1862

by Robert Conroy

  But now the rebs wanted to go and ruin things. “What're we gonna do. Olaf?'^:

  The large Swede grinned. “Nothing. We're gonna sit here and protect the city. Lee comes by, we just wave at him and wish him bad luck. Ain't that wonderful?”

  Billy found that he was breathing easier. It would be far safer for them behind the forts and earthen ramparts of Washington than out in the fields chasing the elusive rebels. At worst, they would be in the trenches between the forts, but even there they would be well protected. He'd heard people comment that Washington was the most fortified place in the world, with Richmond, of course, being a close second.

  Best of all, only a complete fool would attack Washington, D.C., and Robert E. Lee was no fool.

  The Baltimore amp; Ohio Railroad Station on C Street and Northwest was a small and unpretentious brick facility that, thanks to the war was usually overwhelmed with humanity. It had been built to serve a sleepy Southern town and now tried to handle the volume of a surging metropolis and world center.

  Thus, it was little wonder that no one paid any heed to the slightly built man in the rumpled blue uniform that appeared too large for him and gave the false illusion of bulk. If any did notice him, they saw that he wore no indicator of rank and looked like he'd slept in the uniform, which was true enough. The train had been jammed with soldiers of all ranks and civilians of varying degrees of importance. No one there had noticed the rumpled man either.

  Nathan Hunter saw him looking about with a slightly puzzled look on his face. Nathan drew close enough and shouted, “Sam!'^:

  General Ulysses Grant turned and recognized Nathan, who was in civilian clothes. A slight smile twitched at the corners of his mouth as they approached. “Nathan, I think highly of you, but I don't think it's appropriate for you to refer to me by my first name.”

  They had drawn close enough to talk normally and not be overheard. “And if I had yelled out 'General Grant, over here!' you would have been swamped with people wanting to shake your hand. You'd never get away from this mob.”

  Since his victory in Canada, Grant's star had risen and he was considered a hero by an American public who had little idea what he looked like. Grant shook his head and then laughed. Fame was something he had only begun to get used to.

  Grant kept his anonymity until he and Nathan arrived at Willard's Hotel. A reservation had been made in General Scott^’ s name, but Grant signed in with his own. The clerk looked astounded and then made a loud proclamation to all within hearing that General Grant was indeed most welcome at the hotel. Nathan could have strangled him. Within seconds, an astonished and befuddled Sam Grant was surrounded by well-wishers who patted him on the back and pumped his hand. Finally, Nathan extricated him and got him up to his second-floor suite.

  “Good lord,” said Grant as they closed the door behind them. “I thought they were going to rip my uniform off.”

  “You're popular, General. People are beginning to think you're going to be the Union's savior.”

  Grant sat in a chair and smiled wanly. “First of all, I am nobody's savior. Second, in private circumstances like this, I would appreciate it if you indeed would please call me Sam. I think I need friends more than I need rank and its privileges. Just think, Nathan, I was actually going to bring my son Fred with me. The boy would have been overwhelmed.”

  Young Fred Grant was about twelve and, in Nathan's opinion, would have enjoyed the whole thing. However, Julia and the rest of the Grant family had not made the trip. If appropriate, they would follow later. The only real issue was just what Grant's future command would be. Lincoln had not told Scott, and rumors were rampant. The most common had Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac, as that command had been fragmented for several months with Halleck as titular head and Meade commanding the large garrison in Washington.

  Grant walked to a window and looked down on the throngs gathered below on Pennsylvania Avenue. Someone spotted him and the cheering began anew. It didn't end until Nathan went to the window and announced that, while General Grant didn't make speeches, he was happy and pleased at the reception.

  “Y'know,” said Grant as he settled into a large chair. “Once upon a time, something like this would have caused me to take drink. Not now, though. This time,” he grinned, “I'll settle for a cigar. After all, nobody's ever died from smoking.”

  The pain was too much for a man to endure, but what choice had he? Hannibal Watson lay shackled to the wall in the filthy straw of the cell and wondered if the fact that he was still alive was good or bad.

  He groaned. His face throbbed and pulsated where his left eye had been. Now it was a mass of putrefying flesh that would likely kill him if the Confederates didn't hang him first. Most of the other wounds on his body had begun to heal, but not his eye and not those to his soul.

  They had sent dogs into the cave. While these ripped at him, tearing at him and destroying his eye, men had followed and trussed him like a hog. They had called off the animals, brought him out into the sunlight, and displayed him like a trophy. There had been whooping and shooting into the air. They had acted like he was someone truly important: which had puzzled him.

  Then they'd put him in a cage and put the cage on a wagon. As the centerpiece of a small parade, he'd been taken to the railroad and shipped to Richmond. There, he overheard guards talking about his slave rebellion and his slave army. What the hell? Hannibal thought. What slave army? At most he'd had a hundred people and many of them couldn't fight at all. Slave rebellion? Hell all they'd wanted to do was get north to freedom. Yes, they'd hurt and killed people, but that was only because they were in the way. If he'd had his way. there'd have been no bloodshed at all, but that of course, had disappeared the first day when he'd killed the Farnums. Funny, but he could hardly remember what they'd looked like.

  Then it dawned on him. The South's white people were more afraid of him than he was of them. All they could do was kill him, which was likely to happen, but he, or some other Hannibal Watson, would arise again and again until it was all over for the South and her slaves. Lincoln's proclamation had made the freedom of the slaves an inevitability. It might take years, decades, but it would happen. He would never see its fruits, but he could only hope that somewhere, Abigail and their son would.

  He was doomed, but it gave him a sense of pleasure. The South was terrified that her slaves would arise and turn on her. Better that the Confederacy thought he was an instrument of that rebellion. Let them wonder, let them worry, he thought harshly. Let them sleep at night with guns by their sides in fear that their nice tame house niggers would rise up in fury and cut their throats, while their brutalized field slaves rampaged and burned their property, preferably with them in it.

  Hannibal Watson began to laugh and, outside his cell, his guards heard him and wondered. They began to spread stories that Hannibal Watson, that crazy nigger king from Mississippi, wasn't afraid of anything. Know what that means, they asked around? It means that thousands of dark-skinned men with axes and knives were going to descend on Richmond and free him.

  The British expeditionary force to Virginia sailed in two large convoys that met up with each other off the coast of Long Island. Together, they constituted nearly five hundred troop ships and supply vessels, and were accompanied by more than a hundred Royal Navy warships of all sizes. Small, swift, steam sloops and larger frigates scouted ahead and patrolled the flanks of England's armada, while stately ships of the line stayed closer to the heart of the now combined convoys.

  Britannia ruled the waves, but experience with American warships and Yankee tenacity had taught her to be prudent. The Union might not have a blue-water fleet, but she had a number of smaller vessels built especially for coastal warfare. The combined British convoy had left New York and now steamed off the entrance to the Delaware River en route to the Chesapeake. There she would disembark her cargo at Norfolk and a handful of other places able to handle large ships.

  Admiral Sir Henry Chads, commander
of the operation, was only mildly surprised when the scout ships signalled “enemy in sight.” There had been numerous ship sightings as the American coast drew nigh, but they had all been merchants who'd fled as precipitously as a ship could when they'd seen what was bearing down on them.

  By this time, of course, Sir Henry had given up on any thought of maintaining secrecy. Thousands of eyes had watched troops disembark from Canada and elsewhere, and there was little doubt that the vast fleet was headed to the Confederacy. Thus, the sighting of the fleet by hostile ships was of no great import.

  What was surprising to Chads was any attempt to interfere with his enormous fleet. There was simply nothing in the world that could stand against it. Chads had even hoped for such an attempt, which was why he'd chosen New York for the rendezvous. He'd wanted their damned ironclads to come out so he could destroy them and the growing myth of their invincibility.

  “Sir,” said a lieutenant on his staff. “Reports indicate two separate groups of Union vessels. The first consists of a sloop-sized ship and what appear to be four Monitors following. The second appears to be another dozen or so ships of war of various sizes and categories, but wooden-hulled and not ironclads. A few of the wooden ships appear to be frigates.”

  Ironclads, Chads thought with distaste, dismissing the wooden ships in the second group. They were nothing but scavengers. His concern was with the four Monitors, and the sloop was doubtless the ironclad ship the Union had been building up the Delaware in Philadelphia. Let them come. Once again, he strode the deck of theWarrior, the largest and most powerful warship in the world. While theWarrior wasthe only iron-hulled ship in his fleet, he could counter with not only her but with other massive ships of the line, including theAgamemnon, Vulture, Eurylaus, Dragon. andPowerful, which steamed in column behind theWarrior. A second, smaller, group of battleships lurked in the heart of the convoy as an unpleasant surprise for anyone who might break through to it. The Royal Navy had a second ironclad in home waters and others under construction. Chads knew with regret that all future ships would be like theWarrior. Or like theMonitor, he thought with a shudder. What an ugly beast.

  Chads gave the orders calmly. A half dozen frigates were to detach themselves from the convoy and. along with theWarrior led ships of the line, form a wall to prevent the Union vessels from penetrating into the heart of the convoy and wreaking havoc. The remainder of the Royal Navy warships would watch for a sudden assault from a different direction, although Chads wondered where other Union ships might come from. From all intelligence sources, the heart of the North's navy was bearing down on him from the west. He smiled. He would pluck that living heart from the beast.

  Commodore David Glasgow Farragut watched impassively as the might of Britain arrayed itself against his small force. It was an impressive sight. Freed from the constraints of fickle winds, the British steamships moved like ponderous but efficient and skillful dancers as they formed a wall against his fleet. Fleet? Farragut groaned inwardly. To call his assemblage a fleet was like calling a tree a forest, or a puddle a sea.

  Along with his flagship, the untriedNew Ironsides, he had theMonitor herself and her sisters-the brand-newHudson, Delaware, andPotomac. Only thePotomac was a two-turret vessel. The other two had a single turret and were identical to the originalMonitor. Thus, he had five ships carrying little more than a score of guns against an enemy who had about as many ships as he had guns. TheNew Ironsides, the largest American ship, only carried sixteen guns: although they were all eleven-inch Dahlgrens. He could only hope that his ships could stand up to the pounding they were going to get as they tried to penetrate the wooden wall forming before him.

  So far their greatest achievement had been gathering the squadron together at Philadelphia, where only theIronsides had originally waited. The four Monitors had departed New York disguised as barges. Artificial wooden sides and piles of rubbish had made them appear innocuous.

  When-if?-penetration was achieved, the squadron of wooden ships behind his ironclads and under the command of Captain David Dixon Porter would surge into the British convoy and attempt to sink as many as they could and disperse the rest. There was no hope of catching them all, but there was the prayer that the North's wooden warships could do enough damage to cause the British to either withdraw or delay an invasion of the North until the onset of bad winter weather.

  As plans went, it wasn't a bad one. Ironically, the obsolete wooden American ships carried many more guns than the ironclads, so they should be able to truly wreak havoc if the ironclads could pierce the British lines. The archaic wooden ships, however, had no place in the coming battle. They would stand back and wait for their opportunity.

  As the two fleets drew within range, they opened fire. The thunder of hundreds of British guns drowned out the sound of the few American cannon. Farragut was not a coward. He had first seen combat in the War of 1812, and had been a prize-master before he'd been a teenager, but he quickly realized that his plan to assess the battle from his ship's rigging was the height of folly. Anyone exposed up there would be killed by the hail of metal that was beginning to descend upon her. He retreated belowdecks while her empty rigging was cut to pieces. The ship itself, however, sustained no real damage.

  They drew alongside British ships with the Monitors moving as close in as possible. It was then that Farragut realized that the British had learned something from their debacle off New York. British ships paired up and, blessed with overwhelming numbers, flanked the diminutive Monitors. As they had to turn their turrets away to safely reload, they were unable to reload quickly or often, as there was no side where there wasn't a British ship firing on them. The Monitors, however, were so small and so low in the water that the vast majority of shells fired at them were plopping into the ocean, rather than slamming into an armored deck or turret. The smallness of the Monitors also meant that the British ships had to avoid hitting their own sister ships. In this they were not totally successful, and a number of British ships sustained damage from their own side.

  The British were unsuccessful in attempts to ram and board. When there was contact, the Monitors were pushed aside like toys and, with astonishing agility for such ungainly looking ships, simply avoided getting too close. On one occasion, a handful of British tars did gain a foothold on theHudson, but thePotomac fired grape at her own sister ship and swept the British away in a bloody froth before they could do any damage.

  TheNewIronsides had better hunting. She drew alongside the woodenAgamemnon and sent several broadsides into her before another wooden ship came to her aid. Shells from the massive British vessel pounded against the hull of theIronsides, butdidn't break through her iron shield. The thunder was deafening, but they were safe. Just then, a piece of metal entered through a gun port and ripped off the arm of an American sailor. He screamed and fell writhing to the ground. He was replaced in the gun crew and dragged off to the care of the ship's surgeon. More metal penetrated the openings and Farragut understood what was happening. Unable to pierce the armor, the British ship was firing grape, or canister, which, like a shotgun, showered a target with pieces of metal. It was almost inevitable that some would come through the open gun ports. Once again, Farragut applauded the design of the Monitors' turrets. They were only opened momentarily, which negated most of the effect of canister. The navy would have to put turrets on larger ships such as his.

  Farragut broke off contact with theAgamemnon, and theIronsides suddenly found herself confronting the giantWarrior, For a few minutes that presaged the future of naval warfare, the two ironclads hurled shells at each other with no apparent effect.

  “Damn that ship,” snarled Farragut. Another piece of canister caromed its way into a sailor's body and he dropped to the floor, dead. Others had been wounded, but not too seriously.

  Farragut ordered theIronsides to seek out another target. There was no point in having two ships that couldn't hurt each other waste ammunition in the futile attempt. A British frigate approached on his port s
ide and he fired into her at extremely close range. His crew cheered as fires broke out on the frigate and she disengaged.

  For what seemed an eternity the apparently unequal struggle continued. But as the afternoon waned, the small American ships continued to be impervious to British shells, while the wooden British ships took punishment that, since it was cumulative, gradually became serious. Even though they could not fire rapidly, the Monitors continued to shoot when they could, and their large twelve-inch guns did enormous damage.

  Finally, the impossible was achieved. Penetration was made. Farragut had split the larger British squadron into two unequal halves that, under the protection of the equally unharmedWarrior. turned and commenced steaming south.

  By their very nature, wooden ships do not sink very readily unless they are catastrophically damaged. Two British frigates were low in the water and helpless. Their crews were in lifeboats or in the water and clinging to wreckage. Several other warships, including at least one ship of the line, were burning, although they were under way and the fires appeared to be controllable. Most of the other British ships had sustained damage of some kind.

  The Union had lost no ships. Without turrets, theNewIronsides had sustained the most damage. Half her guns had been dismounted and twenty of her crew killed. Another fifty were injured. No armor plates had been destroyed on any ship, although dents were everywhere, and many plates would have to be replaced. TheHudson could no longer turn her turret. She'd had to turn the entire ship to continue fighting. Farragut made a note to commend her young captain, Lieutenant George Dewey, on his doggedness.

  It had been a great victory, but also an enormous defeat for the United States. The convoy, the target of the assault and the reason for the battle, was nowhere in sight. It had continued on during the battle and was not going to be caught either by Farragut's squadron or Porters. Captain Porters ships had seen no action and now were picking up survivors from the stricken British ships.