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

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  The glow from the tip of Grant’s cigar brightened in the dark as he took a good drag. “Well, Phil. It’s up to you to keep him out of this fight tomorrow. Can you do it?”

  “Damned right.”

  SACO RIVER, TEN MILES ABOVE BIDDEFORD, MAINE, 4:20 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Custer’s cavalry brigades splashed across three hidden fords of the Saco less than an hour before dawn. Custer, his arm no longer in a sling, was the first man across after his advance guard. On the other bank, his scouts were waiting for him. A few words were all he needed, and he headed north as a courier sped back across the river to hurry the XI Corps, which filled the country lanes leading to the fords, their way lit only by the starry night.

  Eight hundred miles to the south in Virginia Stuart’s cavalry was also crossing a river, the North Anna again, at Jericho Mill, three miles east of the Chesterfield Bridge while a third of a million men—Americans and Britons—were stirring in the predawn darkness to light fires for their coffee and bacon or filing through their ship messes for tea and an early breakfast. Longstreet’s Corps at last was arriving five miles south of Hanover Junction. It was as if in that predawn moment, pregnant with the day, an entire continent held its breath.

  In Washington, Lincoln had walked through the sleeping White House, unable to rest. With his guards he went for a walk and arrived at Sharpe’s headquarters to find the Chief of the CIB also awake. He was so grateful for the fresh hot coffee that Sharpe pressed into his hand. The warmth of the cup was the first comfort he had had in a tortured night. The President of the United States and his chief of intelligence just sat there sipping their coffee, waiting for the telegraph to come alive with news, any news. Until then, they could only wait. What was going to happen was now completely out of their hands.

  THE SURRATT BOARDING HOUSE, 604 H STREET, NW, WASHINGTON, DC, 5:00, SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  That morning’s heavy rain kept the boarding house’s occupants inside, those who were awake. So no one was likely to see how the street at both ends had been quietly closed off by soldiers of Sharpe’s 120th New York Volunteer Infantry.12 Both Sharpe and Baker were watching the boarding house from the building across the street as assault teams from both organizations slipped up to it, Baker’s men to the front door and Sharpe’s soldiers to the rear through the backyard.

  Mary Surratt had been up early to start breakfast for her family and boarders and was the first to see the soldiers as they rushed through the back garden. She was running to the stairs to warn the boarders when both doors were smashed open and hard, shouting men filled the house. She was seized on the stairs as the men rushed up to break open doors. Gunfire! More shouting. Men crying out in pain. Then down the stairs she saw the men drag George Sanders and Thomas Harlan. More men came through the door, one of them a general. A man reported on the shooting. “We had to kill one of them. He fired at us and wounded one of my men.” The body was dragged down the stairs. It was Richard McCulloch.

  The deal that Sharpe worked out with Baker was that he would conduct the interrogations. He sat there across a small table from Harney in a bleak cell of the Capitol Prison. The room stank. It was early May, but the room was cold and damp. Harney looked at Sharpe and saw a man who was completely at his ease. A soldier brought in two cups of steaming coffee. “I can’t abide a morning without my coffee, and I’m afraid I have missed mine all because of you, Mr….? Do join me. We have a lot to talk about.” Harney clutched at the coffee as if were a line thrown to a drowning man and felt its warmth.

  “Such as your hanging,” Sharpe said. Harney jerked up, spilling some of the coffee. “I’m afraid we have no choice in the matter. Spies are hanged. After all, it was your government that began the practice, and I’m afraid we must insist.”13

  Sharpe observed the man coming apart. “Of course, if you were be of assistance, that would be taken into account. You could simply go home after the war. I doubt if we would want to hold onto spies then.”

  It took another hour of gently coaxing before Harney coughed up the plot and told him about the bomb. He ratted out Sanders and McCulloch. One was already caught and the other dead, so it did not matter much. Of Booth, he said nothing, but that would hardly satisfy Sharpe, who wanted to know how he had got into Ford’s Theater to plant the bomb. He named an actor who Booth had told him had just left to trod the boards in growing obscurity in the Midwest, Edwin Forrest.

  An hour later Sharpe was under the stage at Ford’s with a detachment of Army ordnance men. They found the bomb. The sergeant who lifted the bomb down staggered under its weight. They examined it outside. “Fifty pounds of powder at least. It would have caused this whole part of the building to collapse, General.”

  A thoroughly mortified Tom Ford was completely cooperative. He faced not only possible arrest as an accomplice, but even if he escaped that, professional ruin. He called in his entire staff for Sharpe and Baker to question. The only one who was not there was John Peanut, who had had death in the family somewhere in Pennsylvania, and no one knew exactly where. The timing was suspicious.

  Baker said, “Pennsylvania’s a big state. It will take time to find him. Sharpe would leave that to Baker, whose organization was more suited to that. What bothered him was the accusation that Edwin Forrest had been the one who had helped Harney into the theater to plant the bomb. Forrest had been one of the greats of the American stage, though now fallen on hard times. Ford confirmed that Forrest had gone off to the Midwest to play the small towns that no leading actor would bother with.14

  Ford was incredulous when told Harney had named Forrest as the one who had assisted him to place the bomb. “He’s a Northern man, born in Pennsylvania. I have never heard him utter a single positive word about the Rebellion. I can’t believe it.” Immediately John Wilkes Booth came to mind, but he said nothing. Edwin was a lifelong friend, and he shrank from dragging his family into this thing.

  JERICHO MILLS, VIRGINIA, 5:30 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Robert E. Lee stood his horse by the ford below Jericho Mills as his infantry crossed in the first light. The men were tired from hard marching and hard fighting, but they had a capacity for endurance that never ceased to awe their commander. Yesterday’s fighting convinced him that Hancock was too hard a nut to crack before Meade fell upon his rear. So he was stealing a march and breaking contact to sidestep Hancock and head for the RF&P below Hanover Junction where he would meet Longstreet and resupply his army, at the same time keeping between the enemy and Richmond. With any luck, Longstreet would be moving as well to meet him.

  Stuart’s cavalry ran into the Union pickets of Wilson’s Division strung out south of the river. Ten miles to the south, Sheridan had placed Gregg’s five thousand cavalry squarely across Longstreet’s path thanks to Van Lew’s warning. His only reserve was Merritt’s Brigade. Longstreet’s cavalry screen (5th and 15th Virginia) quickly found the Yankees, and the eruption of their firing line alerted Longstreet who was riding at the head of his first brigades. He galloped ahead to see for himself.

  THREE MILES SOUTHWEST OF WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA, 6:15 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Weitzel had been up before dawn after only an hour’s sleep. His brigade roused itself, made coffee, fried bacon, gnawed on hardtack, and waited to resume the fight. They had marched into chaos the night before. Knots of rebs blundering about in the dark after the cavalry had run through them still had fight in them; they had found a lot more when they came upon Longstreet’s other brigade drawn up in line of battle across the Richmond road. The only light they had was the flashes from their rifles and a barn on fire. The firing eventually died down as each commander pulled back a bit to get control of their brigades, now dangerously scattered. Then they all lay down and immediately fell asleep save for nodding sentries.

  Before dawn his scouts were out to see if the enemy were still there. Gunfire told him they were. He was taking a report from a scout when a horseman on lathered animal galloped up from the southeast.
Someone pointed Weitzel out to him, and he rushed over. He gave only the most cursory salute and blurted out, “Colonel Stevenson is on the way with the two brigades from Fortress Monroe. He is an hour behind me, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, my orders could not have reached them in time to get here so fast.”

  “Don’t know about your orders, but Col. Stevenson, as soon as the cavalry left, he said, ‘I can smell a fight.’ We marched all day and night.”

  DUBLIN CASTLE, 12:35 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Meagher had been too late with the reserve 69th New York to save the Lincoln redoubt. Instead he had led them waving his sword to counterattack the Coldstream guardsmen as they rushed out of the shattered work. It had been a savage encounter, bayonet to bayonet, in the dark streets with only the flickering light of burning buildings. It was as if Meagher was trying to throw his life away, but emerged from each swirl of death unscathed, his sword red to the hilt. Sergeant Major Wright would write later that he was like a warrior king of ancient Ireland of whom the glorious bards wrote. Yet glory was not enough to tip the scales now that the redoubt had fallen and the enemy was streaming into the city.

  Street by street the Irish were pushed back, their repeaters, if they had any ammunition left, of less use in the dark streets than a good bayonet or pistol. By late morning all that were left had fallen back upon Dublin Castle. For the first time in hundreds of years, the complex was going to revert to its original purpose of castle, a walled place of defense and refuge. Barricades were thrown together to block its gates and other entrances. Men scattered through the great buildings to fire from the windows at the lines of men in red who pushed down the streets. A surviving Gatling gun at the main gate made a slaughter pen of the British troops attacking down Parliament Street from the river until the survivors scrambled into houses or feigned death. Elsewhere the red columns flowed through the streets, cutting off every escape from the castle.

  Napier had come through the redoubt himself shortly after it had fallen to bring what order he could to the most chaotic of all combats, city fighting. Dublin would be luckier than Dehli though, the last major city to fall to the British by storm and to be brutally sacked.15 He followed closely behind the attacking troops, but by the time they had cornered the last of the Irish in Dublin Castle, he pulled his men back and sent out a flag of truce.

  Meagher and he met in before the Gates of Fortitude and Justice flanking the Bedford Tower with all the military pomp that both sides could muster. Honor guards, drummers, and color guards marched behind the two generals. The Union flag of the United Kingdom and the Green Flag of Ireland and Stars and Stripes snapped in the wind as Napier and Meagher approached each other and saluted. They spent the barest moment seeking to find some clue in the body language and the eyes. They found in each other the proud Celt and obdurate Saxon, a meeting repeated down the centuries of Irish history.

  As befitting the one who sought the parley, Napier spoke first. “Sir, I have come to entreat you to stop any further unnecessary effusion of blood and the surrender of your command.”

  “British demands are no longer currency in the Republic of Ireland, sir.”

  Napier had steeled himself for this dance around the subject. “It is plain, sir, that your position is hopeless. Any further loss of life will not alter that fact.”

  Meagher knew full well the truth of that, but still this was high drama, and he was looking at the future when this moment was history. “I will not treat on any terms but those that recognize the Republic of Ireland by Her Majesty’s government.”

  Napier would have rolled his eyes had he not been a man of great self-control. His better instincts won out. He reached out as one man to another and placed his hand on Meagher’s arm. “General Meagher, you have played the game and lost. Words will not alter that. There was never a chance you would succeed. But history will acknowledge another fact—the boldness and valor of you and your men. You have covered your defeat in honor.”

  Meagher knew these words would resound down the years, but the dance was not yet over. “Whatever the facts, General, I cannot throw my men upon the mercy of Judge Jeffreys. They have conducted themselves as soldiers and soldiers of the United States of America.”

  Napier knew that a chip had been thrown on the table. He now threw out one of his own. He was under intense political pressure to end this business as quickly as possible and at the least cost in blood and destruction. Disraeli had had the good sense to ensure the widest possible discretion was allowed Napier. “General Meagher, the terms I offered earlier are still good. For God’s sake, sir, let us spare spilling of the blood of good men and the destruction of your own country’s capital.”

  “My own country’s capital, sir? You have no idea of the bitter irony of your words.”16

  15

  “I Would Rather Die a Thousand Deaths”

  NORFOLK NAVAL BASE, VIRGINIA, 7:20 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  The British picket ship waiting outside the American naval base turned about and fled as Farragut led the battle fleet into the Roads. Hope’s signal flags alerted the fleet, and within seconds of their reading, the drums rolled, “Beat to Quarters,” on every ship.

  With a precision that was the envy of every navy, the British ships assumed their final position. Hope placed his floating batteries and gunboats directly in the path of the oncoming Americans, almost sixty vessels in a deep hedge meant to disrupt their formation and do as much damage as possible with its mass of guns. The gunboats were towing the floating batteries. A half dozen of the gunboats had been designated the mission of ramming and boarding the monitors a lá the late lamented Bazalgette (the British did not know he was a prisoner). Behind them and in parallel he placed his heavy hitters in three divisions. The center formation was made up of the seven ironclads and the fleet’s single ship-of-the-line, HMS Edgar, because of its heavy and more up-to-date ordnance. It would have to take the place of the lost Royal Oak.1 Fore and aft of the ironclads were two composite divisions of frigates, corvettes, and sloops.

  Hope’s intention was to be able to concentrate his firepower against the American ships that passed through the floating batteries and gunboats. The line ahead formation also gave him considerable flexibility to adapt to whatever contingency arose. He steamed slowly east to give his fleet as much open water as possible for the coming fight. He did not want his ships to come within reach of Fortress Monroe’s 15-inch Rodman guns.2

  FIVE MILES NORTH OF SACO, MAINE, 7:30 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Custer arrived on the Portland road at the head of his division, and it was a moment for him as sweet as meat off the bone. He had his horse put on a show of dancing, which amused the men immensely. They had accomplished the ultimate feat of which every cavalryman dreamed—to sever the enemy’s line of communications. He sent a brigade dashing north to see what damage they could do on the way to Portland and almost immediately overran a fifty-wagon train of supplies headed to Doyle.

  It would be hours before Doyle realized what had happened. He had other things to worry about. Sherman’s XI Corps following Custer had crossed the Saco to the west of Doyle and attacked down the north side of the Saco River overrunning one of his brigades and driving back the next one. Doyle spurred off with his reserve brigade, leaving Wosleley to watch Sherman, who was directly across the river, or so he thought. Wolseley realized to his dismay that the army’s scouts, Denison’s Royal Guides, were not able to tell him anything. Those scouts who had slipped south of the Saco simply never returned. They had more to fear from the local militia swarming the area than Sherman’s security. Wolseley gave the order to the remaining division to be prepared to march at once. These were the men who had done so well at Chazy.

  At that moment the advance guards of Sherman’s XII Corps was crossing at three hidden fords to the east of Biddeford-Saco, fords discovered by Sergeant Knight and his scouts. As soon as the first regiment was across, Knight and his scouts went north to look for Custe
r.

  Lieutenant Colonel McEntee himself was at that moment reading the message just received from telegrapher in the observation balloon directly south of Biddeford. They had caught the movement of the enemy division to engage the XI Corps and identified the other division still encamped around Saco and perhaps even more importantly had spotted the movement of a large cavalry force several miles north on the Portland Road. The easternmost balloon also reported no enemy activity whatsoever in that direction, only the XII Corps columns marching west north of the river. He found Sherman in front of his headquarters, which was being broken down in preparation to move. The general was nervously pacing back and forth, running his fingers through his scraggly red beard. As soon as he saw McEntee approaching, he focused his whole being on him. McEntee summarized the reporting and his conclusions that the enemy’s attention was to the west of Saco, the force in Saco itself had not moved, that there was no opposition to the east of Saco, and that Custer had cut the Portland Road.

  Sherman’s eyes glittered. He spun on his heel, mounted, and dashed off after XII Corps.3

  FIVE MILES SOUTH OF HANOVER JUNCTION, VIRGINIA, 7:35 A.M., SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1864

  Stuart’s men had been up at dawn pushing Wilson’s men back in a continuous skirmish. Lee had also had the army up and marching at first light. There was no breakfast but what cold rations they could munch from their haversacks on the march. The men barely had time to pee before they were off. Time was everything. It occurred to Lee that both Wellington and Napoleon had things to say apropos to this moment. The Iron Duke, when questioned by a feather merchant on what was the essence of strategy, simply replied, “Pee when you can.” Napoleon, always the more dramatic, had said to a courier, “Go, sir, gallop, and don’t forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time.”4