now.

  So did Sherman. He wanted to beat the best the British had. That would settle matters in a dramatic way, but he would fight whoever was in front of him. Lieutenant Colonel McEntee had told him that at most the British would have thirty thousand men on this field. He was bringing over fifty thousand in the Army of the Hudson, but was ostentatiously deploying only the men of the XI Corps. The XII Corps he had directed t
o the east to be able to come up on the British flank.

  The XI Corps deployed and then halted; its regiments began seeking the folds in the earth in this rolling countryside. Coffee mill guns heretofore deployed in six-gun batteries now scattered themselves in pairs with the infantry. Sherman had sifted the experience of the battle of the Chazy where British artillery focused on the neatly lined up batteries and took them out. Now if only Doyle would attack first. Sherman was sure he would, especially since he had come out from behind several excellent river lines he could hang a solid defense upon.

  Wolseley saw the issue as clearly as Sherman and pleaded once again with Doyle to retire. “Sir Hastings, I must point out that the Americans are employing the same tactics the Iron Duke employed against the French with such success. He hides behind good ground and entices us to attack against his concentrated firepower.” If only he could sway Doyle and postpone the battle.

  At that moment the seeming answer to his prayers had arrived in Brighton on a lathered and wheezing horse that foundered as soon as he dismounted. At the first break in the line, Hope Grant had unloaded his horse and ridden it hard to Brighton. He now ordered the Guards to march to Gorham. Somewhere along the line they would find trains to speed them to Portland.

  HEADQUARTERS, CIB, LAFAYETTE SQUARE, WASHINGTON, DC, 9:01 A.M., FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1864

  Sharpe looked up from his desk at the rap on his office door. One of his junior officers entered. Sharpe had a policy of rap, pause, then enter for his staff. It was Lt. John Aimes, the officer who sorted out visitors. “Sir, there’s someone I think you should speak to, a Mr. William Ludlow.” Aimes gave him a summary, and Sharpe agreed to see him.

  Twenty minutes later Sharpe walked in on Lafayette Baker, head of the Secret Service, with Ludlow in tow. Sharpe and Baker cordially disliked each other. Sharpe did not approve of Baker’s shameful abuse of his spy-catching wit to shake down merchants and others. Baker saw in Sharpe a rival who had taken over presidential security from the Secret Service. No wonder. Baker still smarted from the fact that one of his bodyguards assigned to protect the president had tried to kill him. It had been a huge black eye.