Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  The confrontation over the runaway pig on San Juan Island occurred as described in 1859. The Royal Marines remained peacefully on the island until it was awarded to the United States in 1872 through the mediation of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany.

  San Francisco twice came under the threat of Confederate attack. At the end of 1861, Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley led an overland expedition against the city from Texas, but had to retreat in April 1862 after losing his supply train in a clash in New Mexico. Sibley himself was in agony from a kidney affliction and commanded for much of the expedition from a hospital wagon, in various degrees of inebriation. The second threat to San Francisco came towards the end of the war when it was feared that the Confederate raider Shenandoah might attack from the sea.

  The French did intervene in Mexico, but never managed to subdue the country and evacuated it soon after the end of the (American) Civil War. Their troops did not join the Confederacy in the field, but Frenchmen were present in the armies of both sides, as either observers or fighting soldiers, including Camille-Armand-Jules-Marie, Prince de Polignac, who served as a Confederate major general.

  Tsar Alexander II of Russia sent two fleets to New York and San Francisco in the fall of 1863. Their arrival was widely seen in the North as a gesture of solidarity and Rear-Admiral Popov’s sailors won the lasting affection of the people of San Francisco by helping to put out a fire in the city. But the main reason why the tsar sent his fleets was to prevent them from being immobilized in the Baltic ice during the winter in case war broke out with Britain and France as a result of his suppression of the Polish Rebellion.

  Brigadier General John B. Turchin was a real person, as was his remarkable wife Nadia, and he died in a lunatic asylum in 1901. Similarly, the Emperor Norton I of the United States actually existed, although he was probably saner than is often thought.

  McClellan stood against Lincoln in the November 1864 Presidential election, but was soundly beaten, partly because of the upswing in the North’s military fortunes.

  Relations between Britain and the United States remained tense for years after the end of the Civil War. The American threat to British North America was a serious concern and led to the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the country’s first step towards becoming an independent nation.

  Bibliography

  Adams, Ephraim, Great Britain and the American Civil War (Longmans, London, 1925), 2 vols.

  Allen, H.C., Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations (1783–1952) (Odhams Press, London, 1954).

  Anon., Forts Versus Ships: Also Defence of the Canadian Lakes and its Influence on the General Defence of Canada (J. Ridgway, London, 1862).

  Bailey, Thomas A., America Faces Russia: Russian—American Relations from Early Times to our Day (Cornell University Press, New York, 1950).

  Batt, Elisabeth, Monck: Governor-General 1861–1868 (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1876).

  Baxter, James P, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1933).

  Bernard, Mountague, A Historical Account of the Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War (Longmans, London, 1870).

  Bourne, Kenneth, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815–1908 (Longmans, London, 1967).

  Cameron, Edward, Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart, a Member of the Parliament of Canada, 1861–1867 (Musson Book Co, Toronto, nd).

  Case, Lynn M., and Spencer, Warren E, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1970).

  Church, William, The Life of John Ericsson (Sampson Low, London, 1890).

  Courtemanche, Regis A., NO Need of Glory: The British Navy in American Waters 1860–1864 (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1977).

  Crook, D.P., The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (Wiley, London, 1974).

  Dugan, James, The Great Iron Ship (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1953).

  Gough, Barry, The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America 1810–1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy (University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1971).

  Hamilton, C., Anglo-French Naval Rivalry 1840–1870 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).

  Headley, John, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (Neale Publishing Co, New York, 1906).

  Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., The Civil War in the American West (A.A. Knopf, New York, 1992).

  Kerr, D.G.G., and Gibson, J.A., Sir Edmund Head: A Scholarly Governor (University of Toronto Press, London, 1954).

  Luvaas, Jay, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Dimension (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1959).

  Mahin, Dean, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War (Brasseys, Washington DC, 1999).

  Marquis, Greg, In Armageddon’s Shadow: The Civil War and Canada’s Maritime Provinces (McGill-Queen’s University Press, London, 1998).

  Morton, Desmond, A Military History of Canada (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1999).

  Murat, Ines, Napoleon and the American Dream (Louisiana State University Press, London, 1981).

  Roberts, Andrew, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1999).

  Russell, W.H., My Diary North and South (Harper & Bros., New York, 1863).

  Shaw-Kennedy, James, “Scheme for the Defence of Canada Written in February, 1862,” in Notes on the Battle of Waterloo (J. Murray, London, 1865).

  Simmons, J., Defence of Canada Considered as an Imperial Question with Reference to a War with America (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, London, 1865). Stacey, C.P., Canada and the British Army 1846–1871: A Study in the Practice of Responsible Government (Longmans, London, 1936).

  Stacey, C.P, The Military Problems of Canada: A Survey of Defence Policies and Strategic Considerations Past and Present (Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1940).

  Stanley, George, Canada’s Soldiers: The Military History of an Unmilitary People (Macmillan & Co of Canada, Toronto, 1960).

  Trollope, Anthony, North America (Chapman & Hall, 1862).

  Wilson, H., Ironclads in Action: A Sketch of Naval Warfare from 1855 to 1895 (Sampson Low, 1897).

  Wincks, Robin W, Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years (John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1960).

  Notes

  1.

  Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, vol. 1, p. 218.

  2.

  Russell, My Diary North and South, vol. 2, pp. 421–2.

  3.

  Napoleon Bonaparte had been exiled to St Helena after his defeat at Waterloo. The British also used the island to hold Boer prisoners during the South African War (1899–1902).

  *4.

  Theodore Roosevelt, Custer: A Career in Infamy (Hunting Press, New York, 1901).

  5.

  Trollope, North America, vol.1, p. 446. (This quotation has been edited slightly.)

  6.

  Cameron, Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart, pp. 53–4.

  7.

  Courtemanche, NO Need of Glory, p. 59.

  8.

  Courtemanche, op. cit., p. 47.

  9.

  Wilson, Ironclads in Action, vol. 1, pp. 20–1. (This quotation has been edited slightly.)

  10.

  Courtemanche, op. cit., p. 58.

  11.

  Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship, p. 317.

  12.

  Church, The Life of John Ericsson, vol. 1, pp. 274–5.

  *13.

  Winston S. Churchill, Quebec: The Immortal Battlefield (Blenheim Books, London, 1949).

  *14.

  George B. McClellan, Four Days in March: How I Saved the North in the Late Crisis (Patriot Publishing, Boston, 1868)

  15.

  Bailey, America Faces Russia, p. 70.

  16.

  Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan.

  2

  SHIPS OF IRON

  AND WILLS OF STEEL

  The Confederate Navy


  Triumphant

  Wade G. Dudley

  Yorktown, Virginia

  At Yorktown, on the James Peninsula jutting between the York and James Rivers in the sovereign state of Virginia, the thick fog had lifted by mid-morning to reveal a line of trenches separating two armies. Guns silent, regiments of both sides stood at parade rest. Promptly at 10.00 a.m., the easternmost army began to stack its weapons, then to march in what seemed unending lines through the ranks of its captors. A military band set the tone for the event, playing an old tune (one learned by the bandmaster from his grandfather, whose father had heard the same song played here years before): The World Turned Upside Down.

  Later that day, as two generals met at Yorktown (the one to surrender his sword, the other to commiserate with his vanquished former brother-in-arms), another ceremony took place at a fortress on the tip of the Peninsula. Here, the commandant surrendered his sword and his command to a battered naval captain (left arm in a sling and right eye bandaged) accompanied by a rather roly-poly civilian. When the exuberant politician and his entourage posed for pictures alongside the shamed enemy officer, the naval captain slipped away to the parapet. There he gazed into the harbor at his similarly battered vessel. As the gusting wind streamed its tattered red, white, and blue banner from the ship’s oft-fished flagstaff, he tried to recall what it was that the newspapers had quoted the President as saying a few weeks ago. “In the end, it will not be the ships of iron but rather the steel wills of our loyal sons that decide the outcome of this struggle.”1

  “Perhaps Davis is right,” thought Catesby ap R. Jones (captain of the C.S.S. Virginia by the grace of God and the commission of the Confederate Congress), “but I rather think that we were just damn lucky, and I will take all the iron ships that I can get.”

  Prelude

  The election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president of the United States in November 1860 launched his nation into a bloody civil war. South Carolinians had sworn that victory for the Black Republican would be followed by the secession of slave-holding states from the Union. They, and like-minded cohorts in the remaining six states of the Deep South, made good on their promise as the lame-duck President Buchanan did little (and the president-to-be even less) to prevent this fracture of a nation.

  Secession tested loyalties. Military and naval officers as well as private citizens had to choose between regional affiliation and duty (often sworn duty) to the concept of an indivisible national entity. Even without consideration of duty, the choice was not always easy since ties of clan, friendship, and economics frequently crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. Here and there, voices of sanity competed with hawkish cries and strident martial airs, their pleas for logic and reason unheeded. They, too, eventually succumbed to the madness of fratricide.

  One such voice belonged to William Tecumseh Sherman, President of Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy. A Northerner by birth and a graduate of West Point, Sherman had come to appreciate the cultured pace of life in the South. Despairing at the news of South Carolina’s break from the Union, he wrote a stirring and prophetic letter to his friend, Professor David F. Boyd:

  “You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don’t know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing… You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing… The Northern people not only greatly outnumber the whites at [sic] the South, but they are a mechanical people with manufactures of every kind, while you are only agriculturalists… You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail… At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, and shut out from the markets of Europe by blockade, as you will be, your cause will begin to wane…”2

  They did not listen; the general Southern populace was firmly ensnared in the rage militaire. As the break-away states began to seize arsenals and properties of the United States, some cooler heads closely considered the exact arguments that Sherman had addressed to his friend. A number of those calculating thinkers joined the secessionist congress, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in early February 1862. Though a constitution would not be adopted until the eleventh of the following month, the Provisional Congress of the new Confederate States of America elected Jefferson Davis as its first president, with Alexander Stephens as his vice-president. Davis immediately sought to make sense of the madness by seeking qualified men to assume the key cabinet positions in his government. When, on February 21, Congress created a Department of the Navy, Davis immediately called upon his old friend Stephen R. Mallory of Florida to become the Secretary of the Navy.

  Planning the Impossible

  As a former United States Senator, one of Mallory’s many appointments had been to the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, a position that he had held for a decade. There he had championed a stronger U.S. Navy, pushing programs ranging from shipbuilding to mandatory performance reviews for officers. The irony of the situation, as he assumed the title of Secretary of the Navy, was not lost on Mallory: without his efforts the mariners of his former country would have been far less able to prosecute war upon his new homeland—a homeland miserably prepared for a war at sea.

  Sherman had been correct—agriculture was the South’s economy. There were few seagoing vessels based in the states of the Deep South, and it possessed no ships of war. Aside from scattered fishermen, the South produced few mariners, and those of Southern extraction had been on New England vessels for so long that even fewer would return home. New Orleans had a relatively large shipyard and Pensacola a smaller one while a number of civilian contractors existed in scattered ports, but the new nation lacked ordnance and powder factories, ironworks, machine shops, canvas lofts, and ropewalks. Sadly, the transport infrastructure in the Confederacy was almost as weak as its shipbuilding facilities. Rather than extensive railroads and macadamized roads, Mallory’s new country had long depended on its numerous inland waterways and a well developed coastal trade for its transport needs. The Secretary more than suspected that the Union Navy would soon seek to disrupt such watery highways.

  Nor did it take a genius to realize the manner in which the U.S. Navy would prosecute its war against a South so absolutely dependent upon trade with Europe. With only 42 active vessels (and many of those scattered on distant stations around the globe), the Union’s Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, would put a token blockading force off each Southern port while aggressively converting to warships anything that would float and building vessels as rapidly as possible. As excess forces came available, they would be used to capture island bases to support the blockade, or simply to capture Southern ports. Meanwhile, rapidly converted gunboats would support a Union thrust down the Mississippi River, effectively isolating the Trans-Mississippi command from the remainder of the Confederacy.

  As Mallory began to organize his department he carefully considered, then prioritized, the needs of his nation based upon the obvious enemy plans. First, the defense of the Mississippi River and the nation’s ports clamored for attention. Second, a means to defeat any Union blockade must be found. Third, the vulnerability of the commerce of the North, spread widely across the Seven Seas, must be exploited. And, an unlikely fourth, if possible the war must be taken to the coasts and port cities of the United States. To accomplish any of these goals, Mallory had to build a navy from scratch. At the same time, he found himself forced to wage political war against a president whose knowledge of naval matters could be “captured in a thimble, still leaving room for a lady’s thumb” and against a congress divided by the very states’ rights that had created it.3

  Mallory’s initial defensive plan stressed strong land fortifications at harbor mouths and along the Mississippi River and its key tributaries. At each port, and along the Mississippi, gunboat squadrons would be needed to support the fortifications and to
assist defending Confederate field armies. At the same time, transports would be in desperate demand to supplement the underdeveloped rail system of the South. By early March 1861, the Confederate Navy consisted of only ten vessels, ranging from the antiquated sidewheeler Fulton (U.S.S. Fulton until taken while in ordinary at Pensacola) to revenue cutters and slavers seized by the provisional government. Altogether, they mounted only 15 guns. Incorporation of state navies would eventually add fewer than two dozen small warships to these forces, all as miserably armed as the original ten vessels. This fell far short of the hundred or more strongly armed ships needed for defensive purposes alone.

  To add to the woes of the secretary, heavy artillery and munitions were in short supply. To equip new fortifications adequately meant denying strong firepower to converted warships. The South also lacked foundries and machine shops; in fact, it did not possess any of the facilities to build the steam power plants needed in modern warships, and could provide fittings such as shafts and screw propellers only with great difficulty. Of course, neither engines nor screws would be in great demand until adequate shipyards could be erected. When, on March 15, Congress approved the construction or purchase of ten additional vessels for port defense, Mallory remained uncertain as to whether engines and armament could be obtained for them.

  A Turning Point

  It must have galled Mallory to realize that each day over a dozen modern commercial steamships entered and exited the ports of his nation and that the seizure of even a few of them would have provided the nucleus of a blue-water navy for the Confederacy. However, they flew the flags of European nations, and Mallory knew that recognition by and support from those very nations provided the only hope for final independence of the Confederacy. It was his concern with the perception of his homeland by these foreign countries that led to heated words between President Davis and his Secretary of the Navy at a Cabinet meeting on the afternoon of March 18.